ARE WE A PEOPLE AT HALF TIME? - Leadership Network

What the new churches are is
expressed well by the Fellowship of Las
Colinas, in Irving, Texas, in its official
statement of purpose: “We exist to reach
up—which is worship (expressing love to
God); to reach out—which is evangelism
(or sharing Christ with others); and to
reach in—which is discipleship (becoming
fully devoted followers of Christ).”
Although not usually fundamentalist in the
sense so poorly received in liberal churchgoing
and secular America, these churches
are proudly evangelical—that is, they are
devoted to missions and conversion—and
take the Bible very seriously if not always
literally. God’s word is the only thing
about these churches that is considered
sacred, and yet their people invoke Jesus as
often and as familiarly as other people talk
about their friends.
A CHURCH OF OPTIONS
Boomers as customers are
accustomed to eclecticism,
which is the embodiment of
choice. In spontaneous imitation
of that other late-century
cathedral, the mall, the
megachurch offers a panoply
of choices under one roof—
from worship styles to boutique
ministries, plus plenty of
parking, clean bathrooms, and
the likelihood that you’ll find
something you want and come
back again. This is what the
customer considers value.
People may drive fortyfive
minutes to an hour to get
to a church like this—but then,
as normal Americans, they’re
in the habit. Bob Buford
explains, “People don’t work
in their neighborhoods. People
don’t shop in their neighborhoods.
People don’t go to the
movies in their neighborhoods.
So why should anyone expect them
to go to church in their neighborhoods
They’ll drive right by small churches in
their neighborhood to get to attend a larger
one that offers more in the way of services
or programs.”
The membership of most of the
churches I visited was predominantly
white, although in almost every one I could
see a sprinkling of black and brown and
Asian families. Most pastors plead that
they attract the people who happen to live
in their communities (defined as an
agglomeration of ZIP codes). But they
don’t look happy about it.
Lyle Schaller, the church scholar, told
me that race and ethnicity are “still a very
significant line of demarcation” in most of
American church life (except for very
large, multicultural, charismatic congregations).
The same impulse that drives people
to worship with their own social kind,
or to make the choice of a church a statement
about the way they see themselves in
the world, keeps them racially unmixed. In
this sense the gated community lives.
In Next Church circles
there is a keen interest in
creating churches, or services
within churches, that
minister to Americans in
their twenties. I heard more
than one exegesis of the
differences in tastes and
expectations, spiritual and
otherwise, between Boomers
and Busters.
I did glimpse something
of the Buster style in
Chris Seay, the pastor of
the University Baptist
Church, in Waco, Texas,
who is mellow as only a
twenty-four-year-old can
be. Seay ministers to a
flock of twentysomethings
and younger meeting in
an old downtown movie
theater.
Seay, a third-generation
pastor, says this about
Busters: “It’s not that we
don’t trust God; it’s that we
don’t trust the institutions. They’ve let us
down. But I don’t think Busters have
rejected Christ.” His mission is to “communicate
to seekers in a safe place,” he
says. “They need a place where it’s safe to
say, ‘I don’t believe this whole God thing.
I think it’s a lot of malarkey.’”
Like the mainline denominations,
though perhaps with more success, new,
large, independent churches attempt to live
with intense divisions among their flock
over abortion and homosexuality. Some,
like Michael Foss, the pastor of Prince of
Peace Lutheran Church, in suburban
Minneapolis, are fiercely agnostic. “I’m
convinced you can be a Christian on either
side of those issues,” Foss told me when
we talked last fall. “One of the tragedies of
the culture is the tendency to draw lines
where they needn’t be drawn. Christians
ought to quit throwing rocks at Christians.
We don’t have to agree on everything. And
these are side issues. What we’re about is
spiritual renewal.”
Such dangerously free thinking is not
always apparent among the Next Church
pastors I spoke to. Like politicians, they
put varying degrees of emphasis on teaching
people the biblical injunctions on these
matters, and in their hands Scripture stacks
up pretty heavily against people who terminate
viable pregnancies or enjoy nonprocreative
sexual relations of any type.
But it seemed to me also that their conclusion
was always that compassion was necessary—vigilance
against the sin, forgiveness
for the sinner.
I asked Ed Young, the pastor of Las
Colinas, if his church could keep getting
bigger and bigger, and he answered,
“As long as we keep getting smaller and
smaller.” The riddle is worth pondering.
Growing churches and congregations,
like growing businesses, have a reflexive
thirst for market share. They tend to equate
rising numbers with self-worth and bricks
and mortar with godliness. But growth
is also an expression of the evangelical
mission.
Not only self-styled evangelicals are
growth-minded. Bill Tully, the rector of St.
Bartholomew’s, a distinguished old mainline
Episcopal church in New York City, is
watching the large-church “restoration
acts” across the country with an appreciation
of the inherent tensions of growth.
“People come to church to be touched,
to belong,” he told me in an E-mail mes-
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