The Changing Context of Congregational Life

We have been immersed in the work of tracking the changing context of congregational life and ministry and in walking along side churches to help them adapt to these changes from three complementary vantage points. First, our theology department teaches students who are a product of youth ministry. Our interactions with over seven hundred students (from the STEM, humanities, and professional degree programs) each year from over seventy denominations and 48 states have given us a window into the lives of teenagers and emerging adults in the United States, but also the churches in which they have been formed. For as Kenda Creasy Dean underscores in her Almost Christian, “the religiosity of American teenagers must be read primarily as a reflection on their parents’ religious devotion (or lack thereof) and, by extension, that of their congregations”.[1]  Drawing on her comprehensive research into the lives and thoughts of religious teenagers, she concludes that the kind of students we teach in our classrooms echo with astonishing clarity the kind of formation that they have received from the families and churches in which they emerged.  Second, the teaching and research we do in the School of Theology and Vocation (SoTV) has given us a platform to work directly with pastors, lay leaders, and congregants within our network of influence through ministry enrichment events, colloquiums, semester-long seminars, theology camps, and round table discussions that we sponsor. These face-to-face interactions with the frontline of congregational life have been illuminating and instructive—and as a result we are constantly evaluating and modifying our teaching to adapt to the emerging challenges and needs of congregations within our region. In particular, our Passage Institute for Youth and Theology (generously supported by the Lilly Endowment) has enabled us to come along side pastors and congregations as we partner in a common effort to help churches equip a new generation of Christians to understand and live out their vocation in a world that has been radically changed in recent years by our technological age. And third, through our interactions via the Center for Faith and Work (CFW) we have learned that people long to better understand how their faith is connected with their work, but increasingly they do not see their churches as a place to learn this, nor do they see congregational life as an indispensable part of their calling.[2]

In our engagement with the frontline of congregational life, we have learned that pastors and lay leaders feel like the frenetic and distracted ethos of American culture is set against them and the kind of work they seek to do with their congregations; they feel as though they are only able to tread water. We have also noted that pastors, lay leaders, and engaged congregants who feel called to invest in the flourishing of congregational life feel tired; they have little time for preparation and sustained reflection on the Scriptures that ought to inform their ministry, and even less time to understand the complex and rapidly changing context in which they seek to serve. They want to be fed, need to be feed, but struggle to find space or trustworthy conversation partners to empower them. They also comment that professional training and continuing education are the first things to go as they are increasingly expected to manage programs more than they are to make disciples.  Additionally, we have noted that congregational leaders feel lonely and isolated—both in their own churches, but also with respect to other churches within their community. Although they have a deep desire to network with others who are engaged in similar work, they find no infrastructure in our region that fosters camaraderie. Ultimately, through the generosity of a Lilly Endowment grant, what we seek to offer these congregations with the work that comes from the CFW is hospitality—hospitality that gives them space to recharge, to reflect, to connect, to grow, and to adapt to their rapidly changing context.

As we listen to these church leaders that we engage with through our Passage Institute for Youth and Theology, as we join hands with them in ministry enrichment events on our campus, and as we listen to and learn from our students at LETU, we have observed four themes that consistently emerge as challenges facing congregations today. First, and foremost, there is a profound disconnect between faith and everyday life, including (but not limited to) work and study.  That is to say, we have noted that congregants increasingly have a hard time understanding how their profession of faith (what they say and do on Sundays in church) is related to what they do the rest of the week, whether it is at work, in school, playing sports or music, with family and friends, or in any other forms of life and play. As Christian Smith and Kenda Creasy Dean have underscored in their research, most religious teens either do not understand or do not care to examine carefully what their religious traditions affirm and why that matters for life.[3] Creasy Dean provocatively argues that the problem does not seem to be that “churches are teaching young people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job of teaching youth what we really believe: namely, that Christianity is no big deal, that God requires little, that church is… filled with nice people.[4] This is especially true in East Texas where the default culture is “Christian.” In many cases, it appears that most congregants feel that the only value they bring to congregational life is the money they can give to support the church and its programs. Similarly, pastors often say that they feel ill-equipped to help congregants connect their faith with their everyday life, that most of their training had to do with running church programs. As a result, much of church life feels like trying to sustain programs and activities that only seek to benefit people for one day of the week, and that one day seems to have little to do with the rest of the week. We believe that this disconnect between faith and work (in the broadest sense of the word) is the greatest obstacle to thriving congregations in our region. Therefore, our most pressing task is to help congregations understand how the Christian faith informs, undergirds, supports, and animates engagement in the world. In the SoTV, we refer to this engagement as vocation. Congregations seem to lack clarity regarding the overarching mission of God that we have been invited to participate in and the practices that shape, sustain, and entail that mission. In short, they lack a clear understanding of their Christian vocation.  We have experienced this firsthand both in the classroom and in our enrichment events for churches in the community. Students don’t see how their academic work or the careers they are preparing for are related in any way to their Christian vocation. Church life has been reduced to either being a good person (moralism) or feeling good about themselves (therapeutic); faith is seen as an individual or private response to God rather than a communal or ecclesial responsibility. Pastors feel as though they are constantly competing with more important things such as sports, hunting, cheer, or theater. In our experience, congregations are hungry for resources that will help them better understand their mission and values, but don’t know where to look, and often need help translating the information in a way that it understandable in their particular church context.

A second, emerging challenge is the pervasive and complex impact of technology on the lives of congregants. This challenge comes in various forms. For example, biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence raise perplexing questions about ethics and what it means to be human, and many pastors and congregants feel unprepared to respond to these challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only exposed our inability to think critically about the interface between ethics, economics, science, medicine, and faith, it has exacerbated it.  But it is the ubiquity of everyday technology (such as smart phones and social media) that presents more subtle and profound challenges for quality of life issues. For example, over the past ten years, pastors and church leaders have noted a debilitating erosion of the capacity for sustained attention and attentiveness to the things that really matter such as spiritual direction and reading.[5] We are always distracted and never present, and this has significantly degraded the quality of life in community. Over the past five years we have also noted that everyday technology has negatively impacted congregants’ ability to read Scripture and to follow arguments in sermons and other forms of teaching.[6] We also find that technology is a significant concern for people working with youth. Based on the workshops that we have presented, parents and pastors are very interested in learning about the way technology impacts their children but are unaware and unreflective on the ways it has impacted their own lives. In our Passage Institute for Youth and Theology, we have been intentional about helping students, parents, youth pastors, and lay leaders develop new practices of attentiveness that enable them to reflect upon the influence of technology in their lives, and to mitigate the negative effects. These practices have been well received by all who have participated, but more work is to be done. Additionally, our Faith, Science and Technology Initiative, housed within the SoTV, enables us to be uniquely positioned as a resource for these congregations as they seek to adapt new practices that will enable attentiveness and thriving in community.   

Third, for a variety of reasons, congregations are unable and often unwilling to engage in conflict resolution and reconciliation. We have learned this firsthand in our Honors College capstone course, in which we teach a unit on peacemaking. In some cases, technology, especially social media, has contributed to this tendency. Although conflict in community is inevitable, and despite the fact that the Christian faith has resources to mediate such conflicts, congregations seem to be unaware and/or unwilling to draw upon these resources in order to resolve conflict and to work towards reconciliation, in part because they do not recognize this to be foundational to our vocation or calling. This has led to “fight or flight” responses when conflict emerges; in the face of disagreement, congregants either engage in destructive communication practices, or they withdraw emotionally, and in many cases physically by simply going to another church.

Finally, within our region of influence, which is characterized by racial and socio-economic diversity, and which shares a long history of systemic racial oppression, congregations struggle with racial discord and socio-economic inequality. In many cases, congregations perceive a problem with the way churches are segregated along socio-economic and racial lines and grieve this reality but feel that there is no path forward. The spirit is willing, but the imagination for some alternative way of living together is weak.

The good news about these four trends, as we will argue in what follows, is that these challenges are not insurmountable. The fact is that the Christian faith has resources and practices that can enable congregations to overcome these obstacles. In reality, these four trends function as opportunities for congregations to connect their faith in very practical ways with the most pressing needs of the day. In other words, attending to these four challenges is in fact the very means by which congregations can better understand their mission and values, to reclaim their faith—by attending to these challenges through the practices of their church traditions.

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[1] Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: what the faith of our teenagers is telling the American church (Oxford University Press, 2010), 3-4.

[2] For example, see the provocative essay by Derek Thompson, “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” (The Atlantic, February 24, 2019), who argues that increasingly work is becoming a religion—and it is not delivering on its promises.

[3] Christian Smith, Soul Searching: the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2009), 134, 171. Creasy Dean, Almost Christian.

[4] Creasy Dean, Almost Christian, 12.

[5] E.g. Maggie Jackson, Distracted: Reclaiming our focus in a world of lost attention (Prometheus, 2018).  

[6] E.g. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains (W.W. Norton & Co, 2011).