Closing churches and open hearts
Open hearts don’t keep a
church from closing
If you are one of those people who regularly go to traditional services of worship you may wonder why churches are closing even as people continue to have open hearts.
More and more of my friends and neighbors never grace the door of the places that served their families for generations.
You may be one of the people who no longer attends, supports, or even agrees with the tenets of the faith in which you were raised.
Perhaps attending a church or temple has just never been a part of your practice and seems irrelevant.
Often the biggest attendance events for houses of worship are baptisms, weddings, funerals, or major religious holidays.
In between these events, people follow all sorts of paths to feed their spiritual needs: creative arts, spending time in nature, and volunteering are three that come readily to my mind.
Let’s take a look at some of the factors involved.
Corporation or Community?
One common complaint I hear is that people in search of a nurturing community are met with institutional rules, dogma, and outdated modes of worship.
Whenever there are several generations under one roof there will always be complaints about the way things are done, but this isn’t what I am talking about.
When conflicts arise in a corporation, there is a CEO whose purpose is to keep everyone focused on the goal of the business, ie-his profit margin.
A community of faith, on the other hand, must depend on the grace of the leadership, both lay, and clergy, to listen and guide from a place of discernment and love.
When these spiritual gifts are supplanted by dogma and doctrines and begin to look institutional, many people pull back in search of something that feeds their spiritual hunger without judgment and control.
Changing ideas of community
There was a time, maybe not so long ago, when people saw themselves as part of a neighborhood, tribe, congregation, or family in which each had a significant role as part of a clan.
Not so common today when we are encouraged to be independent thinkers climbing our individual ladders of success. Instead of a three-generation household, families are spread across the continent – or the globe – to make their own way in the world.
This cultural mindset shift creates many struggles in a spirit-seeking community of faith where strong personalities can lead by decree, and the congregation fills with generals and no soldiers.
What are some of the other reasons that churches and temples are losing people’s attendance, talents or money?
I see several reasons, some external, like accessibility difficulties, but most are internal like mindset, fear, or unanswered questions.
External barriers
When it comes to accessibility I think of Gloria and Frank, faithful members of a small congregation in a brick church and 13 steps to the front door.
When Frank could no longer drive and both of them struggled with the steps they stopped going altogether.
Anna stopped going when her hearing loss prevented her from meaningful conversations or understanding the sermon.
Accessibility issues are the easiest to address, and thanks to the pandemic many communities of faith discovered how to use Zoom to bring their message to people at any distance…complete with subtitles.
It is the interior barriers that are so much harder to address, or even recognize.
Internal barriers
1. Changing beliefs
The first of these is a change in beliefs that often comes with age or changing life patterns.
I remember the day I stopped believing in Santa Claus.
I had woken up in the night to see my father filling the stockings my sister and I had hung at the end of our beds.
And I also remember the day about 20 years later when I rediscovered Santa alive and well, who visited my country home in the middle of the night in the disguise of a neighbor and her daughter dressed as elves.
They crept into my house and left packages under the tree because it was a time when I had no money to buy any.
If Santa could be this real, then the God of my childhood Bible stories might be just as real.
I devoted the rest of my life to being hospitable to this Mystery that appears when I am not looking.
There comes a time when we become disillusioned with a God who doesn’t bring us the gifts we have asked for, or we see a great disparity between the love of God and the ‘love’ of people who declare their righteousness based on their affiliation to a denomination or a cult.
Some people no longer believe in the judgment of hell as compatible with a loving God.
I am one of them.
And many eschew the teaching of a supreme being described ‘in our own image’ when we use pronouns like he, him, or her. This changes our understanding of Divinity in both obvious and subtle ways.
2. A traumatic experience
Secondly, as much as we have a childlike trust in a fellowship of faith, we can be traumatically wounded when that trust is betrayed.
This happened to one of my favorite authors, Jan Phillips, who had set out to be like the nun who had literally saved her life, and then was kicked out of the convent for being gay.
She did not turn her back on a divine calling to serve.
From a place of deep wounding, Jan became an activist with a mission to fight injustice with her writing and speaking.
Read any of her books to discover the depth of her faith and the extent of her work today. Her latest, Still on Fire – Notes from a Queer Mystic – is a memoir of religious wounding and spiritual healing.
3. A change in worldview
Third, as we mature we often have a change in world-view.
This may be the biggest factor for someone who identifies as a believer but not as a church-goer.
We tend to have (at least in America) an individualistic independent mindset arising from our sense of personal ‘rights’.
The sad part from a dying congregation’s perspective is that people who used to support churches, temples, and mosques with the dollars needed to keep the lights on in an antiquated building are no longer doing so.
The bright side, however, is that spiritual guides like Thich Nhat Hahn have brought us concepts of ‘interbeing’ that open the entire universe to our definition of ‘faith community’. When I embrace his teachings of being one with not only humanity but with all creation…trees and worms included, my faith has grown in leaps and bounds.
Read The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hahn for more about “interbeing”.
What ultimately matters
My position may not be popular when I say it doesn’t matter if we belong to an organized group of believers to be a good Christian/Jew/Disciple/Person.
What does matter is that we live a life of love, forgiveness, and generosity wherever we find ourselves.
As we welcome the sick, hungry, lost, and lonely with hospitality, forgiveness, and generosity, we are living out the most basic of teachings found in all religions. To Love.
To love is my mission in this world.
What is yours?
Subscribe now to receive a weekly post that explores not only spirituality but creativity and life challenges in the 21t century
