MONDAY MUSINGS

April 7, 2008

The Mission Field

Perhaps some of you thought, as a child, that it would be wonderful to give your life to God by going to some distant mission field to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  China, Indian, or Africa were good possibilities.  What a good and noble way to spend one’s life! 

Two statistics I have just heard suggest that the mission field is not “out there” but right here.  In a recent poll, disputed by some but confirmed in a second poll, only 17% of the population in this country attended a worship service or a Sunday School class on any given Sunday.  The other 83% chose to be elsewhere.  The second statistic is this:  81% of the people in this country under the age of 30 have never been in a church sanctuary, ever.  This would include a weekly worship service or a wedding or a funeral or any other event.  I suspect you are surprised by both of these findings, as I am.

The mission field is at our doorstep, and yet most congregations are so engrossed in taking care of their usual business that we fail to see the need or the opportunity.  We lament the empty pews, worry about giving patterns to sustain our budgets, fret about the absence of youth or former members, and resist doing anything very novel to reach out to those “un-churched” around us.  We often point fingers at others for the plight of our congregation’s situations but are unwilling to venture forth into new directions of mission.

In my work as a Conference Minister in Kansas and Oklahoma I worked with many congregations who were depressed.  They remembered the good days of the 1950’s and l960’s when churches were filled, classrooms were bulging and optimism was everywhere.  Times had changed, radically, but the practices in most churches had not.  I thought that some of the congregations that closed their doors did not died from natural causes such as changes in demographics as much as they died from self-inflicted wounds.  In a sense, they committed suicide, persisting in unhelpful patterns in the stubborn belief that somehow what had not been fruitful would be fruitful if we kept doing what we had always done before. 

The bottom line for me is that the great majority of our congregations could grow and thrive if they were willing to risk trying new ways of reaching out into their mission field.  For every congregation it will be different approaches, but the common denominator is to resist insisting that we must only do what we have done in the past.  I invite a lively discussion of what this would mean for St. John’s United Church of Christ.  Peace.  John Krueger