Sunday, December 27, 2009

A Church Destined to Fail

I have listened off and on to Garrison Keilor's Prairie Home Companion since 1975. He's about my age.

He enjoys making friendly jokes about Lutherans and Catholics. Humorous and insightful mostly.

But, there is a problem. It's the reality of the Lutheran or Catholic churches depicted in his skits. They are shallow insipid things. Certainly nothing of life needed to sustain existence. The churches that Garrison speaks of will fail.

No young people pick up the slack. That's not true at the House of Prayer, or many good churches. They are filled with youth hungry to be of service.

I think about who it is at the Lake Woebegone Lutheran Church that shovels the driveway.

No one under 65 I suspect.

Ditto the Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church in town.

Those churches if they existed will be dead in ten years. Closed. Building sold.

I see hundreds of these. Turned into apartments. Bars. Restaurants. Shops.

The religion that Garrison propounds publicly is dead too. Kind of a Unitarian Easter and Christmas membership. That too is dead. The great split is coming. Those "Churches" must close. They must dissolve. It's a new day. The nominal Christian must come to an awareness of the lostness of their position.

It's promised by the book of Revelation that this divide will come. It can't come too soon.

Time for some serious failure to take place.

1 comment:

Margaret said...

I belong to one of those type of churches - kindly called by others as "the chosen frozen' but nowadays mostly "frozen". I went into self-exile a few years ago from the mother Episcopal/Anglican church because it went corrupt at the leadership level and the rot is still spreading. The controversy over allowing gay priests drove a lot of good people away and the remainder are aging and dying.

I did attend Christmas Eve family service at my former church and there were about 200 in attendance. It was like being back in the 'glory days' of the church. Today the service attendance was back down to average - 40 people - with the average congregation age about 75+. It's a beautiful church with some very good people attending and I still enjoy the rituals and hymns. God is still present there at service, and I *felt* an angelic presence in both services. But the church is dying and the bishop will tell us next month if he is willing to let it struggle on financially. At one time, the church was hugely prosperous in attendance and congregation but those days are far behind now. If the church closes, the diocese sells it and pockets big $$ because it's on prime land. The diocese is in financial difficulty as well, saddled with many such churches, so what would be their motivation for keeping this church going? This is such a common and sad story in all the traditional churches.