Disrupt Church

The question I can’t stop asking myself, the one that inspired me to try this new liturgical style, is “What are we doing here?” “Who are we serving?” I look out at the world and see people in so much pain. Putting aside the events of the last two weeks, and outside of maybe attacks on our soil like 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, when can you remember so many people feeling frightened? And I don’t mean that kind of surprise attack-scared. I mean a low level of fear people seem to be walking around with every day. A private fear. And it seems to be connected to loneliness, ongoing isolation, emotional separation. And it’s connected for some, even many people, with money. Will I have enough? If I don’t, who will help me? Is there anyone I can tell about how frightened I am about being so alone, about growing old, about being responsible for a child, about losing a job, about finding myself unable to keep up with the pace of the world. What if I’m forgotten?

Some of that is tied to climate grief. My children, my grandchildren will never know the beauty of the world I knew. Or climate fear. Flooding, access to food, water, power in times of crisis. And again, back to that underlying fear and the loneliness.

And with all that pain that I see everywhere, these last few weeks have brought us to a place I’d never seen. Those Trump years divided our country along red/blue lines, fracturing a nation that seemed all too ready to break. There was so much anger added to the existential crisis of our diminished democracy, and none of that has been healed. In some ways the passive peace is more a result of not talking to each other at all rather than a capitulation.

But, now, today, these last two weeks, since the attack on Israel and the retaliation against Palestine, that national fragmentation has moved to a new level. There were breaks in families before, but many still remained intact. There was the loss of old friends, but the strongest relationships survived. Most of the fractures were geopolitical- red state against blue state, and the old north-south story. Not any more. This one hit much closer to home, dividing neighborhoods, congregations, families, even households. Many of those last relationships standing have begun to topple.

So, I keep asking myself, “What are we doing here?” “What am I doing?” (Out of respect for this pulpit, I won’t tell you exactly how I word that question to myself, but there’s an extra 4 letter word.) Here I am, the Senior Minister of a well-established, well-connected, well-staffed, well-funded church in the middle of NYC. Who am I serving? Who are we serving?

If I stood right outside that door and asked people “Do you want a spiritual home? Do you want authentic connection? Do you want a progressive, multigenerational, multicultural community? Do you want to live a deeper, more meaningful life? Do you want to work for peace, serve people in need, do you want live music and storytelling, do you want to live in a bigger way?” I think most people would say yes. I mean, not at first. At first they’d be annoyed by the question, and if they thought I was a minister they’d walk quickly pretending not to hear me. But, if they answered honestly, if they weren’t afraid of me and what they think I want from them, if they sat with the questions in stillness for just a few minutes, I’d bet anything half of them would have to say “yes”. (pause)

I love this church so much more than I ever thought I would. Honestly, I moved into this ministry pretty nervous about the history and conflict and significant financial troubles. It never occurred to me that I’d love this church and its members as much as I do. Here in my 5th year, we’ve confronted a lot of really difficult problems head on and we’re so much healthier for it.

But we’re shrinking. Some of that is the move into this space, and some of that is the emptying of NYC since Covid, and some of that is the freefall of institutional religion across the board.

Institutional religion, in my assessment is dying. We’ve lost our place in American society, no longer considered the moral center and no longer an assumed part of people’s social circles. Our buildings are being abandoned, being sold, being repurposed across the country. Ministers are leaving the profession unable to afford working in the parish or unable to sustain their own mental health which is cracking under the weight of congregational criticism and ever-decreasing membership rosters. Religious educators are being pushed out because there’s no money to pay them, and very few children to educate. I offered some numbers last week, but I’ll repeat them here in case they didn’t stick. We lost 18,000 children from our RE programs in the last 10 years. We’ve lost half our members in the last 20. And the people who are left are aging. Our churches have twice as many people over the age of 65 than in the general population.

Gen Z isn’t being raised with religion at all. 45% have no affiliation. In other words, they can’t even say “my family is” UU or Catholic or whatever. A majority will say they believe in god, or have a spiritual life, but they aren’t interested in formal religion and have no connection to any denomination or religious community, even as part of their cultural heritage.

We are shrinking, aging, and increasingly irrelevant.

And, I’m not worried. I’m not worried in part because I know the story of the Great Awakening. I know religion has died before, and it was resurrected when we found new ways to meet people’s needs. The impulse for greater life or meaning doesn’t die. Just the forms we create to respond to that impulse.

Religion is the way communities ask big questions, face into mystery, seek deeper life, together. Spirituality is how we do this on our own, but when we gather with others, we are religious. If we strip it all down, that’s what it is. We then create theologies and we enact those theologies through rituals and rites and they feed us in so many ways. Until they don’t.

When they don’t, we have the choice to hold on to what once worked decreasing our numbers until there’s no one left, or we change to meet new needs for a new generation, expanding and imagining theologies that help people face mystery and live more meaningful lives. The problem is that the people who aren’t being served aren’t in the room. The ones who like what we do are the ones who show up, so they’re the ones with the vote. The people in the room, the people being served, those people define what happens, which is why so often new things start in new places.

That’s why those Awakening churches happened in tents. And barns. And fields. What was happening there wasn’t predetermined. No one could say, “that’s not how we do it.”

I’m a lucky minister and this is an unusual church. For all of our 200 years, we’ve been at least a little experimental. We’ve been willing to try new things. It didn’t start with John Haynes Holmes, but he was the most aggressive in his experimentation. He got rid of paid pews. People used to pay for their seats, creating a class system on display every Sunday morning. He gained freedom of the pulpit, disbanding a sermon committee that approved his message before he could preach it. And he was very intentional about creating a multiracial congregation, a legacy whose rewards we all continue to reap.

So, here we are, with people walking by us desperately needing us who will never walk in here, while we shrink and age, and hold on to who we were, not because we’re afraid of changing, which I don’t think we are, but because of inertia. We do what we’ve always done. It’s easier and familiar and it’s fine. Sometimes it’s really lovely.

But I don’t think we’re even serving the people in the room all that well right now. On any given Sunday, we’ve got people with earbuds watching the livestream because the sounds is better online, or people who are here now, but watch the service later because they couldn’t really hear or see while they were here in the room.

And back to the question. What are we doing here? Who are we serving? This is where Darnell steps in. One day he almost casually said to me, “Peggy, all we need is you preaching, my music and a street corner in Harlem. That’s where the people are. That’s who wants and needs this message. No one’s coming into that church to hear that message of liberation, so we need to bring it to them” That started me thinking about preaching in parks or from stoops. And it got me thinking about what it means to strip it all down.

When we do that, we’ve got a message of salvation. We have a message that tells us everyone is beautiful, everyone is loved, everyone is saved. We know that the Spirit of Love blows through us, lives in us, is the power of heart and spirit that enlivens and connects us. We know that everything is intertwined, interconnected, folded in a wild Love that has saved and is saving us all if we can seize it and pass it on, encircling everyone else with it. Our message is one of liberation in its simplicity, so accessible, so desired, and too easily bypassed if we want to live in rage or fear, but also easily remembered when one of us grabs the other by the hand and says, “We are in this together. I got you.”

When we strip it all down, what we have is what so many people want, whether they are courageous enough to step in our doors or not.

What does any of that mean? I don’t know. I don’t usually preach answers, and you know I love a good question, but today, I’m even further from the end of this thought experiment than usual. Or not. I’m not sure there’s an end. I think this is a process. I’m going to try things and you’re going to tell me what works or doesn’t and I’m going to keep pushing the envelope because there are people walking by us right now, at this very moment, who are afraid or lonely or angry, whose lives are smaller or shallower than they want them to be. Right now walking by us. People whose children have questions they don’t know how to answer and don’t have communities to figure it out with. People who have their own questions, their own longings, their own woundedness who aren’t fed by our current structures but would be fed by our message if we knew how to get it across.

So, what are we doing here?

We’re committing to living into the question, to becoming the balm desperately needed in the world, even if we have yet to figure out how. We’re reminding ourselves that we have what we need to be of service, to helping heal – if not a whole nation, maybe just a neighborhood – of people who are wounded. We are remembering that we have a history of deconstructing and reconstructing for a new age, finding hope in each other.

Religion isn’t dead, but it might need to be resuscitated, so we are breathing new life into it, breathing music into it, breathing a song of love and healing for everyone to hear. This is our time, this is our ministry, we are the ones who are called.

And THAT is what we are doing here.