Over the last couple of days, there has been a lot of hang wringing and gnashing of teeth about a recent survey that indicates that clergy in the United States are less influential in everyday life, almost being considered “irrelevant.” On social media, I have noted a lot of people being openly concerned about what this means for their churches and for Christianity in the United States as a whole. I, too, have a response to the results of this survey and that response is as follows:
“Duh.”
Why is this such a shock? Of course, people don’t trust the clergy as much as they once did. The reasons are various but many are prominent. First, with all of the scandal that seems to rock the church on a regular basis, why should people trust us? How many pastors have been tried and convicted for sexual-based crimes (specifically crimes involving pedophilia)? Why should people trust clergy when there are so many like the Osteens and Meyers of the world who are only in ministry to profit and want people to believe that the path to righteousness involves the accumulation of wealth?
Need I continue?
The church in the US has been losing its influence for many years and this is just the latest casualty of that. This is also yet more proof that cultural Christianity is dead and isn’t coming back. The survey noted that people who reported regular church involvement did tend to trust clergy more than those who did not but they also want to keep pastors at arm’s length. People are not going to run to the pastor every time there is a problem anymore. This is the reality.
The way church was done in the 1950s is not the way it will be done in 2019 and beyond.
One thing I have not seen is what anyone intends to do in order to respond to this trend, which really has been obvious for a while. The one thing we should do is acknowledge that the way we do ministry in the future can not be the way ministry has always been done. We must be trailblazers. We must no longer look at ourselves as the tip of the pyramid and instead become what we were meant to be all along: Servant leaders. We need to be what we were always intended to be: A community where people rely on one another with the leader working alongside everyone else, not a private club that relies on its leader.
As I’ve said before: We need to get back to our roots.
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