LoginHome » News » Spanz Magazine » All Issues » December 2005 » Church in a community of fragments
Church in a community of fragments
Kevin Ward explores the impact of societal changes on the traditional local community-based parish model.
There is now widespread recognition that geographical communities are giving way to networks of interest, so it’s becoming less and less viable to have geographically based churches trying to meet the needs of all in the local community with the same menu.
People do not relate to others in the same place as much (often scarcely knowing their neighbours) but to individuals with similar interests from much further afield. Today, there is little overlap in the people we meet in our work, sport, education and other networks and there is little that might indicate we all belong to one community. We experience community in a thousand little fragments.
Increasingly, sociologists talk about community “across space” rather than “within place”. This has implications for church because the traditional parish structure is based on the premise that people in same area, across a spectrum of ages, vocations and leisure pursuits do things together. Historically, churches were made up of those who were born into in the local community.
However, increasingly people do not identify with those communities anymore. They are mobile and belong to communities of people of their culture, or with similar interests, concerns and preferences. We are communities of choice rather than of birth.
In our diverse, fragmented, network society we need a diverse, fragmented network church that lives within the networks in which people live. There is still a place for some traditional local churches, especially for older less mobile people. But alongside these, we need to develop a whole variety of diverse, culturally and socially specific congregations, which people join from a wider geographical area on the basis of personal preference. If society now consists of a mosaic of fragments or niches then we must do church in fragments or niches.
While maintaining a reduced number of local churches, I believe that we need two basic approaches: firstly, larger churches that have several quite different congregations in them (research now indicates that most larger churches in the United States are multi-congregational rather than multi-service); secondly, smaller niche churches that have incarnated the Gospel for particular socio-cultural groups, including the following:
<typolist>
Older (post-55) adults brought up in the Christian tradition to whom traditional style is helpful.
Baby boomers (early 40s to late 50s) who are churched and often prefer a more charismatic style.
Baby boomers who have left church but have an increasing interest in spirituality and religious questions. A more reflective and open-ended approach that uses traditions eclectically is helpful.
Young families who are often a mix of boomers and GenXers. They typically favour a highly active participatory style.
Young adult GenXers (who are in the mid 20s and often up to the late 30s). Mostly unmarried and without children, they do not relate either to the charismatic or the family-centred styles, preferring their own creativity.
Today’s youth culture who are under 25 and show many differences to the now adult GenXers.
Other ethnic groups who often have a variety of groups with many of the above issues in them. While recognising this need for diversity it is also important that we work on ways to express our unity.
</typolist>
Cross fertilisation and contribution from different ages and groups is important. Larger churches need to work on ways different congregations can come together at times, and the niche churches need to see themselves as part of a bigger whole as well as sharing together in doing things that are beyond the resources of their own community.
<typohead type="2">How did we become a community of fragments?</typohead>
One of biggest social changes of the past 40 years has been the loss of local community. Prior to the 1960s, a substantial part of life took place in local communities. The mainstays of these were married women. Most of them lived within the confines of the local community with their children during the week, and shared it with their husbands during weekends.
Married women began entering the workforce in large numbers in the 1960s, and the significance of the local community began to decline. As families bought a second car, shopping, business, entertainment, leisure all began to occur outside the local community. As communities became less significant, so did local community churches, and many people left the church altogether. The flow started in the mid 1960s, and has not yet ended.
Today we live in a world that is often described by the word “post”. In The Postmodern Parish, Jim Kitchens lists three factors that determine the context of the parish today: post-modernity, post-Christendom and post-denominationalism. To add to the plethora of “posts” I find the most helpful term is yet another post: post-traditional. What this means is not that we are beyond tradition but we have moved to the place where inherited traditions play less decisive roles in the way we understand and order our lives. If traditions remain important to us, they do so because we choose to seek their guidance in the changed and changing contexts in which we live. We often reinterpret and change them in the process.
Such responses to tradition are quite different from the kind of “inevitable taken for granted” way individuals have previously experienced traditions. This is not to say that traditions are no longer important, but that something significant is happening in the way we relate to them. For increasing numbers of people, traditions no longer carry the authoritative weight they once did.
This involves a shift of authority from something “out there” and external to us (scripture, appointed leaders, Book of Order) to authority that resides “in here” – in the self. As a result, we live reflexively , not abandoning our traditions but not following them uncritically. It means testing them by our own knowledge and experience as well as in dialogue with other traditions.
As all forms of church are discovering, this has a profound impact on ecclesiology, to the considerable consternation of many. In Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth writes: “… in every age and place its constitution and order have been broadly determined and conditioned by political, economic, and cultural models more or less imperatively forced on it by its situation in world history… It has had and still has to adapt or approximate itself to these in order to maintain itself… in respect of the form of its existence… there is no sacred sociology [of the church].”
There are then no sacred forms of church. There are traditions we should value and we ignore or treat these lightly to our own impoverishment. Yet we must recognise them as human constructions. We need to, again, give full expression to the reformation principle, ecclesia simper reformanda, as we develop ecclesiastical practices that are both faithful to our tradition and appropriate to the social and cultural realities of our posttraditional, post-modern and post-Christendom society.
It means we need to recognise the difference between valuing “traditions” and “traditionalism”. We need to ask what the essence of this we are trying to live out is, and how we live that out now in our very different context, rather than slavishly adhering to the forms it was in an earlier context. This requires we break with the “but we’ve always done it this way” mentality that infects so many.