Church Failure as Seen by Her Leaders

FAILURE IN THE CITIES

“The most compelling mission of the Church today,” says clergyman G. Paul Musselman in the Saturday Evening Post of November 18, 1961, “is not in the far-off, least civilized corners of the globe. The biggest task lies right at the heart of urban civilization, in the tall towers and asphalt jungles of our cities. That is where the Church has failed. It is a failure that is told in terms of dwindling congregations and closed church buildings—and an increasing inability of the Church to enter the lives of those who desperately need something of the spirit to give meaning to our materialistic civilization. . . . In the past fifteen years or so New York City has lost more than 300 churches, Chicago 150, Cleveland 72, and Detroit 63. . . . Church leaders are taking a new look at expensive church buildings in which clublike congregations sometimes ignore the world outside and slowly hug themselves to death in huge structures they no longer can support. . . . Perhaps Protestantism must lose a few more status symbols before it remembers that its destiny is not to be a custodian of property but to be the creator of a Christian culture.”

TOO CONCERNED OVER RESPECTABILITY

The New York clergyman Harold A. Bosley was reported by the Miami Herald of July 19, 1962, as saying: “This nation’s churches have become so fearful of saying the wrong thing that they simply say nothing. We are so respectable we are afraid of our own shadow. . . . American churches used to be the moral custodians of the community and would cross swords with anybody, but today they have timidly forsaken that role.” Along this same line Cynthia Clark Wedel, a vice-president of the National Council of Churches, said, as reported by the Houston Post of October 1, 1961: “Too many churches reflect an image compounded almost entirely of sweetness and light. We are afraid that if the Church becomes involved in anything controversial, it will cease to be popular—people might leave or not want to come in.”

“PLATITUDES AND FIDDLE-FADDLE”

As quoted in the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California, in its issue of September 30, 1962, clergyman Henry J. Stokes is reported as saying: “Our current unrest and upheaval in every realm; the growing view by the observing world that the church is irrelevant with its platitudes and fiddle-faddle of much activism; and the realization that human relations in whose welfare Christ is vitally concerned have unmasked our shallow spiritual grasp of the true witness. These and other thorny affairs make the requirements of preaching an almost impossible assignment. In it all, the preacher cannot please God and man. Often he pleases neither.”

AVOIDING ITS RESPONSIBILITIES

Anglican clergyman A. Gordon Baker is reported by the Toronto Daily Star of April 2, 1962, as saying: “The Church has been sidestepping its responsibilities for centuries. . . . Christianity has become as vacuum-packed as the coffee on the shelves of today’s supermarkets. Surely Jesus Christ did not endow a church with his presence in order to establish a comfortable and secure private club.”