Leaving Church? Why?

Two blog posts about why people are leaving church have turned up this week, and it's worth noting them here as part of an ongoing conversation about the question: Why are people leaving the church (in 'droves' as one of these writer's notes). 

The first blogger is Joshua Graves - he's the preaching and teaching minister for the Otter Creek Church in Nashville, Tennessee.  One of his points is: Church and community are very difficult. Church is a great idea until people get involved. Bonhoeffer consistently warns us in his various writings that we destroy community when we try and create it. Meaning–community, in and of itself, cannot be the goal. Rather, community is the space in which we communally seek to experience the resurrected Jesus. That being said, anyone who’s been a part of a church community knows that relationships will suffer, endure disappointment because this is true in any community...

He has more to say on the topic. but the following paragraph perhaps sums it up: I think the real cause of disillusionment with church is self-disappointment. Pain birthed anger, now solidified in cynicism and apathy (funny how those two always go together). Frustration with “the church” is first about frustration with self. We tend to, in the wisdom of Donald Miller, judge others based on actions while judging ourselves based upon our intent. We are harder on “the church” so we can be “easier” on ourselves. This is why some Christians literally demand more from their church than they do from their own family, their own personal lives (money, time, etc.).

The whole post is called Leaving Church?

The other post is from Bradley Wright, whom I've mentioned on several occasions on this blog.   In a post called, Why do Christians leave the faith? the fundamental importance of apologetics.  Wright begins his post by writing: Several colleagues and I recently finished a study of why Christians leave the faith, and we were surprised at what made a difference as well what didn’t seem to matter. 

The post begins in outlining the sociological aspects of their study (and this post is the first of several that will be appearing) but it soon gets onto looking at some of the reasons people bring forward for why they left the church.   For Wright, many of them hinge on a lack of understanding of apologetics, which of course basically goes back to a lack of understanding of the Bible and God Himself. 

The return of the multi-generational household

The following paragraph indicates an interesting trend in family households, which may also be increasing in New Zealand.

The number of Americans living in two-adult-generation households grew from 28 million in 1980 to 49 million in 2008, with 25% of Baby Boomers expecting to live with their parents again; and the recession has accelerated the trend. Supporting both parents and children takes a major emotional and financial toll, with the average yearly cost of supporting an aging parent at $5,534 and the yearly cost of supporting adult children at $7,660. But 76% of those helping a relative say they enjoy it, and 54% have bonded with their loved one more than they anticipated.

The first sentence is a bit unclear, but basically we're talking here about a member of the grandparent generation moving back in with one of their children and that child's family. Or the three-generational group moving into a different house together.

We were blessed when our children were growing up to have my mother living with us. She had her own living area upstairs, her own bathroom and a small kitchen. The enormous benefits this gave to our children are too many to count. It was also great to have a built-in babysitter (!)

However, this won't work in every situation, and it can be an awful burden for some. Still, my intuition is that it's healthier for the older person to live with their family. Even older people living in their own homes are healthier than older people living in rest homes. People who go into rest homes seem to deteriorate faster than those who don't.

It turns out my intuition is backed up in the report the paragraph at the top of this post relates to. One of the findings was:

Older adults who live alone are less healthy and they more often feel sad or depressed than their counterparts who live with a spouse or with others. These correlations stand up even after controlling for demographic factors such as gender, race, age, income and education.

The report is called: The Return of the Multi-Generational Household. It is presented by the PewResearch Centre, and came out in March 2010.

Photo by Dianna, on Flickr.com

Embracing the Elderly

A brief piece in the latest NZ Management says ‘Employers Should Embrace the Ageing Workforce.’ It must be an idea that's found its time, because putting this phrase in Google brings up a number of references to it around the country, including this one.

Wouldn’t it be good to see a similar heading in SPANZ or some church magazine saying: ‘Churches Should Embrace their Ageing Parishioners?’ My gut feeling is that 'Ageing Parishioners' are left to fend for themselves spiritually and emotionally, and that the big focus in most churches is on children and, even more so, young people.

Of course we should be concerned for these two groups; they're the future. But older people are not the past - they're still the present, and they bring with them, in many cases, great stores of treasures, most of it neglected by your average church.

Many churches barely acknowledge the older people, or else they leave other older people to look after them, as though only the elderly can care for the elderly. As someone in late middle-age (not quite retired, in other words), I am just as concerned as ever about the state of my faith, about how to think theologically about all the issues that beset our modern world, about how to face the fact that death creeps closer with every day, that health isn't as stable as it used to be, and a number of other matters.

I don't feel old inside. Inside I still have a sense of being about thirty (though with a bit more experience under my belt), and it's only the fact that the body doesn't agree that makes me aware of being older. My suspicion is that people much older than me don't feel old inside either. But we can be made to feel old by being put to one side or ignored or treated as though we have no past, no history.

Boomers are an increasingly large percentage of the population. And, it seems to me, an untapped resource - and mission field.

Tinkering

Jonny Baker, (who has moments of writing entirely in lower case) noted:

one of the points that i found interesting in robert wuthnow's book after the baby boomers: how twenty and thirty-somethings are shaping the future of american religion was that young adults have an extended period before getting married and having children (if they do). this means that there can often be a 10 year period of extended young adulthood. church attendance in this age group has been in decline, but the most interesting part about that is that the young adults who are attending church tend to be married with kids - church somehow is appealing to and catering for families better than single people. so this extension of young adulthood compounds the decline.

The single word that best describes young adults approach to religion and spirituality - indeed life - is tinkering. A tinkerer puts together a life from whatever skills, ideas and resources that are readily at hand... Tinkerers are the most resourceful people in any era. If specialized skills are required they have them. When they need help from experts they seek it. But they do not rely on one way of doing things. Their approach to life is practical. They get things done and usually this happens by improvising by piecing together an idea from here, a skill from there and a contact from somewhere else.

Like the farmer rummaging through the junk pile for makeshift parts the spiritual tinkerer is able to sift through a veritable scrap heap of ideas and practices from childhood, from religious organisations, classes, conversations with friends, books, magazines, television programmes and web sites. The tinkerer is free to engage in this kind of rummaging...