The Sauntering Pilgrim

The church we’ve called our spiritual home for so long is dwindling. For the more than forty years I’ve been in parish ministry, our numbers have been declining and our spiritual vitality has been waning. Now for the first time in our nation’s history, adherents of the Christian faith account for less than half the population, and no turnaround is in view.

It’s a lonely feeling when you have some really good news to share and no one with whom to share it. Think of when your first child or grandchild was born, or you were accepted to the college of your choice, or you got that long-awaited partnership, or the one you love more than life itself said “yes, I will marry you.” And the person you told first made light of it, treated it as irrelevant, and dismissed it as unimportant.

If you’ve had that experience, you know something of what the first disciples felt when Jesus came into the scene and changed their life but not the life of someone they cared about, like Philip telling Nathanael, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth,” and Nathanael wanted to know if anything good could come out of Nazareth (John 1:43-51). Evangelism has been defined as “one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.” But what if you’ve tasted the best, freshest bread you can imagine, and there’s abundantly more of it than you can ever eat, and the person who you know is hungry doesn’t believe you?

That’s the situation the church is in today. People are hungry, they know they’re hungry, and they’re looking for bread. According to recent research, 66% of those over sixty are at least moderately spiritually open. They may not be famished, but they have an appetite for a more transcendent experience of life. That’s a large part of the reason we’re in church: we have a hunger that’s fed here. And judging from the folks you see here on Sunday morning, you might believe it’s mainly us older adults who feel that hunger and want to satisfy it.

But check this out: the number of those who are spiritually open and seeking is even higher among today’s teens than among those over sixty. Seventy-four percent of them are described as moderately or highly spiritually open. Those numbers tell us something important. People at both ends of the age spectrum are not merely willing to explore their spiritual lives but are eager to do so. And there are more young folks ready and willing to do that than are here in the church today. So why aren’t they here? What’s keeping them away?

According to research by the Barna Group, one of the most respected researchers of religious life in the country, published in a book titled UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity . . . and Why It Matters, one of the chief reasons why young people are turning away from the church, or never felt drawn to the church to begin with, is because they perceive us Christians as professing a faith we do not live. They like the faith we profess, the faith of Jesus, but they’re turned off by the way we don’t embody it in our daily lives.

That, I believe, is not reason to develop another program of evangelism or church development or membership growth. Rather, it’s reason for some thorough, open-eyed, and rigorous self-examination. Or have we grown too comfortable on our couches, too content with the status quo? To borrow an image from Annie Dillard, have we rowed out into the thick darkness of the spiritual life, or are we playing pinocle in the bottom of the boat?

“On the whole,” Dillard wrote, “I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

The disciple Philip – well, something awakened in him. He met Jesus and got in touch with a power he perhaps too blithely invoked, or that power got in touch with him, and he went and told Nathanael about it, but Nathanael sloughed him off at first. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” “Come and see,” Philip told him (John 1:43-51).

Folks young and old today are looking for the power that can be released by the chemistry sets we play with every Sunday morning. They want an encounter with something that makes them reach for crash helmets and life preservers and send up signal flares to let others know they’ve found not a faith about life and what lies beyond but an experience of the rapture of being alive (Joseph Campbell’s phrase).

We don’t have to develop a new program or strategy to draw those folks into the church. We don’t have to go chasing after them. What we have to do is exhibit the depth and grace and transcendence of life – the rapture of being live – that they’re looking for, that we’re all looking for, but that some of us have forgotten to reach for.

My wife Sheryl is a gardener – a master gardener, in fact – who likes to work with native, pollinator-friendly plants. And for her, there’s not much that beats the experience of having her garden serve as host to the life cycle of monarch butterflies. She loves providing hospitality to that endangered species by establishing a monarch waystation. She’s learned that if you want monarch butterflies, you don’t go chasing after them; you take care of the garden so they come to you.

It’s the best metaphor I know for inviting others into the experience of the rapture of being alive that we call the Christian faith. Tend our gardens. Nurture that experience of life in ourselves and in our community of faith. Practice the disciplines of discipleship so that those who are seeking will find it in us. During Lent, we’re going to look into five or six models of discipleship that are found in the New Testament.

But whether in Lent of out of it, let’s study together how “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God” (Micah 6:8). Let’s renew our devotion to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts. 2:42). Let’s refresh our practice of partnering with the Spirit of God, so that people who want to know how to truly live will learn it from us.