Lectionary Reading - Luke 1:68-79
“The end of religion as we know it,” was Zechariah’s message of hope in Luke 1:68-79. While he may not have used those exact words, it was the meaning behind them in the event Luke recorded. To elaborate on the passage, I’ll draw upon commentary from Chris Haslam at the Anglican Diocese of Montreal (http://www.montreal.anglican.org/comments/cadv2m.shtml)
Haslam’s commentary notes that Zechariah is a priest who has been on duty at the Temple. While serving in the most sacred part of the Temple, an angel appears to tell him that his wife, Elizabeth, will bear a child in her old age. The child is to be named John. Zechariah questions how such a thing can be. For doubting, the angel renders him mute and unable to speak. Speak loss will be his life until his son is born.
Eight days after their son’s birth, Elizabeth and Zechariah take their child to a rabbi to be circumcised and named. When Zechariah is asked for the child’s name, he motions for a tablet to write on as he is still mute. On writing that his son will be named John, Zechariah’s powers of speech return. He is then filled with God’s Spirit and foretells that his son will prepare the world for a blessing God plans to bring. The blessing is Jesus who will save people from sin.
Zechariah then says that people will learn through God’s blessing that they can love God and no longer fear God’s wrath. And through John’s ministry of proclaimation, he will foster an ethical godly way of living that prepares people for hearing Jesus’ message and teachings. For in Jesus, all will experience a new “dawn” for humanity. The new dawn will be that when our hopes run low and we stand in great need, Jesus will be the light guiding us forward into peace -- peace that will bring wholeness, harmony, well-being, prosperity, and security for all.
In what Zechariah prophesied, he meant nothing less than a complete transformation of religion as it was known and lived in his time. As many of us know, the religious system of his time had been carefully crafted over numerous centuries and even millennia. Life in the system meant complying with hundreds of different religious laws and spiritual expectations. According to the system, one did so if one hoped to find favor in the eyes of God rather than anger. The end result is that the laws and expectations micro-managed people’s lives so severely that they feared God and feared any religious authority representing God.
Their religious system, initially intended by Moses to help people structure their lives and find relationship with a loving God, devolved into abuse and neglect. At its worst, it placed heavy burdens on its followers emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and financially. Over time, it became a system of maltreatment rather than a system of uplift. Even its leaders were corrupt and idolatrous and so full of ego that they chose to maintain their institution and its survival at any cost.
In doing so, they closed themselves off to God’s Prophetic Spirit. Even Zechariah, for all his goodness, had lost touch with God’s Spirit. It would take an angel’s visitation in the Temple to begin his restoration. And so that he had time to fully reconnect with God, the angel rendered Zechariah mute until his son’s birth. The reconnection would be critical for the spiritual discernment Zechariah needed for supporting his son and wife in helping John grow to be the courageous man God needed -- the one we know as John the Baptist.
Nearly two thousand years later, God’s Spirit is trying to break through with a message of hope not unlike that which Zechariah experienced. It is a message that everything must change and that the end of religion approaches, at least the end of what we have known as religion. Does that strike terror in you or give you cause for celebration? Maybe you feel something in between, like anxiousness or worry? Perhaps like Zechariah you wonder how this can be and even doubt it. Possibly you’re in a different space altogether and come hell or high water, you’re determined that religion will remain exactly as it is. Well, it’s certainly your right to try, but the cocoon that’s encased you is aging, cracking and fragmenting, falling into pieces here and there. Before long, it will be dust.
How do we know this? Well, let’s look around. In most of our long established faith communities, the hair is pretty gray. Fewer and fewer people are available to help with ministry. Those remaining have poorer health and less energy for doing the things that need to be done and they have many needs. Along with it, there’s an increasing leadership vacuum. Those studying that vacuum project that most of the 300,000 congregations in the United States will close within the next twenty years due to the diminishing number of people willing and able to be leaders.
Two other important measures are the median age of your congregation and the fact that congregations lose 12% of their active membership every year.
Regarding the median age of active members, if half or more of your gathered community is not under the age of 30, then your congregation is in decline and will probably be gone within a generation, perhaps sooner depending on your church’s median age. Regarding the 12% annual loss, a congregation must bring in as new members the equivalent of 12% of its active membership just to maintain its present size. As one might guess, most established congregations have great difficulty doing that these days. Most are losing ground in terms of these two important measures and they’re losing it fast.
So why do the religious find themselves in these situations? Well, it has mostly to do with the inability to change and being open to change, especially the change that Christ wants now for making justice real and the Peaceable Kingdom real. After leading three congregations and serving as a denominational field officer and congregational support minister during much of the past 25 years, I find this to be the case. A lot has to do with people being uncomfortable with change and the pain that change requires and not wanting others in the congregational family to feel pain. So the congregational boat is never rocked nor are its sails put into the wind. And people who rock the boat are typically put ashore.
Often a band-aid for discomfort is applied to the situation when something more drastic is needed. For my own experience, I know young adults (largely missing from our churches) who have shared very deeply their pain and distress over their churches and denomination’s inability to redeploy precious resources so missional winds could fill congregational sails. Their discouragement runs deeps at seeing important assets lie idle for decades, often resting in the hands of a few churchgoers here or a few churchgoers there. They feel helpless to effect change that’s needed in their larger communities as the local church typically sees its resources existing for its own needs. When two of these young adults asked a denominational official to explain why such things are allowed and why someone doesn’t do something about it, the official’s response was that the issue calls for patience and gentility.
The young adults pressed back that they saw no sense in such an approach. Furthermore, it represented poor stewardship which would fail to attract members of their generation, thereby leaving the denomination little hope for the future. Reflecting for a moment on their words, the official noted that perhaps it’s kinder to rip off a band-aid quickly like at the doctor’s office, rather than taking it off slowly and supposedly gently which serves only to prolong pain and discomfort. Makes sense to me.
The problem is that religious leaders often prefer not to risk the positive regard they’ve built up through the years. So they fail to speak plainly and forthrightly as Zechariah did. One can bet that in Zechariah's case, he risked a great deal uttering his prophetic words. No doubt he lived those words out since his son became a powerful, even eccentric, spiritual leader. What can be said of prophetic leadership other than is never easy and often it’s full of heartbreak and hardship; the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus the Christ stand out as examples.
So while it seems that religion’s end is upon us for a variety of reasons, an entirely new movement of the faithful is taking shape and form. They are persons who refuse to sit passively on a pew or commit their time to congregational maintenance. Years ago they lifted their eyes to the horizon and the Spirit gave them phenomenal -- even eccentric -- vision of extraordinary possibilities for healing the world, ending suffering, and reconciling humankind. Nearly one million of them lifted their eyes in the early 1990s. Today, they number 20 million and in another decade or two they will be 40 million strong in the United States.
Who are they? They are today’s generations of young adults and baby-boomers missing from established churches. They are the persons from those generations who saw the need for change and welcomed and embraced it as part of their daily life. They are independent-minded people who are unwilling to let churches or denominations dictate how they will follow Christ or what they will do on behalf of the Peaceable Kingdom. They are the ones who say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Openly, they welcome and work alongside brothers and sisters of any faith who seek for the world to become whole, where all will have enough, and none will fear for their safety at any moment of the day or night.
Many of them work toward these ends through being the church in their private homes, cramped apartments, and coffee shops, bar taverns, auto repair centers, places of work, or a Habitat for Humanity build. They know no limit to the possibilities or opportunities for being the church --- doing so when and where and how it best suits their sense of calling. Worship for them is no spectator-sport but an experience they have in the midst of hands-on work relieving pain and suffering and injustice done to others.
As these individuals prefer to do ministry rather than manage real estate, existing church buildings will be repurposed as was done with one in my community. Where there had been a diminishing number of worshippers huddled together in a deteriorating building the congregation couldn’t keep up with, there is now a non-profit agency that serves more than 10,000 people each year in the course of eliminating racism, empowering women, and promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all. Where there had been no vision for the future, there now exists a completely renovated facility supporting victims of domestic violence, homelessness, sexual assault, oppression, child abuse and neglect. At such a place, on most days of the week, you’ll find the company of the committed and faithful. There, they have rebuilt lives, fostered positive life choices, and rebirthed self-esteem; all because of innovative services provided in a caring and compassionate environment.
Yep, it’s the end of religion as we know it. So I ask again, does that strike terror in you or give you cause for celebration? Do you feel something in between, like anxiousness or worry? What I pray is that you feel hope. In fact, I pray that you feel an abundance of hope. The church will always be with us. It isn’t going away. Jesus will make sure of that. It will simply look and act a little different. Eventually we’ll get the hang of it and learn to embrace the change we need to be. In time, we will become valuable and necessary to the change that's taking place.
Perhaps one young adult said it best to me this past week while relating a conversation with his grandfather. He asked his grandfather who is an evangelist how he felt about the church dying and going away, i.e. the church that’s been his whole life. The evangelist said, “It has to die if there’s to be what God wants next.”