Why talk together?

We need to talk together because the world is changing! The days of the local church where everyone came from the same background, had similar religious experiences and shared the same cultural views and practices are numbered. Sure they will hang around for a while but they are dying out.

In a very simple, clear and accurate article Wesley Granberg-Michaelson writes about the future of the church. He makes the compelling case that the game is up for would be homogenous cuhrches. Try as they might most of these types of churches cannot grow. This is because demography, culture and changing world views have left them behind. In the US it is expected that 100 of these aging white Protestant mainline churches will close each year for the forseeable future. It has been happening iun Australia and Europe for decades.

Lectures and directives from the pulpit might work when the majority accept the dominant world view. However when groups are diverse and hold different perspectives and experiences they will not be told. Talk together is the key to sustaining diverse communities.

The changing landscape for the church

Granberg-Michaelson says that the changes that make this death spiral inevitable include:

• Multiracial congregations are expanding to draw 1 in 5 churchgoing Americans. Surveys on American congregations report a higher level of spiritual vitality among them compared with racially homogeneous congregations.
• For 400 years, the faith has been moulded by the largely European culture that came out of the Enlightenment. But today church vitality is coming from emerging expressions of Christianity in Africa as well as in Asia and Latin America.
• These new influences are raising new questions about the relationship of the individual to the community, rational versus non-rational pathways to perceiving truth and the interplay of the spiritual and material realms.
• As the yearning for authentic spiritual experience moves from the head to the heart in this new environment, spirit-filled communities are flourishing.
• The culture wars in the church are divisions that are not seen as the core of the gospel and many contemprorary people don’t want to fight over them.
• “Belonging before believing” is reshaping pathways of discipleship. The demand that outsiders first adhere to specific beliefs expressed in creeds or confessions is giving way to inviting them first to explore and share in worship, reflection and service.

Evangelism needs us to talk together

Anyone who has a genuine concern and capacity for evangelism knows how inportant it is to understand context. To understand context  – the life, experience and values of people – requires listening. Talking together starts by the dominant group listening to the ones who are different.

When it is appropriate there will be a place for the evangelical person, or church, to share their perspective. However it can never again be in the arrogant, superior, assumption of knowing what others need to learn. The talking will be more in the form of testimony about what God has meant in their life. Then, once again, it is time to listen to how others have experienced God in their life.

To talk together today about faith (or anything in the church) requires patience and humility. It requires a setting and practices that make it possible for all to share. Many of the processes in the Western church assume that there is one place of knowledge and one way to work it out. We need processes for being in community that are open to learning from the stories and experiences of others. There needs to be space to experience the non-rational ways of gaining insight.

How does your congregation foster open, honest and risk taking conversations? When you meet for Bible study how do you listen to one another? When you meet to make decisions how to you talk together so that all perspectives are heard? Unless churches develop process that help them to talk together they will not navigagte the changing landscape of society and the church.