The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III

 © 2023, Dr. Tamilio

For a long, long time now, people involved in church studies have been scratching their heads wondering why the church is in a state of decline.  Although there are certainly signs that this trend is turning around, churches today do not have the members they used to.  We all know that.  It’s no mystery.  The question is why.  Why is this the case?  What happened?  Cindy and I were taking Lizzie for a walk the other night, and we were talking about exactly this question.  An idea surfaced for me, and although this may not be the answer, I believe it will lead us in the right direction and offer a possible solution.

More than anything else, the church provides people with a sense of community.  Yes, I know there are many other Christian practices that are central to our faith and occur within the ecclesial community — such as preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, baptizing new believers into the faith, celebrating Christ’s presence through the bread and cup of Holy Communion, and serving God in the service of others through our outreach endeavors.  However, we do all of this together as the Body of Christ, as a community of believers.  As I have said many times before, Christianity is not a call to a solitary life of prayer.  It is not about reading the Bible on your own.  Although these are common practices among Christians, and they are important, we are nurtured and spiritually filled by being in a community with one another.  As Jesus said in Matthew 18:20, “where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

Here is the problem: people, in general, have lost a sense of what it truly means to be part of a community — part of something bigger than themselves.  Our culture encourages individuality, and, in many respects, that is a good thing.  The ancient Greeks knew this.  That is part of the reason why the expression “know thyself” was inscribed on the legendary Oracle at Delphi, according to Pausanias (the Greek writer of the second century BC).  It was also central to the teachings of Socrates who claimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living” in Plato’s dialogue the Apology.

But we are not just isolated individuals.  As the poet John Donne wrote in his piece “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (a poem that Harold Drake used to quote all the time):

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

We are not islands.  We were made for one another.  We were made to exist together in community.  Millard J. Erickson puts it quite accurately and succinctly when he writes, “the Christian life is not a solitary matter.”[1]

Our culture, in general, rejects that.  Society claims that you can do and be whatever you want.  It’s all about you.  This is egoism gone amok.  Look out for number one.  My wife was telling me that she sees this in her kindergarten classroom.  Five- and six-year-olds today lack basic skills in etiquette.  They treat one another in horrendous ways to get what they want.  This isn’t their fault.  It’s our fault.  This is what we are teaching them.  This is the message coming to them from all corners of society.  Do what you want and be what you want.  No one has the right to tell you anything.  This ideology, especially when it is inculcated in the young, leads to selfishness and a complete lack of respect and regard for other people.

Mind you: these kids aren’t to blame.  We, their parents and grandparents, we are.  All of us.  We have forfeited raising children and allowed them to be raised in popular culture.  People used to be concerned about parents using television as a babysitter.  Now the attention economy of the youth — and even adults — is being subsumed by social media and its consumer-oriented, vapid values.  We don’t raise our children with a sense of communal responsibility.  We give them a device and let them learn social skills from Tik Tok, Instagram, and Twitter.

Social media is the height of isolation.  You sit alone and look at your iPhone, tablet, or laptop.  There is no interaction with other people.  The problem with this is that children are not being socialized.  They are not forming romantic relationships in their teenage years.  They are part of what’s called “hook-up” culture.  (Look it up.)  They are also getting their driver’s licenses much later and studies show that they are less stable emotionally and psychologically.  They do not take risks and lack basic interpersonal skills.  They are not meant to be islands either.

Historically, the church offered the social values to which we subscribed — values that reflect the Triune nature of God.  It is Trinity Sunday, and as much as we try to explain the Trinity as a mathematical problem, we would be better to take a page from the contemporary theologian Daniel L. Migliore who claims that God’s triune nature means that God is a community of persons that coexist in a perfect covenantal relationship of mutual love, support, and care.  Being created in the image of God (what theologians and Bible scholars call the Imago Dei) means that we are to coexist in a similar covenantal relationship: one that reflects the very essence of who and what God is.

But that’s not what we are encouraged to do.  Keep people glued to their screens.  Keep them isolated.  Let’s make it even worse.  Let’s present them with divisive, sociopolitical issues so that they will fight each other and continue to buy what we sell them.

There is no room for the church in such a structure.  There is no room for any institution that stresses community, and love, and understanding, and cooperation, and forgiveness.  The church is about us together.  It is not about any one of us.  The church sees people as greater than the sum of our parts.

This is a value that people crave and they don’t even realize it.  We need to keep doing what we do best: being a place where all are welcome, where they feel as if they have inherent worth as children of God, and where they are encouraged to coexist as part of something greater than themselves.  They are welcomed into a community that words cannot fully describe.  However, when you are in that community, you know what it is.  Just like our Triune God: almost impossible to describe, but it is felt when you’re in a place like this.  It touches you at the core of your being.  It is about all of us, not any one of us.  It is about the love we share that God pours into this place continually.

Psalm 8 says that we were created a little lower than the angels.  Let us strive to be like them and to let others know that this is a place where they will find their wings, and where they will find love — they will find it in abundance.  Amen.

[1] Milliard J. Erickson, Introducing Christian Doctrine, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 392.