I Am an Exile

 A while back I found a book by David Kinnaman, of the Barna Research Group, at a thrift store.  The title is "You Lost Me" and it is about the departure of Millennials from the traditional churches.  [Barna Group prefers to use the term "Mosaics" for that generation "because it reflects their eclectic relationships, thinking styles, and learning formats, among other things." p.246]  Kinnaman actually sorts these wanderers into three distinct groups.  Some are what he calls "Nomads"--younger people who have drifted off after growing up and leaving their parents' home for college or work, but are likely to drift back as they marry and start families.  Many  people of previous generations followed that pattern.  A second group he calls "Prodigals"--people who grew up in the church, but have now rejected the faith and have no intention of coming back.  The third group he labels as "Exiles" which he defines as "those who grew up in the church and are now physically or emotionally disconnected in some way, but who also remain energized to pursue God-honoring lives....One hallmark of the exiles is their feeling that their vocation (or professional calling) is disconnected from their church experience." [p.75]

I am not a Millennial or Mosaic; I am part of the post-WWII Baby Boom generation.  But I am an Exile, by Kinnaman's definition, and have been for a while.  Even during my many years in churches, the only "vocation" that got much attention, in nearly all the congregations I was part of, was being in "ministry"--preacher, missionary, Bible college professor, and in later years, worship leader.  Nobody seemed to care what the rest of the people did from Monday through Saturday, as long as they tithed their income to the church.  Even when they did a sermon or teaching series on "spiritual gifts" most people got excited about the "gifts" that would get them up on the front platform, not things they could do outside of the building during the week.  When I was finishing high school and preparing for college, at the church my family attended in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, those of us in the youth group who planned to go to Bible college were a notch above the others.  The rest were just going to college or jobs--we were going into "full-time Christian service."  That was the prevailing attitude in many churches in the area in those days.

Over time, it turned out my "vocation" was something else.  In my late 20s, my wife and I bought a run-down house and fixed it up.  "Rehabbing" was a big thing in the older neighborhoods of Cincinnati in the '70s, and back then it was focused on homeowners doing it themselves.  Most were younger people like us, and they did not have the money to hire contractors to come in and fix stuff.  (If they did have the money, they could have bought a fancier house elsewhere.)  But I found that I liked doing it.  And I had learned how to do research in high school, so I was able to learn to do more and more.  By the time we were halfway through our second house, I was working on other people's houses and getting paid for it.  It turned out I was good at sorting out problems in houses and finding ways to fix them.  Even now that I am mostly retired, I still do some of that for family and friends.  I may not do all the fixing, but I can help them figure out the problem and how to solve it.

There's a saying attributed to the Amish:  "Work is worship."  I am afraid that attitude was mostly missing in the churches I grew up in, and still is in the majority of churches today.  All too many Christians do not have that idea.  In the years between graduating from Bible college and learning to work on houses, I had jobs under two different men in a franchise organization.  The first, in Cincinnati, held to more of an Amish view:  for him, being a Christian in business was about servicing his customers well and treating his employees well.  The second, who I worked for in Indianapolis for a year, thought being a Christian in business meant going to all of the Christian Business Men's Committee functions.  He eventually became a bigwig in their organization.  By the time I left that job, it was obvious to me that both his customers and his employees had little respect for him.  But he is still highly regarded by the CBMC and his local church.  I guess he has his reward....I personally prefer, mentally at least, to take the Amish approach.

The Decline Continues

 The decline I am talking about here is that of the American church.  For my thoughts on political stuff, look for my posts at https://www.aleksandreia.com/--"Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization."  I am likely to go back to keeping my posts here less political, and do my politics over there.

Back to the church:  I have posted back in the early years and my recent posts about the weakness of the church in America.  I am still seeing more signs of this condition.

About a week or two ago, I saw a news item about the United Church of Christ.  This is one of the mainline "Seven Sisters" denominations--part of their roots are in the Puritans who settled New England in colonial times.  The Puritans eventually adopted the name "Congregational."  In the 1930s they merged with another group, one known as the "Christian Connection" to become the "Congregational-Christian" denomination.  In 1957 they merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and re-named themselves "United Church of Christ."

Anyway, the news item said they were selling their national headquarters building in Cleveland, Ohio.  The article also revealed farther down that they had moved to Cleveland from New York City in the 1990s to save costs (both commercial real estate and living costs were cheaper in Ohio).  But now, the 9-story office building they had needed for their 300+ staff was too big and too expensive for the 100 people that their national office was down to.  So they are moving to something smaller and selling the old office.

The article does not mention their decline in membership, but it has been substantial over the years, just like most of the other mainline groups.  Most of the Seven Sisters--the UCC, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Methodists, the American Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ--are around half of the membership they had in the 1960s.  Some of their loss has been because of the growing secularization in our country, but a lot of it has been people leaving for other churches that are more conservative on theology.

I have a little bit of background in the UCC myself.  When I was in elementary school, my family attended one of their churches near a little crossroads called Five Mile, Ohio.  It wasn't because my parents were into the UCC--it was just the closest church to us, and my parents felt at home with the people.  It was a little country church, a simple building--no separate classrooms, just a big room with a coal stove on one side for heat, an old organ on one side and a piano on the other, with two sets of pews and an aisle between.  There was no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse out back (a fair number of the neighboring houses didn't have indoor plumbing yet, either).

They didn't have a full-time pastor, just an older retired preacher who came out on Sundays to preach.  When he quit, they went together with two other small churches in the area to hire a Methodist student from Kentucky to come out and preach on Sundays.  Occasionally, the UCC sent a couple of people out from the district headquarters, who lectured the local farmers about their current hot thing, the Civil Rights Movement.  It didn't go over all that well...not because the farmers were for segregation, but because it just was not part of their lives.  Ohio was never a slave state--the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that set up how the Northwest Territory was to be organized, settled, and formed into new states, actually banned slavery in the Territory.  And now this was Brown County, 50 miles east of Cincinnati, a rural area with few blacks living in it.   In the six years I went to school at Greenbush, a few miles away, we had one black student in our class for a year or two--no others.  There had always been free blacks in Cincinnati itself, and there may have been some in Ripley or other small towns along the Ohio River, but we were about 20 miles north of the river.  Five Mile itself was a little crossroads, named because each road took you to a larger town five miles away.  At that crossroads there was a general store (oldstyle, not like today's convenience store) with one gas pump.  On the opposite corner there was a small barn; the other two sides of the corner had farmhouses.  That was it!  Even the church was about a half a mile down the road; our house was about halfway between the crossroads and the church.

The church itself was small in numbers, maybe 40-50 people most of the time.   There was an old-style placard on the wall with places to post the attendance for the last couple of weeks.  It also said there were 64 (if I remember correctly) church members.  The standing joke was some of those were only there in spirit--they were out in the cemetery, not in the building!

We moved back to Cincinnati in 1962.  My father was working at a Ford Motor factory on the northeast side of Cincinnati, and the fifty-mile drive each way was hard on him and on cars.  But in 1972, when my grandfather died, my parents went back to Five Mile and bought a cemetery plot with space for 6 graves.  They buried my grandfather there; my grandmother was put beside in in 1979.  When my father died in 2010, he was interred there, and my mother in 2012.

Why did they do that?  I don't know for certain, but I suspect that in terms of community feeling and neighborliness, that little church was better than anything they had known since.  When we left there, we moved to a new suburban development on the north side of Cincinnati--a place that had recently been farmland, and was now growing rapidly with new houses and streets.  The schools were bigger.  The churches were bigger and fancier; but there was not as much love for your neighbors.  There are some things that growth alone cannot do.

The UCC finally gave up and sold the church building, I believe sometime in the 1980s.  A startup church bought it from them.  The old members from the area kept coming to church there.  If I recall correctly, it was some kind of independent charismatic church.  But the new church took off and grew.  First they added a kitchen and bathrooms to the building. and maybe some classrooms.  Finally they outgrew even the expanded building, and bought land and built a new church not far away.  When my father was buried in the cemetery, another startup church was using the old building.

If this pandemic slows down, I want to go back there.  I haven't been back for some years--it's 150 miles each way, a third of it not reachable by Interstate highways.  But I would like to stop by to pay some respect to my family, and to the community that they loved in that place.