the future of the church

My church had a meeting about a building project - improvement on the current buildings to incorporate a more 'traditional style auditorium' (one large enough for 400 people and better to have weddings in) - and it was...interesting.

I'm not going to talk about the money involved, but about where I see the future of The Church, not just the future of this church (although obviously the church I'm attending will also be mentioned and referenced as part of The Church).

The church I attend is 100 years old. At some point in the 60s, the 'traditional style church building' that the church must have been meeting in got rebuilt to a somewhat mid-century-modern A-frame building. In the mid-00s, with the church growing through the next gen of kidlets of the faithful, they rebuilt whatever building had been used out the back for a Sunday School and general education centre, and turned it into a centre specifically for education - high ceilings, divisible rooms, storage spaces all along the sides. There was a space for an early childhood learning centre downstairs and a small kitchenette and 'mothers' room' upstairs.

The current set of buildings served all four church services (8am traditional, 10am family, 5pm family modern, 7pm youth modern) up until COVID. Then there wasn't enough space in the old A-frame church building for everyone to fit in, and so 10am, 5pm, and 7pm set up in the 'education centre' with the dividing panels folded away. The kids programs are held in the various rooms and spaces around the church during 10am and 5pm, but 8pm refused to move from the A-frame, so they get set up every week special.

Some of the services are getting bigger. 10am is regularly running into 'overflow spaces', but 7pm is also bursting at the seams. And people don't want to move services and lose their congregational community. I understand that. I haven't been in a church service in months now and the weekly bible study groups and the occasional trivia night gatherings are very much keeping me connected.

I understand the reasons for the desire to build bigger, but some of the underpinnings of those reasons are not concepts that I accede to, or at least, not the way the church board does.

Firstly: the myth of unending growth. The last 40 years have seen unprecedental global, economic, and population growth, and up until about 10 years, an unthinkable social stability. But that can't continue forever; we're running out of oil, we're running out of resources. Our society - our communities - are fraying at the edges. Fearmongering, frustration, the internet, and the social media algorithm are wedging us into smaller and smaller groups.

That isn't going to get better. Not now, not in the next twenty years. Not so long as people cling to the idea that we can get back to the boom years (really, the Boomer years). We are going off-road, baby, and there ain't no maps into this land. Now is not a time to be building up, but to be reinforcing what we have and improving our social connections.

Modern western Christians have a bad habit of thinking that the 'ever onwards and upwards' is going to be a thing forever - most likely because we're steeped in modernity and western thinking and it's hard to step outside of that. We like to cite 'Judgement Day' or the day when time will stop and all things will be made new, but apart from general evangelistic fervour, we live (and vote) as though this world doesn't matter.

Secondly: the myth of church growth. Globally, Christianity across the world has held stable for the last 40 years. However, the number of people IDing as Christians in the west are decreasing while the number of people IDing as Christians in the Global South is increasing.

My church is Anglican. It's in the name. It's a Church of England church. Which means it does things a certain way. Holds certain views. Enshrines certain perspectives.

Those perspectives are not going to hold for the next 40 years. We are going to become a minority, which means - if we want to be effective in ministry - we should be spending money working out how to reach sectors of society which the Anglican church of Australia has been generally kind and loving towards but which is wary of them in authority and leadership.

Notably, the Sydney Diocese is current led by an Archbishop who is of Sri Lankan background, who started off Hindu before he converted. This is definitely a good start, but cross-cultural ministry absolutely needs to be more of a thing, not only in our mission statements but in where we put our money and our leadership authority.

At the meeting, I brought this point up. Perhaps a little baldly: "one does not send a man accustomed to harvesting wheat to harvest sugarcane". I got a few laughs, but I think I also made my point, albeit not as thoroughly as I wanted to.

In essence: we are an Anglican church. We are Anglicised in our manner and our practices. And while we say that the gospel is relevant to and needed across all nations, the points of emphasis and comprehension will adjust according to the culture's understanding. We see this in none other than biblical translation - when a woman, when a black African, when a black American, when a native Malaysian translates the bible, the things they see in the words of Christ shift in importance.

Our current bible is written to emphasise male leadership and authority and to de-emphasise female leadership and authority. The translation of the role of historical women of the church as 'assistants' or 'helpers' rather than 'disciples' or even 'apostles'. The reduction of 'I shall make a shieldmate for him' to 'I shall make a helper for him' in the Genesis account.

It's translated so that 'homosexuality' is the word used almost universally for a number of practices that had no correlation to modern same-sex attraction and marriage, and for which we have no modern equivalent.

Even terms that encapsulate concepts that we might argue haven't changed from then to now don't match the ancient world's perspective: 'marriage' as translated from the bible doesn't really have a concept of a woman joining to a man but still remaining her own person and legal individual, with rights to her property (and his) and to the children of her body. Women weren't people, and so – in the most basic form – marriage was the passing of property and inheritance with a person as the passage.

So my church - conservative, Anglicised, with a typically western way of thinking is most certainly not intrinsically equipped to deal with an increasingly unChristianised west, and an increasingly Christian Global South - unless we're going for a White Messiah complex.

TBH, I think at this point, the best thing Christians in the west can do is to shut up and do the work of bringing in the Kingdom in anything except words. Anything that doesn't involve offering proselytisation. If they ask, by all means. But we're going to have to be something really special for them to ask and we don't have it in us, not yet. Not when the changemakers of the world are largely atheists and agnostics and while your average Christian in the neighbourhood is too busy fighting for the status quo.

That's my thoughts anyway - they're not borne out by any research or any foreknowledge. Nothing from the last eighty years will back me up – although all the scientific evidence points to our world changing dramatically in almost every aspect of life - but the next eighty years of our society, our world, will be nothing like the eighty years before that and nothing like the hundreds before that.

We have to live with it. We have to learn to live in it. We have to learn to love in it.

The current Anglican church of Australia is not as ready for this as they think they are. What too many are still dreaming of is a Billy-Graham-esque conversion of thousands of westernised Australians to Christianity, with attendant social influence, ethics, mores, and morals. They dreamed this back in the late 90s, with a movement (from America, I think) called 'The Harvest', where we were going to reach 10% of the Sydney Diocese for Christ...

That movement failed; people went, but it wasn't what they wanted. That world they wanted was already shifting and changing. The people they thought they could reach had heard it all before and their hearts were hardened.

We're not going to get those soft hearts back.

I don't think we can rewrite the church-as-a-concept's role as a villain in contemporary society. Our society's memory via the lingering records of global technology is now too long for most people to trust us when the church leaders say "but trust us, we're the good guys sent on a mission from God!" The records might not show the majority experience, but those that were hurt by abuse or rigidity or "excommunication" do not forget how they were betrayed or left by the wayside, and they are not quiet.

What we can do is individually and in our local Christian collective (ie. "church") is rewrite how the people around us - the people we interact with and the secular communities we live among - see the church and Christians. And that might mean running counter to the expectations people have of the church when it comes to peripheral matters, whatever those expectations are.

A point was brought up by a guy I know about our church becoming what I'm going to term a "vampire church" (not the phrase he used): basically a big church that pulls believers from other churches, enriching itself at the cost of others. Which nobody wants, but which does tend to happen - the more resources, the more social energy, the more everything a church has, the more that other people's heads get turned and they come and want to stick around in The Church Where It Happens.

That's not something we want to be. It's not something that any minister wants but the risk is always there, particularly as the young ones go to churches where things are happening and end up staying there.

Basically, I don't know that they've convinced me to put my money towards this, and the one question that I'd like to know is not going to be either asked or answered: what would it take to stop this work from going ahead?