A Church by Any Other Name

At the end of August, my wife and I had the opportunity to travel to the United Kingdom on vacation.  After a tiring overnight flight, we landed in London and travelled by rail to Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, for the first weekend of our trip.  We toured a castle, ate at several nice restaurants, and did some shopping.  On Sunday morning, we walked about a mile to the city’s waterfront to look around.  A carnival of sorts was going on, almost like the 5-county fairs I remembered from my childhood, but on a slightly smaller scale.  There were some rides for the children, as well as a swimming area and a sand play area.  Local craftspeople offered their wares, and vendors offered culinary options from traditional Welsh dishes to Brazilian and Asian meals.  As we walked around, we discovered that this great celebration, full of young families enjoying a morning out, was connected to a sailing race that would take place later in the day.

Along the waterfront, in the middle of the festive crowds, was a small white chapel.  It was, in fact, one of the things we had come to the waterfront to see:  the Norwegian Seafarer’s Church.  For centuries, it had been a spiritual haven for the Norwegian sailors who crewed the fishing and merchant ships based in Cardiff, and among those who were christened there was the children’s writer Roald Dahl, author of such classics as “James and the Giant Peach” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”  Yet for 30+ years, this charming church building has fallen out of religious use, and today it is a combination coffee shop and art gallery, with no religious activity at all.

 

This state of affairs seemed to strike me at almost every turn on my trip to the UK.  In Cardiff, we saw two “functioning” churches, a Baptist church that held an English service and a Welsh service each Sunday (and which was locked behind iron gates the rest of the time), and a Catholic church that instructed people to use the side door for Mass.  In London, we stayed in a tourist and business district and saw few churches.  Oxford had several churches, but they seemed more tourist attractions than anything else.  And one of the books that caught my eye in a bookshop for the University of Wales Press was a text detailing the decline of the church in Wales.  Many church buildings are being repurposed, used as cultural centers and pubs.

I wasn’t surprised by any of this.  I know that committed Christian discipleship is on the decline in Europe and the UK, and I also know that many of the expressions of Christianity in the UK are consciously non-building-centric.  I’ve even taught a class on how the church is going through a period of massive change today, away from the patterns of faith which many of us find comfortable.  Yet I was surprised by how the actual sight of non-functional or repurposed church buildings had a visceral effect on me.

The closed doors, scaled-back worship schedules, and seeming cultural irrelevance brought home for me that there is no turning back.  The American church is on the same trajectory as our European counterparts, just not quite as far along the curve.  Yet there will come a day, barring some major change of direction, when it is American churches that are turned into bars and clubs and coffee shops and art galleries.  In many parts of the country, it is already happening.

The question that stays with me, though, is what the church is going to do in response.  Are we going to be held back by the forms and understanding of church that we grew up with:  “Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors, and there’s all the people”?  If we do, there is a high likelihood that we will have to change that old Sunday School rhyme to something like “Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors, and where’s all the people?”  Perhaps instead we need to learn from events “across the pond.”  The world is changing around us, and when the church doesn’t adapt, it gets left behind.  God doesn’t – he finds new ways to accomplish his purpose and spread his love in the world – but the church does.  Will we make a move now, transitioning how we do church so we are effective in a changing world?  Or will we hold tightly to our buildings and our church models and traditions until we fade into the sunset?