The Storied Church

A Strategy for Congregational Renewal

Matthew Gorkos

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506470092
• eBook ISBN: 9781506470108
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

Matthew Gorkos begins The Storied Church with this compelling statement: "I believe in the church--in the power of faithful people serving a good and gracious God--and I believe in the power of a good story. Moreover, I believe, as this book will argue, that church and story--harnessed together--could be an even more powerful force for goodness in our world." Neuroscientists, anthropologists, archeologists, and psychologists all agree. Story is how our brains and our communities make sense of things. Storytelling helps us cope with change and loss. Storytelling helps us transmit lessons and life-skills to the next generation. As human beings, it seems we can't do without story.

This book--indeed, this whole idea of story-centered church renewal--was born of a suspicion that the restorative, transformative, life-giving function that stories have for us as individuals may serve communities of faithful people as well. If stories help us survive as human creatures, why can't they help churches survive? The problem that story-centered renewal seeks to remedy has only become more prevalent and urgent in the age of Covid-19. Our churches need hope now more than ever. Writing from a pastor's perspective, Gorkos hopes to encourage and empower other pastors and lay leaders with both the hope and the tools they need to effect revitalizing change in their faith communities. Each chapter includes questions for reflection to help readers listen to and tell the stories that will lead to renewal and transformation.

1

Church in Search of Story

The Village Church

Once upon a time, there were village churches. Out of a combination of resolute piety, yearning for fellowship, and central location, these churches emerged as the spiritual and social hearts of their respective communities. (If you didn’t just read that in your best epic-rolling intro voice—like the one you use at the beginning of Star Wars movies—go back and read it again with some dramatic flair.) Once upon a time, not in a galaxy far, far away, but right here in America, village churches were being founded in New England by pious pilgrims, in Pennsylvania and New York by devoted Reformed and Lutheran Germans, and all throughout the rural countryside by fervent Methodist circuit riders. “Once upon a time in America, Protestant congregations were village churches that offered weary immigrants a new home in a new world.”1 These words of Diana Butler Bass bear the slightest tinge of wistfulness. Yet when she wrote them in 2006, she was not setting out to paint a fairy-tale picture of yesteryear. Rather, she was offering a sobering reminder that the twenty-first-century socioreligious landscape in America threatens the continued existence of those same Protestant congregations and their denominational support systems. Villages are ceasing to be villages; and consequently, the village churches that once occupied a central place in the spiritual and social lives of their citizens are facing rapid institutional decline and death. She writes later in the same book, “The old Protestant mainline is no longer mainline. It no longer speaks from a pinnacle of cultural privilege and power.”2 The world and our local communities have changed—and with them, the place of the mainline church.

For example, I recently had the privilege of serving for three years at a small United Church of Christ (UCC) congregation in southeastern Pennsylvania whose institutional journey fits the village church pattern—and current dilemma—of many mainline congregations. The origin story of Pennsburg United Church of Christ (PUCC) opens in Germany around the turn of the eighteenth century, where after enduring decades of warfare and strife, citizens began deciding by the thousands that their homeland was no longer hospitable to farming or habitable for living. Therefore, many made the risky decision to cross the Atlantic in hopes of better land and a more stable political and religious environment. For most of them, the destination was a territory known then as “Penn’s Woods.” After arriving in Philadelphia, the German newcomers would follow the Delaware River northward into areas now comprising Montgomery, Northampton, Lehigh, and Bucks counties.3 Wherever they found suitable land, they settled and began farming. Wherever groups of farms developed, communities took shape and villages sprang up. Wherever villages developed, there arose a desire for organized spiritual care and social connectivity.

However, due to a severe shortage of ordained clergy, these communities would regularly enlist respected, literate citizens to read Scriptures and sermons to them. Enter into the story John Phillip Boehm, a schoolteacher and devout Reformed Christian, who had emigrated from Germany in 1720. Boehm, though not ordained, was asked by several local faith communities to not only read to them but also organize worship and administer the sacraments. Over the course of his ministry, Boehm would help establish a dozen of these small, village congregations in southeastern Pennsylvania.4 Over the next fifty years, these village congregations (and many others) were organized under a governing authority that became the Reformed Church in the United States.5 Finally, in 1840, shortly after the next wave of German immigrants began to arrive in America, the church in Pennsburg was born.

For the next 117 years, it ministered to its community as Pennsburg Reformed Church. When the United Church of Christ was formed in 1957—the German Reformed Church being one of the four converging branches—the church adopted the title of the new denomination. Today, over 175 years since its founding, the church endures—still tracing its legacy back to Boehm’s village ministry model, still situated on the border of Montgomery and Bucks counties, and still perched on a Main Street corner in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. It is a church built upon a foundation of close-knit local community, familial legacy, and its German Reformed tradition.

Once upon a time, PUCC was a thriving village church. However, the taken-for-granted characteristics of village life that had contributed to the sustained institutional well-being of the church throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have either waned considerably or disappeared completely. Like many suburban towns, Pennsburg and its surrounding area have undergone such rapid change over the last fifty to sixty years that it is no longer accurately called a “village.”6

Once upon a time, PUCC was a village church, but not anymore. Although its physical location has not changed, its context for ministry has. The town still exists, but many of its “village” qualities have disappeared. As the firm foundation upon which the church was built has been shaken and weakened by increased isolationism, impermanence, and historical discontinuity, it has experienced the institutional decline shared by many of its fellow churches within mainline American Protestantism. And so I want to highlight those three trends, which directly contradict the foundational values of PUCC and are having a costly impact on innumerable mainline congregations.

Since 1960, Pennsburg’s population has increased 125 percent, a growth most visibly evidenced by the continual conversion of local farmland into housing developments. In other words, new people are moving into town, but they are moving mainly into new houses on the outskirts of the community. Ironically, as the population of Pennsburg has increased and new homes are being built closer in proximity to one another, the residents have actually grown more relationally distant from one another. In village life, citizens would intentionally venture from the seclusion of their farms and homes in an effort to connect with their neighbors. The opposite is now the case: following busy workdays or long commutes, citizens intentionally choose seclusion and disconnection. No longer a place where everyone knows everyone, Pennsburg has become a town where neighbors are content to coexist as strangers.

Sociologists and theologians alike have lamented this suburban trend toward isolationism as a key contributor to the atrophy of authentic community. In 1989, Ray Oldenburg decried the loss of neighborhood connectivity and advocated for the formation of “third places,” which would foster belonging, relationships, and a communal identity.7 Likewise, twenty years later, Peter Block recognized an innate human need for belonging and stressed the importance for any given community to encourage relationships and cohesion among its citizens.8 The social fabric of the village is no longer knitted so tightly.

The way in which the close-knit village has been unraveled by isolationism cannot be denied nor can its impact on the village church be minimized. The village church once attracted new members based solely on its reputation as the local center of both religious and social life in the community—on its ability to sew relationships. Long-standing residents of the village attended for fellowship, be that fellowship sacred or secular in nature. New residents of the village came to get connected, both spiritually and socially, with their new neighbors. In some cases, the occasion for gathering was literally to knit. Knitting or quilting groups were once a hugely popular staple of mainline/village church life. However, the church is no longer the center of village life, and the knitting groups have largely gone the way of the church’s role as the town knitter of community. On one hand, those who crave community can now choose from a veritable marketplace of options, including professional networks, niche interest clubs, youth and intramural athletics, and groups at the nearby YMCA. On the other hand, the overall desire for that community has waned. Due to isolationism, the once cherished status of the village church as the hub of the close-knit community formation has been emptied of its value.

Another foundational element of village life and of the village church is an enduring familial legacy. “The health of old mainline denominations was for many decades reliant upon the health of their mostly small rural and often kinship-constituted congregations.”9 People and families would settle and stay for generations. Parents would raise children in the church, and those children would then raise their children in the church. Marriage and baptism were two major avenues—more like boulevards—of membership growth. However, this legacy has also been undermined, in Pennsburg and elsewhere, as marked increases in mobility, educational opportunities, and distances between home and the place of employment have all contributed to the disruption of village familial patterns. Today, parents are having fewer children, and the children they have are more likely to pursue higher education. Consequently, more children are leaving home, leaving town, settling down, and starting their families in places other than where they grew up. Stephen Compton argues, “Disruption in the pattern of family perpetuation of membership has led to critical changes in these once extraordinarily stable congregations.”10 Village churches once built their membership and based their programs and ministries on an assumption of proximity and progeny. New members came naturally, and evangelism was rather effortless. As Linda Bergquist and Allan Karr state, “These churches stop needing to find people because so many people find them.”11 For so long, mainline churches took for granted the steady regeneration of membership. However, once people stopped finding them (or stopped looking), those same churches find themselves ill equipped to begin reaching out.

Last, the original village church at Pennsburg was richly rooted in the specific immigrant experiences and German culture of its members. Even as generations passed, there continued to be a shared heritage among those who held dearly to their German ancestry. In fact, PUCC is only forty years removed from Sunday morning sermons being delivered twice—once in English and once in Pennsylvania Dutch—and its liturgical style and worship are still reflective of its German Reformed tradition. Its heritage is also evident in the congregation’s customary celebrations. For instance, Harvest Home Sunday is recognized in worship on the last Sunday of September each year and traces its origins to the annual thanksgiving for another fall crop harvested and stored. The German heritage is also still apparent in its food. PUCC’s collective appetite is for such beloved German culinary staples as sauerkraut, pickled red beets, and pot pie. Those connections to German tradition have less significance in Pennsburg today. Though the town’s population growth has led to little in terms of racial diversity, it has diluted the German influence on Pennsburg’s local culture. Whereas the residents were once predominantly of German descent, only one-third of the town’s residents still trace their roots to German ancestry.

These three factors have undoubtedly helped precipitate the decline of the village church. As is the case with many mainline churches, the symptoms of decline at PUCC have been most observable in shrinking membership rolls, worship attendance, and endowment funds. Over time, these societal trends of isolationism, impermanence, and historical discontinuity have functionally handcuffed their ministry by simultaneously contributing to the depletion of human and financial resources and rendering many of its programs and models for ministry irrelevant in light of the changes to its setting. Still, in the face of its decline, it is a church that, like many of our churches, holds on to the hope of renewal.

Questions for Reflection

• - How did your church come into being? What is its origin story?
• - How has your church’s context changed over the last fifty years? Twenty-five years? Five to ten years?
• - In what ways do isolationism, impermanence, and historical discontinuity impact your congregation?

The Existential Crisis

The knee-jerk response for many struggling churches is to address threatening symptoms by haphazardly siphoning waning resources into one of the three societal trends I mention above or hastily investing in gimmicks promising temporary reprieve. Many church renewal strategies emphasize stewardship campaigns or evangelism programs that seek to address particular aspects of decline without addressing the larger concern. Further, I maintain that focusing too narrowly on the signs and symptoms is like band-aiding a bursting dam. It causes churches to settle too quickly for superficial cures while failing to see the true magnitude of a problem that is existential in nature or failing to identify real potential for change. As the pillars of the “village” have been eroded by a combination of isolationism, impermanence, and historical discontinuity, the proverbial rug has been pulled out from under the village church.

By way of illustration, the 1998 cult comedy The Big Lebowski is a convoluted goofball caper featuring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, bowling, and an abundance of f-bombs.12 The film follows the erratic journey of the Dude, played by Bridges, as he is thrust into a web of confusing criminal activity involving a greedy millionaire, a trophy wife, a reclusive daughter, a gang of nihilists, a porn producer, and a rival bowling team.

One might justifiably wonder, “What does a film like that have to do with church renewal?”

There’s not a literal connection. But there is a metaphorical one.

One of the film’s brilliant ironies is that although his character is first introduced to the viewer as distinctively calm and laid back, the Dude is, for most of the film, anything but calm or laid back. Instead, he regularly appears flustered, confused, and prone to emotional outbursts, all the while grasping for some sense of understanding or control of the situation in which he finds himself. At one point, when he has reached peak disequilibrium, he groggily mutters, “All the Dude ever wanted was his rug back.” This clues the viewer in to the true source of the conflict his character endures.

The plot of the story is set into motion when the Dude’s beloved rug—the one that “really tied the room together”—is ruined by two bumbling henchmen. The desecration of the rug, in additio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: A Brief Story on Writing This Book
• Chapter 1: Church in Search of Story
• Chapter 2: A Storied Faith
• Chapter 3: A Storied Community
• Chapter 4: Finding a Story amid the Stories
• Chapter 5: Integrating Story Centrality
• Appendix: Stages of Storied Development
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index