Why is My Church Shrinking?

We lived in the same house for 25 years.  When we moved in 2000, it was time to unload some of the stuff weighing us down, so we had a garage sale.  As the moving van headed to the new house, it wasn’t just our collection of stuff that had considerably lightened.  In some real sense, what we kept and what we left behind has influenced our life paths going forward.  Or perhaps we moved partly because we felt the need to change the path of our lives.  Or both.  In any case, it is kind of liberating from time to time, to think about what you really need to keep, and what, from a past life, is just taking up space in the attic.

Churches are professional hoarders.  If you look deeply enough, behind the liturgy, behind the culture, behind the theology, behind the architecture, behind the beliefs and hopes, you will see a random collection of 2000 years of ‘stuff’.  Some of us like to bless it all, and call it Remembering the Tradition.  If we flip the coin though, the dark side of tradition is the recent TV show Hoarders.  Hoarding is when all the stuff clogs life, when the stuff loses all relevance to what I really need to do after breakfast this morning.

Hoarders are of course dysfunctional, and perhaps shouldn’t be taken advantage of on TV.  Letting go is hard, because not just the ‘stuff’ is going, but pieces of past lives too.  Hoarders need much more than a dumpster.  They need to be in touch with the essentials of their own lives, with what really makes them human.

Churches are professional hoarders.  One wonders, can we stop endlessly rearranging the stacks of stuff cluttering the metaphorical hallways and stairways of our community, and get back to the essentials of life together?  The premise of The 500 Year Garage Sale is that declining mainline churches desperately need to go back to the essentials.  And to go back to the essential core of what is important for life together, is to go back to St. Paul.

So now you are cringing.  Paul is archaic.  Paul is from a different world.  Paul’s religious world view doesn’t relate to today.  If you have every tried to read him, you quickly gave up because it is difficult to follow his abstractions and wooden language.  All true.  But it is also true that if you read Letter from Birmingham Jail without any knowledge whatsoever of Dr. King or the civil rights issues of the ‘60s, you would be equally mystified.  You need a readable translation, and you need a minimum amount of background information to understand the man in his context.  The same is true of Paul.

A group of us are together trying to ‘go back to St. Paul’.  We are rereading all of Paul’s authentic letters to groups of Jesus followers, in the hope and expectation that we will learn enough about community back then, to figure out what is essential for ‘doing church’ today.  We want to free ourselves from 2000 years of baggage, lighten the load, and visualize our small role in the re-formation of mainline Protestantism.  As we read and discuss, I want to share some of what we learn about Paul, and what I think this means for reforming the church in our time.

We started our group with some brief information about how to properly read Paul in his context.

Step 1.  Forget everything you learned about Paul from the Book of Acts, which forms probably 95% of everyone’s  image of Paul.  Why?  Because Acts was written in about 120CE, a century after Jesus, and more than a generation after Paul.   Acts is an epic story of how the Jesus movement transitioned from Galilee and especially from Jerusalem, to Rome as the center of the known world.  Acts is definitely not historical detail.  The only accurate and firm historical knowledge of Paul and his communities comes from Paul’s own letters.  Where the letters and Acts conflict, which is often, the letters take precedence. 

Step 2.   Not all letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament were actually written by Paul.  According to best current scholarship, the authentic letters of Paul are 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans.  2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Hebrews were not written by Paul, and to varying degrees actually were even not in harmony with Paul’s thinking.  These later non-Pauline letters tended to tone down Paul’s understanding of Jesus in order to make the later Jesus movement more culturally acceptable to Roman society.

Step 3.  Get a good translation in order to make Paul understandable.   Translations can either stick very closely to the original Greek word order, and therefore be wooden and difficult to understand in English.  Or they can be very free form, and sacrifice accuracy for readability.  The translation we are using, The Authentic Letters of Paul, is exceptional in that it sticks to the sense of the Greek text in an accurate, scholarly way, but still is surprisingly readable.  Here is a video link to one of the translators, talking about the translation process.

Step 4.  Read Paul’s authentic letters for yourself, in the order given in Step 2, which is probably the historical order in which they were written.  Remember that when Paul was writing in the 50’s, the gospels didn’t yet exist – they hadn’t been written yet.  (Mark, the earliest, was composed some time in the later 60’s.)  Most important of all, form your own sense of Paul’s intent.  Resist the temptation to think that the ‘experts’ know more than you.

Following these 4 steps, our adult discussion group is working its way through Paul’s letters.  We think from each of the letters we learn something useful about reforming how church is typically done in the 21^st century.  Paul can lead us to rethink 500 years of Protestantism.  Next:  what we think we learned from 1 Thessalonians.