Blended churches: The New Faith Paradigm?
Simon Rowe, “Norwegian Church,” Flikr.com, CC BY 2.0
About a year ago, three neighboring Protestant congregations—two Lutheran, one Methodist—merged into one in Woonsocket, a small South Dakota farming community near where I live.
This interesting faith innovation was reported Feb. 12 in Sioux Falls’ Argus Leader, the state’s largest-circulation metro newspaper.
The merger may be the wave of the future for small-town churches that for decades have struggled to survive as the number of farms and population in Great Plains ag areas have steadily eroded—as have church memberships, a side-effect of sharply declining American religiosity in general.
The handwriting seems on the wall. Demographic research shows that the fast-growing percentage of Americans who identify as nonreligious now comprises a quarter of the United States’ (and South Dakota’s) population, and so-called millennials (young citizens born around the cusp of the millennia) are by far the nation’s least religious sub-group. So the future, certainly in the Heartland if not also elsewhere, appears headed for greater irreligiosity.
Rhonda Wellsandt-Zell, the pastor of Woonsocket’s new tripartate Spirit of Faith church, told the Argus Leader that it took three years to get the three separate failing congregations to buy into a merger.
“I said, ‘If we’re going to die, we’re going to die healthy. And if we’re going to live, we’re going to live healthy and boldly.’ Once they made that decision to live, it took off.”
The new multi-congregation has pooled the resources of the original three and plans to use the joint $300,000 to help build a new church facility to house their growing numbers. Groundbreaking is projected late this year. While each church previously attracted but a handful of worshippers every Sunday, Spirit of Faith now draws 40-100.
Americans may be moving in the direction of Norwegians, and other now overtly secular Scandanavian countries. Researcher Phil Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia (mainly Denmark and Sweden) several years ago interviewing citizens about their views on religious faith. He discovered that Scandinavians are reticent to talk about religion and averse to the negative-sounding term “atheist,” although the vast majority say they don’t believe in God. Zuckerman said religion is a “nonissue” in the Nordic states, that people simply didn’t care about it. One Danish pastor told him “God” is viewed as an “embarrassing” term in his country and that most Danes “would rather go naked through the city than talk about God.” Zuckerman’s respondents generally offered these kinds of statements when asked about God, Jesus and life after death:
“I never really thought about that. [But] It’s been fun to get these kind of questions that I never, never think about.”
But if Americans are leaning more toward atheism these days, it’s not necessarily cause for alarm. Andre Compte-Sponville, author of The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (Viking 2007), describes Scandanavia as, “What remains of the Christian West when it ceases to be Christian.” Despite consensus godlessness, citizens generally retains core Christly cultural and social traditions that the faith incubated over centuries, such as communal compassion, trustworthiness, loyalty and personal kindness.
Zuckerman found that Scandinavian societies, despite their pronounced irreligiosity were “above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.”
So, as rural communities like Woonsocket converge their churches to survive, while aggregate numbers of faithful continue to decline nationwide, American society maybe slowly headed ultimately to a Scandinavian-type faith model. Where we live kindly lives but without belief in supernatural entities.
In the meantime, Woonsocket’s new blended Spirit of Faith congregation is full of hope, even as the closure of American churches gains worrisome momentum across the nation. “We realized we had potential to do more with our lives,” Pastor Wellsandt-Zell said, “if we were working collectively together.”
