Australian churches: reflection

So, as I sit on the plane ready to go home (flat bed in business class - thank you, frequent flyer points), some reflection on my church reviews seems in order.

First, a caveat: all my 'reviews' were based on truly limited data.  A church doesn't consist solely (or perhaps even chiefly) of its gathered life in its principal worship service: there is so much more to it than that.  The visitor cannot really know what else is going on behind the scenes.  But, for most churches, much of the time, the public worship is an indication of something: it contributes quite significantly to the shared story which the church members tell one another.

The script I borrowed for my reviews asked the question about how happy you would be to make this church a regular part of your life: it's an interesting gut reaction, really.  Crave MCC got a low score, and yet, putting those three side-by-side, it would surely be the only one I'd seriously consider: with hindsight and reflection I think a significantly higher score would be accurate.

One reason for this is the following observation: for most of my life, I have tended to be quite a few years younger than the average age of congregations and prayer meetings I've attended.  As I get older, that seems more and more anomalous: in particular, aged 42, I'd hope to see lots and lots of people around who are younger than me.  And two of those churches just didn't come close to that.  I'm really not ready to hang out exclusively with grey-haired folk just yet.

Do those churches - and countless others with similar demographics have a future?  No doubt some do: some churches just work out well for an older community, and re-invent themselves for each age of retirees. But statistics tell us that the entire church in the west is ageing, and that congregations continue to close at quite a rate.  Some of that closure is offset by new church plants.  I don't know if the trend is still downwards, but I have a hunch that it is.

Surely it's difficult for an ageing fellowship to re-invent itself. Human nature doesn't lend itself to that, and churches tend to be among the most conservative organisations out there, designed quite carefully to resist change.  By God's grace, change does happen: the church I formerly belonged to in Oxford faced certain closure, a little over 20 years ago, but instead a string of good things has happened, and for the last 15 years or so, it has been full of young families, with new births happening seemingly every week.

Prediction is difficult, (especially where the future is concerned, as the President of my College used to say).  But in the UK and in Australia, it seems, the church as a whole has a lot of ageing congregations: my own church included. 20 years from now, things are going to look very different.  Without some changes in our
demographics, not only are we going to dwindle, I'm going to be heading for retirement and finding the church empty when I get there.

It would be wrong to confuse demographics with rightness, or even relevance.  Some churches of a historically very conservative disposition are thriving and 'relevant' - Driscoll's Mars Hill, for example, or another I read of recently in LA, Reality.  Liberal churches haven't tended to be the kind of place packed to the doors.  But there are many shades and different mixes - sometimes with counter-intuitive matches of membership and outlook.  Many emerging churches have eschewed the everlasting search for numbers in place of trying to live intentionally as a community.

The simple conclusion is just to say that the big shift we've seen in church-going in the last 60 years or so hasn't really finished running its course yet. That's kind-of scary for us all, but particularly for those stuck in a kind of demographic cul de sac.  Undoubtedly, some of those who offer a certain evangelical certainty are thriving: I wish them well, and hope it's not an unstable kind of life.  The emerging model seems much more organic: it may not be taking the world by storm, it may go under many names, it may not be a model or a movement at all.  But as an idea, it works for me.