The Washington Episcopal Clergy Association is focusing its 2010/11 program year on “Reimagining Congregational Vitality,” as the future of the mainline churches is looking rather bleak. In her recent book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, Phyllis Tickle suggests that in the United States, institutional Christianity is in the throes of a radical transformation, and must quickly prepare to take risks and make changes in order to fully participate in what the Holy Spirit is bringing forth. Failure to engage, she believes, will result in increasing irrelevance, stagnation and death.

Such views also are held by the Emergent Church Movement, whose defacto spokesperson is the popular author and non-denominational pastor Brian McLaren, whose many books include A Generous Orthodoxy, which I have read and find quite good. A priest in our own diocese, the Rev. Ken Howard, also has written a book in this emergent church mode, Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond Us and Them, which builds on Tickle’s thought and suggests that institutional Christianity in this country is undergoing a massive shift because the paradigms which guided institutional Christianity for centuries have collapsed. Howard believes that if we in the Episcopal Church realign ourselves to ride this wave of paradigmatic change, we will be all right, but that ignoring or attempting to fight this wave of change will drown us.

Given such understandings, the future of the institutional church we know is bleak indeed. Change is coming; that is sure. And there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, although American Evangelicals on the right and left seem to think they can by using political power, such as the old Moral Majority right or the newer left-leaning social justice Evangelicals, more or less led by Sojourner’s editor Jim Wallace. The problem with the political power folks – whose numbers include many emergent church types – is that they want political power. This is a kind of neo-Constantinian move to restore the cultural influence which time has taken away from American mainline Protestants. (Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, tempting the church to serve the Empire first and God second.) Many American Protestants – and other religious groups, too – seem to want a restoration of what we usually call Christendom. But it’s not going to happen.

And there are reasons: In his book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter says: “For politics to be about more than power, it depends on a realm that is independent of the political sphere.” Not realizing that the church is the only independent institution which might do this, Christian groups which might provide ideals and values that elevate politics beyond the quest for power embrace politics as the means of changing culture, thereby reducing Christian faith to political ideology, right or left. Moreover, such pursuit among Evangelicals as well as some emergent church groups also fosters the radical individualism and consumerism which destroys the church’s ability to form its members into people of faith in an environment of “continuity, historical memory, rituals marking seasons of life, intergenerational interdependence, and common worship” (Hunter).

Only strong faith communities, larger than the sum of total individuals which make them up, can provide the formation necessary to resist the individualism and commercialism which reduce people to isolated individuals whose purpose in life is to consume more and more of whatever is advertised. Families, weakened and formed by the same cultural problems as the rest of our society, cannot do this anymore. The emerging church movement, as well as any church that offers a “niche” version of church, “makes possible churches designed for different needs and interests” (Hunter). As George Barna notes in his book, Revolution: “Growing numbers . . . are piecing together spiritual elements they deem worthwhile, constituting millions of personalized ‘church’ experiences.” Thus the church itself becomes just a consumer choice for Christians, not unlike any other consumer choice, reducing the church to another cultural expression of individualism and materialism (Hunter).

But the Church as God’s gift to God’s people is a community different from any society in which it exists. It should serve God first, and its country or culture second. The church is meant to be the leaven that raises the whole loaf of a society, not the dough. And if the church can contribute to the common good, making more disciples for Jesus Christ to worship God is its first priority. For this reason, our weekly communal worship and our formation of adults and children as members of Christ’s body who are faithful to that worship should come above anything else. For corrupted by our individualistic, consumer culture, that’s not how we live anymore. Participating in weekly worship has become an “option” for us, rather than our prime duty and chief witness to our culture that something is more important than anything else.

For well-formed Christians, putting even family before worship in a non-emergency situation is not a consideration. And neither is golf, nor having guests in, nor band, nor sports, nor anything else which interferes with the active communal worship of God and Christian witness to the community that God is more important than anything else.

How well formed are we? How well formed are our children? An hour or two once a week or even less, as when we or our children are scheduled to participate in a service, will not form anyone to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. It only forms one to be an individualist consumer, which is a huge cultural reason we have little sense of the common good any more.

Being a disciple, however, requires discipline. And weekly communal worship is the first discipline. The other disciplines follow from that.

The Rev. Marc Britt is rector of St. John’s, Broad Creek.