Funeral Shift's Impact on How We "Do" Church

Over the years of attending and officiating funerals, there are a few shifts that are interesting.

The rise of the picture slideshow is among the more obvious ones. Not long ago I would ask if the family would like tables set up for pictures to be displayed at the entrances of the sanctuary. This happens occasionally, but by in large the pictures are all digital and all on a slideshow halfway through the funeral. Perhaps not a big deal but it is notable.

The shift from calling it a funeral to calling it a memorial or a celebration of life is also fairly common. It makes sense that we want to remember the life and not the death of our loved ones. I get it. This may not be a big deal, but it is notable.

These are obvious shifts, which all point to the more subtle and yet more profound shift. There is a shift in funerals in what is being said. Specifically, the funeral is becoming a place where the plea is “Do not forget me.” This is a shift from what funerals had been for so long. Part of the point of a Christian funeral is the community promising “we will remember you.”

Shifting from “we will remember you” to “don’t forget me” may not be a big deal, it is. It suggests that we are more aware of how disconnected and unrooted we are from one another and a place. We move from place to place and from people to people, so of course when we die we are concerned that we will be forgotten, so we ask that we would be remembered. Our final request echoes our deep longing for relationships that are so meaningful that there is no way we would be forgotten.

The more disconnected we are from long time friends, family, a place and a community the less likely we are to have these deep and meaningful connections. The Church is a place that says, in part, there is no need to worry about being forgotten because we promise we will remember you. There is no way we could forget you. You are important and valuable to us and this community that we promise to tell your stories and see your love in this place.

Churches may be “old fashioned” and slow to change. Churches are not “nimble” and churches often don’t have the means to adapt to the “new”. Some see this as a detriment to the church and are looking to change it. It makes sense that we would want to change the church and make it more relevant so that people don’t forget the Church. This sounds similar to the funeral shift. Rather than asking “don’t forget us” the Church could be investing into the lives of people so deeply that there is no way that the Church would be forgotten.

Perhaps the most faithful Church is the one that when someone dies, the community says, “we will remember you.”

Repent By Hugging a Tree

Every preacher I know has a sermon on repentance. The difference is in degrees. There are those with an intense repent message and those with a mild one. The intense message are those messages you and I see in popular culture. It is the guy on the street corner. It is the preacher in Footloose. It is the message that says you need to give up some action. The ol’ “We don’t smoke or chew or hang with those that do.” Stereotypically this is found in conservative circles, but it is not limited to it. There are liberal circles that have their own version of an intense repentance, but the knock on liberal circles is that the call to repent is more mild. So mild in fact that some might not even say that liberals call for repentance. This mild message often comes as a reaction to the more intense repentance message and sometimes is a message that is not preached often in liberal circles.

Of course these are broad stereotypes and there is much more nuance in the messages of repentance. However, if the call to repent is intense or mild, one thing seems to hold true across conservative and liberal circles. The call to repent focuses on substance, and less on form.

When repentance is focused on the substance of our lives, then we begin to think that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, as Dallas Willard says, a gospel of sin management. When we think that repenting means that we need to turn away from one set of actions that lead us to hell or unhealth, and take on a new set of actions that we think will lead us to salvation or health, then we are in the realm of sin management. We can get a life coach or a trainer to help us change the substance of our lives. We don’t need any divine help to change the substance of our lives, individuals and human communities can do that. The Christian call to repent is not focused on the substance but on the form of our lives. For this we need divine help and cannot do this on our own. Of course, the paradox is that if we repent in form, the substance of our lives will change.

Psychologist at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Canada Dr. Kenneth Hill looked at 800+ people who were lost in Nova Scotia and found that most of them repented of their substance. What I mean is when a person was lost, they stopped walking in one direction, turned and walked in a different direction. This is often how repentance is thought of. We are going one way and we need to stop and then start going a different direction. But this way of repentance is just in substance, not in form.

https://nasar.org/education/hug-a-tree/

Dr. Hill found there were two people who were lost who repented not in substance, but in form. One of these "repenting-in-form” people was a 11 year old child. When this child was lost in the woods, they did not stop walking in one direction and begin walking in another direction. This child just stopped walking. This child repented from the act of walking altogether. This child repented in form.

This 11 year old was taught in school that if he was ever lost that he should “hug a tree and survive”. 

Of course, this runs counter to what we would think is the “correct” thing to do. You may think that to hug a tree is to be passive and that we really need to work to be found. We think that if we are not working for our salvation then we will not be saved, if we are not working to be found then we will not be found. We are not confident that anyone is coming to save us or even that we are lost to begin with, and so in our efforts to “save ourselves” we get more lost, walking in circles. 

Christianity says that we are to repent of our form. Specifically we are to hug the tree of the cross and in doing so we will be saved. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ! We are to repent (turn) from trying to save ourselves, we are to turn from our refusal to admit we are lost, we are to turn from the very form of our lives and hug the tree of the Cross.

We are to trust that there is One who is coming to find us, save us and bring us into salvation.

The Sensible Church

Church leaders are sort of freaking out these days.

There are many reasons for this, and I am sure you can relate to more than a few of them. The uncertainty of participation in a COVID world. The decline of membership. The decline of finances. The reckoning of Christian nationalism. The nationalization of everything. The intersection of justice and mercy. Denominational splits and local church infights. New theologies and new mediums for communication…

The uncertainty of the sea change prompts church leaders dive into the resource reserves in the hopes to find something to help navigate the choppy waters. The way we typically think about how to solve problems is to either look to the past or to the future. Generally, conservatives look to see what has worked in the past to solve present problems. Progressives scoff at conservatives and say something like, “what got us here cannot take us there.” And so, progressives tend to look to the future to solve present problems.

This way of framing things overlooks the flaw that conservatives and progressives share. If we look to the past or the future church leaders are looking for what is sensible.

And that is a problem.

Sensible is attractive because, well it is sensible. Our minds tend to gravitate toward what makes the most sense and go in that direction. The sensible option is often an easier option to “sell” to others and get people on board. That which is sensible is also well supported by loads of books and resources, so it gives the impression that the sensible way is the best way.

Of course what is sensible to a progressive may not be sensible to a conservative. The Bible is full of examples of people doing the sensible thing but it is not what God desires. And for as easy as it might be to “sell” the sensible, it also instantly sets up an us/them divide where the “them” are idiots because “they” don’t do what is sensible able. In fact we often look to the other and say that their actions “don’t make sense.” It is also unhelpful for church leaders to be looking for the “best” way when we should be looking for the “faithful” way. But these are not the deeper problems with the sensible church.

It does not take any courage to be sensible. Faith is not needed to be sensible. In fact, courage and faith can be liabilities to the sensible church.

The call of Jesus to the church is not to be sensible, but to have courage to be faithful. The way of the cross is not sensible. Trusting that God is alive is not sensible. Resurrection is not sensible. Unconditional Grace is not sensible. Forgiveness is not sensible. Rejecting many leadership principles is not sensible. Reconsidering the core mission of the church is not sensible.

Desiring to be the sensible church is the symptom to our lack of faithful courage. We look to the past and the future for what is sensible, but the Good News is that we are liberated from being the sensible church. We are freed from having the answers, the best plan, the business model, the strategic vision, the marketing campaigns or any other action an organization might consider sensible. We are freed to be the foolish followers of the folly of God in Christ Jesus.

Maybe Paul was writing to the Sensible Church in Corinth when he wrote 1 Corinthians 1.18-25:

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
   and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.