Ketchum: Let’s work to get and keep churches off life support

The Rev. Buzz Thomas thinks the organized church as we know it is on life support. I hate to believe it, but odds are he just might be right.

Pastor Buzz, a retired minister, lawyer and former interim superintendent of schools in Knox County, Tennessee, shared his observations in The Tennessean and were posted on the USA Today website. The Tennessean and the Times Herald are part of the USA Today network.

The retired preacher believes churches are dying because their faith leaders are failing to attract the next generation of worshippers by remaining stuck in the past. He says he and his wife attended a Mainline church service not long ago and found “(an) audience from a 1972 episode of Lawrence Welk.”

Ouch.

Yeah, longtime churchgoers are getting pretty long in the tooth. Pastor Buzz writes, “Young people are leaving church like deer fleeing a forest fire. For the first time in history, a minority of Americans belongs to a church or synagogue.”

Ouch, again.

He rightly berates the Southern Baptist Convention for keeping its ban on women pastors. “A church foolish enough to discriminate against the gender that does 90 percent of the work doesn’t deserve to survive,” he says.

Yet another ouch. Let me just point out that a good number of denominations welcome women to the pulpit. For my money, churches that reject women as preachers are missing a really good bet.

Yet another really big ouch.

All of this is pretty disheartening for those of us white-haired old fogies who don’t have anything better to do on a Sunday morning but go to church. Sort of makes me feel like one of those dinosaurs sinking into the La Brea Tar Pits.

So what to do? Rev. Buzz says keep politics out of the pulpit. Focus on social action. Emulate Jesus’ activism that was so threatening it got him killed by the ruling Romans in First Century Palestine.

Focus on things like climate change, inclusiveness, families, addiction, loneliness, depression, Pastor Buzz says.

Much of this is worthy and likely would appeal to young folks.

But there’s just one problem. Most of those issues have been politicized to a point that preachers could get ridden out of their pulpits for emphasizing them. I’m not advocating ignoring them, I’m just saying preach on them in the context that this old world belongs to God, not us.

Churches are defined by their spiritual beliefs. To ignore that divine forgiveness of sins is pegged directly to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection threatens to turn churches into little more than social clubs. Jesus is the meat and potatoes of faith.

It makes the church the church, not the Downtown Social Club.

So, yeah, let’s work to get and keep churches off life support. Let’s don’t make them the best-kept secret in town. Do lots of stuff. Plant a garden in the church’s back yard and give away as much of the food you grow as possible.

Feed the poor. Get needy folks into shelters so they don’t have to live in cardboard boxes because it’s often not their fault that they are poor. Help build affordable houses that folks can turn into homes.

Let’s do all that and more and get excited about it. But let’s also remember why and for whom we do it – that guy on the cross.

Jim Ketchum is a retired Times Herald copy editor and a former religion editor. Contact him at jeketchum1@comcast.net.

This article originally appeared on Port Huron Times Herald: Ketchum: Let’s work to get and keep churches off life support