Sustainability

If something is not sustainable, its end comes about by one of two ways - either by calmly moving to a more sustainable behaviour (having responded early) - or erratically panicking as the system comes crashing down.

I wrote about that in an environmental context, but it seems it also applies to church behaviour (link again provided by a friend).

The writer seems to be almost suggesting that it may even be too late for the first of these options.

As a whole, the mainline churches are now making the transition from slow decline to progressive collapse.

He suggests one big thing that makes the challenges all the more difficult is that churches have ignored sustainability - "at the deepest level, this involves the sustainability of the church itself."

Religion will not long prosper as a luxury good; it is not primarily a way that comfortable people who are basically happy with their lives can make their lives even richer and more rewarding. A sustainable religion must convince people that it is necessary to life, health and spiritual coherence.

Other areas of this sustainability problem included the 'business model' of the church:

[a model of] a professional, full time leader in local congregations that own and operate purpose-built buildings has been clearly falling into crisis for a generation [with] large and growing numbers of local congregations who simply cannot operate this way. They defer maintenance, cut programs to the bone and find that more and more of their energy is required to maintain an existence which is less and less creative and rewarding. This is clearly and blatantly an unsustainable situation, yet most denominations and judicatories have chosen to think about it as little as possible. ...even today more mainline energy is expended on denial than on reform.