In the past few months, Covenant has hosted a conversation about the Anglican Church of Canada’s decline, including essays by Cole Hartin and David Goodhew. Goodhew’s essays shared a good deal of hard data but also made claims about the causes of the decline. Emilie Smith offered a response to Goodhew that, while not denying the numbers, included a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the church’s current cultural context. Stopping short of completely agreeing with Goodhew’s language of “collapse,” she links the notion that the drop in numbers should not be the main metric of health. Her primary complaint was that Goodhew ties the decline to, in his words, ”Canada’s determination to be in the vanguard of progressive theology.”
Smith has a very good argument here. Goodhew seems to have engaged in a bit of post hoc ergo propter hoc (before, therefore because) logical fallacy. As a fellow theological conservative, I would like to believe that the Western mainline Protestant turn to progressive theology and practice has caused the decline of mainline churches. And yet, for me, the case has not been made, or at least not as persuasively as I would like. Rather, it is true that any church —conservative, progressive, fringe, mainline — can grow using well-known principles of church growth. If you want a good book on the subject, try Kevin Martin’s 5 Keys for Church Leaders. The principles there can be applied in most all theological contexts.
But the flip side of the coin is the argument that a move toward progressive theology, especially on human sexuality, will expand the church. The claim says that a church open to a wide diversity of people, especially LGBT people, will attract more people. It is possible that in some Western and largely urban pockets, and in some specific parishes, that phenomenon has occurred.
But such a shift, at the macro or perhaps denominational level, has not led to demonstrable widespread growth. I am not sure there is any denomination in the West that has moved in this direction in the last 10 or 20 years that is seeing widespread growth, or even not experiencing significant decline. Again, I am not linking a cause, but rather underlining that growth has not been spurred by a move toward a progressive position on questions of human sexuality. In fairness, perhaps we have not waited long enough. An organization (the church) that has been seen as anti-[fill in the blank] will take time to shed that image. I suspect, though, that at this point it does not appear there will be much left to benefit from this theoretical case.
So we turn from the narrative about growth to theology. Ultimately, this is the core question: What is the church for?
I need to challenge Smith on a seemingly underlying assumption about what the church is for. Her litany of progressive causes is very full. For the vast majority, those line up with what could be called biblical justice. No concept of Christian discipleship could look at those and conclude they do not follow from Scripture. Even though I disagree with Smith about human sexuality, every would-be disciple of Jesus has to take seriously the prophet’s call of “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).
Christians should be the first to acknowledge the issues of sin in our common life. The knee-jerk reaction of conservative Christians to deny the continuing reality of racism (or a number of other sins) is perplexing. A conservative theological axiom is that we are not free from sin (yet). And because we believe that God loves us no matter what, we are free to say that the racism (or other sin) we are likely to find in our hearts doesn’t threaten God, and so should not threaten us. Thus the flow of the Christian life marked by repentance, grace, and renewal.
But again, what is the role and vocation of the Church at its most foundational level? Smith draws on a conversation with Archbishop Lynne McNaughton: “It isn’t a question of which comes first, personal faith or actions of justice.” Smith adds:
Churches are called to be centers of loving action, nurturing faith as part of these actions in the neighborhood and in the world. This is what is required of us in the name of our faith in the God who made all creation.
Here we find a troubling view of the purpose of the Church, one common in the Episcopal Church. “What comes first” is what God has done for us — and done it first — in Jesus Christ. Neither personal faith nor an action of justice comes first. Rather, it is God’s outpouring of himself — Jesus’ Incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and provision of the Holy Spirit come first. It is this moving toward us, a love for us while we were dead in our trespasses, that must have primacy in all our reflections about the purpose of the Church. The mistake is manifest in how Episcopalians often approach the Baptismal Covenant (what we are called to do) without at least equal time given to Baptism itself (what God in Jesus has already done). In short, any discussion of the Church must have the gospel as its unambiguous feature.
This means that local churches are called to be centers of the gospel of Christ — God’s work of redemption in Jesus. And of course this means disciples of Jesus go out into the world to speak and act — to be “doers of the word” indeed. A congregation that is purely about “causes,” whether conservative or progressive, is simply not the Church. Here I have waded right into the question of the notae ecclesiae, the marks of the Church, and I wish to say with clarity that the first mark is the proclamation of God’s work for us in Jesus Christ.
In the 1975 British comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a character protests to the undertaker, “I’m not dead yet,” and is promptly hit over the head. Perhaps we should be slower to hit each other over the head when trying to fix blame for decline. Instead, what is needed is a robust commitment to fostering churches that are unambiguously about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and the promise of life in him.
When Charlie and his wife arrived in Colorado Springs in the mid to late 1990s, they joined an Episcopal church. Living in the South, with a Baptist church on every corner, Charlie was a Lutheran. Now living in Minnesota, with a Lutheran church on every corner, he is an Episcopalian.