For a long time now the church in America has followed a few largely unquestioned formulas for outreach and evangelism. “Build it and they will come” is the one I’m most familiar with: Put a church building in a good location, make sure your signage is visible and attractive, use marketing to invite people to your events and services, train friendly people to welcome them, and throw community events that allow people not in your church to become more familiar with it. “Invite them and they will come” is another approach that some people use. Personally asking someone to go to church with you so that they might become connected, first through you, to the community. When new people do come, they will find varying methods attempting to invite them to faith or church membership ranging from the coercive and hell-fire to the more gentle pitch around the value a particular church’s ministries might bring to enhance their lives.
The underlying assumption beyond these approaches is that the people a church is trying to reach want the same kind of spiritual life and community church people do. And that the existing faith communities represent the buffet of options spiritual hungry people are looking for. But the data continues to show these assumptions couldn’t be more misguided. Yes, there are people who will come if you build it or invite them. But we all know by now that an increasing amount of people are not looking for the life with God that traditional churches are offering.
“After years of reflection…Patrick moved into mission”
George G. Hunter III
Both Jesus and Paul spent years preparing themselves through prayerful reflection before they entered into their mission and ministry. St. Patrick, with a missionary team, lived in Ireland and entered deep reflection for several years before living on mission. And yet our church today plunges forward doing what it’s always done when it needs to pause, listen, ask, watch, and learn. Our Lord, and these saints did not take lightly the challenge of authentically and effectively being sent to love, serve, heal, and preach among people who were new to their message. Why are we?
I only mean to make one point here: The church must look to Jesus and these saints and invest itself in the years of reflection it will take to learn how to genuinely connect and become relevant and attractive to a culture that considers them largely unimportant at best and harmful and villainous at worst. That investment in reflection costs something, and the church has largely been unwilling or unable to to pay that cost. Before I take a stab at why that cost has been too high for the church, let me say more about reflection.
Reflection entails deep curiosity and careful observation and listening, a willingness to view assumptions with suspicion and a critical eye, the patience to wait in the “I don’t know/understand”, and courage to step into imagining a future that is new and strange. Above all, reflection asks questions, particularly “why?”. It is sacred and transformative work. With God’s help It changes us and heals us. It is not too much to say it is a key part of our ongoing salvation. So if it’s so important, why isn’t the church seriously investing in it? Simply put, the cost has been too high.
- Investing in reflection costs being open to the reality that the way you are doing things isn’t working. I can’t overstate how much this costs to systems and institutions that have invested decades (centuries really), money, and human formation into a way of thinking and operating that has become set in stone. All systems and institutions have a flex point beyond which they cannot operate. If the intended purpose cannot be achieved within that flex point, the system or institution becomes obsolete (at least in achieving that purpose). If there is an unwillingness to deconstruct or abandon the systems and institutions because the cost of doing so is too high, then the gift of reflection becomes extremely limited, because it must provide solutions within the narrow flex points provided. If reflections reveal purposes beyond that flex point, it becomes ignored or worse those purposes become stripped and filtered to the point that they can be co-opted into the current confines…losing their truth and power but appearing to many as legitimate.
- Investing in reflection costs abandoning some of the efforts you currently count on for success to make space to observe, inquire, pray, and experiment. The church is anxiously scrambling to survive, or at least maintain the lifestyle to which it has become accustomed. Most human and financial resources are committed to this task of maintenance and growth. Like a struggling corporation, the research and development department, which didn’t need to exist for the last century and was never a real office in the first place, has no dedicated space in the system to operate. I see most system and institutional stewards recognizing the need for reflection and learning, but the pressure to survive, along with all of the other forces of stress, have made reflection too high a cost to pay. Interestingly, burn-out and widespread failure often put us in a position where reflection is no longer an option. Reaching rock bottom has a special way of making us open to another way.
- Investing in reflection means shifting from certitude into mystery. This cost has more to do with the way we approach faith as a personal journey. If the general thrust of popular religion in the last several centuries has provided firm answers to life’s most perplexing questions then it has also ill-equipped us for the work of sacred reflection. A posture of hands clasped tightly around doctrinal or ethical assurances that, operating like a shield/sword, must wage victory over and against competing cultural, scientific, and political philosophy make deep reflection almost impossible. Reflection requires open handed, vulnerable, and flexible attitudes if its gift of truth and wisdom are to be received. Those requirements have an immense cost when you consider the fear and anger being constantly stoked within and around us. To pay them means we risk losing not only a system or institution but the very convictions we’ve counted on to keep us stable and secure.
By acknowledging and naming these costs we get closer to being honest with ourselves about whether we might have the willingness and courage to pay them. The church is in a moment when it still has tremendous wealth, influence, people, and power. But those gifts must be employed strategically and faithfully to invest in deep reflection as we prepare for new and faithful ways of moving into mission.