The Church of the Future

I don't know what it is, but I know what it's not

Last month, I was asked to give a talk to a congregational board about my vision of the church of the future, which I delivered over the weekend. Now to be honest,  I’m not sure they got what they were hoping for, because I think they were looking for the practical ideas they could implement.

I gave them something a lot more theoretical. Theological, even. And I called for a real paradigm shift.

I think that’s because as I started making notes on the piece of paper that I titled “The Church of the Future” I wrote “What Will Save Us?”

You see, I think about how this faith saved me, and I hear so many others talk about how this faith saved them – from harm, from depression, from negativity, from despair, from exclusion, from discrimination. This faith – grounded in universal love – is a saving faith.

And.

If we are to do the real spiritual work our saving faith demands – living it out loud, actively widening the circle of love, building the beloved community inside and outside our walls – hell, if we expect our faith to matter in 20 years, we have to let go of our faith in what will NOT save us:

There is no such thing as Salvation by Individualism. We have to shift our understanding of this faith – and of humanity itself – to concern for each other, to belonging, to how we hold and care for each other. We have to recenter our communities of faith in our own lives, remembering that we need one another, and yes – it does feel like a loss when you leave, for whatever reason.

There is no such thing as Salvation by Governance. Yes, how we organize helps keep our communities afloat, and yes, it matters that we take care to ensure it meets who we are now and allows us to follow our vision. But we cannot get so stuck in the bureaucratic weeds and expect the structure to be solid enough to save us. We need to be a lot more agile than we have been and not rely on how we’ve always done it.

There is no such thing as Salvation by Bottom Line. We’ve been taught to save and invest, and that it’s wise to live frugally, just in case. While not all of our congregations have endowments and investments, many do. Our portfolio good, and we have lots of unrestricted funds, and we get memorial gifts to support the work of the congregation… but we can’t pay our people fairly, or get the repairs done? Come on… the beloved community does not rely on a solid investment portfolio and praise those of us who scrimped on copy paper and toilet paper. The beloved community thrives when people thrive, when there is enough. Our faith is effective when we invest in ourselves and each other.

There’s no such thing as Salvation by Propriety. We can and should talk about the hard stuff: and by that I mean sex. And violence. And discrimination. And trauma. Yet we worry about who will get offended. We can blame the Victorians for this one; it became easy to not talk publicly about things like sex, bodily functions, body parts – because they had to find ways to not talk about the harms of slavery, oppression, poor factory conditions, violence. We inherit this whole thing from their unwillingness to face hard truths. How can we do the work our faith calls us to if we can’t even talk about what the hell is that we’re trying to love out our world?

Speaking of words, there’s no such thing as Salvation by Nomenclature. Too many times we get caught up on what we are going to call a thing – whether it be a mission statement, or a policy, or a program – and if we don’t like what words we used, we think it will fail. And when it doesn’t work, we blame what we call it, rather than the work we did because of it. How many times do we get stuck and not do anything because we can’t stop wordsmithing?

There’s no such thing as Salvation by Lecture. Seriously. There’s a reason they call us “people of the words”… golly, if we could only hear more pontification about a thing, maybe this time we’ll get it. :::eye roll::: We can talk until we’re blue in the face – in annual meetings, in forums, in discussion groups – but words alone will not move us. Show us who you are and what you are willing to do, and we’ll get to work. Now I’m not saying we don’t love an inspiring speech or lesson or sermon – but there is a difference between those formal deliveries and the pop-up pontification that seems interesting only to the person pontificating.  

We are called to put our values into practice, and can do that when we remember the love that holds us, the world that calls us, and the possibilities that await us. Talk about that. Show that in your worship, and your welcome, and your financial commitments, and your actual work in the world.

The church of the future needs us to let go of the minutiae and lean into what will actually save us: The Full Expression of Love – for those already here, and those yet to come…. for the world we dream about and the world we live in now.