Churches are closing and all my friends are leaving.
A few thoughts on ecclesiology and toxicity in the ELCA.
[This ongoing writing, Dying on Obscure Hills, is my attempt to migrate my thinking away from the echoing destructiveness of social media, and towards longer thoughts on what I am reading, encountering, and thinking. If it’s for you, cool. If my hills are just too obscure or frustrating to watch me die on? Stop reading and we can have a beer together. I am better in person, promise.]
This week, the first congregation I served, Redeemer Lutheran in Lawrence, Massachusetts, closed their doors after ninety-three years of ministry to immigrant communities. They thrived as a small congregation for almost a decade after declared for dead and beset by pastoral misconduct. Truly a miracle from God that has saved some lives, crossed boundaries, and was a glimpse of the Kingdom of God.
This week also saw another handful of announcements from colleagues in Chicago who are leaving without new pastoral calls in hand, leaving ministry altogether, or moving to a new geographic region.
There are lots and lots and lost of thought leader think pieces on why all these things are happening. Burnout? Trauma? Secularism?
I can only speak from my vantage point in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but I want to process some of my grief here by suggesting another connecting point:
The ghosts of our past have finally come back to haunt us.
I was told when I took the call at Redeemer that I would be ending my ministry career by a boomer colleague in New England, because it was a small, white congregation unable to change. What they didn’t know was that the previous pastor had married and divorced a parishioner in the congregation, leaving an immense traumatic wake behind them.
By the time I got to Redeemer, the energy and size was small enough to really make it uphill climb for all of us to get to a point where we had the energy to make an impact big enough to change their fortunes. They were faithful to God in doing tremendously important and new ministries, and God was faithful to them. For everything, there is a season, yes, but for too many important ministries in important places, the church spiritualizes closings that have to do with a long-term lack of investment and resources, not God’s eternal timing.
This is true particularly in communities of poverty, working-class communities, rural communities and communities of color. The ELCA has always found its greatest success in suburban, white churches, where self-sustenance is simply easier, but made our investment in that model the rule for churches everywhere.
So, I am left to wonder, in the same way I wonder about my beloved friends who serve in African-descent congregations on the south and west sides of Chicago:
Self-sustaining ministry is the name of the game in the ELCA, but is it our death knell too?
There are three idea I want to explore on this topic that are making life toxic in our congregations right now: we are not church together, we have too many churches, and we are eating our clergy alive by making them fundraise their own ministries.
Our presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton likes to take as many opportunities to remind us that we are “church together,” but that is simply false. Our model is based on congregational autonomy, a choice that we made in 1988 (before many of our leaders were born), to create the sort of church where money flows largely upward.
People give to congregations. Congregations give to synods. Synods give to churchwide. And churchwide…maintaining a $4 billion endowment.
Do those funds come back down to congregations in vulnerable economic communities? Congregations experiencing gentrification? White flight? Historic ministry with vulnerable or underserved populations? Simply put, no.
The money that goes to churchwide, does come back down, but in the form of priorities that the national offices declares important, which are often a decade or more behind the prevailing wisdom on church planting and church renewal. Whether lone-wolf models, churches planting churches, or our current obsession with innovation, we are playing catch up to a world we will never catch up to with our current ecosystem. Even innovation, which emerged from Harvard Business school over twenty years ago, and now en vogue in the mainline church, deserves significant critique for the way it uses and disposes of resources and people, as Andy Root has pointed out.
One thing that has been abundantly certain is that there is no form of significant long term financial support or for that matter reparations for communities in which the ELCA has participate in their disinvestment. Not intentionally, but through its support of self-sustaining models in communities that need a model of true interconnectedness to survive, thrive, and invest in their neighborhoods, as opposed to fundraising simply to keep the roof on and pastor in their stead, this disinvestment has created toxic environments across our church of haves and have nots.
Until we figure out an intentional spirituality of life together, in which churches that have more than enough economically invest in churches serving in vulnerable or underserved places, we will continue to implant toxicity into our church.
Undoubtedly this model of church together has also created an environment where we have three churches in half a square mile in some wealthy urban and suburban communities in the Upper Midwest, while anchor institution congregations in neighborhoods in Chicago, Boston, New York, and rural communities across the middle of this country continue to whither on the vine of self-sustenance as their expenses, many of which dictated by the needs of an older and well educated clergy, rise.
The pay discrepancies, the investment discrepancies, the institutional lack of imagination means that as long as churches continue to close in places where God has clearly identified His preferred presence (poor, widows, outcasts, etc…), we are committing a tremendous violation of Christ’s body in the name of a model that reflects capitalism and ecclesiological Darwinism more than any biblical model of church life.
We simply now have too many churches to make a significant missional impact in many communities, dividing people, their gifts, and the work of God into maintaining distinctly Lutheran churches, while ignoring full communion agreements with Episcopal, let alone Methodist and Presbyterian congregations who have somewhat similar issues. Instead of creating communities filled with people, energy, and mission committed to the ongoing work of God through the presence of the Holy Spirit in Christ’s body, we’re still trying to make it alone, too afraid we’ve already hit the iceberg and simply don’t know how to get off the boat.
We failed to make courageous decisions in 1988 about how we would structure our church, so we have multiple ELCA congregations within a mile of each other in some places, choosing on their own accord to work together. What would have happened if 35 years ago, we chose to integrate these congregations together? Not mergers, but entirely new lives reflecting the new life of a new denomination?
And while we want to be young and diverse, we packed up our congregations in those communities and moved them elsewhere or closed them entirely over the last thirty years, simply because they were “self-sustaining.”
It’s survival of the fittest in this church until there are barely enough people to survive.
I used to suspect that it was our decisions about sexuality, or about scriptural interpretation, or the general nostalgia of the Lutheran church that was powering the toxicity and decline within our church. But now, I am more convinced than ever that our sin has been integrating this ecclesiological Darwinism into our bones, where we are functionally in competition with our neighboring churches and our fellow Lutherans to have enough resources fast enough, to innovate fast enough, to grow fast enough.
Even my current congregation, Holy Family, a trailblazing African-descent Lutheran church, had to scrap for grants and support and money for decades in order to build mixed income housing, be a sanctuary for children, build a renowned school, all in one of the largest public housing projects in America.
Is that the sort of Church that God intended for us?
Where has been the Spirit in all of this? Where is the heavenly gates at each table filled with bread and wine? Where is the suffering body of Christ bound up with one another? I have heard more about mission, innovation, and leadership in the last decade than I ever did about the indwelling and transforming power of the Holy Spirit.
I think that’s been the red flag all along
And now, there are not enough clergy and too many churches in places where they don’t need to be, and we have long ago vacated the communities we desire to be in (see a map of the ELCA congregations of the west and southwest sides of Chicago).
And now, we are training our clergy in the best business models around, focused on developing leaders informed by the latest leadership and fundraising models from Silicon Valley and Harvard. Yet, those same places are becoming less and less human as they explore the potentially disastrous idol hunts of transhumanism and AI or are essentially hedge funds playing educational institutions.
We want leaders who are deeply grounded in the Holy Spirit, but then we want them to fundraise their own people in order to fund the work of not only the local congregation, but also the synod and church wide offices while having an ecclesiology that has taught each and every one of our congregations that they are perilously, in the end, on their own.
And so, those congregations have taken on that attitude deep within their spiritual bones, a sort of anxiety and toxicity that can only be the work of powers and principalities in our midst, especially as it most often plays out around money.
If you want to know why our pastors are burning out, and our churches closing, I don’t think we need to look at leadership training models, or innovation styles, or sociological data.
Just look at who we’ve chosen to be, and the sort of god we actually live out in our practices.
The ghosts we’ve been avoiding all along are here, their haunting is real, and the pandemic simply made them a bit more visible.
We aren’t a church together, and it’s time we admitted it.
And maybe, just maybe, after admitting we have a problem, we can find out way back into the Story and the God that promises us to belong to one another in mutual love.