The Care of Souls

There is a conversation which is going on among church leadership and clergy groups wherever I go and that is a conversation about the changing of the church.  I’m not just talking about the decline of Sunday attendance in the mainline Christian Church—attendance has been declining for fifty years.  I am talking about the unexplained shift in society away from traditional Christian values with regard to the care of souls.  I am talking about the increase in the number of people we see who are raised outside of the family tradition of Sunday church.

All across this nation churches are closing and being re-purposed as bars, retail shops, residences, and classrooms.  These closings are the result of declining attendance and shrinking membership. People think they have figured out that God is not really necessary and God has no interest in our lives. Fewer and fewer people talk about eternal things. Fewer and fewer people spend time studying scripture.  Prayer has become a way to ask a divine being for favors.  More and more people find themselves adrift amid a society fixated on consumption, acquisition, and status.  It is like we find ourselves trying to sing in a world inhabited only by the tone-deaf.

As Sally Forth said in one of her comic strips, “the problem with keeping your head in the face of a crisis is, people don’t think you know there’s a crisis.”

This problem may have many causes, and we may settle on many solutions, but each conclusion will have the same premise; the way we think about church and ministry must change.

As our society embraces the nihilism of the future, and as we walk away from all that previous generations struggled to build and leave to us, we turn further away from what brought us here as we simultaneously bemoan our loss of the life we hold so dear.
Maybe we cannot keep God on the back-burner until we need him.  Maybe we have reached a tipping point in church attendance and participation. Maybe our society is shifting away from the past and toward the future.

But our future holds a place for those things for which we long: liturgy, music, preaching, and Holy Communion.  These are the traditions which connect us with the traditions of the church.  These are the bridges which lead to God and the Good News of Jesus Christ.  And these are the Remagen bridges which we must fight to keep open in order to retreat away from a God-less society of tomorrow. If we let the church fade to darkness, to what will we return when we discover the promises of this day hold no solutions to the problems of tomorrow?

Think you are up to this challenge? You better be; for to be the church in this new and changing environment of tomorrow is going to take the total commitment of everything we have.

Peace,
Father Mark+