We do not presume to come to this your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your abundant and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table; but you are the same Lord whose character is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.  Amen.

My remix:

We do not presume to come to this your table, O God, trusting in the delusion that our shit don’t stink, but in life and love’s abundant and great mercies. This non-stop junk food bullshit we binge on with brandnames like Self-Importance that’s all but convinced us we’re the reason for this cosmic miracle we call Earth, even though we act more like aliens are war with this planet even though we’re people who’d be nothing without it; thank God creation wasn’t left to us because we almost certainly wouldn’t have invented mercy or grace or forgiveness or love, much less flowers and trees and different colored eyes and skin and all those languages and the adorable sounds babies make while they’re sleeping or the dude who came up with Code Red Mt. Dew.
So grant us, grace-filled God, to partake in a shared supper that draws us to one another like Jesus did and taught, that our weak and marvelous bodies, and our selfish and poetic minds, might be made clean by the humbling awareness of the body and blood that we all share, and that we might live in or through or just more than we do now in something, like God, that’s _bigger _than us. And that that big thing that we know, when we’re not being pompous assholes, dwells in us. Amen.

Economist: “What has gone so wrong for America’s oldest churches? One answer is age. According to data from the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, a majority of mainline Christians are over 50 and one-third are older than 65. Only about one in ten are under the age of 30. For many churches, older congregants are simply dying too quickly to be replaced by new members . . . Pew reckons that if these trends continue, the non-religious could become the dominant group in American society as soon as 2055. One concern is what the shepherds will do next. A deeper one is what happens to a wandering flock.”

Alongside this, the US is seeing major declines in volunteerism which means churches are forced to decide whether they can afford employees who perform tasks once done by volunteers or, simply put, to let some things fall by the wayside (small and midsize churches, with small and midsized budgets, feel this acutely). There’s also the yet-to-be-addressed crisis of pastors who are anxious, unsupported, and burned out. There’s also major declines in seminary enrollments resulting in fewer pastors in the pipeline. It seems to me that the US is in the midst of yet another reformation (or reformationS).

There are other reasons for church decline: Americans in general have more money to spend on leisure and travel; parents and grandparents engage with their children differently than in previous generations, which means, among other things, people are prioritizing school events over church ones, many of which are held on weekends; people increasingly consume temporarily rather than engage longitudinally; podcasts and video streaming mean people don’t have to step foot in a church to “attend”; religion and spirituality are increasingly, like everything, hyper-individualistic, a me (and me only) thing (ie, if you don’t do, say, think like me I’m out); culture is shifting so fast that church leaders struggle to respond; church scandals have led to distrust of clergy and denominations; counties like the one I live in has seen major declines in church attendance as, curiously, the number of churches actually rose . . . in other words, more (and more) churches are competing for less (and less) churchgoers; I could go on, but I’ll stop there.

Not all churches will fold. But if the statisticians & sociologists are right, we’ll be reading about church–and seminary–closure with increased frequency in the coming years. The remaining churches–and seminaries–won’t be “winners” per se. Some have big endowments that will allow them to muddle through, but that’ll be a minority for sure.

This isn’t the first–or the last–time churches have faced a reckoning. Not even the first time in the US, a relatively young(ish) nation. A guided tour of the churches along the Boston Common will underscore that fact in 2-3 hours tops.

I have a theory why some churches will close and others won’t. The theory involves humor, light, tolerance for questions, trust, and most of all, God, which leads me to my main point: God will find a way. I’ll write more about the optimistic side of this conversation soon.