From the Past Will Come the Future

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.