Tag Archives for Christian Century

GATHERING & How dinner churches are surviving (and thriving) in post-pandemic church.

“How are dinner churches surviving the pandemic?” by Kendall Vanderslice, The Christian Century, 3/23/21.

…Modeled after the early church practice of sharing a meal together as Eucharist, dinner churches seek to address social isolation and loneliness through the very structure of their worship. Their practice also mirrors the agape meal or love feast tradition, a tradition adopted by John Wesley and memorialized in the UMC Book of Worship.

…In many denominations, the quick shift to online worship led to theological confusion and debate over if and how to celebrate the Eucharist. For dinner churches, which form their core identity around gathering for a communal meal, that question posed a particular sort of challenge. Their approach to it has varied, as has their approach to virtual worship generally.

… Over the course of the two-hour service, congregants participate in every aspect of the liturgy. They welcome visitors and catch up with old friends. They sing, eat, and discuss the scripture reading. They pray and share their joys and concerns. The church even sets aside time for mingling, encouraging congregants to utilize breakout rooms in shifting groups of two or three people to approximate the informal conversations that would happen at the start of an in-person gathering.

… Anna Woofenden, the Protestant chaplain at Amherst College and pastor of a campus dinner church, made the transition quickly as well. “We had spring break off, then we started right back up. We kept the same time, the same liturgy, we just met on Zoom.”

This consistency from week to week, and from pre-COVID worship to now, has proven invaluable for worshipers and pastors alike.

“Lots of students told us, ‘This is the one consistent thing in my life right now. It’s the one thing I can count on,’” says Woofenden. “In this time where everything feels different, everything feels uncertain, we all find great peace and comfort in the well-worn words and well-worn rhythms and being held by that liturgy.”

…As the coronavirus precautions stretch on, churches of all sizes and traditions find themselves increasingly hungry for more embodied forms of connection. The virtual agape meal or dinner church service provides that. Although it cannot fully address the human need for physical relationships, it serves as a helpful tool until the longing to worship together as a body can be filled. This tactile reminder of a future in which we will gather once again to break bread, shake hands, and embrace one another offers something to carry us through to that future, as the Eucharist carries us on toward the new creation.

“Even though we’re on Zoom, we can breathe together and feel the presence of God touching us and speaking to us as a community,” Scharen says. “That’s the work of the Holy Spirit blowing, even through this weird Zoom format that we have.”

Read more at … https://www.christiancentury.org/article/features/how-are-dinner-churches-surviving-pandemic?

ACCESSIBLE CHURCH & An example of an ability-inclusive church, where people with and without disabilities both worship and lead.

by Andrea Perrett, Christian Century Magazine, January 28, 2021.


… Each week at Beloved Everybody Church, these three symbols—a heart, a gift, an a butterfly—are used at the beginning of the service to remind the congregation of the community’s values. The Los Angeles church is intentionally ability inclusive: people with and without intellectual, developmental, or other disabilities worship there together. When I joined an online service from my home in Vancouver, British Columbia, 1,200 miles away, I expected to be there as an observer. Instead I was generously ministered to.

Bethany McKinney Fox, the church’s organizing pastor, stands out for her inclusive and integrated approach to worship. Bethany, who does not have a disability, has long had a passion for the inclusion of those who do. In high school, she formed a meaningful friendship with a student with physical and intellectual disabilities. She served as a longtime volunteer in a L’Arche community, a home in which people with and without disabilities share life together. She was a special education teacher. She has a PhD in Christian ethics, focusing on disability, healing, and the Gospels; she also worked for Fuller Theological Seminary as director of its disability services office. She and her spouse, Michael, are preparing to open their home to a person with an intellectual disability.

For all her credentials and achievements, Bethany says she “just really likes being friends with people with diverse abilities and disabilities.” It shows. She is clearly loved by those who participate in Beloved Everybody’s activities, and she joins them in many areas of their lives, not just for Sunday worship.

Everything at the church—from the style of worship to the way leadership functions—is designed for people with and without disabilities to join together in community. This structure presents an alternative view of the body of Christ, one that is perhaps closer to Paul’s original description, in which “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispens­able, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect” (1 Cor. 12:21–23).

Started in 2017, Beloved Everybody is still growing into its rhythms and rituals…

Read more at … https://www.christiancentury.org/article/features/beloved-everybody-ability-inclusive-church-embodies-beloved-community

DECLINE & How dying churches abuse pastors. A review of researcher #GeneFowler’s examination of why traumatized congregations so often attack their leaders.

by Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner April 23, 2020, Christian Century.

… Church abuse of clergy is quite different. It’s a pattern driven by the congregation’s social unconscious reaction to traumatization. Fowler skillfully builds on the work of Wilfred R. Bion (who helped develop the theory behind psychoanalytic group psychology—including the power of the herd instinct) in explaining how this trauma plays out in congregations.

The motivation for church abuse is usually fear, Fowler explains, and this fear can be especially acute in times of palpable decline. As members of a congregation consider the annihilation of the church they’ve long known and revered, they experience a collective trauma. No longer able to maintain an idealistic image of themselves, they fall into denial and then fear. Abuse may also stem from ancestral trauma that’s passed on to a congregation from a previous generation.

Fowler tells the story of decline across several generations, beginning with Robert Wuthnow’s premise that the 1950s were marked by “a spirituality of dwelling.” After the chaos of World War II and the Korean War, people needed to view the church as a safe space, a sacred place in which to be nurtured, a spiritual home where they did not have to think too much. This was the heyday of the popular children’s rhyme, “Here is the church; here is the steeple. Open the doors; see all the people.”

The 1960s, Fowler explains, “constituted the initial period in the story of Protestantism’s trauma-producing membership decline in the United States.” The spirituality of dwelling was replaced by a “spirituality of seeking.” “Sacred moments of experiencing the divine and a continuing spiritual journey replaced sacred space and the need to know the sacred territory.” This major cultural and ecclesiastical shift stretched across subsequent decades, even as it went largely unnamed.

Christians who see their image of the steeple church shattered are often traumatized by this shift. The shattering of a beloved image is a loss that many congregants find unbearable. They realize that they cannot depend on the church’s culture—including its clergy—to remedy the shocking sense of annihilation that comes with the displacement they’re experiencing.

“When congregations must defend themselves against confronting their fear of congregational annihilation at all costs, their effort is at the expense of the pastor and the pastor’s loved ones,” Fowler explains. In their pain, the congregation begins the movement to get rid of their pastor—even when there is no reason justifying such a move. Common tactics include defamation of character, casting of shame, forced termination, and unemployment.

Read more at … https://www.christiancentury.org/review/books/how-dying-churches-abuse-pastors

ATTENDANCE & How many people go to church each Sunday? They told Gallup 40%. Reality only 20.4%

by the Hartford Institute for Church Research, retrieved from http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html#sizecong, 11/9/16.

A: For years, the Gallup Research Organization has come up with a consistent figure — 40 percent of all Americans, or roughly 118 million people, who said they attended worship on the previous weekend. Recently, sociologists of religion have questioned that figure, saying Americans tend to exaggerate how often they attend.

By actually counting the number of people who showed up at representative sample of churches, two researchers, Kirk Hadaway and Penny Marler found that only 20.4 percent of the population, or half the Gallup figure, attended church each weekend.

As added proof for the accuracy of this smaller percentage of churchgoers, if 20.4% of Americans (approximately 63 million in 2010) attended the nation’s 350,000 congregations weekly then the average attendance would be 180 people per congregation which is almost exactly the figure that numerous research studies have found.

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