Do Churches need to put Better Teams on the Field?

I came to the Seattle area shortly after the Seattle Mariners began as a major league expansion team. At that time, the Mariners offered free season passes for two to any interested clergy.

Why? Maybe they hoped we would pray for them. Lord knows, they needed it. Maybe they thought we had some influence on other people? Or possibly, and this was demonstrably true, there were plenty of empty seats and management was simply trying to get some bodies in the stands any way they could.

My wife and I went every now and again. It was a night out. The Mariners seldom won, but it was still fun. Something to do. Affordable. But the stadium remained largely empty until the team got better, which took a long time. Now, the M’s field a pretty regularly competitive team, and pretty regularly the stadium is full.

During the lean years, the failures of the Mariners were often explained by pointing to factors extrinsic to the team itself. “Seattle isn’t really a baseball town,” and “it’s too far from the heartbeat of baseball to catch on.” A variation of this was,“We aren’t a big TV market, so we don’t have the money to put a great team on the field.” Others pointed out that the Mariners had more traveling miles and hours than any other big league team. And then there was “the marine air.” Close to the coast, the air was more moisture laden, turning what would have been home runs elsewhere into long fly-ball outs.

In church world, we in the Pacific Northwest had our own version of this. The Pacific Northwest is, after all, the original “none-zone.” A region known for famously low church-affiliation rates. Old clergy would welcome newer ones by telling the joke about the “white stuff” on the Rockies and Cascades. “All that white stuff? As they come here, people discard their church membership certificates along the way!”

Serving a downtown church, I added my own to the general complaints about Seattle and the Northwest being a secular and un-churched part of the country. “People have to drive by lots of other churches to get to us.” And, “Parking is a bear.” Or just, “People don’t want to come downtown like they used to.”

For a while now going to most any kind of mainline Protestant denominational meeting or conference, means hearing a litany of factors cited to explain the church’s discouraging state. We accept, or are told to accept, the idea that, “the church is dying,” and “the institutional church, as you have known it, is over.” Denominational leaders and academics tell us that society has changed in ways that make church no longer relevant. We are obsolete, like the horse and buggy, or DVDs and CDs. The social supports that made church work are gone. Other social factors make other kinds of activities more appealing.

But I wonder if a part of the problem is more like that of the Seattle Mariners. For a long time they simply weren’t putting a very good team on the field. They didn’t play good, let alone great, baseball.

Recently I was at a meeting with leaders of one mainline denomination, a body that has been in precipitous decline for decades now. At this, and similar meetings, it is customary to run the numbers, noting the steadily downward drift in members and attendance. This is attributed to changes in society, in people’s interests or temperaments or capacities. But what if, true as many of those factors may be, we simply aren’t putting very good teams on the field and haven’t for a long time? What if our churches and denominations haven’t identified or developed people who can really play the game well and with joy?

I posit this alternative take because, despite the constant reports of “the rise of the nones” or “the secularization of our society,” or “a general loss of interest in religion” there are churches that are flourishing, with good preaching and strong, loving congregations that make a difference in the lives of people, families and the communities in which they exist. I have seen these churches. I am in one of them most every Sunday. And these flourishing churches, while an exception to the rule, are not unique. I can take you to a handful of them in really every city and some towns I know.

What’s going on? Did these exceptions simply not get the message of their demise, or irrelevance or obsolete state?

Or is it possible that these churches have people who know how to play this game and do so with confidence and joy? That they have some really good players, clergy and lay, and that the ownership/franchise is fielding a team, a congregation, that plays good ball? And that they have a good farm, or player-development, system?

I know, this isn’t what anyone wants to hear.  It’s easier to lament macro-level social change as the reason we are where we are. And to be sure, it is real and it is challenging, for the church as for many others groups and institutions in our society. So we accept the verdict of sociologists and pronouncements of pundits that church is just over, get used to it, adjust, and plan for your extinction. Surely some great new thing awaits in the wings.

As tough as it is to say that maybe we haven’t been fielding very good teams for quite a while, there’s an upside to it. If it’s at least partly on us, then maybe we can do something about it? I remember Becky Thompson, a middle-aged black woman who was a stalwart at a small racially-mixed church in NYC’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” where I worked during seminary. The church was having a fund-raiser and Becky was working the grill, flipping burgers and turning hot dogs. She smiled fiercely and said, “We’re not letting this church go down, no way!”

Decades later I returned to the location of that congregation really expecting it to be gone, replaced by a towering high rise. But there it was. This mustard seed of a congregation was, by the grace of God, still there. But more. The tiny seed on hard soil had grown. It had become the home of two congregations, both now going strong. I wish I heard a few more people who sounded like Becky, determined to pushback on the trends and the experts, and to bear an against-the-odds witness to God’s faithfulness.