“Fabric Conditioner”

The Church has continued to rebrand a product that an entire generation has failed to purchase. In 2017, it’s time to stop going to church.

Happy 2017! Never have I been more excited to hammer the finishing nails into the coffin of a year than I was to 2016. Certainly there are great things to which I look forward in the coming year, not the least of which is the birth of my twin daughters in the next month. But like an ice fisherman taking a tenuous walk across thin ice on a balmy winter day, this year was marred by tremendous fragility.

• The countless deaths of prominent celebrities.
• The Pulse Nightclub shooting that took the lives of 49 LGBTQ people.
• The police shootings of black men and women, including Philando Castille here in the Twin Cities.
• My melanoma diagnosis and surgery.
• The election of a presidential candidate who has levied threats and lies against my Latino, Muslim, immigrant, and/or refugee neighbors.

Periods of turmoil and uncertainty lead to deep questions about our very existence.

• Why am I here?
• Does what I am doing matter?
• Should I be using fabric softener?

Should I be using fabric softener?!?

Yeah… I think the answer to that question is pretty clear, even in periods of turmoil and uncertainty. Regardless of where you stand on the “fabric softener issue,” sales numbers suggest that millions of people agree with me on this one. According to an article last month from the Wall Street Journal, an entire generation has largely dismissed the need to use fabric softener. Companies such as P&G that produce fabric softener have been scrambling to reinvigorate sales, attempting to educate this next generation who “don’t know what the product is for” and even to rebrand the product under more appealing titles such as “fabric conditioner.”

Millennials Are Fine Without Fabric Softener; P&G Looks to Fix That

Taking drastic and unprecedented measures in order to reach new customers — particularly the much maligned “millennial” — is nothing new. Just look at a San Fransisco restaurant’s attempt to lure younger customers with iPads.

San Francisco restaurant now using iPads as plates in effort to reach younger audience

Change the name. Change the packaging. Improve the education that drives demand for the product.

There is, of course, another solution that P&G among others are unwilling to (publicly) admit: reevaluate the actual product that an entire generation seems to understand the purpose of and has willingly left behind.

The church in the United States is dying.

Fudge the studies how you’d like. Twist the narrative how you will. But even in our “post-truth” world, numbers don’t lie: fewer and fewer people are attending church. While to varying degrees, this is true across denominations and geography. In fact, a study by Pew Research found that only 35% of self-identifying Christians consider worship service attendance an important expression of their faith.

Religion in Everyday Life

Blame for decline in church attendance in the United States can be placed any number of places.

• A lack of adequate education around what the church is and what it provides.
• An embrace of secularization that minimizes religion to personal/private spirituality.
• A rejection of close alignment of churches with political parties.
• A rejection of institutions as a whole.
• A rejection of church teachings on issues of science, gender, sexuality, etc.
• A change in consumption methods that prefers on-demand services (Amazon, iTunes, Netflix).
• A sense that church is irrelevant and/or boring.
• A bevy of other, more attractive ways to spend Sunday mornings … including staying in bed.

There can also be a number of responses to the decline in church attendance.

• Let’s spice it up and convince the other 65% that they’re missing something important.
• Let’s move into a cool old building to attract the gentrifying hipster crowd.
• Let’s loosen our dress code and put diverse faces on our website.
• Let’s pay thousands of dollars on branding and marketing to compete with the other major attractions in our city.
• Let’s create avenues for on-demand consumption.
• Let’s assemble incredible worship bands, technology, and pyrotechnics that increase the quality of our services.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but I would argue that the vast majority of responses to declining church attendance are largely the same: “We need to repackage and rebrand the same old product (Sunday morning worship services).”

But what if the problem with engagement is not the packaging and branding but the product itself? What if consumers continue to reject our product because we are treating them like consumers?

Don’t get me wrong, creating experiences is important. And yes, I still have great faith in the Church, both local and universal. But the church — that is, the thing traditionally defined as a Sunday morning service — is dying.

Just as fabric softener isn’t going to disappear from shelves overnight, neither is this traditional form of church going to simply disappear quickly and quietly. For those on the inside and who have grown up within this form of church, there is an inherent sense of purpose in this form. We are, after all, in the era the megachurch and multi-campus churches that seem to be expanding and growing at incredible rates.

But is this form of church sustainable and viable? Or, more importantly, is it effective at bringing new people into the faith and training them in the way of Jesus? I am particularly concerned for answering these questions in urban settings, contexts in which the answer to each of these questions seems to be a resounding “no.”

People have grown up in or around church “fabric softener,” know what it does, and have freely chosen not to buy it. They will do the same to church “fabric conditioner.”

Why millennials are leaving the church

In 2017, Community Church Richfield is entering our second full year of weekly worship gatherings. From the outset, we were determined to not refer to our Sunday times of worship as “services.” After all, “services” reinforce a consumer mentality, and we wanted our Gatherings to be “just one of the things that we do.” We focused as well on the “environments” of Goings (“the ways in which we actively care for our community in the way of Jesus”) and Groups (“fostering relationships and formation through activities and study”).

Despite this intentionality, our time, energy, and resources over the last twelve months were largely focused on driving people towards attendance at our Gatherings. The results have been — quite honestly — disappointing. We’ve had some people come and stick, but these have largely been individuals who have bought into the larger vision in spite of our Gatherings. Others have attended a time or two and left, these being largely church-attending Christians looking for a local product but unsatisfied with the quality of said local product. Still exponentially more people have never graced the doors of our building with the intention of attending one of our Gatherings, regardless of whether it was Sunday morning or Sunday evening.

Hindsight is alway 20/20, and obviously there are things that we could have done better. There are ways we could be better resourced. There are ways we could have better promoted ourselves. There are ways in which I could have preached better. There are ways in which we could have had better systems in place for when people actually did come to our Gatherings. There are ways in which we could have better understood the people who are already committed to CCR and leveraged their strengths to reach our community.

What it comes down to, however, is continuing to focus on a product. Though smaller and different than our megachurch brothers and sisters, our first twelve months of existence were largely spent joining the chorus of attractional churches in hosting an event which people attend with the expectation of being wooed, wowed, and coddled into coming back the following week.

And we joined the statistical majority of churches that have sucked at providing such a product.

And it’s a product that has largely been left behind anyways.

We shouldn’t be surprised when our consumers act as consumers rather than participants. And we shouldn’t be surprised when people intentionally choose to not consume the unappealing product we are peddling.

What has been interesting and enlightening over the past twelve months, however, is that we have seen at CCR the greatest amount of interest and engagement in our Goings and Groups that are actually in the community and involving people. You might even say that our environments that involve participation and formation have sold far better than our consumer product.

So what if the target of the Church was not necessarily attendance but engagement?

What if the aim was not so much sales as participation?

What if we stop going to Church in order to be the Church in the place we find ourselves?

As we begin 2017, the hope is that things will be both different and better. We want to see fewer deaths. We want to see Black Lives Matter just as much as other lives. We want to experience fewer diagnoses. We want to see our neighbors protected.

And as a local church called to be a signpost of the kingdom of God in Richfield, Minnesota, CCR wants to deliver something viable and compelling that will encourage engagement in the year ahead and for years to come.

We should be encouraged that the Church has not always been in this product category, and does not have to remain here.

So in 2017, we’re going to be rethinking Gatherings, Goings, and Groups.

• We will focus on placemaking — forming and developing physical environments where people can work, play, relax, learn, and grow in the practical way of Jesus.
• We will decompartmentalize, adjusting everything we do in one arena to overlap and reinforce what we do in another.
• We will form ourselves around who we are rather than who certain models of ministry tell us we should be.
• We will cut the production in order to promote formation and participation.
• And we will recontextualize teaching to be engaging — not merely intellectually but socially, emotionally, and even physically.

If these things seem ambiguous it’s because they are intentionally so. One of our values as a church is “process,” the conviction that none of us — individuals or institutions — has fully arrived. We as a church are continuing to work out the practical implications of each of these commitments.

What you can be sure of is that we will be delivering different products aimed to engage new people in the radical way of Jesus in our world. We hope, as well, that these are “products” in which you will choose to personally invest or participate.

As Jesus routinely said, “Those who have ears, let them hear.” Ventures such as these require revolutionaries who are able to hear beyond the status quo and instead grasp the potential of what is to come.

• If you’ve felt unsettled by “church as it is,” we want you.
• If you’ve wanted to participate rather than merely consume, we want you.
• If you’ve believed that church is more than an event to attend, we want you.

So may God bless you/us in the year to come. And may God not only bring old, lifeless bones to life but initiate new bones that will sustain life for years to come — even and especially the local church as very real representatives of Jesus in the world.