This is going to sound like
advice from one old Episcopalian coot to another but it's really advice to all
Christian church leaders worried about their declining attraction to young
people. Even if you're not Christian you can imagine that worry: young
person shows up, you do the sixteen different things recommended by
psychologists, sociologists, salesmen, or your own diocesan expert, and he
doesn't come back. And each week you see more and more symptoms of a
dying organization: multiplying analyses, lengthening meetings, emptying seats,
whitening hair.
My advice is not
original. It is essentially that of the Episcopal Diocese of New York to
its parish greeters or ushers: "Place yourself in the shoes of the
visitor." What I want to add is some urging to do that more
realistically, and to act more radically after we've done it.
So here comes today's
visiting young person. What do you see? If you live in a college
town, as I did, chances are you are going to see young people much better
educated than the young people in your day. If you live in a different town
chances are you've got a lot of young people who went to colleges like the one
in my town.
That means that you could be
looking at the heart of your declining-attendance problem. A recent Pew
survey firmly shows a progressive decline of church attendance with years of
schooling. If we take seriously the possibility that it's the schooling
that's killing us we've got to look more closely at that schooling. So we
can be sure we're really getting into the shoes of the visitor.
To get in there fully, of
course, we'd have to have sat in the classrooms he (or she, understood from now
on) sat in, and been impressed by the teachers he was impressed by, and read
the books they respect and assign. We can't do that, but we know enough
about the academic tradition to know that this is going to include tests for
reliable belief (science courses, mainly) and lessons in the dangers of credulousness
(history and political science courses, mainly). And we know that from
the beginning he is going to have been urged, in his composition and logic
courses, to think critically — that is, skeptically.
And we'd have to have lived
with him in his rooming quarters, and eaten and drunk and smoked where he eats
and drinks and smokes, and absorbed the culture, finding out what's cool and
what's not. We can't do that but we know enough to make this important
distinction: between those students who take their education seriously and
those who don't.
All right, Episcopalian
recruiter, here he comes. You smile, you greet him, you lead him (and
whoever has escorted him, hopefully an Episcopalian who can help with the
liturgy, more hopefully an Episcopalian who can convey the attractions — the
dignity, the elevation, the beauty, the power) to his seat. You put
yourself in his place. You have joined the pre-service meditators.
The lovely Bach introit slides down from the loft behind you. Rustles
from the narthex, then the stirring processional, robes flowing past, voices at
your ear, parts strengthening and fading, the glitter of precious metal, the
forward-bending cross, the bobbing heads of the stair-climbers, then, elevated,
the formation of officiants. A pause, prolonging your expectation.
Then the solemn call to worship, the declaration of its purpose, the reminder
of our need, the sense of shared resolve in breasts around you. On with
the grand project of human betterment. A silver-haired, well-tailored
gentleman in a business suit rises to the most elevated position and, in a
cultured accent, gives us the first instruction: "When God saw what the
people of Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his
mind about the calamity that he said he would bring upon them...."
I won't continue the reading
but believe me, this First Lesson will come across as such a farrago of
nonsense that the visitor, who wants to follow, won't be able to believe that
he's hearing right. Jonah doesn't want the city to be saved, he
gets angry, he argues with God, he asks for death rather than to have God
change his mind in this merciful way. He sits down outside the city,
pouting apparently. God "appoints a bush" to give him shade, making
Jonah happy, then he "appoints a worm" to kill the bush, then he
prepares a dry wind and a sun so hot it makes Jonah angry enough to say,
"It is better for me to die than to live."
The visitor waits for the
moral, hoping for clarification. Here is what he gets: "Then the
Lord said, 'You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and
which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in the
night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in
which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know
their right hand from their left, and also many animals?'"
That's all. The
obviously well-educated gentleman, wise in years, waits the recommended three
seconds (to allow the First Lesson to sink in), then says, "The Word of
the Lord."
All right, you there, trying
to get into the visitor's shoes. You'll know you are succeeding when you
find yourself actually listening to these words. They are not just
sounds, part of the ceremonial rumble toward the sermon. They are saying
something, and you want to know what it is.
The visitor is listening the
way he listens in the building he comes to you from, the one with the
classrooms, and he is looking at this person up front the way he looks at the
persons up front in the classroom. He has acquired habits of listening
and expectations of language that are hard for him to break.
Yes, there are things that
he knows that will make trouble for us later but now it is important to
remember what he does not know, or does not know yet. He does not know
that there are theories that explain all this nonsense, or put it in
context, and make it more palatable. He has never heard of the
theory that the Lord shapes his words according to the understanding of his
people, even if the words that accomplish his purpose with people at one time
in history will appear as nonsense to people of another time (the Theory of
Accommodation), he knows nothing about Christian Apologetics, he has been in on
no discussions of "the truth of myth," or "necessary
fictions," or "parabolic renderings," he has never attended a
meeting of The Inquirers, the church's adult discussion group. He does not know
the history of the Bible, he does not know the succession of covenants, he does
not even know the difference between the Old Testament and the New
Testament. And there is no foundation in him whatsoever for the love of
the old words that repetition has built up in us, the aging ones. He
doesn't draw on any reserve of forgiveness. He just listens to what he
hears and judges the sense of it.
And I don't think he
forgets, or puts what he has learned in separate compartments. In
university classrooms that's hard to get away with. No, this that he has
taken in, been forced to take in by its emphatic positioning (right
there, wham, at the beginning of the service) and framing ("The Word of
the Lord!"), will sit like a lump in his brain the rest of the
service. There'd better be a lively sermon, because his mind will return
to it in every idle moment.
One way to solve this
problem is to make a good Anglican compromise. Remove from the Lectionary
(the collection of passages from which readings are chosen) the greatest shocks
to educated visitors, substitute harmless or, hopefully, attractive passages,
keep the ones the white heads will leave the church over, and move the whole
thing to a less prominent position in the service. And, oh yes, keep the
Adult Inquiry class ready for the visitors who come back and need incentive to
stay; they are your best future escorts of first-time visitors.
But the problem may be too
deep for that solution. The problem may be — can we Protestants possibly
admit this? —with Scripture itself. It just can't bear the weight we, to
keep our tradition going, put on it. Even with a delivered Accommodation
Theory we're in trouble. The visitor can still ask, "Why should I
have to sit and listen to what's composed for primitives and children? I
am not a primitive and I am not a child." And our more sophisticated
reply, that for our kind of wisdom you have to become a child, will not, at
this point, be understood.
It's painful to admit
that — in salesman's terms — our basic product is the problem. It's so
painful that we just can't give up trying to locate it elsewhere. Surely
if we display our social outreach, choose more singable hymns, make the service
easier to follow, refresh the newcomers' packet, and professionalize the web
site we'll pull out of this.
Of course many passages from
Scripture are painless, and some, both palatable and digestible, are pure
pleasure. Turkeys like 15 Pentecost (the Jonah passage) come along only
once in a while. The thing is, you don't know when your best prospects
are going to show up, or how far their pain will be reported. Furthermore,
even on a good Sunday the Old Testament is likely to pain him.
We try to think about that
pain. We see that it is, as the education of our young broadens and
deepens, going to get worse. We realize, with a pang, that the problem
that's killing us is a problem that Catholics, when the Jonah story was in
Latin, didn't have. Freely charm your visitor with music and
ceremony. Looks attractive, doesn't it? Oh, oh. Where is this
leading? Gott hilfe uns.
Well, can't we make
the pain go away by picturing a different visitor, one who doesn't take his
education seriously? "This nut's too hard to crack. Forget him
and go for.....?" What, just the C and D students? We become a
refuge for "fellows whom it hurts to think." That's a knock on
Christians already. A lowered aim puts us in an impossible position.
OK, this pain is going to
get worse. If it gets bad enough, and we see no other out, maybe we'll be
ready to forget the Anglican compromise and go radical. Forget the
Lectionary, forget the three set readings, forget representation of all the
voices that have told us what we are, forget "the Word of the Lord,"
and start over. With the Bible, treated as a treasure of options.
Set before the local priest. He, knowing his congregation and community
and what kind of prospects will be coming through the door, chooses among them
and proceeds accordingly. Maybe he'll stick with the Lectionary, maybe
he'll make a few substitutions, maybe he'll knock everything out except for the
one passage he thinks he can get such mileage out of that he doesn't need
anything else. But one thing for sure: his every choice will be made in
the light of what he wants to accomplish that Sunday with that audience,
especially with his sermon. He'll make sure that no off-putting passage
goes out into the air without an explanatory, ameliorating sermon behind it.
Because we've lived by
Scripture doesn't mean we can't die by it. I know it's hard to believe
that a few readings from the Bible are killing us, but why take a chance?
At least we can remove the passages that, if my sense of an educated visitor's
response is right, inflict the deepest wounds.
