Attentive readers of these posts know that my father, Loren B. Mead, is an Episcopal priest. Ordained more than fifty years ago in the Diocese of South Carolina, he served in the parish ministry at Trinity Church in Pinopolis, South Carolina and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the Church of the Holy Family. Once the relevant British authorities licensed him under the Colonial Clergy Act, he also served as the visiting Rector of Esher in the UK. While I was still a teenager he moved to the Washington area (where he and my mother still live) to found what later became The Alban Institute, one of the leading centers in the United States and even the world for the study of the life of congregations. Throughout his career he has thrown himself into the life of the church and of the wider society. At some personal and professional risk he worked for desegregation and racial justice in the South at a time when this was not always easy or popular. He was an early and strong advocate of the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church.
But he has always believed that the business of the church is ultimately the saving gospel of the resurrected Christ, and he has built his life and career on his understanding that it is Christian communities, congregations, where the Holy Spirit brings people together to form new communities and create new life. This is an ecumenical stance — not simply in the now-trivial sense of interdenominationalism among like-minded liberals, but in the more difficult and perhaps vital sense of finding common ground among liberal and evangelical Christians. Both Bishop Jack Spong and Pastor Rick Warren speak highly of my father’s work; I could wish that more people in the church were spoken of in the same way. The essay below was prepared for the journal of the Academy of Parish Clergy, Sharing the Practice.
Now closing in on his sixtieth wedding anniversary (when he hopes to swim the Hellespont with whatever children and grandchildren he can dragoon into this madness), my father continues to think, speak and write. Recently, he has started to think about blogging. We shall see, but in the meantime he sent me some reflections on sixty years of professional engagement in the American church. These are powerful and important thoughts, and over the next couple of Sundays I’ll be sharing them with you here at Via Meadia. Please feel free to share your thoughts and reactions; the Venerable Mead says he is ready and willing to respond.
Tidal Changes in the Work of the American Clergy In the Last Fifty Years
Every generation of clergy faces new challenges and unexpected threats, a need for new skills, and each also meets totally unforeseen opportunities. New clergy just a decade or two ago faced a very different world of ministry than their successors do today. Doing what successful clergy did in the 80s or 90s is likely to be a recipe for failure if tried today.
Most such newcomers to the calling are so pressured to respond to the crisis in today’s ‘in’ box, or to develop a new approach to something the board got exercised over last month, or perhaps to check out an article about some spectacular program somebody has tried — to wonder how to carve out time for hospital calls today. And those calls have to be made. Now. Pressure of the moment rarely gives time to do much reflection. This necessity to respond to the crisis of the day makes it easy to lose perspective. We lose sight of the fact that our institutions have already managed to survive a remarkable set of crises in just the past few decades. And sometimes we survived just by the skin of our teeth.
Pressures of the day make reflection a luxury for which we have little time. There’s too much on our plates TODAY to think about how we got here: I mean this year’s budget is a TOUGH challenge. It won’t wait. The argument between our parish ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ is heating up just when we thought the last brouhaha was over. And the board meeting is Wednesday – only two days off.
I’m suggesting a bit of reflection that could make better sense of what’s happening now. Thoughtful clergy have always been helped in moving ahead by getting a new look at where they’ve been.
Part One: RELIGION AT THE FLOOD TIDE
I came to theological training over 50 years ago, and I arrived in a different world from that which seminary graduates discover today.
Our society was in a flood tide of expansion, optimism, and hope when I accepted my degree in 1955, in company with a remarkable group of men (they were all men, then), many of whom were veterans recently back from victories in Europe and Asia. Having won THAT war, those classmates infected us with the belief that ANYTHING could be defeated, that NOTHING would stand in our way.
In our world of the mid-century, it seemed as if a great tide had come in, a tide of confidence, a tide of willingness to take on any challenges with certainty that we could win. It was in the air – we lived in a ‘can-do’ ethos. Mixed in with that cultural euphoria was deep religious commitment. We saw ourselves as a new kind of clergy, a new ‘band of brothers’ with a new, challenging, and exciting mission.
The faith we had generally fit the shape of our denominational stories, The denominations were our ‘outfits’ and we loved and served them without much question. You remembered that when you were in the First Marines, you just had learned to do what First Marines did. Our denominations were our families, our new outfits – we depended on each other and we trusted our officers.
Great theological voices were active and present – Barth was still alive, and so was Niebuhr. Tillich still held forth. My own world was this ‘mainline’ protestant world. Today I can see the shortcomings and blindnesses of that narrow vision, but many of us didn’t see it then. It was just a few years earlier that our horizons had been stretched by the name of Herzberg’s big book: PROTESTANT, CATHOLIC, AND JEW. And it would be another generation, almost, before John Fletcher pushed even that horizon, adding BLACK PROTESTANT to our worldview. Before those inputs, most of us in the clergy knew only ONE of those realities. Or even less: Just our denomination by itself. Each of us tended loyally to follow our denominational scripts. When we worked together, we tried to respect differences. Methodists and Baptists had more difficulty with Episcopalians because ‘they drank’ than because of ecclesiology or theology. Everybody had trouble with the Methodist who didn’t smoke – and enjoyed ribbing them that Duke was built on tobacco money. People needled Presbyterians and made them defensive about ‘predestination,’ without knowing what Calvin really meant. We protestants joked about Catholic talk of ‘transubstantiation,’ again, without knowing what was meant. Good natured ribbing between members of different outfits in the army – although there remained sharp edges from time to time, especially with Catholics.
It’s interesting that we who were clergy paid little attention to the floods of laity who drifted from one denomination to another without much trouble. Later we named this the ‘circulation of the saints,’ but we didn’t take it very seriously. We didn’t think what that restless movement might foretell.
Those ecumentical conversations left important players out. Most of our Academy members came from the kinds of mainline churches that I came from. The world of evangelical and Pentecostal churches was almost invisible to us, ignored by the public religious voices and unseen by the media. Those strong communities were there, though, and often aggressively growing. This large population of people with more conservative religious traditions were busy. Busy deepening their faith, building and studying in Bible schools, engaging in revivals and conferences, communicating on their radio stations. They were there and growing stonger, but they had dropped out of public presence after the Scopes trial in 1925.
Another strong strand for millions of Americans, the ‘rapture’ was a central part of a vital faith focused on Biblical prophecy and evangelism, but it was a faith few ‘mainliners’ had ever encountered. I don’t believe anybody in my seminary even heard of it until the 1990s. To say nothing about ‘millennialism,’ or the Scofield Bible.
That was somewhat the world into which the Academy of Parish Clergy was born in the early 1970s.
Ours was a world of genuine optimism – perhaps even of triumphalism. Although we were separated into different institutional bases, we KNEW that the church was on the move, that all men and women were on the way to salvation. Everything was going to be bigger and better. And, as clergy, WE were on the move.
Part Two: UNDERCURRENTS
Underneath this barbed ecumenical friendship there were larger, unexplored divisions. Some divisions were centuries old, but others had exploded only in the 18th and 19th Centuries. When Darwin published on evolution in 1859 (just over one century before I graduated from seminary), his work triggered an allergic reaction among many, a reaction that I believe to be stronger and wider today than it was then. Darwin and ‘science’ became lightning rods for the anxieties about religion and reason generated in the period of the enlightenment. Darwin’s work touched the frayed nerves still left over from controversies about Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, who had up-ended the solar system and universe. For many, these ideas challenged the existence of Heaven and Hell.
For many deeply faithful people then – and even today – those scientific discoveries seemed to attack basic Biblical truths they held onto as vital to their very faith. Many of those people found even more unpalatable the use of literary criticism to explore how the Holy Scriptures were put together.
In short, for over a century, many of our most loyal church members had felt themselves battered with information that seemed to them to ‘disprove’ things they had understood to be inviolable. Many loyal members felt their faith being undercut and weakened.
The churches were full, but many of the people in the churches were aware of dissonances in their world. Parents often were unhappy with the colleges their children attended, because the kids came home spouting things about evolution and astrophysics that were not at all what parents expected them to think.
For over a century the authority of the clergy and of the bible and of the church took hit after hit. Many good church members had experienced deeply troubling challenges to truths they had learned from their parents and their trusted religious leaders.
People sitting in our pews now faced other changes that further shattered their sense of security. I came out of seminary to a thoroughly patriarchal world and church. Women had been ‘given’ the vote only a short time before. In many places in my home state of South Carolina black citizens were still unable to vote. Pent-up desire for change were appearing across the country at different speeds. Everywhere, long-standing practices were challenged and changed.
A country heavily rural in 1900 rapidly was turning urban, and communities and their churches across the country were learning to accommodate themselves to different populations. Family farms, which had generated much of the country’s image of itself began to disappear. Small towns and their small congregations had been accustomed to provide vitality and leadership to states and to the nation; but they began to wither and even disappear. Cities exploded in size and complexity. The economy went on steroids after the Second World War with pent-up demand for houses and cars. The new industry of advertising spread the desire for more and more, and Television placed those desires in every living room across the country. People who had had nothing in the depression all of a sudden had money and things. And a lot of options. Many more of the newcomers to the country were from distant places, from different cultures and ethnic groups.
The war in Viet Nam challenged the nation in its heart. The nation experienced sharp divisions and was confused in ways it had not known since the Civil War a century before.
Family structures came under stress as the automobile gave access to new worlds of leisure or just of movement from place to place. Interstate highways made settled people into nomads. The invention and widespread use of the ‘pill’ changed sexual dynamics forever – adding its stress to those things already pulling at family life. Feminism and civil rights movements made for changes in workplace and school – changes that were threatening for many.
Unseen things also happened. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Society’s fights became hotter and politics more polarized.
But the churches? The mainline churches like the ones in which Academy members served?
The early years were experienced as flood years. The tide of growth and expansion filled the pews, caused church planting to flourish, and caused offering plates and budgets to expand. New institutions – seminaries, colleges, and homes for the aging — were built. Denominations expanded their staffs and headquarters – even judicatories, once led by an executive and a half-time secretary ALSO built headquarters to house expanding staffs. Although we didn’t realize it, the floods of people coming into the church were partly the baby boom children – the biggest cohort of children the country had ever seen. The resulting growth ‘felt’ like a triumph of evangelism, but when it was over it was over. Congregations everywhere became uncomfortable with clergy leaders who could not produce a flood of new members ‘like our old pastor did.’
The ‘God Box’ on Riverside Drive in New York became a model as major national denominations developed headquarters buildings to house expanding staffs and operations.
But under all the activity, EVERY local congregation began to feel heat. Every local pastor discovered that what had WORKED in the 50’s occasionally stumbled in the 60s, and what FLEW in the 60s had to struggle in the 70s. By the 80s most of us knew we were in trouble.
One of the first outward signs of the change was the fact that the United Methodist Church, the denomination that had had annual increases of membership since its founding – in 1966 for the first time ever had to note decrease in membership. Soon, most of the mainline denomination membership curves started downward. That was the tip of the iceberg.