Decline & Renewal, 10: John York Guest Column

Editor's note: I am blessed to be able to publish several guest columns. During the rest of March, you'll read thoughtful words from church leaders like Tim Spivey, Andy Wall, Stan Granberg, Aaron Metcalf, Rick Gibson and more. I previously told the story about the College Church of Christ in Fresno. We've already had guest articles from Sean Palmer, Steve Martin, Ben Ries and Lynn Anderson.

Our fifth guest column is from a native Oregonian. John York primarily grew up in Roseburg, Oregon, where his dad was the preacher. After university and graduate training in Texas and Georgia, he returned to the Northwest and taught at Columbia Christian before moving on to Lipscomb in Nashville. John has been active in ministry wherever he has been, preaching at the East County church in Gresham, OR, and later co-preaching with Rubel Shelly at the Woodmont Hills church in Nashville. Among other things, John now heads the Doctor of Ministry program at Lipscomb University.

The View from John York

Lost in the Silence

Much of the conversation about the decline in our churches over the last forty years has centered on questions of identity and particular intramural quarrels. At some point in the not-so-distant past, we lived with the assurance that one could travel anywhere in the United States, enter a "Church of Christ" and have the same basic experience. The only difference from one to the next might be the preacher. The Sunday school materials were uniform—usually chosen from one or two Church of Christ publishing houses. The songs were basically the same. There were only a couple truly different hymnals from which to choose. And we knew we were right: about baptism, the Lord's Supper, church organization, and worship. In particular towns and cities, questions related to mobility could be ignored. You attended the "neighborhood" church because it was the closest to you and there was no reason to drive across town to another one.

Some people assert it was "worship wars" of the 80s and 90s that brought on our identity crisis. Others suggest it was the grace debate in the late 70s and early 80s that led to the loss of sound doctrine. But I think there is a cause behind those conversations that can be traced almost to the beginning of our heritage. It has to do with the way we read Scripture. When I was a child (the 1950s), churches up and down the West Coast split over a series of debates that focused on commitment to "speak where the Bible speaks, and be silent where the Bible is silent." Following a form of the "Regulative Principle" brought to America by the Puritans, we announced our conviction that the silence of Scripture always meant prohibition. And so the legal wrangling began: over Bible school classes, kitchens in the building, drinking fountains, support of orphans homes, communion cups, outreach ideas like Herald of Truth, etc. Since the Bible was silent, some thought that all such activities and structures must be prohibited!

It is true that the congregations that overcame those issues often managed to move through the 1960s with great growth and success. Migrations to the West that formed our congregations in the 1920s and 1930s continued to supply a steady stream of already churched families. We also had great confidence in our message. We alone, as non-denominational Bible believers, had the way of salvation “correct" when others did not. Doctrinal truth was meaningful to many in the midst of other signs of the times in the 1950s and 60s. The threat of Hell was as real as the threat of Nuclear Holocaust, and we had a sectarian message that was convincing. And, there were all of those Baby Boomer children to be raised in church, swelling the Sunday School classes, growing churches up and down the West Coast that were 200+, and in some cases 500+ in attendance. Our think-right-do-church-right approach was a winning combination.

The Speck in our eye that became a Log

So what went wrong? How did so many thriving churches in 1970s and 1980s lose so much ground in the 1990s and beginning of the 21^st century?

I suggest that our lenses for reading scripture—particularly the Regulative Principle—left us with enormous blind spots and a faith that was shallow and unsustainable. We privileged a set of proof-texts that couldn't handle the weight of people's increasingly busy—and messy—lives. Going to church was an emotionless set of less-than-effective practices/answers/doctrines that left people longing for whole-person experiences (body and mind, emotion and reason, action and feeling) of God and community. The "worship wars" had some people making arguments about the silence of Scripture that others found empty and meaningless. Along the way, we found ourselves making all kinds of odd claims about sacred and secular space and time, even within our church buildings. At first our intramural arguments over who/what was right just led people to shift from one Church of Christ to another. (We "planted" a number of churches this way!). But the next generation—children of the Baby Boomers—along with many Boomers themselves, started looking elsewhere for places to belong. The silence of Scripture as a rule of interpretation no longer worked.

Reading the Bible (Again) for the First Time

Yes, one could certainly argue that Biblical literacy in the last 30 years has sharply declined among us. But I wonder if actual Biblical literacy—knowing God and the story of God revealed in ALL of scripture, not just privileged proof texts to support our particular practices—wasn't already in decline back in the heady days of packed auditoriums on Sunday.

The way forward is not so much about finding new ways to make church relevant as it is finding better ways to read scripture, and with that more authentic ways of living the story of scripture. There is an urgent need to go "Back to the Bible," but not with the same glasses we've been wearing and not with the same goals for reading. Rather than "restoration" being our primary code word for identity, perhaps we should try "reconciliation." Rather than restoring our version of an ancient church, perhaps we should invest in the mission of reconciling all things to God. Perhaps then we could move beyond the noise of our arguments about silence to a healthier engagement with God, God’s story, one another, and the world.

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Bio:

John York is Associate Dean and Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Lipscomb University's Hazelip School of Theology in Nashville, TN. Prior to joining the Lipscomb faculty in 1998, John served in full-time ministry with congregations in Oregon, Texas, and Tennessee. He also taught at Columbia Christian College for seven years (1977-80, 85-89).  John and his wife, Anne, have two sons, Matt (Lipscomb University, 2003) and Brad (Abilene Christian University, 2005). They also have two grandchildren—and a third due later this month!

John received his training from Abilene Christian University (BA, MA, MDiv) and Emory University (PhD, 1989), and most recently Lipscomb University (MA in Conflict Management, 2011). He has spent much of his career bridging the worlds of church and university, having been in full time ministry and full time teaching for more than thirty years. John co-authored The Jesus Proposal and The Jesus Community with Rubel Shelly (Leafwood Press), and contributed to Reclaiming the Imagination: The Exodus as Paradigmatic Narrative for Preaching (Chalice, 2009).