Theology Today - Vol 30, No. 1 - April 1973 - ARTICLE - The Church's Task: A Sense of Life's Meaning

52 - The Church's Task: A Sense of Life's Meaning

The Church's Task: A Sense of Life's Meaning
By Dean M. Kelley

IN the eight months since it was published, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing has gone through four printings and elicited a surprising degree of response from many varied sectors of the population. I have been gratified to receive a more favorable treatment from those who are not "conservative" than I had expected. As the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Hollywood, Calif., Lloyd J. Ogilvie, remarked, "Sometimes a book seems to gather up the times and point a new direction, and yours is one of those." It is perhaps a tribute to fortuitous timing as much as to any intrinsic merit that the book is doing as well as it is; it seems to have scratched an itch that was just beginning to be felt by many people. Whether it will make a significant difference in the long run is not yet apparent. But from the various kinds of feedback that have reached me so far, I can offer the following reflections.

People seem to be laboring under the mistaken, but understandable, impression that the book is mainly about "conservative churches" and "church growth." It is not. It is about the function of religion and how that function is best

Dean M. Kelley is Director for Civil and Religious Liberty, National Council of Churches, and author of Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (1972). He is a United Methodist minister who has served churches in Colorado and New York.

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performed. That is, it is about ultimate meaning and its utilization in human life. Church membership statistics are adduced mainly for the purpose of posing the questions which most people in the "mainstream" churches were not previously prepared to take very seriously: What is the "religion business" and who's doing it well? "Conservative" is another source of misunderstanding, conjuring up images of fundamentalists and evangelicals-some of whom are not doing the religion business as well as groups which could as well be called "radical": Jehovah's Witnesses, Black Muslim, Children of God, pentecostals, or charismatics.

But as my editor observed, "We have to find a title that win speak to people who haven't read the book yet, not just to those who have." A title like "Why Strict Churches are Strong" would be much more accurate, but wouldn't sell as many books, and even it wouldn't reflect the main theme-that human beings must have meaning for their lives, and they will get it somewhere. The churches can offer them bread or a stone, and the difference between stone and bread seems to be not in content but in demand, in seriousness, in strictness.

Many commentators try to struggle with the statistics, contending that they do not show what I see in them, for various reasons such as the following.

1. The charts in the book are selective; they do not show the many "conservative" groups that are not growing. This may well be true; I only picked the groups that were most visible, and among them the ones whose reporting of membership statistics was fairly stable over the past few decades. I don't believe I claimed or implied that all "conservative" churches are growing.

2. The apparent decline can be explained by intervening variables such as greater mobility, less time available, competing interests, increasing secularism. To my mind, most of these are not causes at all but symptoms of the declining effectiveness of the mainstream ways of doing religion. Of course people have less time available for it in competition with other interests; of course they go to the mountains or the seashore on Sunday and do not put down deep roots in conventional churches in the communities where they stay for only a brief sojourn. All of this testifies only to the ineffectuality of most churches which they might contemplate attending.

3. The graphic presentation of the statistics is misleading and exaggerates the importance of relatively minor decreases in the past few years. Maybe so. I tried various ways of presenting the statistics that would be accurate and yet bring out what I thought was significant-the concerted downturn of the foremost religious groups' drawing power in the course of the past few years. My

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editor greatly simplified the rather fussy graphs I had prepared, contending that the difference in scale between the long-term and short-term graphs was quite obvious to anyone who could read. Whether there have been larger lags in church growth in bygone eras I am not prepared to argue; I merely accepted the picture portrayed after considerable research by Edwin Gaustad in his Historical Atlas of American Religion. If there were periods of decline which he failed to show, complain to him.

Most of the criticisms of the statistics I used are, in my estimation, little more than quibbles and do not in the least affect the generally recognized fact that the mainline churches have simultaneously struck a period of serious defection and loss of esteem. Most religious groups can coast up the population escalator by sheer momentum of procreation; it takes hard work to turn around and actively lose members-to stride down the upward escalator faster than it is rising. Yet that is what the mainline churches have succeeded in doing-together-and that strikes me as inescapably noteworthy and not easily explained away, though the above criticisms are laudable attempts to do so.

III

More cogent is the criticism that, in explaining the dynamics of religion, I have seized upon a particular class-linked form of religious behavior (the way poor and unlettered people do religion) and elevated it to be the norm of what it is to be religious. Really, I am told, we Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Methodists are just as religious at heart as these sectarians, but you don't give us credit for it! Well, who but God can assay the religion of the heart? I was going by the admittedly external measure of how much time, energy, money, anguish, and struggle people expend on their religion. By those standards, Episcopalians and Jehovah's Witnesses are simply not in the same ball-park, and to use the same term- "religious"-for their behavior, without comparing what it costs them, is to miss one of the most important aspects of religion precisely the one I wrote the book to emphasize!

A sub-category of this criticism is the rather condescending observation that, after all, the religious groups to which I have drawn attention are really very small, marginal, and "bizarre" in comparison to the millions in the mainline churches. Isn't it the truth? It is the very contrast between the intensity and vigor of the small groups I described and the placidity, stagnation, and amorphousness of the great denominations that is the point of the book. As for who is "bizarre," would this term not have been a natural one to characterize the early Christians, the Anabaptists, the Wesleyans, and all the other high-demand movements whose successors have

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now settled into more complacent, conventional (and less religious?) ways?

Another criticism is that many modern people do not need religion, but get their meanings for life from science, humanism, etc. To this there are two answers. Whatever supplies ultimate meaning for a person's life is his "religion"; and, more and more people are turning away from scientism (science as a religion) because it is unsatisfying. The latter point is made at great length by Father Andrew Greeley in his new book, Unsecular Man (Schocken Press, 1972). In my book, I tried to explain why I think man will not "outgrow" religion, but evidently a few did not find that explanation convincing.

Another criticism was that there is simply no empirical research in the book (beyond a few statistical graphs), just a series of hypotheses for someone else to test. Granted. I point that out in the preface and never claimed otherwise.

None of these criticisms seem valid to me or would cause me to change the main course of the argument, though I might try to ward them off by better explanation of the argument. They represent, I feel, valiant efforts to discount the disquieting effect of the point I wanted to make-brave tries, but insufficient (in my view). There are a few criticisms I can think of which might have more validity, but the critics have not launched them so why should I?

If there is any regret I would have about the book, it is that it does not sufficiently free itself from the received stereotypes of content and method: the assumptions that the only "serious" content is fundamentalism, the only strict methods are those of heresy-hunts and authoritarian hierarchies-neither of which need be true. If there is ever a sequel to the present volume, it ought to try to spell out in more detail bow to be "serious" without the wooden, surface literalism and legalism of the fundamentalists; how to be strict without the cruel, gory (and really not very effective) excesses of crusade and inquisition.

I must confess that sociology of religion is not my occupational field, and I had subtitled the manuscript an "excursion" in that field rather than the more pretentious "study" substituted by the editor. Some sociologists of religion have suggested that "the shoemaker should stick to his last," while other have expressed the hope that this book will be my last. But I take some encouragement from persons (in the declining churches) who have remarked, "It's painful, but we have needed something like this for a long time!" I only hope it is not too late.