“Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able,” as Herman Melville summed up the whaler’s version of the Fourth Commandment (for most Protestants and Jews; it’s Number Three for Roman Catholics), “And on the seventh the same, and holystone the cable.”
In that spirit, I’m posting a God-blog today, then it’s off to the gym to work off the unbelievably rich fare they served at the church coffee hour this morning.
Two friends have recently told me that they were visiting my neighborhood in Jackson Heights looking at apartments for sale. Smart thinking; Jackson Heights offers a lot more space for the money than snootier neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. We’ve also got some of the best restaurants around; I particularly like Sripraphai for the best Thai food I’ve had on this side of the Pacific and the old favorite Jackson Diner, still serving some of the best Indian cuisine you can get.
However for me at this point the central attraction of the neighborhood is the local Episcopal Church: St. Mark’s Church between 81st and 82nd on 34th Avenue. Since moving into the neighborhood I’ve been an active parishioner and it’s been an eye-opening experience.
This isn’t the first church I’ve belonged to. My father is an Episcopal minister and while my attachment to the church has waxed and waned over my life, the older I get the more I appreciate the importance of being grounded in the life and faith of a local congregation.
I joined St. Marks following a principle I first read about in the work of the British literary critic, children’s book writer and Christian apologist CS Lewis. Lewis thought that Anglicans shouldn’t hunt for the nicest or most suitable parish church in the area. That was too much like joining a club. Instead, you should just go to the church that was closest to you and involve yourself in it – trusting that the people you meet there and the form of worship practiced there have something to teach you. Don’t go to church as a critic, airily considering whether this group of people is ‘worthy’ of your exalted and sensitive self.
It’s good advice; without it I probably would have commuted on Sundays to one of the endowed parishes in Manhattan. There’s nothing wrong with them, and like all thoughtful Anglicans I am deeply grateful to Queen Anne for putting the church on a solid foundation here. But commuting out of the neighborhood to a rich and fancy church, however gratifying aesthetically or maybe even socially, would have meant I missed out on the rich experience of getting to know some of my neighbors in ways that never would have happened if I hadn’t decided to put roots down in the local church.
Getting seriously involved with St. Mark’s, a struggling congregation in a changing neighborhood, has also helped me understand some of the issues facing mainline churches today. As an intellectual who often perceives religion in terms of ideas, I’ve been surprised to learn how few of St. Mark’s problems have anything directly to do with any of the theological controversies shaking the Anglican Communion or the mainline churches.
Our problems are much simpler than that. We are trying to maintain a large building and its grounds. As the neighborhood and social patterns have changed, our congregation has gotten older and smaller; it is harder and harder to find people who are able to fill key positions in the lay leadership. Paying a full time priest stretches our resources to the breaking point, but our congregation needs a lot of help.
Mainline churches today are a little like GM. The world around them has changed; they have tried to stay the same and as a result every year sees them a little weaker, a little less able to respond to the challenges they face.
It starts with the physical plant. The idea that every local Christian community should have a building with a steeple dates back to Europe where local church buildings were government facilities and the clergy served many of the functions (registering births and deaths, providing welfare and educational services) that today are handled by the public sector. In this country the model of parish communities each with its own building and full time cleric is partly rooted in the colonial tradition of established churches and partly from a time when churches were the only available community centers.
The role of the full time, professionally trained minister (or priest, depending on the theology and history of the denomination involved) is also rooted in the past. Ministers and priests are supposed to be professionally certified like lawyers and doctors through long and elaborate post-college study at professional schools (called seminaries) staffed by tenured faculty. Historically, most seminarians were young men who planned life long careers in the ministry.
The different denominations have systems of management and governance that date from the 1950’s and 1960’s when exuberant denominations, flush with post-war cash, built and staffed large regional and national organizations. There are levels of middle management administering various activities and programs that have been added over the years. At the peak of the pyramid stand interdenominational organizations, pre-eminently the National Council of Churches of Christ.
There are large headquarter buildings like the National Council of Church’s headquarters (usually called the “God Box”) at 475 Riverside Avenue in Manhattan, or the national offices of the Episcopal Church on Second Avenue. There are imposing stone piles throughout the country like the National Cathedral in Washington DC and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine near Columbia University in New York. Both the buildings and the bureaucracies that fill them are expensive to maintain.
Meanwhile, local church programs often reflect the patterns and the lifestyles of past generations. In many congregations, the network of activities and organizations was established back when many women did not hold outside jobs and had more time for volunteer and community work. Today, these churches are struggling; their organizations and programs may not meet the needs of contemporary communities, and the volunteer workers who had the creativity, experience and time to make things work are no longer abundant.
The whole mainline system is under immense pressure. Roughly half the local churches in the country are in a predicament like we have at St. Marks, barely able to keep the doors open and the salaries paid. We have less and less money to pass up the ladder to support the diocesan bureaucracy; and the diocese itself has less and less money to send up the chain to the national church.
The seminary system is coming under particular pressure. Most seminary students today are ‘non-traditional’. They are often making mid-life career transitions; many are women re-entering the workforce. Seminary tuition is high, reflecting the cost of tenured faculty in various academic disciplines. In most cases, seminary training is pretty academic: studies in New Testament Greek, textual and literary criticism of the Bible, studies in various arcane questions of historical and contemporary theology. Fewer and fewer congregations can pay the salaries that seminary graduates need to cover their living expenses and repay their student loans.
What this means is that at every level life from the St. Marks Flea Market up to the ecumenical deliberations of the grand exalted masters of the National Council of Churches, life in the mainline churches is a long, grim and probably doomed struggle to hold on to the past. Everybody is trying to do 95% of what we did last year with 92% of last year’s budget – and each year things get a little worse. There’s a little more deferred maintenance on the building, a couple fewer folks in the pews, a program or two that has to be curtailed, a slightly bigger draw on what’s left of the financial reserves.
It’s depressing – and many of the folks who are working the hardest in the mainline churches are pretty depressed.
This matters – at least some of it does. I think it matters less at the top; if national denominational and interdenominational structures are slashed to the bone, I’m not sure that much of value will be lost. But local congregations are important.
At St. Marks, our vestry (the elected leaders of the congregation) has decided to try something new. They want to close down the congregation as it now exists and rebuild their ministry from the ground up. I’m not sure if this will work. It’s very hard to start something new; it was hard for the children of Israel to leave Egypt and they spent most of the next forty years in the desert complaining about Moses. Exodus (an Old Testament book like Job, Dr. Dean) tells how the presence of God went before them, a fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day. And even then they got lost. We’re probably not going to do much better.
But I’m incredibly grateful to have the chance to be part of a community struggling so honestly with such important issues.
I plan to keep blogging about religion from time to time. It’s connected to most of the subjects I care most about, and it matters more deeply to more people than almost anything else. Thanks to my life at St. Marks, I’m not just going to approach it as an intellectual subject rooted in the world of ideas. Religion is a lot more than theology and ethics. Ultimately it is a question of community – you, God, and your neighbors. Making communities richer, deeper, stronger, better is what religion is there for; that’s why it matters so much that so many of America’s local congregations are struggling today in an institutional and financial framework that no longer makes sense.