My basic premise is this: the church is dying. It's structure and theology make no sense today and haven't for decades. Far from being innocuous, their outdated uselessness goes beyond a nostalgic irrelevance to purposeful insidiousness, not just taking up space, but monolithically standing in the way of the spirit.

--Chuck Meyer, Dying Church, Living God

How true.

Sadly, the congregation I presently serve has spent a year on visioning and it counts for nothing. Intractable parishioners are already clogging the works. They will be successful in halting the kind of change necessary to save the dying corpse we know as the church.

Maybe that is really my mission, and should be the mission of all progressive pastors. Before there can be rebirth, there has to be death. As Meyer points out in his book (cited above):

Renewal movements are irrelevant when they merely remold the same old material. They resurrect the undead--a contradiction in terms except in zombie horror movies. Just as you cannot put new wine in old wineskins because the old wineskins will burst, a new church cannot be built on an old foundation. We have to let it die, even assist it to die, before it can be resurrected. It must be dead the institutional equivalent of three days in the tomb. Really dead. Stinking dead. bone rotting, rafters to basement, dust-to-dust dead.

Amen, and amen! Meyer knows the church well!

My basic premise is this: the church is dying. Its structure and theology make no sense today and haven't for decades. Far from being innocuous, their outdated uselessness goes beyond a nostalgic irrelevance to purposeful insidiousness, not just taking up space, but monolithically standing in the way of the spirit