Will It Be Different? No doubt about it.

So I was on TV yesterday. Not a big deal. So far down the line, my days on 2nd string B-Team seemed a highlight.

I asked the producer, the old band mate who asked me to appear, what the viewership is. He said, “Half-a-dozen.” I don’t think he was kidding. 

But I have sent the link to my church family, so…a ratings boost! Up 300 percent! Wait. I don’t want to talk about my ratings. Unpastoral. Unseemly, too.

What I do want to talk about is something I said yesterday almost unwittingly…

I had been talking around it for a while but it sort of crystallized in the moment.

The interviewer asked me something about whether, on the downside of the COVID-19 lockdown, corporate worship would change. I said it already has. We could list many of the various ways: from "sing along" hymns to online stewardship; from virtual (or, in the words of Pope Francis, “spiritual”) gatherings to virtual/ spiritual Communion (as we did last week); from live stream to archived, "catch it when you can" services.  

channahonumc.org

But almost instinctively, I appealed to United Methodist history: how in the early days, the movement was comprised of small groups gathered for Bible study and prayer. The members of the group held each other spiritually accountable. The Methodists would go to the parish church for the Sacraments, but the primary locus of the spiritual life and growth was the small group: the Class Meeting, as it was called.

In America, where there were few churches at all—and where most American Methodists were distancing themselves from anything “England”—circuit riding preachers traveled among the small groups, providing Wesley-approved sermons and the Sacraments. Circuit Riders might see a small group only once or twice in a year, and were never appointed to any circuit for longer than a year, and so the people were really pretty much on their own in terms of discipleship and evangelism. And did they ever evangelize! Methodism grew very rapidly in those days.

              

So: small groups regularly, big church occasionally.

One could argue that the same dynamic was present in the early church. The disciples of Jesus gathered together to tell Jesus stories, to pray—and without mandated form or credentialed celebrants, to share the Meal that made the Church the Church, and to baptize. Later, codification occurred.  

Which is to say, over time, the early patterns were reversed. In the early church, a concern for “manual, apostolic succession” defined who could and could not administer the Sacraments, who and who was not authorized to preach—the “stuff” of faith was taken out of the hands of the people and given to professionals. Faith became more passive and the clergy more powerful.

wikipedia.org

In America, the same solstice occurred: from vital small groups to a “local church” model. And from local churches to BIG churches. One could cite reasons: the settling and increasing urbanization of the country’s population (going from more transient and rural to more sedentary and municipally clustered in ever larger cities); the expansion and education of the clergy… there are more besides. 

But the upshot is that, among Methodists, at least, our original pattern of belonging was reversed: people were increasingly (and more nominally) a part of centralized congregations, but only occasionally a part of a small group. And many of the small groups (Sunday School, Circles, etc) were often more social than spiritual.

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If the churches became the primary locus for what passed as “Christian education,” the pastor became the “expert” or resident theologian. Spiritual authority was ceded to the educated clergy, while  “membership” was less discipleship than passive and consumerist: “Let’s see what the preacher has for us today.”

(I am told this dynamic is present in other churches, too, with a kind of cult of personality associated with some preachers and a kind of “Temple” mentality associated with some churches.)

I wonder though if now—and this brings me back to the TV interview—we may be seeing yet another solstice, one that returns us to our roots. Is this lockdown awakening people to the power of the small group? Could people begin taking spiritual responsibility for their own households (much as the epistles urge people to do—though those passages are often read dismissively and quixotically: as the strawmen of anti-patriarchal anger).

Professional clergy may become more of a rarity, and a more functional class at that—as the rabbi goes to the Weismann house for the bris of the new baby in the Marvelous Ms. Maisle, pastors may go into homes where small groups gather for Baptism or Communion. 

reformjudaism.org

Buildings may be converted to other kinds of ministries, or deconsecrated and sold.

Imagine: no budgets, no maintenance and upkeep, more spiritual vitality, less credentialed clergy but more lay responsibility, more personal engagement in daily faithfulness… could this be a tipping point for all these things (and in one form or the other, some of these trajectories have been underway for a while)?

The changes will not be completed immediately or perhaps ever, but one could (read: can) see it happening, for those who choose to remain Christian on the other side of the sea change that is upon us.  

Temple and Synagogue, as I mentioned the other day. And on account of the synagogue, perhaps again the kind of growth and enthusiasm that characterized our earliest days.