What are the challenges facing churches today?

I am working on a grant for the School of Theology and Vocation at LeTourneau University. The grant application asks the following questions: What are the challenges congregations today? What are the most pressing cultural and social shifts affecting congregations? 

Here is my first crack at a response:

Through our Lilly-supported Passage Institute for Youth and Theology, and via our engagement with a variety of undergraduate students (from the STEM disciplines, the humanities, and professional degrees programs) at LETU, we have a unique and revealing window into the life of churches within our network of influence. Additionally, over the past five years, the teaching and research that has been done through the School of Theology and Vocation (SoTV) has provided a platform in which we have been able to host on our campus enrichment events, colloquiums, semester-long seminars, theology camps, and round table discussions that have given us the opportunity to engage face-to-face with church leaders from a variety of backgrounds and denominations. Our interactions with over six hundred students each year from over seventy denominations and from 48 states within the Union have given us a window into the lives of 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 were shaped.  

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, we have observed four themes that consistently emerge as challenges facing congregations today.

First, and foundational, there is a profound disconnect between faith and everyday life, including work and study. That is to say that 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 Smith and 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.[2] 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.[3] 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 feel ill-equipped to help congregants connect their faith with their everyday life. 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. So, while it may seem fundamental, the most pressing challenge in congregational life within the networks that we serve is a clear understanding of how the Christian faith informs, undergirds, supports, and animates engagement in the world. In the SoTV, we refer to this engagement as vocation or calling. Congregations have no clarity regarding the overarching mission of God that we have been invited to participate in and the practices that shape and sustain that mission.

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 that many pastors and congregants feel unprepared to answer. But the ubiquity of technology presents more subtle and profound challenges for everyday 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 discipleship and reading. We are 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 technology has also negatively impacted congregants’ ability to read Scripture and to follow arguments in sermons and other forms of teaching.

Third, for a variety of reasons, congregations are unable and often unwilling to engage in conflict resolution and reconciliation. 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 wavering faith that has led to these circumstances.

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[1] Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian, 3-4.

[2] Smith, Soul Searching, 134, 171. Creasy Dean, Almost Christian.

[3] Creasy Dean, Almost Christian, 12.