Churches are chapels or mission stations

By the Rev. John Wright
Pastor of Grace UMC, Corpus Christi
The theme of the 2008 General Conference was “A Future with Hope.” Nevertheless, all agreed that we must face the present situation realistically; otherwise, as Bishop Janice Huie, the outgoing president of the Council of Bishops (who grew up in Beeville), said in the opening sermon, we have only “marshmallow hope”—the sweet, sappy kind of hope that evaporates in the noonday sun.
Facing the present situation realistically means acknowledging the following facts: In 1968, there were 11 million United Methodists in the United States. Today, 40 years later, there are just less than 8 million—a decline of 27 percent. In the past 10 years, membership has declined by 6 percent, and worship attendance by 4 percent. There has been a 20 percent drop in confirmands and 22 percent fewer baptisms.
The average United Methodist is 57 years old, while those younger than 18 years account for less than 5 percent of church membership. In the past 20 years, the number of fully ordained UM ministers younger than 45 has dropped from 9,000 to 3,000. Forty-two percent of United Methodist churches in the nation did not have a single profession of faith in 2006!
Why is The United Methodist Church in the United States declining in membership? Lyn Powell, the lay leader of the North Georgia Conference, who gave the keynote laity address to the opening session of General Conference, answered this question by alluding to the famous quip in the old “Pogo” comic strip, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” She paraphrased this saying to fit our present situation in the church like this: “We have met the answers to our questions, and they is us.”
I would put the gist of her argument like this: We are declining in membership because we have allowed too many of our churches to become chapels, instead of being the mission stations that the early Methodists envisioned every local church as being.
A chapel focuses on providing spiritual services for its own members. In a church that is a chapel, members understand themselves primarily to be consumers of spiritual products offered by the pastors and staff. A church that is a chapel is like a cafeteria. The pastors and staff stand behind the serving line. Their job is to cook up and serve dishes that the members select according to their liking as they go through the line.
In contrast, when the church is understood to be a mission station, its focus is not primarily on satisfying the members who are already there, but rather, its focus on reaching those who are not yet there with the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. That is not to say the nurture of our own members is unimportant. Sure, we preach and teach our own members. Sure, we offer a variety of classes and learning possibilities and opportunities for fellowship to our own members. Sure, we care for our own members pastorally when they are sick or hurting.
But all this is not just for their sake but also to equip and enable them to minister to others. Sure, in a “mission station” type of church, the pastors and staff serve members in the serving line, but they do this so that the members can then take their own places in the serving line, or better, so that they can go out and bring others to the “cafeteria” for spiritual nourishment.
In short, in a chapel, people come for self-satisfaction—for a little spiritual nourishment, a little polite conversation, a little folksy fellowship. But in a mission station, people come to be trained and equipped to go out “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world” (the mission statement of The United Methodist Church).
But therein lies the problem. Too many local churches have lost their sense of mission. In her opening sermon, Huie recounted how in her travels to churches in Arkansas and Texas, she often has asked, “Friends, tell me about your mission.” Then she added, “I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard this response: ‘Mission? Bishop, we just hope we can survive another year, and we don’t know how we are going to do that.’”
I submit that these churches are at the brink of survival because long before, they ceased to be mission stations and instead became chapels.
Powell makes the same point that I am trying to make: “Too many people in our society think that the church is a private club. They would not dream of being so rude as to walk through the doors on Sunday morning and interrupt us.” And so, she said, the first rule for our laity is to “invite, invite, invite.”
Quoting Acts 2:46-47, Powell said, “It would appear that the New Testament considers it of utmost priority ‘to be adding daily to our numbers those who are being saved.’” And yet, she lamented, “too many of our laity no longer claim that core responsibility…today we laity have almost lost the skills to go out in the community and to win the whole community for Christ.”
Powell’s remarks remind me of something Becky Grimes (a member of Grace UMC) recently shared with me. She told me about how Dani Beckett, a former Grace member, had welcomed her when Grimes and her husband, Bob, first moved to Corpus Christi. On first meeting Grimes, Beckett said to her in the course of their conversation: “Becky, you need to come to our church.”
Would that all our members could invite the people they meet so naturally, so genuinely, so winsomely, so graciously! As United Methodist Christians, we certainly do have “a future with hope” if we will let God transform our churches from chapels into mission stations!