Practical matters challenging churches include reaching and keeping young people, responding to “relentless demands,” and providing a vision of congregations as communities of reconciliation, a top executive with the Lilly Endowment said.
Christopher Coble, vice president of Religion for the Lilly Endowment Inc., delivered the keynote address at a three-day conference celebrating the Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology. The initiative is a 15-year partnership among Lilly, United Methodist Candler School of Theology and United Methodist-related Emory University.
Coble’s address at the “Practical Matters Conference,” March 22-24, focused on “three practical matters needing work today.”
The church’s continuing inability to reach and retain people is the first issue and it isn’t a new one, Coble said. He quoted at length an 1882 article that lamented the number of churches of every denomination that were just one-fourth to half full and nearly absent of children and young adults.
We changed that phenomenon, Coble said, when church leaders took seriously the changing social landscape that led to low attendance among young adults. Those changes included new patterns of work, new forms of leisure and the beginning of high school as a standard part of education. Churches needed to create ministries that took new life situations for young people seriously.
The most lasting response was the creation of youth and young adult ministry both within denominations and as parachurch organizations, Coble said, adding that scholars and church leaders should focus now on the deeper work of understanding how the changes in the wider social environment have made new ways of connecting with God and each other possible. He said leaders should also look at how faith is or can be effectively transmitted from one generation to the next in this new and changing environment.
Second, Coble addressed how church leadership can respond to what he called “relentless demands” in the face of dramatic disparities in resources.
These demands are generated by the “staggering variety” of ways people now congregate and the degree to which clergy must now rapidly switch tasks, and increasing divinity-school enrollment by people with no intention to be involved in congregational leadership, Coble said.
Coble said a vision of religious communities as communities of reconciliation must be at the heart of both ecclesial and pastoral imagination. As divisions in U.S. culture sharpen and are exacerbated by social media, Christians must work for reconciliation. This work, he said, is not a cheap papering over of dissent, but one in which Christians acknowledge brokenness, repent for acts of fear and suspicion, work actively to make visible those who have been made invisible and build bridges rather than walls.
The three-day event was part homecoming for doctoral and post-doc graduates, part public forum and part intensive work on methods that support the teaching and study of practical theology.
The partnership began in 2002 as a $10 million, five-year grant to Candler and Emory’s Graduate Division of Religion to create a concentration in practical theology for up to 40 doctoral and post-doctoral programs. The grant was extended another 10 years with a second round of funding. As of today, Candler and Emory’s “Initiative in Religious Practice and Practical Theology” has funded more than 90 doctoral students and provided more than 20 post-doctoral fellowships.
The initiative has helped create a fundamental shift in all graduate religion studies at Candler and Emory, said the Rev. L. Edward Phillips, current director of the initiative. “It’s like the difference between teaching the history of basketball and coaching a basketball team,” he said.
A March 23 panel brought together three public theologians to share their insights on the core work of practical theology and religious communities today.
The Rev. Brian McLaren, activist and public theologian, began by noting religious communities have real potential to destroy the world by action or by standing by as others destroy it. But he suggested religious communities could engage in practices that can save the world.
Faith must be reframed in the context of common good for all people, including the least, McLaren said. New ways must be found both to hear the spiritual experiences of each other across our diversities, and to celebrate the “founders, saints, elders, and protégés,” McLaren said.
Diana Butler Bass, a scholar specializing in American religion and culture, told the story of a shift in her own approach to religious scholarship to a focus on religious practices in congregations. She said the shift came thanks to encountering the story of Swain Memorial United Methodist Church, a vibrant and effective congregation on Tangier Island, Virginia.
That island is sinking as sea levels rise, and Bass said talking about effective congregational practices does no lasting good when the land is sinking.
Bass said more than congregational vitality is needed. Churches need to encourage “spiritual buoyancy” to survive the coming flood, which she said is not a metaphor but a real ecological crisis facing the planet.
The third panelist, Abdullah Antepli, the first Muslim chaplain at United Methodist-related Duke University, said he delights in holding apparent contradictions together in his work.
On the one hand, he believes the day of focusing on attendance at a mosque, synagogue or church is over. He said church leaders should strongly consider de-investing in those forms of religious practice. At the same time, he said, it is essential that more be done to help the people in various religious communities understand their own traditions deeply.
The failure to do this, which he lays at the feet of existing models of formation, has allowed many mainstream religious people to cede the voicing of their traditions to religious extremists.
Lilly Endowment’s funding for the initiative ends in August 2018. But the graduate concentration in practical theology will continue.
Burton-Edwards works for InfoServ at United Methodist Communications.
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