Change is in the air. It is that time in the fall when the lingering warm summer days are interrupted by cool winds blowing from new directions. Some might say, “Winter is Coming” but there is still the fullness of fall to experience. The leaves are mostly fully changed and falling now. But the turnover of seasons is in the air in other ways. 

Manitobans have just voted in a new Premier and governing party. Change and new directions have been promised. 

Climate change is never far from our minds these days, with hurricanes, floods, and hotter-than-ever months on record. 

More local to us, we are surrounded by sister congregations in transition, with pastoral vacancies dotting the Lutheran landscape in significant ways. 

Change has arrived, and I don’t know about you but I can feel it in my bones. Things that were headed our way in 2019, but that were delayed or re-directed by the pandemic are finally landing at our feet. 

You have heard me say this before, we will not escape these forces of change. Congregations and communities of faith are experiencing all kinds of change too. There is a lot of technical or functional change that is happening. Declining resources have meant that congregations are re-working how they provide ministry. Re-configured staff, partnerships with sister congregations, building rentals and so on. But it isn’t just technical change, it is just a matter of figuring out the puzzle of how to match the available resources to the possible ministry configurations.

There is also deep change afoot. The kind of change that requires true deep transformation. Transformation in how we understand ourselves as people of faith. It is no longer enough to feel obligated to come to church out of a sense of duty or habit. We have too little precious time to spend on things we don’t care about these days. I can see that following Jesus is more and more at the center of why people are coming to church in 2023 than at any other time in my ministry. 

And with that shift, the ways we do ministry are changing. I can see people who no longer receive or consume the ministry of the church but are rather fed by it. Fed to turn around and serve in their own expressions of the gospel promise. 

If there is any part of all this stressful change that is going on around us that is life-giving, it is this one. As we are stripped of our excess as communities of faith, our focus is shifting to that central experience of being forgiven sinners trying to follow Jesus’ call to serve the world. 

Of all the change that is in the air these days, that is the one that gives me the most hope!

As someone who grew up with cats, I confess that I did not piece together that when a dog needs to go outside, so does the dog owner (at least while she is a puppy). Now as a puppy owner, I find myself standing out in the backyard waiting for the dog to do her business far more than I thought would ever be necessary. Between that and twice daily walks to the school pick-up/drop-off location, I have found myself standing out in the rain more than I ever imagined necessary this week. 

All the grey skies, fall leaves and rainy streets give the sense of a dreary fall movie, maybe a movie about a family coming home for Thanksgiving and being stuck together for a comedic and/or miserable weekend. 

Thanksgiving is one of those occasions that we celebrate without thinking too deeply about, lest we get lost in a vortex of existential turmoil. Think about it too much and it might start to hurt your brain. 

Taking an opportunity to give thanks for the blessings that we have received in life is certainly a worthwhile endeavour. But where does the duty to give thanks begin and end? And just what are we thankful for? 

Thankful for our material possessions, or that we aren’t unfortunate enough to be poor?

Thankful for an abundance of family and friends in our lives, or thankful that we are not alone?

Thankful because Jesus or Grandma or our 3rd-grade teacher told us to be, or thankful because of genuine gratefulness?

Thanksgiving, in that sense, is an odd occasion then. It could perhaps come across as mandatory gratefulness. Yet, gratefulness is a learned skill that needs to be practiced to truly embody it. 

It makes sense then that, as Canadians (and Americans a little later), we make sense of this occasion for gratefulness by gathering around a meal. The opportunity to eat together is the great equalizer, putting the strong and mighty next to the weak and lowly, all the same at the table. 

And even though Thanksgiving is not a church holiday, gratitude and thanksgiving are deeply connected to faith. In fact, ‘Thanksgiving’ is one of the names that we call Holy Communion. The Greek word for Holy Communion, Eucharist, means thanksgiving. In the Eucharist, we pray, giving thanks to God for all that God has done for us. Yet we also recognize that our thanks are insufficient. Somehow, God still comes and joins us to the Body of Christ in the Bread and Wine. 

The true Thanksgiving might just be that of God towards us. God’s faithfulness toward and gratefulness for creation. 

Maybe that is the best way to understand Thanksgiving. We can never express our true gratitude and thanks to God for this life of abundance, but God’s love and gratefulness given for our sake make true Thanksgiving possible.

Recently, I wrote about an article published in The Atlantic magazine entitled “The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church” by Jake Meador. You can read last week’s eNews here if you missed it. 

The Atlantic article argued that the shape of American (also Canadian) life has changed to focus on individual achievement and productivity. This focus on ‘workism’ has pushed religion (or other forms community) aside as most people are seeking meaning and purpose in these individualistic pursuits. 

In response, my point was that the church needs to be a place that pushes back against the message that our value is found only in what we achieve and produce. 

But what does that look like to stand in opposition to the dominant cultural narratives of our world? How do we tell a different story about the meaning to be found in our lives?

Well, I am not so sure that it is an obvious thing for most churches. I think that many congregations struggle with trying to be an alternative to the powerful forces of post-modern life. In fact, so strong is the message of individual achievement in our lives, that many churches often end up amplifying the message of the importance of career and lifestyle success.

Most people unquestioningly try to do a good job in the work they do, try to provide a good life for their families, and seek to have some measure of enjoyment on the side. We can put a lot of our energy into the homes we live in, cars we drive, trips we take, hobbies we spend our time at. And there is nothing inherently wrong with those things. 

The problem is in defining our value and worth, seeing the core of our identity in whether or not we are successful at these things. Success can be a relatively arbitrary thing. The difference between things going well for us or things being hard for us can often be a matter of just plain luck. 

And rather than pushing back against finding our identity in success, churches can even try to measure themselves by the same yardstick. Most congregations try to measure their success in the number of people who cross the threshold of their doors, the amount of offering in their offering plates and the ability to maintain their church building. 

Often congregation with the biggest numbers of attendees, biggest budget and biggest staffs, end up being some if the chief promoters of the idea that our value is found what we achieve. Being “successful” infects their Gospel message, tying God’s love to their achievements in attracting people, to their obedience to “God’s will” , to the faithfulness they display and to how much they tithe. 

Strangely, congregations that might appear to be middling or failing at numerical and financial success often provide the biggest contrast to our world’s dominant narrative. These are communities of folks committed to one another. Their worship might not be the flashiest, their budgets hanging on by a shoe-string, their programs might not be the trendiest. These kinds of churches are people that come together in community even though it takes work and effort, with everyone chipping in to make it happen… all for the sake of the Gospel. These churches cannot help but stand against the narrative that tells us are value is found in what we can achieve on our own. 

And that is the point, because being part of a community of people that are committed to one another is unusual. Being part of a group that not only makes space for each member to contribute, but needs all of its various members in order to function. That means belonging to a community that tells us our value and identity is already assured by God and not by our own effort. This is strange thing in our world.

And oddly enough, the life-giving ministry that we have to offer to the world just might involve offering a strong contrast and alternative to the world. To proclaim in our imperfect and flawed community that the God of all creation gives us value and meaning as people. God declares us beloved children regardless of what we do, but because of who God has made us to be. 

At the beginning of August, there was an article published in the The Atlantic magazine on ‘The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church’ by Jake Meador. In pretty short order, the article was widely shared on social media. People were talking about it online, writers were writing about it. 

The article begins by noting a significant percentage of Americans have stopped going to church (12% or 40 million) over the previous 25 years. Why this is happening has been of significant concern and importance to religious leaders, as well as interest to sociologists.

While many would point to corruption and abuse scandals that have plagued the church (sexual abuse, residential schools, pandemic restrictions, etc…), the most predominant reasons that sociologists are finding are more mundane.  

The central thesis of the article is that the shape of American life has changed to be productivity and achievement focused. Many have shifted their lives to find identity and meaning in jobs and work – workism as the article calls it. Truths that ring true for Canadians as well. 

Because of this social shift from community life to individualistic pursuits, people have generally become lonelier and more anxious, forgetting how to live in community. 

As I have pondered this question for almost two decades now, this feels like a diagnosis that gets much more deeply to the heart of the matter. The easy answers like youth sports and dance, Sunday shopping and laziness are inadequate to the question of why people are drifting away from church. There is something deeper in the way we are living as a society that is causing us to forget how to be a community in ways that seemed effortless and natural not that long ago. 

(Side note: It has to be stated that economic forces have made us more work- focused since the 70s. Rising inequality and wage stagnation has meant that single income earner households dealt with the increasing cost of living by adding more income earners. More simply put, wives and mothers who once stayed at home and could devote weekday time to the church (or school or community group) now MUST work because minimum wage has been kept low, jobs have been outsourced and corporations have suppressed wages for the sake of profit.)

As people have less and less time for activities and relationships outside of work, active participation in a church becomes a cost-benefit calculation. Sunday morning still remains one of the few work-free times in most people’s lives. Church is now just one of many competing options for precious leisure and personal time, which is spent with more careful discernment. Especially as many people are losing the relational skills of being in community. 

Ironically, church is the antidote to workism, which fails to bring meaning and purpose in our lives. Church communities – at our best – proclaim a reality in which our worth and value, our meaning and purpose come from outside of our own efforts. They are determined by God, granted by love, and indelibly given. Of course, at our worst, churches succumb to the achievement and productivity narratives by measuring ourselves by how many members we used to have and how big our budgets used to be. 

Even as our society shifts away from communities (like church) being central in the way we live our day-to-day lives, the answer isn’t for churches to slowly fade away. Rather, congregations and faith communities are more needed than ever. It is clear that workism is not working for us. Pinning our worth and value to what we achieve is one of the things causing division and strife in our world. 

Churches are needed to offer a counter example, to be an alternative vision of what life could be in the 21st Century. To be people and communities gathered together by the grace and mercy of God who loves us freely and ferociously. To hear stories that give our lives meaning, grounded in the promises of resurrection and new life. 

To keep being what Jesus called us to be from the very beginning – God’s beloved people, the Body of Christ.