The Outchurch
I’d like to introduce you to the fastest growing subgroup of Christians: the outchurched. The truth is that people are leaving church. They start by leaving one church, and going to another. In typical American fashion, we have so many options, like channels on a television. Each time they leave, they feel a pang of guilt, but they are so happy to feel free of something that just wasn’t right at that last place. The pastor was weird, or they loved the pastor but the people were weird. Maybe the people in political power were simply not nice or someone embezzled or had an affair or elders wives were too judgmental or any number of things. Leaving felt good, but leaving wasn’t the solution, it was finding a new church. The guilt of leaving is quickly washed away by the excitement of a new church. The pastor is amazing, or the children’s program is great and your kids love it. They have softball or BBQ’s and the associate pastor is a surfer dude that makes everyone feel really mellow and good.
Every Christian I have ever known has been through this at least once. Many have done it more than once. In the past 20 years the trend has been toward larger churches. Many people go from a 100 member church to a 300 member and eventually end up at a mega church. That’s one of these 1000 plus churches with million dollar television screens and a rocking worship band and an organization that does a Billy Graham version of church on every Sunday, three or four times and maybe on Saturday night too. But, eventually people at those churches end up on the outs as well. There’s something missing they might say, or they miss the community of a smaller group, or they find that the organization is impersonal and run like a big business. The food court is really fun for a while, but when you really need help, you have to make an appointment with a certified MFC counselor or you just want to get to know one of the 100 associate pastors, but they are burned out and so busy that you can tell that they are really only engaging you as a “customer” not as a friend. A new disenchantment sets in. Unfortunately, the disenchantment after a few churches can mean a new disenchantment with Christianity. The leavers who jump ship often jump with a sense that maybe its more than screwed up people who make screwed up churches. Maybe it’s a screwed up faith as well. Whatever the cause, there’s a growing group of people that I’m calling the Outchurched. They are leaving the church, and maybe skeptical of the church and maybe of Christianity. They are people with honest hearts and minds who tired of the hypocracy; bored of the repetition; skeptics of the sermons; suspicious of the politics of the new Right and the role of that in church; ambivalent about new buildings and new programs. They are asking questions about social issues; they are globally conscious; they might not be anti-gay, and wonder where that fits into their faith; they wonder why churches don’t engage in poverty issues, why the church backs the wars; they want to know why all of the resources of the church go to buildings and sound systems and why kids go to camp in the mountains to get spiritual instead of to Mexico to build houses for the poor. They wonder why people are judged for drinking by people who are assholes; why they are judged for having pre-marital sex by perverts hiding behind prudishness. They wonder why they should listen to bad Christian music as a path to greater spirituality when there’s so much better music to inspire them outside of Christian music. They wonder why there’s a whole sub-culture of Christianity with its special words, inside meanings, expectations and philosophy of life tied to a lot of questionable theological conclusions. They question these theological conclusions, over and over and wonder if they are crazy. They don’t have a theology degree; they feel guilty for questioning things. But, their heads and their hearts keep telling them that all of this just doesn’t add up. By the time they leave, they are either really screwed up or the most free and wonderful people you’ve ever met. The only difference between these two results is whether the person is still guilting themselves or whether they are really free.
For many Christians, instead of just leaving church and leaving Christianity at the same time, my hope is that people will leave the church only to FIND Christianity. My theory is that the most important group of people is this invisible population of leavers, the outchurched. These folks are where its at because they were willing to shed the institution and many, maybe most, of them are very genuine. If they were not, they would have stuck around despite their misgivings. They would have played along and felt good about their place in the community. Instead, they probably pushed themselves out to the fringes for years as subversives, maybe even encouraging others to bail out before they themselves did. They found new language to communicate what faith was all about because they got tired to the language of the church, which requires a long time in the church to even begin to understand. They’ve had beers with other leavers on the way out, and maybe even had some of their best experience out there on the fringes before they left, meeting the other people who had found their way to the back rows of pews and to the fringes of the church community. But, eventually they do leave and they are relieved and hopefully, they are there because they believe. They are actually there from a deeper faith than they knew existed, a faith that has to exist without the good feelings of a good sermon or the emotional outpouring of a good song or hymn or the hugs and encouragement of familiar people. These are the makings of a fresh wave of faith, a modern approach to Christianity that is more encouraging than anything that I’ve seen. It surpasses the mega church movement, and maybe the evangelical movement itself. Millions of good, faithful people are out there who have abandoned church, or are on the fringes and have written off church even if they still go occasionally. They are the Church in a way that maybe most churches are not. The Outchurch isn’t a new church or a new denomination, it’s a coined term to describe the people of the Church, the invisible body of Christ, who are simply not into church and maybe never will be. I’m advocating the theory that they don’t need to, and that instead, they be recognized for what they are doing and given opportunities to organize enough to gain some benefits from each other, to network and dialog and find encouragement in the fact that they are more “right” than they thought they were when the left church, and they are not alone.
