Show Abandonment and the Church

Dr. Dennis Atwood

On my way to the church office this morning I listened to a report on NPR by Neda Ulaby entitled:  “Show Abandonment: When Viewers Drop Popular TV Programs.” The tag line was: “What happens when fans stop talking about a show that used to be their favorite?” Take American Idol, for example. Last week's finale was down 8 million viewers from last year. Such are the problems of the first-world.

The NPR report focused on the fickle nature of television viewers and how American’s loyalty to a favorite show is weakening more and more. For example, at its peak over 8 million people tuned in to The Office each week during its nine-year run. Over the past few seasons, however, viewers have peeled away resulting in the show’s final season and series finale just last week.

 “Show abandonment” apparently comes in stages. First, there is “denial.” The DVR episodes begin to pile up and you don’t have time to catch up on the ones you’ve missed. Next comes “delete.” You begin to delete the lost episodes because you just don’t care enough anymore to catch up. Then, there is “acceptance.” Finally you simply abandon the show altogether. You admit that your loyalty is gone and you move on to the next thing that catches your eye—until it doesn’t.

 

There is also another class of viewers besides these “abandoners.” They are known as “bitter-enders.” These folks stick with a show till the bitter end even as others are abandoning ship. I have to admit that I am one of those “bitter-enders” when it comes to The Office. Sure, the show may have weakened a bit over the past couple of years, but I’m glad to report the series finale was actually a perfect ending to a great run. I’m glad I stuck around—till the bitter end.

 

Wow. Where to begin when it comes to stretching this analogy of “show abandonment” into the realm of “church abandonment”? I don’t have enough time and space to make all the connections, and I don’t even think it’s even necessary. 

 

We all know the story. Church attendance is down everywhere. People are busy. People are fickle. People are losing interest. Churches are in panic mode. Just look around and you’ll see churches bringing in a flashy program, new worship style, or exciting preacher. “We’ve got to get things back to where they once were!”  But things are never going to “get back to where they once were.” New Wine requires new wineskins, said Jesus. We can’t capture time or new wine. The gospel keeps flowing and expanding. If containers become hard and brittle then… well, you end up with wine all over the floor.

 

In one sense, we Christians should be “bitter-enders” in that we don’t abandon ship and move on to another congregation just because we begin to lose interest in our existing one. The virtues of faithfulness and commitment to make things better are far more admirable than abandonment. On the other hand, there are churches that stubbornly refuse to consider the idea of any change whatsoever, and as a result they hasten their own bitter end—even though there doesn’t have to be a “bitter” end.

 

So draw your own conclusions about faithfulness and abandonment. The Church will be here until Jesus says it’s done, but that promise doesn’t give churches a green light to bury their heads in the sand. Healthy churches are able to distinguish between containers—which are useful, and New Wine—which is essential. Healthy churches have their collective eyes open and are always paying attention to the new winds of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said he would never leave or abandon us. Are we abandoning him?

Dennis Atwood is the pastor of FBC Mount Olive. This article originally appeared on his blog.

The Ladder

by Dr. Guy Sayles

Unless you’re a painter, roofer, or fire-fighter, you’re probably not on a ladder very often.  From time to time, you use a step stool to reach the top shelf of a tall cabinet or a step-ladder to change a light bulb. A couple of times of year, you get out the extension ladder and clean out the gutters; but, most of the time, the ladder stays in the garage and you keep your feet on the ground.

But, when it comes to ladders of ambition and achievement, many of us are climbing all the time.  There are always more rungs above us.  Who can count the steps between mail room clerk and CEO, graduate assistant and Distinguished Professor in an Endowed Chair, second lieutenant and general officer, between apprentice, journeyman and master?  I know it doesn’t have to be this way, but for a lot of us it is: our dreams are of moving up: from the windowless office on the first floor to the sunlit corner office on the top floor.  Success for most of us means going higher, moving to the top.  So there’s always more climbing to do and always people just behind and beneath us, climbing faster and faster, threatening to pass us up or knock us off the rung we’re on.

Some of us become so obsessed with climbing the ladder that we lose track of other things which actually matter more than the ladder: things like love, authenticity, and integrity; like health, happiness, and compassion; like family, friends, and God, for instance.  We can get into a frame of heart and mind which convinces us that the ladder is what matters—and no room on it anything other than our own ambitions.  But, because we want to think of ourselves as good people, we tell ourselves that we haven’t left those other thing and other people behind permanently.  We make a kind of bargain with our conscience: “Leave me alone for now, and I’ll get back to you later.  The ladder now; the soft stuff, the heart stuff, after we have more time, more money, and more security.”

Then, something happens.  Someone close to us gets sick or has an accident.  Our spouse walks out.  One of our kids gets in trouble, real trouble, the kind of trouble we can’t fix by writing a check or hiring an outside helper.

Or, to get ahead, we cut corners, bend rules, and subtly stab coworkers in the back; then, one day, for some reason, we catch our own eyes in the mirror and don’t like the person looking back at us.

Or, depression sets in, or we start feeling a tightness in our chest, or we can’t sleep.

Something happens.  And the awareness crashes in on us that we’ve been climbing a ladder not worth climbing.  Remember the truism offered by business guru Stephen R. Covey: “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

We discover what William Butler Yeats described in his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:

. . . Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Maybe you know what it’s like for the ladder of your dreams to go away and, then, to lie down, depleted and defeated, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  A time like that can be a gift if we view it as invitation to clarify what truly matters, to integrate faith and ambition in a way that faith is in charge, and to renew our awareness that success without love isn’t success at all.

Guy Sayles is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Asheville. This article originally appeared on his blog, From the Intersection.

Chicken 'n' Waffles

by Justin Thomas


Growing up in the southern city of Atlanta, it is not uncommon for me to hear, “I am in the mood for some chicken n’ waffles”. There are many restaurants within the city of Atlanta and throughout the United States where one can go eat an amazing chicken n’ waffle meal. Well a little of over a week ago when I was in Granada, Nicaragua, a few of my classmates and I, along with our professor and colleagues from Wake Forest Law School, decided to go to a locally infamous waffle restaurant for lunch. This restaurant had all types of waffles. From chocolate waffles to pecan waffles, the menu provided a variety of options from which one could happily choose. I was so excited to see the choices, when suddenly the desire for chicken ‘n’ waffles slapped me right in the face.  I looked the menu up and down to see if they just happened to have it on their menu. To my disappointment this delicious staple item that I could easily find in the States was nowhere to found.

Then, like the Saturday morning cartoons, a light bulb went off. I looked on the menu and I saw they offered a chicken sandwich and they offered waffles. With the help from the law professor that accompanied us, I was able to tell the server to use the chicken breast for the sandwich and put it on top of the waffle.
It took the staff a minute to comprehend what I was trying to do, but they were able to comply.  About 15 minutes later the server comes out with chicken n’ waffles just for me.

Something as simple as being able to order chicken n’ waffles represents the little things I take for granted in my own culture. The crazy thing is, I was able to introduce a staple dish from my culture to another just because I had a taste for it at that time. But there are other simple things I take for granted--like
free public transportation for students to go to high school so they can further their education. It was sad to find out that Nicaraguans who live in remote villages had no way of getting to high school unless their families could afford the same transportation that comes through the village to pick up the men and take them to the sugar plantations early in the morning.  I had the privilege of meeting a couple of young women who desperately wanted to come to the States to attend a university.  How could that desire ever become a reality if they cannot even afford a bus ride to school?   A simple desire for chicken n’ waffles was granted in minutes, and as I reflect on the enjoyment of that one desire, I realized the simple desire for those young women to attend high school and a university here in the States is not one that can be met in like fashion. We take for granted so many little things because we are worried about “bigger” things, while at the same time there are people who simply wish they could get a seat on a school bus.

We may have problems in our lives but if we started focusing on the little things we have, no matter what we are going through, we will recognize we are truly blessed.  So the next time you put your child on a school bus, or make a special request from a restaurant’s menu (whether it is fast food or five star) take a moment to give thanks for the little things, and pray for those people across this world who would give anything to have some of your same, simple opportunities.

Justin Thomas is an intern for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina and a third-year student at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. He wrote this blog after completing a Nicaragua Immersion course in January 2013. This post originally appeared on the blog for the course, http://wakedivnicaragua.wordpress.com/.

Shift Happens (Or It Should)

by Rev. Dr. Larry Hovis

Most of us in North Carolina realize that a significant shift has been taking place in recent years, a shift in the relationship between the church and the culture. Earlier in my life and ministry, the church sat at the center of the culture. A majority of people went to church, or at least understood the nature and purpose of the church. The culture supported, rather than competed with the church.  The church enjoyed a privileged place in most of our communities.

That is no longer the case. The place of the church has shifted from the center of the culture to the margins of the culture. Not only do most persons not attend church, but they don't even feel guilty about it! Some have no direct knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the church and don't see how it is relevant for their lives.

This is a relatively new phenomenon for most of our churches in North Carolina, but it has been going on in Canada for a long time. On a trip to Canada during last summer’s sabbatical, I met with Baptists who share our core beliefs and practices and learned how they have been dealing with shift for several decades. As I visited with Marc and Kim Wyatt (CBF Global Missions field personnel from North Carolina), congregational leaders, regional denominational leaders, a seminary professor and the leaders of Canadian Baptist Ministries (a global missions agency), I learned of shifts they are making that are enabling Canadian Baptists to deal faithfully and effectively with the larger cultural shifts that have now reached the Tarheel State.

From Church-As-Community Institution to Church-As-Mission Outpost

In our heyday, churches were viewed as significant community institutions. People understood what churches offered and came to churches to receive religious goods and services (programs and ministries) in much the same way they went to other community institutions to receive the goods and services they provided. Church leaders worked to provide the best programs and ministries possible in order to attract people to the church, who, for the most part, understood what the church was trying to do.

Churches in Canada no longer pretend that the culture "gets" the church. Instead of thinking like marketers or managers or even chaplains, they are learning to think like missionaries. When missionaries move to a new place of service, they don't assume that those they are trying to reach understand what they are doing. They don't begin by creating programs to attract persons to the church. They first learn the language and customs of the community. They build relationships with people to discern their felt and real needs. Then they begin to translate the Gospel of Jesus Christ into tangible need-meeting ministries that connect with people where they live and where they hurt. Bible studies and worship services grow organically out of tangible expressions of the Kingdom of God, not vice-versa. In the future, in order to deal with the changes in our culture, we church leaders in North Carolina will need to think more like missionaries and less like program managers or chaplains.

From Fearing the Stranger to Welcoming the Stranger

Because of an open-door immigration policy, Canada has become a haven for people all around the world who have immigrated there to flee persecution or to seek a better way of life.  The city of Toronto is the most multi-cultural city in the world, and much of the rest of Canada has become very culturally diverse.

I imagine it was difficult, in the early days of a high level of immigration, for traditional Canadian Baptist churches to embrace the newcomers to their communities. The changes in their communities caused most of them to decline significantly in terms of traditional measurements (attendance and money). But in time, some of them began to discover ways to welcome the newcomers to their communities who came to Canada from other countries. And the congregations that have learned to make this shift are growing again.

For example, I was given the opportunity to preach at Bromley Rd. Baptist Church in Ottawa. It's a church that in many ways is very much like North Carolina CBF churches - architecturally, programmatically, and liturgically. But this traditionally Anglo church has reached out to newcomers in the community, particularly immigrants from Haiti and Karen people. They have reversed the decline in membership and attendance, they have more children in their Sunday School, and most importantly, they more faithfully reflect the Kingdom of God.

In North Carolina, our churches haven't always been welcoming to newcomers. Sometimes, often out of fear, we have shut the doors of our churches and our lives to them. A key task facing us is to make the shift from fearing these "strangers" to welcoming them as brothers and sisters in Christ.

From Mission Trips to Global Discipleship

How can we make these two shifts? Canadian Baptists have developed a powerful tool to equip Christians and churches to move in this direction. Like us, the Canadians have been sending church members on mission trips for three decades. But they discovered, as many of us know intuitively, that these trips often have as great an impact on those making the trips than on those we are seeking to serve. So, they have developed very intentional processes to utilize short-term mission experiences as vehicles for missional formation and discipleship development.

By leading mission trip participants through a pre-trip preparation phase that lasts several months, guiding them in focused reflection during the trip, and helping them apply what God taught them on the trip after they return home, church members who take mission trips not only grow more deeply in their faith, but they are better equipped to serve as missionaries in their communities when they return home.

In the coming years and months, CBFNC will be working to develop processes that will help congregations who participate in our mission efforts to make this shift. Not only will it enable us to be better stewards of the significant resources we pour into mission trips, but it may be a vital avenue of spiritual renewal for our churches and Kingdom-transformation for our state.

The church in North Carolina, like the church throughout North America, is undergoing drastic shifts. We may not like it, but we can’t stop it. Thankfully, like-minded and like-hearted Baptists in Canada have more experience in dealing with these shifts than we do. By learning from them and following their lead, we can make our own shifts that will enable us to be faithful to God’s mission in our time and place.

Larry Hovis is the Executive Director of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina.