I talked with my brother last night. He and his partner are members of an MCC congregation and have been for something like 25 years in two different cities. They've served on the board, served as liturgists, served on search committees, taught ARE classes, been actively involved in every aspect of their church life. But in the last few years they have pulled back, no longer serve any of those roles and only attend about every other Sunday.
And why? Their beliefs haven't changed. They haven't been lured away by another denomination, such as those now experimenting (comparatively speaking) with being open and affirming. They don't dislike the people. There have been no major conflicts within the congregation. So what changed?
Well, the culture has changed, both inside the congregation and in society at large. When my brother first joined MCC in the 1980s, a lot of LGBT people were being rejected by their families when they first came out - some for a very long time. As a result, some of the most important activities of the church year were their holiday gatherings, refuges for people who couldn't (or couldn't comfortably) go home to their families for Thanksgiving or Christmas. The church provided a family for the rejected. But now they can hardly find enough people to have their holiday meals together because everybody just goes home to their family now. Families have gotten over it, either coming to an acceptance of sexual minorities generally or just deciding that family takes precedence over these little disagreements.
There's certainly still a role for MCC to play, still people who need support and sustenance that they can't get where they were before. But the role has definitely changed. And in the process, congregations have realized that, to maintain their population, they have to appeal to a different LGBT demographic or at least appeal differently to their core demographic. They are not changing their message. They are still there primarily to serve the same basic population. So if you're not going to change your theological core or your basic mission, how can you change your appeal? Why, style, of course!
My brother's congregation changed the music. It's gotten louder and more contemporary. And there's also a lot of what our fundamentalist dad calls Seven-Eleven music: music with seven words that you sing eleven times. Now, mind you, my brother does not dislike the new music because it is new. He dislikes it because it is loud and simplistic and generally lacking in grace. And he dislikes it because it displaces what was meaningful to him.
So what does this non-UU family anecdote have to do with all the UU discussions about attaining growth by means of changing style to speak more effectively to a new demographic - whether racially/ ethnically, economically, educationally, or chronologically defined?
Just this: if we want to change things to bring in new people, we have to be prepared to do a complex calculation. If we make this change or that, how many people can we reasonably expect to gain and how many will we lose? Will the people we gain quickly become stalwarts who will join the board, teach RE, serve as worship associates, pledge at or above the average level necessary to keep everything going? Or will they be semi-affiliated, coming to church when they don't have something better to do, giving little of self or resources? And, in addition to calculating how many will go and what resources they may take with them, of those remaining, how many will scale back attendance, participation, and contribution because the changes are not what they need from their church?
Not to be crass, but we need our number crunchers to crunch the damn numbers. Can we reasonably expect to have a net gain as a result of making a particular change? A net gain in attendance? In other participation? In contributions? In resources available to the church's mission? In the longterm health and viability of the congregation? No major changes should be made to the way a congregation operates without making this honest assessment.
Thinking some particular change is good or necessary is no substitute for a cost-benefit analysis.
1 hour ago
3 responses:
It's an important question you ask, but one that probably can't be answered now. So few UU congregations (you can count them on one hand) have changed their service styles to the "contemporary" model that there's just no data on it, so no number crunching can take place until we try it for a while.
Most "mainline" Christian churches (that I know of) offer a contemporary service, also have a "traditional" service for those who don't like the new music, liturgy, whatever. Clearly they have also recognized, as you have, that many people find comfort and refuge in those traditions, and are trying to meet the desires of two different constituencies.
Our congregation has two traditional morning services and one contemporary afternoon service. Average attendance at the contemporary service last year (Aug.-Apr.) was around 50 per Sunday. The traditional services had between 125 and 200 each (from memory), with the 11:00 a.m. service clearly more attended than the 9:30 a.m.
On some Sundays, attendance at the contemporary service was close to that at the early morning service. Obviously, time slot makes a big difference, since that's the only thing that distinguishes 9:30 from 11:00.
"Seven-eleven hymns" is a clever way to characterize some facile Christian pop. There's a huge industry churning this stuff out on a weekly basis. Most of them probably won't be sung more than once, but they have to make up for starting several centuries behind. It's unfair to tar all Christian pop with the same brush, though. The Kingsmen ("Louie Louie") and the Beatles ("Let it Be") were both pop groups from the '60s, but they are qualitatively in different universes. I trust that there will be some "keepers" as time passes.
As for the question of commitment from newcomers, no congregation expects people to want to (or be qualified to) join the board or teach RE as soon as they arrive, regardless of what music they listen to in worship. That kind of commitment takes cultivation, education and deep connections. Those are the things that good worship starts, but cannot finish without meaningful programs the other 167 hours of the week.
@ Busyhands - Thank you for this reply!
Of course, newcomers shouldn't even be approached regarding participation within their first year. My concern was not for immediate results but what we might expect to emerge. And yes, if there is only one service, the calculation does have to consider the balance of what is gained and what is lost.
I like the idea that many Christian churches have used and some UU churches of adding an alternate format service rather than simply changing the service everyone is used to. But that does usually happen in congregations that can populate all the services they offer. It is less common in churches small enough that adding a service would make one or the other a tiny and/or dwindling presence.
For comparison's sake, though, I blogged back on Palm Sunday about an Episcopal Church I visited that had a very small and dwindling "original" congregation who met the needs of a burgeoning Hispanic presence in their area by adding a Spanish-language mass in addition to the English one for the old-timers who remain.
It works for them to have one service that everyone there knows has no future but still nourishes the remainder of the Anglo community. While adding the new Spanish mass allows the parish to continue its mission even as the old approach is dying out.
Multiple services allow everyone to go to the service that best suits them, not leaving us in the potential dire situation of running off the traditionalists while making room for people with different tastes and needs..
Thanks. Good insight; thought provoking.
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