Recognizing the diversity of the unchurched outside the church walls
In Oregon this past weekend 170 church workers attended a workshop on church hospitality sponsored by Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals gathered for the day at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral the Sentinel reports.
Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, spoke to the gathering. His eighteen page slide presentation, Changing American Religious Landscape, is available at the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon website. It is a useful distillation of Pew research that would be a good jumping off place for church evangelism committees. Of course Precept information will tell you more about the unchurched in your community.
Lugo's presentation gets you thinking about unchurched, or as he terms them the unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics, secular unaffiliated and religious unaffiliated). Would good hospitality towards the secular unaffiliated look the same as towards the religious unaffiliated?
Then there's a comparison of adult affiliation with the childhood affiliation (not surprisingly Catholic are down the most -- the comparison forces you to look at how many members that church has lost because adults left the church of their childhood).
Protestants as a whole have actually been losing members slightly faster than Catholics, but Catholics losing far more of the native born to the Protestants than the reverse. What does hospitality towards disaffected Catholics look like?
There are many more nuggets covering immigration, ethnicity, and fertility.
When you think of church hospitality what do you think of? The refreshments committee or the evangelism committee?
As a relatively new Episcopalian who came from the Catholic Church in 2006, I felt welcomed because: 1)A friend who was a former Catholic invited me to join him for liturgy; 2)The person I stood next to that first day was very welcoming, and we've become good friends; 3)The parish I joined made everyone welcome, allowed people to join the parish first without becoming Episcopalian, and then offered me the opportunity to become formally Episocopalian only if I felt called to a deeper relationship (I joined formally in 2008); 4)the preaching was extraordinary; 5)the smaller congregation (I went from a parish of 3800 families to 225 families) was easy to get to know; and 6)Even though my children were grown, I appreciated the strong priority of the parish towards formation of children, because it said the parish cared about its future. It took me a while to articulate the theological differences, but now when other Catholics ask me what it would take for me to return, I reply that I'll be back when I find women and married men presiding from the altar, gays and lesbians openly worshipping with their children in the pews, and everyone being invited to communion.
There remain tremendous numbers of disaffected Catholics who could find a home with us, but many hold back for what I perceive to be ethnic heritage (e.g., the Irish) or psychological reasons. It was easier for me, because my mother was a Presbyterian, and I knew from the earliest days there were other alternatives. As the R.C. Church retires the priests who came of age in the early 1960s and continues its embrace of a more authoritarian culture, perhaps the best message that could be sent to disaffected older Catholics is "Vatican II is alive and well and living in the Episcopal Church."
Steve Schewe [Full name added by eds. Commenters, please remember to do this if your sign in name is not your full name. Thanks! - eds.]
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May 27, 2010 11:32 AM