“Unchurching”

“Unchurching”

I recently viewed a Youtube video of a TedTalk given at Palo Alto College by Richard Jacobsen. Here is the whole title: Unchurching: The Exodus from Institutional Forms of Church|Richard Jadobson|TEDxPalo Alto College. (I am not sure if copying and pasting that URL will work simply because I don’t know where the spaces are. So type it into Youtube’s search box.)

I also heard the following statistic (not from Jacobson): During the 1950s approximately 3% of Americans claimed no religious affiliation whereas in a recent poll approximately 20% claimed no religious affiliation. The latter people are labeled “nones” by sociologists of religion.

Whether this is a reliable set of statistics is debatable because personally know Christians who claim to be authentically Christian but have given up trying to find a “church home” and do not consider themselves part of any organized religious group. I suspect that if they were asked by a poll-takers about their religious affiliation they would say “none.” Also, I know Christians who attend very non-institutional “churches” (fellowships, small groups, whatever) who would also say “none” if asked for their “religious affiliation” because they don’t recognize what they attend as a “religion.” The old saw that “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship” still expresses the attitudes of many unaffiliated Christians.

So when I hear the 20% statistic I wonder how the question was asked. If I were attempting to discern how many or what percentage of Americans really have no religious affiliation I would ask “Do you think of yourself as a believer in some religion or specific spiritual path?” I think many who do not think of themselves as “affiliated” (with any religious organization) would say “of course.” And there would be many Christians among them.

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Back to Jacobson’s TedTalk. Jacobson there promotes Christians leaving “institutional churches” and gathering in fellowships outside organized, structured, institutional churches. Well, there’s nothing new about that.

One of the blessings and curses of being old and having been around American religion and studied it for many years is that you know things younger people don’t know. Here’s what I know. Way back in the 1700s pietist Protestants were leaving the state churches of Europe in droves and meeting in “conventicles” or “collegia pietatis.” Many of them did still attend Sunday morning worship at a state church, but their real religious-spiritual “home” was their small group that met without the benefit of clergy for prayer and Bible study. Many of these pietist Christians were persecuted in places like Sweden so they came to the American colonies and later to the United States to find religious freedom. Any of them founded new denominations such as the Swedish Covenant Mission or the Free Swedish Mission (etc.). One contemporary expression of that is the Evangelical Covenant Church of America. There are many more, some of them Baptist groups such as the formerly known as Baptist General Conference (originally the Swedish Baptist Conference) now strangely called “Converge.”

Then, jumping three centuries ahead, during the middle of the 20^th century there were many sort-of “house church” movements such as the Oxford Group founded by Frank Buchman. (Later it was re-named Moral Rearmament.) Alcoholics Anonymous has some roots in this movement. Adherents (I don’t know if they had membership as such) met in homes for Bible study, discussion, prayer, and confession of sins. Many of them belonged to traditional churches, but many of even those considered their Oxford Group meeting their true church. Swiss theologian Emil Brunner was strongly influenced by Buchman and the Oxford Group and that shows in his book The Misunderstanding of the Church where he blasted “institutionalism” as the main disease of the church and argued that the true church is the ekklesia of the New Testament—pure fellowship with no institutional structures.

During the 1960s and 1970s millions of Americans became involved in various house churches and coffeehouses with the charismatic movement and the Jesus People movement. I lived through those movements and well remember how many of them eschewed institutional church affiliation and regarded their house church or their Christian coffeehouse as their true church.

“Unchurching” has been going on a long time. There’s nothing new about it. But Jacobson is right that you do not need an institutional church to “have church.” And perhaps the mass exodus that we are experiencing from the traditional, institutional churches is a good thing insofar as it can be a wake up call for those that have become overly institutional to the detriment of lay participation and true fellowship.

However, even a house church can become institutional in the sense of being too planned, too structured, too focused on a particular leader or leadership team—to the detriment of real lay participation.

1 Corinthians 14 tells us how the church meeting should “go.” Each one (in context meaning true Christian disciple of Jesus Christ) should participate in the worship service or meeting or whatever it is called—at least occasionally. Here the Friends (Quakers) seem to have preserved an important element of primitive Christianity.

I believe we (American Christians) have gone off the rails, so to speak, by quenching the Spirit in our overly planned and prepared worship and in our highly structured church organizations bound by elaborate by-laws and customs. I am not against leadership, but true Christian leadership equips the “saints” to participate in the life of the church including the meetings for worship and Bible study and prayer. Christianity was never meant to be a spectator sport; unfortunately it has too often become that. And many authentic Christians are walking away to discover new forms of church life.

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