Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I’m writing this on my 40th birthday, and it’s been a really fun day. I always like birthdays. I especially love getting to hear from and get caught up, once again, with family and friends. Even on a birthday such as this – one which carries with it such an increasingly large, round number – it’s all the more special to hear from those who’ve walked a lot of my past with me, and, together with them, to remember and celebrate and look forward.

Today, I’ve been trying to figure out if forty years is a long or short time.

On the one hand, it doesn’t really feel that long – and, no, this isn’t my way of deluding myself. It’s simply flown by, and I’m shocked that it came so quickly!

But, on the other hand, forty years does feel kind of long. Like that ancient biblical number which indicated ‘fullness’ or ‘more than sufficient time’, forty years is a good long chunk of time. I’m a father now, for instance, and I constantly find myself comparing my experience growing up and that of my daughter’s. Looking back over my childhood, I see things that I took for granted and which my parents, as young parents themselves, also took for granted but which, today, have completely and totally changed. The Catholic parochial school in my neighborhood, for example, sent the kids home every day for lunch, fully expecting that someone – most likely, the mother – would be home and cooking a homemade meal. Talk about a cultural shift! Church attendance and church membership were still pretty strong and compelling cultural forces forty years ago, and I can’t remember knowing anyone in my neighborhood who didn’t attend church, at least somewhat regularly. My home television set – the only one in our house, mind you – was black-and-white until I was, maybe, eight or nine, and there was no internet, no wireless, no iPad.

Forty years later, major and substantial cultural shifts have already happened, and there’s simply no denying that we live in a very different world than the one I grew up in. True, every generation always changes things and nothing ever stays the same, but in terms of voluntary human organizations and the shape of western, American human communities, churches included, the cultural shifts have fundamentally disrupted what once worked. Not too long ago, it was okay to forecast a fairly bright and promising future for most Christian congregations in America, saying, “Don’t worry, when the kids grow up and have kids and families of their own, they’ll come back and settle down and enroll their kids in Sunday School and share in the leadership of church.” Now, that’s an uncertain gamble. Whereas the institutional church has always lived on the borderline of obsolescence, now it seems all the more heated and real. And frightening.

But forty years later, there are still congregations and there are still Christians and there are still those who set their lives on following Jesus. It looks really different today than it did yesterday: smaller in some aspects, larger, at least broader, and more disparate in other analyses. People are still gathering around God’s Word and seeking a renewed life in Jesus, and the institution called ‘church’ has also woken up to this new and exciting reality. The Episcopal Church, for one, just passed a triennial budget at General Convention which puts lots and lots of money in church planting and church revitalization and digital evangelism. Talk about a culture shift, and for such good!

And that, I suppose, is really the answer to my day-long question. I guess it’s not whether forty is a long time or a short time (whether I’m “the new thirty” or whether I’m actually hitting middle age!), but whether God is still in this and where, in particular, God is making “all things new.” To me, then, this gift of a life spent following and serving Jesus still feels good, very, very good!

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