At the beginning of August, there was an article published in the The Atlantic magazine on ‘The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church’ by Jake Meador. In pretty short order, the article was widely shared on social media. People were talking about it online, writers were writing about it.
The article begins by noting a significant percentage of Americans have stopped going to church (12% or 40 million) over the previous 25 years. Why this is happening has been of significant concern and importance to religious leaders, as well as interest to sociologists.
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While many would point to corruption and abuse scandals that have plagued the church (sexual abuse, residential schools, pandemic restrictions, etc…), the most predominant reasons that sociologists are finding are more mundane.
The central thesis of the article is that the shape of American life has changed to be productivity and achievement focused. Many have shifted their lives to find identity and meaning in jobs and work – workism as the article calls it. Truths that ring true for Canadians as well.
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Because of this social shift from community life to individualistic pursuits, people have generally become lonelier and more anxious, forgetting how to live in community.
As I have pondered this question for almost two decades now, this feels like a diagnosis that gets much more deeply to the heart of the matter. The easy answers like youth sports and dance, Sunday shopping and laziness are inadequate to the question of why people are drifting away from church. There is something deeper in the way we are living as a society that is causing us to forget how to be a community in ways that seemed effortless and natural not that long ago.
(Side note: It has to be stated that economic forces have made us more work- focused since the 70s. Rising inequality and wage stagnation has meant that single income earner households dealt with the increasing cost of living by adding more income earners. More simply put, wives and mothers who once stayed at home and could devote weekday time to the church (or school or community group) now MUST work because minimum wage has been kept low, jobs have been outsourced and corporations have suppressed wages for the sake of profit.)
As people have less and less time for activities and relationships outside of work, active participation in a church becomes a cost-benefit calculation. Sunday morning still remains one of the few work-free times in most people’s lives. Church is now just one of many competing options for precious leisure and personal time, which is spent with more careful discernment. Especially as many people are losing the relational skills of being in community.
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Ironically, church is the antidote to workism, which fails to bring meaning and purpose in our lives. Church communities – at our best – proclaim a reality in which our worth and value, our meaning and purpose come from outside of our own efforts. They are determined by God, granted by love, and indelibly given. Of course, at our worst, churches succumb to the achievement and productivity narratives by measuring ourselves by how many members we used to have and how big our budgets used to be.
Even as our society shifts away from communities (like church) being central in the way we live our day-to-day lives, the answer isn’t for churches to slowly fade away. Rather, congregations and faith communities are more needed than ever. It is clear that workism is not working for us. Pinning our worth and value to what we achieve is one of the things causing division and strife in our world.
Churches are needed to offer a counter example, to be an alternative vision of what life could be in the 21st Century. To be people and communities gathered together by the grace and mercy of God who loves us freely and ferociously. To hear stories that give our lives meaning, grounded in the promises of resurrection and new life.
To keep being what Jesus called us to be from the very beginning – God’s beloved people, the Body of Christ.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
