There is a warning that is quite common these days in Christian circles that the church as we know it is dying. Statistics are often used to point out how young people are leaving the church in droves and that mainline churches are dropping in numbers quickly, often having to shut their doors permanently. This is a line that is often used by church leaders to motivate people into action, to challenge them to share their faith, and to get them buckle down to live differently than the world around them. Is fear of demise the best reason to do those things?
The church is certainly going through a shift, especially in the western world. We have talked a lot about this. Christianity no longer has favoured status in the community, it is not the default mode of believing and the world is a hectic, pluralistic and individualistically focused world. All of this makes our faith more challenging to live out, but it doesn’t mean that our faith is dying. Yet, we need to talk about how the world is changing so that we are prepared to live into the new world with a resilient faith. We can’t ignore the challenges, responsibilities or opportunities this new world gives us.
I came across some advice that I found helpful this week for dealing with the conversation about the future of the church and how to build a resilient and conversational faith. This advice came from an interesting place –CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks podcast. If you are familiar with the show you know it is a show about science, not about the church. In fact, they were talking about the difficulty of conversing with people who didn’t believe in climate change and the challenge present in that. Nothing about church or Christian faith—but it works.
Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian climate psychologist—(which apparently is a real thing), was discussing the reason people struggle to accept the truth about climate change. He says that our brains protect us from discouraging news, so when we hear the threats or facts about climate change there are five barriers that prevent people from listening to climate change talk. It is often the same thing that people do when they do not want to address how the church and the world is changing. These can be difficult conversations so the easy thing to do is to not pay attention.
I don’t have the space to elaborate on how each of these affect climate change or the church—you will have to do your own thinking and reflecting about that, but I will list the five barriers with a brief introduction.
- Distance — The stress is painted as something happening far away, in a distant time, to people we don’t know (not happening to me).
- Doom— We are tired of hearing about the catastrophic gloom that we can only solve through extreme sacrifice (we are tired of the scare tactics, so we stop listening).
- Dissonance— When the facts interfere with our lives, we choose to ignore the facts so we can feel better about how we live.
- Denial— Based in self-defence, not ignorance, denial is about protecting oneself from fear or guilt. (everything is fine in my world—I see no evidence)
- Identity— We filter the news through our identity, and seek out information that confirms our existing values. Any information that challenges that is seen as unimportant.
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