you must change your life

I've spent all week in essay-land and below is the final paragraph from one of them, for an online class I took on the spiritual life of the congregation. the essay reflects one of the thoughts I've been having the past few weeks, encouraged by the reading for this class and another class on liberation theologies. if contemporary xianity is the church of the empire--and this is not just about xianity, by effect all contemporary religions, judaism, islam, buddhism, hinduism, and unitarian universalism, are the churches of empire--then perhaps it's not a bad thing that congregations and churches are dying out. perhaps the reason we aren't drawing young people to us is because we are not offering what they need from a spiritual angle. perhaps what needs to happen in the 21st century is the previous millenia of theologies need to fall away so new, 21st century theologies can be built by those young people themselves. let the dead bury the dead, indeed; let the living build for the living.

"We’re concerned, and rightly so, about the drain on congregations. Churches are dying out and there are any number of statistics that prove this to my satisfaction. But perhaps we’re looking at this wrong. My friend Pete, a Lutheran minister who nears retirement and the return to Tanzania where he was born, has a theory that every ten years a church ought to burn down so each generation has the opportunity to rebuild it from the ground up. No more favorite windows, no more nostalgia about the hymnals, no more untouchable crosses sitting like a gargoyle on an otherwise renovated wall. We fear the end of church, the dying of the light. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing. As Diane Butler Bass notes, “Jesus insists that every person he meets do something and change. The whole message of the Christian scripture is based on the idea of…the change of heart that happens when we meet God face to face.” We may be wrong to assume one needs a face to meet with god. All religion has at its core this message: You must change your life. Perhaps we shouldn’t assume that advice is meant only for people. Perhaps like a fir seed, snuggled so tightly in its pine cone husk that it takes a forest fire to bring it out, churches must die out for greater church messages to emerge."