Quotes from current Willow magazine

With the current issue of Leadership came a free copy (vol. 15, iss. 1) of Willow. I found a few quotes that caused me to pause and think.

In the article, The Next 1,000 Years of Christianity, on page 17, Kevin Kelly writes:

Some of the fastest growing churches are those at the margins of Christian denominations. The Church of the Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, is experiencing fantastic rates of population growth, primarily outside the U.S... The Amish and other denominations out of the mainstream are also rising faster than the general Christian population. Growth at the margins has been the rule all along anyway. The Methodists, Pentecostals, and the original Protestants themselves were all margincal churches that experienced rapid initial growth. We should expect the greatest growth in the future to occur from church groups that are either at the margine or outside the mainstream. Some of these will be considered cults by insiders, or heretics by the orthodox, or at best, worrisome experiments that need to be watched carefully...

So I wonder, what does this mean for the Seventh-day Adventist Church? Does this observation and prediction provide evidence to the claims of some that say the Adventist church has become too mainstream, that we no longer emphasize the distinctives as much as we should? Does it mean that we would do better to revert to early 20th century Adventism? On the other side of the fence are individuals and groups who are "experimenting" with all sorts of non-traditional ideas. Some of these ideas are "fringe" when compared to mainstream Christianity. Rather than reverting to traditional, early 20th century Adventism, maybe we should be going to the new kind of fringe. Or perhaps there's some other message in what was observed above. Since this is just one data point, any conclusion from just this observation is fraught with problems. Perhaps the point is that to try to appear more mainstream or fringe for the sake of growth is probably seeking the wrong goal.

There is another article, an interview with the authors of unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity. I just finished reading the book and I think all Christians should read it. Even though I'm a few years outside their research population, my views closely match that expressed by them.

Anyway, in the interview, the following is found on page 21:

One of the dirty little secrets of sociological change is that we are facing a new generation among which one in five say they have essentially no faith -- and that used to be one in 20...

... We're starting to discover over the last six months or so, is that even the impulse of inviting a friend to church and people's willingness to be invited among a new generation is actually lower than ever and less effective than ever... [emphasis mine]

So all those great evangelism training that we might have had -- where we build relationships, awaken spirituality, and then invite them to church -- well, that method may be going the way of the big, public evangelism efforts. In a way, that's not a bad thing, I think.

But it does pose some questions for us. Whether we like it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, for most of us, the church building is the center of our Christian activity. When we think about our life as Christians and as Adventists, we inevitably think of what we do at the weekly church gatherings as defining it. It is still difficult for me, and probably for most of us, to get into the mindset that Christian life is not confined to a place and time. We may know that intellecutally, but actually believing it and living it is much more difficult.

When we think of worship, we think church. When we think evangelism, we think baptisms so that church attendance and tithe giving goes up. When we think social events, we think church socials. The location defines our connection to God. Come to think of it, that's not too unlike the Jews and Jerusalem and the Samaritans and Mount Gerizim. Maybe the observation made in the interview quote above is a call for us to take Jesus' message of John 4:21-24 to heart. Maybe the call is for us to stop trying to bring people to church, but to take the church (defined as the body of Christ) to the people.

The interview has some suggestions for what this "church" might look like:

... The way you are as a neighbor, the way you love other people, the way they [outsiders] see you being generous, the way they see you resolving and forgiving conflict... (p. 22)

... A Christian who's got compassion, who's kind, who has grace and knows how to walk forward in that tension of truth and grace, just like Jesus modeled for us... (p. 23)

... We want Christians to get back to the basics of the gospel, to help people mend their broken lives, to help them understand better how the world works and how Christ is always redeeming and fixing those things that are broken... (p. 23)