The New York Times recently published this article: Megachurches Add Local Economy to Their Mission. It documents an interesting trend. Megachurches are commonly accused of teaching a “health and prosperity” gospel just to gather a crowd and, certainly, some do.
But a number of megachurches are taking steps to help improve their local economy through development projects that flow directly from their sense of God’s calling upon them to be a blessing to their communities.
One common complaint about churches is that they take property “off the tax roll”. Certain churches, however, start out with a business as mission model and a tax paying business entity owns the property that the church rents. Others, though operating as “non-profits” still are generating sorely needed economic activity across the country and, thereby benefiting their neighbors. As the article correctly notes, this is not without historical precedent as many monasteries functioned as local economic hubs. What’s new, evidently, is the modern American church’s recent amnesia about the link between faith and work that was the hallmark of the Reformation. The Medieval Church was used to seeing monastics work in commerce as part of their holy calling. It was the reformers - the forebears of the UCC - who proclaimed that such dignity extended to the work of those not under specialized religious vows.
For the last generation, the mainline’s forays into the field of commerce have been largely restricted to advocacy for workers from a distance, mainly through attempts to influence politicians. This has had the effect of catering to the statist lust for power without accountability by giving a religious justification for a federal government that knows no limits in its conceits or intrusions. While such a strategy was done in the name of empowerment, it failed to empower workers directly. As a result, while it can be said that while certain gains and legal protections for workers were made, the main beneficiaries were the politicians who accumulated more power to impose their will. It also benefitted those who gloated in their moral superiority.
Leave it to the evangelical megachurches to roll up their sleeves and seek to benefit their communities and the mission of Christ’s kingdom through enhancing local commerce. Some might say the mainline is still deluded by it’s “Christendom Complex” - our supposed ability as the Cardinals of Suburbia to tell the feudal lords how they might instruct their vassals to better accommodate the serfs of the land. But pronouncement with incarnation is not cutting it for the mainline these days as numbers and budgets decrease precipitously while non “mainline” churches and institutions seem to sprout up on every corner. Whatever their faults, they are to be commended for their basic understanding of the church as God’s people who go to reach out to others instead of waiting them to enter our hallowed halls.
This is not just a problem for those “liberal” or “progressive” churches… it’s the presenting issue for “evangelical” and “conservative” churches in the mainline. We’re all too busy asking pastors to serve as the congregational concierge at the beck and call of the congregation. When the church doesn’t attract people just like the ones who came in the 50’s, the pastor is called a failure as an evangelist. When the pastor reaches new people from the community who suddenly invade Ozzie and Harriett’s happy hunting ground, the pastor is called a “troubler of Israel” and criticized for all the new disturbances that come when new people join the church who aren’t to the old guard’s liking.
We seemingly are suffering a systemic lack of vision and entrepreneurship in the mainline for a number of reasons. The example of the megachurch should encourage us and spur us on to better efforts to bloom where we find ourselves planted. Part of that is due to the message of our respective judicatories… “Send money, keep the doors open, hope people will come in the doors”. Now the money is drying up and the locals are wondering how to keep the doors open. As our nation goes “post denominational” faster than you can say “pension plan”, only churches who learn to reach new people will survive. The only vestigial remnants of yesterday’s denominations will be those entities who learn to provide a service that no local church alone has the skills to provide. The finances from those services will provide their financial base as per capita “royalties” for the use of the “brand name” evaporate because the are increasingly meaningless.
How can mainline denominations join the party of evangelistic entrepreneurship and make the transition? That will involve understanding the intrinsic strengths of each denomination and asking how those strengths and acquired knowledge can translate into a strategy for helping local church growth. Obviously they must be services the local church actually wants help in providing instead of the usual crop of advocacy for things no sane person ever realized were a problem or are, in fact, the promotion in religious guise of out right sins.
Churches gladly pay for curricula and resouces that actually help their mission and will go to the provider who helps them. Tomorrow’s churches will not however continue to subsidize distractions to their core mission or continue to fund “ministries” that have little relation to the Gospel, the realities of the local situation, or mission. For that matter, they won’t keep funding their own persecution by judicatories who believe they exist by divine right.
Entrepreneurship at the denominational level will be the only thing that allows survival in the coming post denominational world. For example: the denomination that creates a nationwide non profit credit union to help workers escape the debt slavery of pay day loans may be able to justify their continued existence. But they’ll have to make it easy for local churches to participate, make it easy to integrate with the evangelistic work of the church and share the revenues. Or a denomination might start a legitimate non profit credit counseling operation for a change and help local churches perform that service.
Those are just suggestions. Dozens more could be brainstormed if people had the will. But they are real possibilities that build on the strengths a denomination might have in certain administrative and legal areas. Unless denominations take such measures to make themselves useful now, the post-denominational era will leave them too poor to hire anyone to turn the lights out.
