Two weeks ago, on Pentacost Sunday 2010, my son (Mark Roberts) was ordained at Hillsdale Community UCC, where he was raised.  It was an incredible experience; imagine the community that raised your son or daughter laying hands on him or her, and setting your (adult) child aside for ministry to Christ’s church. 

But what kind of church will he or she end up serving?   I work for a Conference of the United Church of Christ, and both my work and my passion is for the vitality of those churches.  Many of them are fulfilling important roles in the life of Christ’s church, as are churches from other mainline denominations.  But many others are struggling to adapt to the culture of 21st century Southern California and Southern Nevada.   The world has changed in major ways in the last half-century, and the changes that are needed for churches to thrive in this new culture are daunting.  Over half the churches I serve probably find themselves resonating with this challenge.

I am retirement age.  Many people my age are enjoying travel, hobbies, free time, or families.  I have those yearnings.  But I keep remembering three years ago, when I attended a 50th-anniversary celebration of the birth of the United Church of Christ at our General Synod in Hartford, CT.  It was a great celebration of the work the denomination I love had done in it’s first 50 years of life.  But reflecting afterwards, I realized that this celebration did a far less satisfying job of looking 50 years into the future of the UCC. 

Why?  Who really can know, but my personal guess is that the people that planned the event were far more comfortable thinking about their church’s past than its future.  There are certainly many reasons for that, some of which are perfectly understandable.  But I can’t shake the feeling that the real reason we continue to avoid the subject of our future is not that we can’t see what’s coming – its that we don’t like what we see.    

That is why I’m here, still working instead of enjoying my retirement.  I want to help these churches, and maybe by example churches with similar challenges in other places and denominations, see that there is a future for “the church”.   I believe that with all my being.  The open questions are “What kind of church?”   ”How different from today’s church and churches?”  “How do we make the transition?”  What if we cannot, or will not, adapt to this new world?”    

Unlike my son, I am not ordained, and yet, I feel as if I have been trained for this mission all my life.   My undergraduate degree in social sciences, my post-graduate training in business and research methods, and my early careers and developer and analyst have been great preparation for helping people see what needs to be done to shape the future of the church, and the church of the future.  I also have spent my life in the church.  It has protected me when I needed protection, held me up when I needed protection, brought me my wife and raised my children, and been the vessel where my faith has deepened and my life has found meaning.

So that is why I’m here, opening this blog conversation with others who love their church and want it to thrive in the future.  The blog is named NewLife4Church for that reason.  I feel called to spend my “retirement” helping churches find new life, and even become new churches again. If you’re in a congregation that is longing for something similar, I hope you’ll look for more thoughts from these posts in the weeks and months ahead.

Advertisement