Waiting On The Old Church To Die

I grew up in a small town in North Alabama. I was born in 1962 while the civil rights struggle was in full swing. The American civil rights struggle was born in churches and strengthened by the belief that God is able to give you strength to endure all injustices while fighting to end them. My father was a pastor and my mother was full of Faith. Like many families during hard times, you reach for whatever will sustain you. Church was such a significant part of my life that everything revolved around the habits and traditions that were passed down through the generations. Growing up in a small church gets you so much exposure to what your family and congregation believes that is it easy lose focus. Additionally when the church gets too personal, the whole congregation can inadvertently take on an identity that makes it less effective. I want to give fair warning to anyone reading this post that I am writing from my own experiences and viewpoint and do not intend to offend and hope that you respect that my intent to encourage us all to do better.

I was a fairly smart kid. I made great grades with little effort and was pretty good in seeing the value of things. I was motivated to believe that God had a plan for me but really didn’t feel that anyone at my church was talking to me most of the time. The pastor at my church had been there for decades and had a manner of preaching that was catered to meeting the needs of the people who came to hear him. He knew that the people who voted him in could vote him out. Pastors had to have alliances until he had gained enough tenure to do as he chose. Unfortunately, that empowerment came with an inflexibility. To make a suggestion was to criticize so most people didn’t make any suggestions that had a chance of changing the character or nature of the church. The conventional wisdom is the vision for the church was delivered through the pastor so people making suggestions were trouble makers. What did that mean for my church? Simply put, my pastor’s vision was to preach a sermon that would sustain the collection plate every week and that is what he did. His concern was making enough money to pay the bills, get paid and leave some money in the “building fund.” Nothing else really happened.

The identity that smaller churches took on were dictated by the deacons, elders or ruling families. Being comfortable in leadership was important. If you had an uneducated leadership team, you typically had an uneducated congregation. It is hard to maintain customs and traditions when you have someone asking too many questions.  The more educated the leadership was the more progressive the church tended to be. Most leadership roles in the church were generational and passed down in families. If you were to tell someone your last name, people were typically able to tell you what church that “your people go to.” It was not uncommon to have families split on Sundays because the husband and wife were from different families that attended different churches. Rather than pick one, they would just maintain separate memberships at both so they would not offend either congregation. This was important because family loyalty was the cornerstone to growth in the church. It was extremely rare to have a new person or family join the congregation, get involved and feel welcomed enough to stay.  

Rather than having free choice, a child was expected to join his “family church” and stay there all of his days. The result was rebellion. In order to have a choice, you had to move. If you lived close enough to your “home church” you were expected to drive there or explain to both congregations why you didn’t. A person who left his “home church” needed a letter so that the new church would not think that you were a troublemaker. The only way you could comfortably change churches was by marriage or stay away from church long enough that people forgot where you were supposed to be.

I could see all the problems that my church had and the ways to fix them but knew that I would be powerless to change anything unless I stayed at the church and waited on the older elders and deacons to die and then I might have to ability to make a suggestion that had a chance of being implemented. The other caveat is I would have to be willing to fight with all the members who held on to tradition like it is the unwritten word of God. The evidence that I was not alone in my feelings is the fact that most children left as soon as they had a choice. If they moved away from the area and got exposed to more progressive doctrines and more active congregations they tended to never go back. If they stayed in the area, they would stay away from the church until they felt comfortable coming back to play their roles or they waited until old habits and traditions died with the members who were resisting change.

I left home after high school and went into the military. It took me years to adjust to churches not like the ones that were in my area while growing up. Initially, I would find churches that were like my family church and found that I was not comfortable with them due to the same dynamic in a different form. Now I was an outsider. Being an outsider was interesting. You were valuable because people would encourage you to speak up hoping that you could influence change that they wanted but were afraid to mention. They wanted to see change without being known as the “instigator” that demanded it. One pastor made me a deacon fairly early and put me in charge of the projects that he knew his deacons either didn’t have the technical skills or courage to do. The disappointing reality is if you take a group of people who have been doing things the same way for decades and try to institute changes with the same leadership, there is only a marginal chance that you will be successful. I eventually came to the conclusion that leadership means everything. If you have a leader, who is comfortable with things staying just as they are, then he is really not a leader at all. You can’t win a battle without advancing on an enemy and you can’t have a victory if you aren’t willing to fight. It is not enough to do what it takes to maintain when the real mission of the church is to grow.

In the past 30 years, I have lived 7 seven states, visited 10 different countries and enjoyed some manner of religious service in all of them. I have seen churches in all stages. Some were young vibrant and growing, others were progressive and distinctive while some were simply dying and decaying. I remember being a part of congregations that welcomed newcomers and provided nurturing and growth opportunities for everyone. I also remember enduring the disappointment of churches that were simply holding on to the past, missing the opportunity to train and develop its youth while influencing the community around it. I think those were the saddest of all because I have always been able to look into the bored, uninterested faces of the young people who were there just because they had to be. All they were doing was waiting for the old church to die.

My question to them is a simple one. How much time do you got?