I once visited the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California; it was a side-trip on our family pilgrimage to “the happiest place on earth.” Somehow it seemed appropriate that the extraordinary glass edifice built by the Gospel of Jesus Christ filtered through the power of positive thinking should be located a few blocks from Disneyland.
But it seems that even the church of the “Hour of Power” has fallen on hard times. The Crystal Cathedral is not surviving the economic recession quite as well as its Disney neighbour. The megachurch is facing a $55 million deficit. It has experienced a 27% drop in revenue over the last two years. In response they have laid off 140 staff, dropped TV broadcasts in certain markets and canceled the Easter pageant. The trustees have now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The religious blogger for beliefnet in a post called “‘Stained’ Glass at the Crystal Cathedral,” today ponders the implications of the Crystal Cathedral’s dramatic decline.
In some ways the plight of the Crystal Cathedral exemplifies the status of what some call the “Christendom” expression of Christianity. All over the western world signs of “post-Christendom” are glaringly evident. In small town America, many church buildings are just half full at best on Sunday morning. In urban centers hundreds of Christian churches are converting to daycare centers or restaurants… or mosques. The massive, ancient cathedrals of Europe are mostly vacant at traditional times of worship. The signs of a decaying tradition are too stark to miss.
But… even while Christendom fades, a new season of faith is rising. New forms of Christian faith are taking root in the very shadows of the declining edifice of an old order. Coffee shop churches, fellowships in homes and college dorms and yes, even on line are opening new forms of and fashions for followers of Jesus to gather, worship, seek and learn and serve in the name of their Lord.
http://blog.beliefnet.com/prayerplainandsimple/2010/10/stained-glass-at-the-crystal-cathedral.html#ixzz12oicflhP
There is no question that a tectonic shift is taking place in the religious world. The blogger at http://www.beliefnet.com/seems to be of the opinion that, in the light of the end of Christendom, we in the religious enterprise are going to have to re-think the way we do church.
The suggestion seems to be that, in the face of economic decline and an incredible diversification in spiritual affiliations, and secularization of contemporary culture, churches may need to rethink the way we do church. We may need to start to think in terms of small and flexible when it comes to embodying our communal expressions of faith. It may be that the era of Crystal Cathedrals has come to an end. Perhaps the way forward looks more like “Coffee shop churches, fellowships in homes and college dorms and yes, even on line” ways of gathering for worship, fellowship and nurture in following Christ.
There may be more than purely economic reasons for churches to ponder the possibility that small may indeed be beautiful. Increasingly, a new generation of followers of Jesus are aware that how we build and where we meet have an impact upon the environment God has entrusted to our care. Young people want to bike or walk to church. They are not interested energy-consuming edifices.
They want to eat “the zero-mile diet,” and develop green spaces rather than parking spaces.
As the demands and speed of life continue to increase at an alarming rate, people are looking for smaller more sustainable ways of being. People have less time and less inclination to dedicate themselves to the care and nurture of large edifices in which to gather big crowds. They crave an alternative to the impersonal economic machines that seem to dominate so much of our lives. They want the intimacy of a neighbourhood. They want places where they can be known by name and valued as an individual person rather than a productive cog in a large machine.
It may be that the shift in our culture is offering the church a profound opportunity to return to our true values and rediscover our true identity.
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October 20, 2010 at 3:46 pm
John
Here here….yes, this is the situation that faces churches everywhere, and it is no more real to our community than with the situation facing our diocese and with the impending ‘merge’ of St. Phillip and St. Mary. We not only need to move forward with our move, but if this upheaval is to have any lasting merit, the ‘way that we do church’ will have to change with urgency. This needs to be the focus of the leadership team(s) – diocese, clergy and laity-or we will find our community being in the same situation in the not-to-distant future.
October 21, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Jeffrey
Mega-churches aside, declining overall church attendance should indicate the need for change in all forms of churches. Today’s skeptical, cynical young people show little interest in supporting traditional spiritual institutions. I have heard skeptical comments about the “need for church” in Bible studies and discussions for years; as that generation grows older, I see more of them move away from the institution while they retain their faith.
Mega-churches will probably always exist, but, like all churches, not all of them will maintain their population. I think all churches will need to understand that they no longer have the “corner” on the Christian faith, that “church” may only function as a vestige of the past, something attended and supported because of its tradition, not for inherent value in the community or society. Technologies and bureaucracies have changed our society and made churches redundant; practically all of the services churches have provided for over 1000 years can be found in other places. People can individually seek their faith with ease and comfort, and stationary, belief-based communities are mere inesential appendages to the seeker’s walk.
This gradual process of individualization, probably beginning with the automobile and culminating with the World Wide Web, will continue while churches exist, even a few megachurches here and there. Churches, large and small, will not disappear. But they might alter their statements of faith, service format, and community services to maintain social relevance.
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos articulated these gradual changes extremely well, when it compared the evolution of the human brain to the evolution of a city.
Similarly, our overall culture has added many different parts to our community during the last 100 years, and the church institution, which evolved over a few thousand years, has not adapted at the same speed as the culture. The mega-church worked as a competitive cultural force for the last thirty years or so, but the world has moved on and let the mega-churches dwindle. As the mega-churches become more minor, small churches come and go and disappear.
We should not expect the church to keep up with cultural adaptation. It cannot do so. But the Captal-C Church will continue in different forms in the hearts of the people. People want to feel whole and complete, and technologies have given them the means to do so without Sunday services and church membership. Even the regular church attendees are probably involved in smaller groups and meetings to make their faith more relevant, and attend the church to keep a connection to the “vestiges of the past.” That vestige, archaic as it may seem, might also help the church continue to evolve, slowly and steadily, alongside the many other spiritual, relevant, functioning renovations our culture provides its members for spiritual nourishment.
October 22, 2010 at 5:59 am
inaspaciousplace
Thank you so much Jeffrey for this really thoughtful and stimulating comment.
At our last Spirituality Cafe (see October 21 post) we came up with the image of a library for “spiritual institutions.” It seems to me that you are absolutely correct, people can be well nourished by taking a book home and reading it by themselves. They further be well fed by studying that book with a group of similarly interested readers.
But I wonder if it is possible that we might risk losing some depth if we completely abandon the concept of the library. Is it possible that the quality of public discourse and intellectual pursuit might be lost without the depth of tradition that a library preserves by virtue of the diversity of voices it embraces?
Is it possible that without a library, our culture eventually will simply be surrendered to whichever voice shouts the loudest and carries the biggest stick? Could it be that there is something inherently beneficial in preserving the diverse conversation that a library represents and that is supported in our culture by a larger gathering of faith in which people are challenged to carry on relating to one another even when they may not agree all the time on everything or necessarily get along all that well?