Flipping the Script

Originally published here - Vibrant Faith Articles.

Recent research reveals that 40 million Americans who used to go to church no longer do… These are the “nones”—people who are disaffiliating, deconstructing, reconstructing, and de-churching. People who once included churchgoing as a normal part of life, but no longer do.

For the first time, in the eight decades that Gallup has tracked American religious membership, more adults in the U.S. do not attend church than those who do. People are finding faith, God, and community elsewhere.

Jeremy Meyers of RedeemingGod.com says: “They’re leaving… The Church as we know it is dying.” Well, I don’t think it’s dying. I think it’s changing. We need to reimagine church, reimagine faith formation, and reimagine ministry today.

In his instruction to the Congregation for the Clergy (July 20, 2020), Pope Francis writes about the church’s evangelizing mission:

"The parish is not an outdated institution; precisely because it possesses great flexibility, it can assume quite different contours depending on the openness and missionary creativity of the pastor and the community. While certainly not the only institution which evangelizes, if the parish proves capable of self-renewal and constant adaptivity, it continues to be ‘the Church living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters.’ This presumes that it really is in contact with the homes and the lives of its people and does not become a useless structure out of touch with people or a self-absorbed group made up of a chosen few."

The church is not outdated. It is not a useless structure. We are capable of self-renewal!

But there’s criteria there, too...
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​Read more of this article HERE at Vibrant Faith.