De-churched Dones

Once upon a time, an old friend told me her preacher/father maintained that a minister of the Word never had a more captive audience than at a funeral. Everyone was there, the faithful and not so; and everyone was listening because a cadaver can create the kind of doubt that makes faith more appealing rather than less. 

"At a funeral, people listen to scripture as if they've never heard it before," he told her, or words to that effect. All he really had to do was read Psalm 90, he said. The Word gathered everyone's attention, all by its lonesome.

I wouldn't wish a funeral on anyone of course, and I wasn't anticipating the one I attended last weekend. Most I've witnessed in the last few years have been for folks who spent mornings and evenings wishing they'd be the ones at the heart of things, hoping the Lord would take them with least bother possible. Right now, I know a handful whose morning prayers are laden with that peculiar genre of hope, a hope to die that's not despair.

But Saturday's memorial was not for an old man. Saturday's memorial remembered someone who'd been taken far too quickly--not a child, but a man, my brother-in-law, who still had much to live, much to teach, and much to love, a death that shouldn't have been, but was. 

No matter. Believe me when I say, the funeral was an inspiration. I left fortified in every way--and so did others.

But the next day, Sunday, no one went to church. My parents would have been, well, mortified. Not going to church would have been unthinkable, impossible. 

We're different, their kids are. And so are their grandkids. We're not lacking in faith or openness or fidelity; but we're simply not as earnest about brick and mortar, the place my father would have called "the Lord's house."

In an interesting article in Patheos, Jeff Cook summarizes the major points of a new book by Josh Packard, Church Refugees: Sociologists Reveal Why People Are Done with Church but not with Faith. The numbers research sociologists have been crunching reveal some notable characteristics of our time and the many flavors of Christians within it. 

Most worrying, perhaps, is their discovery that a goodly percentage of those considered "dechurched" are older, more established members, people with almost flush church vitaes--big givers, active members, even elders and deacons, church officers. That "cradle" Christians sleep in wouldn't be particularly shocking; but when the movers-and-shakers stay home, it's news. In contrast to the "Nones," who've been getting all the headlines as of late, such studies and studiers call the folks who are shrugging off church the "Dones."

Why the phenom is happening? The Cook summary lists four reasons Packard gives.

1. The Dones say they left because of the judgmental posture of church people individually and collectively which assaulted the communal experience they longed for.

Red and blue churches, conservative and liberal, are world-class judges, of course. If you choose not to attend a pro-life or pro-choice rally next week, church people on both sides of the politics at war in America can feel judged because they darn well are. They should be going on mission trips or singing in choir or filling a pew every Sabbath. Should, it seems, is a very "Christian" word. It judges so very well.Last Sunday Grandpa and Grandma Schaap's progeny flat-out skipped church. 

Feel the judgement in that plain old declarative sentence?  In the guilt wars, I'm a decorated veteran. I'm a Calvinist after all, and we know sin when we see it and we see it all over. My parents were even more proficient than I am--a bike on Sunday, a movie. I've got a goodly heritage. That some "Dones" choose to scram and avoid the stocks standing just outside the church doesn't shock me one bit.  

2. The Dones say they left because they are tired of trying to serve Jesus through the bureaucratic methods of church organizations which often stifled progress and gave little attention to what they cared for most. Many of the Dones wished to build the Kingdom but were only offered opportunities to build someone’s church empire.

Want to know where to distribute that tax return? Let me count the ways. Some months of the year the only envelopes in the mailbox are requests for doughnations. What seems like success can be deadly--masses are great at rock concerts but not when some distraught family needs a cake pan of steamy chicken casserole. Size matters. 

A distaste for professional Christians is something that should make pastors shiver and bureaucrats update vitaes.

3. The Dones say they left because they wanted to come to their own answers about God through dialogue and struggle, not though prepackaged lectures and the predetermined conclusions of their church leaders.

My way. My will. My tastes. My needs met. That we preen more than Grandpa and Grandma, that we are vastly more narcisstic than our parents is almost across-the-board undeniable. "The Greatest Generation" was far less concerned with me than us. No more. We can afford to go our own way, and we do. Period. Rights are cool; responsibilities hunch shoulders.

4. And the Dones say they left because their church only understood “morality” in terms of “substance abuse” and “sexual activity” with a common disregard to systemic issues of equality, poverty and unjust economics.

Call me a liberal, but anyone who doesn't feel a bit squeamish about using the word Christian as an adjective today has, I think, drunk the Kool-Aid. Christian music, Christian movies, Christian novels, Christian politics--it's all of a type. It's Pat Robertson or whatever it is James Dobson is presently afraid of.  

Maybe it's the media's fault, maybe it isn't: but most Americans these days consider the word "Christian" to be a shibboleth of the "Religious Right." If you don't fight against abortion and for open carry laws, if you don't buy the global warming hoax and you think the Duggers are getting the shaft right now, you're a "Christian." 

These days, whether we like it or not, we're a brand; and what the numbers suggest is that some of us at least walk, not just from church but from using the word "Christian." Some of us are not that. 

Don't get me wrong. If you'd quiz my family, none of them would say they didn't attend church last Sunday for any of those reasons; but I am confident that church itself--worship in a building, whatever shape or size, whatever music or theology--means something different to us than it did to our grandparents. 

On Saturday we'd just experienced one of the most profoundly spiritual and religious moments of our lives.  Don't misconstrue. We're a religious bunch, a Godly bunch. Seriously. And no one in our family has walked away from church; come Sunday, I'm sure, most will be back in the pew. 

But something is different these days. That realization, to me, is inescapable.