I’m in a dour mood today. Don’t read beyond this if you don’t
want to be pulled into my dour mood. In a few weeks I will be attending the
last reunion at Andover Newton Theological School, where I attended seminary
during the 1980’s. It will be a good chance to catch up with friends I haven’t
seen in a long time, and a chance tor reflect on the seismic changes happening in
the mainline church.
In the last two months more seminaries have announced
significant changes. Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts will
not grant degrees after this academic year, and their future is uncertain. Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley,
California plans to demolish all but one building on their campus and build a
senior housing complex, while reducing their operation to one building. Andover
Newton decided recently to relocate to Yale Divinity School in New Haven,
Connecticut. Just a barebones administration and four faculty will relocate. The
campus will be sold.
The world of the church that I knew is crumbling at a
dismaying rate. I fear that mainline denominations are one and a half
generations away from collapse, at best. My generation is aging, and we will
all be retired in the next ten years. After that, the second career people will
retire, and the younger generation now in seminary will continue for awhile.
I know this sounds dour, but it is happening at an alarming
rate. I fear for the church for several reasons. I fear for the loss of an
educated clergy. Not because it is traditional, but because it is necessary. It
is necessary for clergy to be educated about the Bible. There is more to know
than what you can pick up on a few blogs online. Studying the Scriptures takes
more than just reading the passage over a few times. For me, it involves
reading (in the case of the Old Testament, plowing) through the texts in the
original language, reading commentaries, and reflecting on the meaning of the
passage. I didn’t learn to do this on my own. I learned it in college and
seminary. In another fifty years, who will be left who will do such work? Will
the church, what’s left of it, suffer for such a loss?
What will this mean for preaching? In our tradition, this is
at the core of worship. We don’t gather just to sing hymns and share
announcements. We gather to hear the word of God read and spoken. The read
part, from the Scriptures. The exposition of the word, spoken.
In my previous blog entry I wrote about how I use
handwritten notes when I preach, and that I don’t read my sermons. That’s
because the word is preached by speaking. It is always spoken. How did I learn
to do that? I learned it in seminary. Who will teach the next generation to
preach? Will preachers in the future just read by rote sermons they found
online, canned messages with no connection to the present context? I don’t know.
I will undoubtedly be retired in a decade. I would be able
to teach someone how to preach if the need arose, but would there be a demand?
Will the church suffer for it? Yes.
The church will suffer because the world we live in is much
more complex than it has been in the past. Technology that provides us with
marvelous tools also inflicts toxicity, and enables isolation. When we actually
talk to one another we don’t always know how to do that other than shout at
each other in the way we do on social media.
I fear that God has abandoned the church. Not the church as
a whole. The church as we have created it, the church that has been as it is
for a couple of centuries.
Natalie Sleeth wrote one of my favorite hymns, “In the Bulb
There Is a Flower,” a marvelous reflection on death and resurrection. In the second
line she writes, “From the past will come the future; what it holds, a mystery.”
I grieve the coming loss of the church as an institution, but I pray that what
God will create will continue to preach in witness to the power of the resurrection.
