Seeking 35,000 by 2000. Celebrating 28,000 in 2013.

One of the people who regularly responds to my blogs under the radar, i.e., in personal emails away from the gaze of CGGC leadership, repeatedly makes the claim that CGGC leaders--especially in Findlay--do what they do in order to justify the jobs they hold, the cushy offices they sit in and the juicy salaries they draw on the tithes and offerings of the CGGC faithful.

I have resisted reaching that conclusion--and I still resist it--because I know most of those people fairly well and it's hard for me to be that cynical about them.

However, there are times that it is difficult to defend the Findlay gang.  This is one of those occasions.

Have you looked over the latest issue of The Church Advocate yet?

It's first article is a very clever piece of writing by Ed Rosenberry which begins, "This issue of The Church Advocate is devoted to celebrating what the Lord is doing in and through the Churches of God, General Conference (CGGC)."

The article concludes:

"So, while celebrating what the Lord is doing as revealed in these pages, be bold to ask Him what part you might play in the work.  May next year reveal even greater forward progress in and through the CGGC because we all stepped up."

The article prepares the reader to see CGGC statistics for 2013, which appear near the end of the issue.  In spite of Ed's tone, it seems to me that the numbers don't add up to the conclusion that we should be thanking the Lord for pouring out amazing blessing "in and through the Churches of God, General Conference."

Two statistics are suggestive of CGGC reality in 2013.

1.  I recall that, during the 35,000 by 2000 campaign, that was taking place 20 years ago, there were just slightly more than 350 CGGC American congregations.  in 2013, the total in the U. S. is 336.

And, that decline of about five percent includes a pretty substantial mountain of congregations added by the process of what the folks in Findlay dub "adoption," or the recruiting of already established churches or non-CGGC church planters who decide to join the CGGC and are adopted by a "judicatory" in the CGGC. 

I don't know what the number of adopted congregations were as of 2013 but I do know that most of the boasting ERC church planting does is of what has been added to ERC numbers through adoption and not as a result of the Lord blessing existing ERC ministries.

2.  As the title of this post suggests, Ed is celebrating an average worship attendance far below the goal we established in the 90s for the year 2000.

The reported worship attendance of CGGC churches in 2013 is 28,072.

Two of my characteristics of the CGGC brand are Cynicism and To Talk is to Walk-ism.  Both characteristics are in play in the latest issue of The Church Advocate. 

There are many hundreds in the CGGC today who are cynical about everything that comes out of Findlay.  They are predisposed to see this invitation to celebrate "what the Lord is doing" as phony.  And, based on this issue of The Church Advocate they seem to be justified.  Issues of The Church Advocate such as this justify the widespread cynicism among our pastors and people.  This attempt to declare what is going on in the CGGC as worthy of celebration is classic to talk is to walk-ism.

The reality that CGGC worship attendance will have to increase by 25% in order for our body to achieve what it hoped for when it began 35,000 by 2000 in the mid 90s.

I don't see the rosy picture that Ed attempts to convince us is present to be seen.

We must repent and begin to care about is true and what is false.

Same Sex Marriage. What Comes Next? Implications for Christian Leadership!

Many of us in Pennsylvania were startled when, a few weeks ago, a Federal Judge struck down our state's law defining marriage as being between one man and one woman and we were discouraged by the decision, the next day, by our Roman Catholic governor, not to appeal the decision.

With that in mind, then, you may consider the leadership of the ERC to have been prescient because it had, during Conference sessions just two weeks earlier, suggested that ERC churches include language in their official documents declaring that the "___________________ Church of God" only performs weddings between one man and one woman.  

Three thoughts:

1.  As always, ERC (and the entire CGGC) leadership seeks an institutional remedy to a spiritual problem in the culture.

What difference is it going to make on the Day that the Son of Man appears in His glory, along with the angels, and sits on His glorious throne and separates the people of the world as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats that the ____________________ Church of God has language in its legal documents protecting itself, on an institutional level, from the need to allow a same sex wedding on its premises?

The issue the church faces is one of righteousness and sin, not of institutional insulation.

2.  Consider the exponential rate at which institutional (especially Evangelical) Christianity is being insulated from mainstream American culture.

 

At this moment, history is changing in a way that it does only once in every thousand years or more.  What the Roman Emperor Constantine began to put in place 1,700 years ago is finally and suddenly collapsing--as we read the daily headlines.

To me, though, what is truly timely in all of this, is not the sudden acceptance of same sex marriage. 

Even more significant is the recent Time Magazine cover which identifies the struggle for transgender equality as the next Civil Rights movement saying, "Nearly a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, another social movement is poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs" and identifying that movement as the struggle for transgender acceptance.

The institutional Evangelical American church is now on the defensive--as the ERC's move to protect its churches makes clear. 

Institutional Evangelical Christianity is, suddenly, the dinosaur on the American landscape.  The world in which it was fit to exist has evaporated away more rapidly than we could have dreamed--and the rate of change is quickening.

Think for a moment:  Because the CGGC has become thoroughly institutionized, what defensive, institutional remedy will CGGC leadership now concoct to preserve the sanctity of, for example, its churches' bathrooms in anticipation of the day that a person who is biologically a man sues the XYZ Church of God because it discriminates against his spiritual need to use the women's potty? 

What bylaw might it suggest to preserve the purity of its nurseries and children's Sunday School class rooms when a transvestite sues in court to serve there?

And, what unrighteous, yet culturally-accepted, movement will come after this one?  And, how quickly will that movement gain momentum?

Can anyone else see how quickly the institutional American church is becoming a laughingstock in mainstream American culture?

The truth to which the institutional Evangelical church must adapt is that institutional Christianity has, from the days of Constantine, required the existence of a culture that looks to it as the institution which upholds its moral values.

The relationship between church and culture that makes institutional Evangelical Christianity viable is broken and it is not likely to be repaired. 

The church as an institution is no longer viable in the United States.

Suddenly, institutional Christianity is the Edsel.

3.  American Christians need, immediately, to refashion their understanding of what kind of person is spiritually fit to provide them what they call leadership.
 

It may already be too late for this to make a difference for Evangelical denominational Christianity in America.

In the CGGC, specifically, we need to take stock of the fact that the people who lead us are not taking us into the future.  They produce fruit of wanting to take the CGGC back into the Middle Ages.

Right now the eNews articles are about how Ed spent his  EASTERTIDE.

Eastertide? 

Eastertide!

The second to last edition of The Church Advocate strongly recommended the celebration of Lent--which was all the rage in Middle Ages Catholicism a thousand years ago--in the CGGC.

In the ERC, we were recently favored by articles written by the Executive Director and his wife on the spiritual value and importance of the observance of Holy Week.

Those who sit in CGGC staff offices are promoting a Medieval version of the church at the very moment when the culture is saying that the intimate connection between culture and Christianity that gave birth to Medieval Christianity is precisely what it neither wants nor needs!  Oh, how John Winebrenner would have cringed!

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Please understand: I like all of the guys who sit at the top of all the CGGC pyramids. 

I know them and consider them all to be perfectly sincere and entirely well-intentioned.  I accept the reality that most, if not all of them, genuinely believe that the best future for the CGGC is one in which we all think about how we spent Eastertide and that we all entered Eastertide after a sincere celebration of Lent and a pious observation of Holy Week--i.e., that we do all what the best Christians did in the year A.D. 800.

But, times have changed.

Times are changing more rapidly with each passing decade.

And the world in which the Son of God became flesh and lived is not calling for the witness of the church that existed a thousand or more years ago.

We need to change what's at the top of our pyramid--if we are to have any future.