Martin Kelley

Quote:

Increasingly I’ve come to wonder if churches are, to some extent, analogous to record labels and newspapers. The latter two business built their limited resources and high barriers to wealth; printing newspapers and promoting hit records is an expensive game. But, the Craigslist, blogs, DAWs and MySpace have become deal-breakers — especially if you don’t lay awake at night dreaming of wealth and a home in the Caribbean. Both record labels and newspapers created wealth through the way a resource problem was answered and structured. You needed a label to get your music out, now you don’t. You needed a newspaper to create a PR buzz or post a classified, now you don’t.

This truly is a blessed time for those for whom doing is a reward in and of itself, regardless of the rewards. The way of doing for the “ordinary” person has changed, if they are really focused first on the doing. How does this relate to church?

Forgive me for waxing economical, but to me church is a kind of resource problem (or collective action problem). We “do” church because there are things a Christian just can’t “do” by themselves. In a way, ecclesiological power was like the power of the record label or newspaper in time when access to theological education and resources was scarce and expensive.

Via Emergentvillage

The Claremont (CA) School of Theology recently hosted a gathering of leaders from thirty Protestant denominations, who looked at the downward trends in the “Mainline” Protestant churches.

Friends aren’t generally considered part of the “Mainline” churches, but the term itself comes from Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Main Line” suburbs became the address-of-choice for Protestant elites and feature the historically Quaker institutions of Haverford and Bryn Mawr. There’s been a lot of cross-over style with certain types of Friends and an overlap of issues.

Claremont professor Philip Clayton attended the recent meeting and compiled the stories into nine challenges Mainline Protestant churches face. Follow the link for more in-depth descriptions of each point:

1. People no longer believe that church attendance is socially necessary, that is, necessary for the social health and perhaps even the economic survival of individuals and their family.
2. People no longer believe that church attendance provides the only or the most important means of establishing and maintaining a sufficiently strong connection with God.
3. Many of the institutions that once lay at the center of our society are equally endangered.
4. The classic modes of church teaching — reciting language together and listening to a man talk for twenty minutes — are no longer effective modes of communication for Americans.
5. The traditional church was a family unit. It included not only mom and dad but also the grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.
6. Most of us do not live in one place long enough to put down real roots.
7. Our communities are not only continually in flux but massively diverse in their beliefs, values, and social identities.
8. Pastors today are generally not viewed as moral authorities in their communities, and theologians do not speak for and to the nation.
9. We are no longer blending powerful theologies with transformative ministries in the world.