Why Isn’t Church Working Anymore?

When church stops working in mid-life.

If I carried a sign and stood at a robot (also called a traffic light, an increasingly common sight in South Africa) that said, “Mid-forties. Church no longer works for me. Any ideas?” I wonder if I would get any responses.

Why a series of posts?

This post turned into a series of posts which came about as a result of having the same conversation several times with people who seem to be in the same life stage as me – mid-forties with teenage kids.

Photo by Ruvim Kerimov on Unsplash

The conversations basically involves being dissatisfied with the church experience in general and the state of the church.

1. Late thirties to forties.

2. May have deconstructed.

3. May have been hurt in church.

4. Don’t really find community.

5. Don’t feel like the experience is life-giving.

6. Don’t agree with the theology.

7. Don’t feel like they’re hearing anything fresh in church.

8. Can honestly get more out of podcasts.

John Mark Comer says it's one of the most common critiques as to why older people don’t go to church anymore: they just don’t see the value.

It’s something he and Preston Sprinkle discuss in this podcast.

For nearly two decades, John Mark pastored at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon. After leading Bridgetown through five years of spiritual formation initiatives and seeing the impact, he wanted to help other churches discover a similar path of apprenticing under Jesus. In 2021, with the blessing of the church, John Mark stepped away from his role as pastor to launch Practicing the Way, a nonprofit designed to create simple, beautiful formation resources for church communities around the world. Today, John Mark is developing new practices, courses, and podcasts for Practicing the Way and serving as a teacher in residence at Vintage Church LA with his wife Tammy and their three kids: Jude, Moses, and Sunday. This podcast conversation is all about John Mark’s vision for practicing the way.

Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

It’s something I can empathize with. While I have managed to maintain a weekly church-going practice as a Christian and have a conviction about it, the church certainly hasn’t always felt like home.

And as someone who listens to many podcasts, they are probably better prepped and presented than many of the preachers in our local churches.

Perhaps at the heart of the issue is that the church has fallen out of practises and that discipleship is not happening nearly as much as it should be in many churches.

Compelling Missional Disciple: Disruptive Discipleship - Jon Tyson

Time: 56 minutes

Digging Deeper

But perhaps if we dig deeper beyond some of the more obvious things I have mentioned above, there are deeper issues as to why church becomes hard to stick with.

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1) The social contract

A lot of churches find themselves in a social contract. It goes something like this: the people of a particular church like the format they have and the program they follow every week. They like the way the leaders or pastor ministers, and if that changes, they get pretty upset.

Comer speaks at length about what happened when he took his megachurch through five or so years of spiritual formation practices and how he burnt out doing it.

People are creatures of habit, and we like to keep it that way. The social contract also means we don’t really have to change that much when we go to church. We just show up, have our meetings, coffee, social connection, and we go home again. Live as normal during the week. Rinse and repeat.

2) The maturation process

There are 5 stages of human development according to Robert Keegan's Theory of Adult Development. So, you begin to think differently about life as you mature depending on what stage you’re in.

As you grow, you can find yourself disconnecting with others when you have moved on a stage and those around you have not. This led to people around me not understanding why I ask the questions I did and me getting frustrated when they were not seeing my point of view.

An executive coach commented to me how the leaders he coached often ended up leaving the organizations they were in. This was because they were growing at a rate their colleagues were not. They found distance growing between them and their companies relationally because their view of themselves and the world was changing. And then, when problems on the ground weren’t getting solved, they got frustrated with how the disparate viewpoints meant they could not make progress in an area, or they were not adequately supported. And so, they moved on.

This frustration affects us in the church too, and we need to think hard about how we work to build common ground with people who share the same faith as us.

3) The church model is not working anymore

I’ve been in a denominational context, church planting movement, independent churches, and congregational churches over 20 years, which has covered everything from a strict liturgy context to a house church type scenario with no format.

Being restricted or disillusioned with the model can lead to real frustration. The longing for more from the church experience and my inability to affect the status quo of church and successfully dialogue about the issues has often been at the core of why my family moved church contexts.

When people think in a model when it comes to leadership and not along relational lines, church can become really challenging.

4) Loss of connection

Christianity is really hard socially. It’s one of the things Jesus did intentionally. Unlike sports clubs, book clubs, charity organizations, and so on, people who are very different from each other gather at a church to worship.

And that disparateness can get in the way when Christians don’t figure out a way to share their lives and their stories.

We’ve had the most success in building connection around a dinner table and yet find that sharing a meal has been pretty uncommon in most of the churches we’ve been in.

Having a meal with 20 people at a social event may happen regularly, but having people in our homes around a table is something we’ve rarely experienced in a church context.

The age of the smartphone means we have social media friends and we instant message each other, but we don’t share lives often with each other.

5) The businesspeople-pastor disconnect

The organizational elements of a church often lack organizational best practice. And businesspeople who know a lot about running organizations often battle to find traction with pastors who have seminary degrees that don’t always prepare them well for running an organization.

On the flip side, businesspeople often get asked to run ministries in churches when they know nothing about ministry, and then there is sometimes a distinct lack of pastoral care in the process.

The disconnect in people’s forties often seems to be around our opinion around how leaders lead, what we think about that leadership, and how we dialogue over it.

This isn’t only a businesspeople issue. It could be between parents and kids ministry leaders etc.

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In fact, most of the above really comes down to one simple issue: relational disconnect. I’m “over here” on this issue and you’re “over there,” and the distance between us creates tension. I have historically not been very good at closing those gaps and walking away feeling heard and understood, even if I don’t agree with the other person. I think it’s not a widely held skill set in society in general.

So, what’s the answer? Well, that’s a tough one. Dialogue, finding common ground, and a lot of patience and grace. It seems like this might be deliberate on God’s part too. I mean, Jesus had Matthew the tax collector, Simon the Zealot, James and John nicknamed the sons of Thunder, Peter (who cut off someone’s ear), and Judas, who betrayed him, on his team. That’s a melting pot of personalities and beliefs. Perhaps the point is that community is hard and transformational?