by the Rev. Lee Woofenden
Theme Presentation
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I have an important announcement to make: The Swedenborgian Church isn't weird anymore!
Back in the early seventies, I had a school friend named Sheila. Now Sheila was a jock. Field hockey, basketball, baseball, track, volleyball . . . you name it, Sheila played it. But I think her favorite sport was asking me what church I belonged to. This was a team sport. She would gather up a few of her friends and bring them over to me. "What did you say was the name of your church?" she would ask. "Swedenborgian!" I would reply. She would then do a masterful job of evoking, for our listening pleasure, a sumptuous buffet table crammed full of fine food, with the faithful filing by filling their plates, and thus participating in the primary ritual of the Smorgasborgian church. Yes, we were weird--and I thought it was kind of fun to be weird!
But in the back of many Swedenborgians' minds was the idea that, well, after all, Swedenborg is kind of weird in the eyes of society, and we're perhaps a little weird for believing what he taught. It used to be conventional wisdom in the church that when you're talking to new people, you wait a while--until you've piqued their interest and preferably gotten them hooked--before talking about strange things like Swedenborg going to the spiritual world and talking to angels and spirits. Otherwise you might scare them away!
Today, we are living in a whole different world. Angels have major network TV programs, near death experiences have become a staple of popular movies, and practically every book store has a Religion and Spirituality section. Of course, there are still plenty of materialists and skeptics out there who think this is all an irrational craze. But there is no denying that spirituality and the afterlife have gone mainstream. And now, instead of being a bit shy about Swedenborg's spiritual world experiences, we're more apt to brag just a bit about how our guy was there before it became popular!
Today, millions of people are searching for what we have: a spiritual perspective that is deep, satisfying, sensible, and personal. And I believe our church is finally getting to the point where we can offer our perspective and our spiritual community to the many.
Of course, we Swedenborgians have been offering people Swedenborg and the New Church for over two centuries now. Yet though our church showed signs of real growth throughout the 1800s, we did not make it far into the 1900s before we entered into the same disastrous decline that decimated the ranks of mainline Protestantism and Catholicism alike. We had a great message, but somehow it was not getting through. People were abandoning the church in droves.
This led to decades of soul-searching in the church. Our standard response to the lack of popular appeal of our church tended to be, "The world isn't ready for us yet." Maybe that was true. But it isn't true anymore. The world is more than ready for us. People are searching for what we have.
In recent years, we have finally turned the tables and started working on the question of whether we are ready for the world. The earlier Swedenborgian movement tended to be a heady, intellectual affair. This appealed to many of the intellectual and financial leaders in our society; but our church never quite took hold in the popular mind. This, I believe, was because we were not fully applying to our church our own teachings about the necessity of a balance of love and truth, leading to practical acts of kindness and service.
Back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager, the "conservative" vs. "liberal" struggle was still raging in our denomination. Our church was divided into warring camps that glared at one another across the aisles, and did not attend one another's parties.
On a deeper level, the liberal vs. conservative conflict of a few decades ago can be seen as a struggle over whether we would remain primarily an intellectual church, or whether we would combine the powerful spiritual insights in our church with an equally powerful practice of love and compassion. I've heard it said that "the liberals won." But in my view, the result of that struggle was not really a victory for either side, but a gradually emerging synthesis of the best of both perspectives--a marriage of love and wisdom. The result is a church that is increasingly dedicated both to the truth that our teachings have to offer (which was the core value of the conservatives) and to being a spiritual community devoted to loving and caring for the people in our communities (the core value of the liberals).
In other words, we are finally becoming a church that begins to express the fullness of our own teachings about how a marriage of love and wisdom makes the Lord's true church. This is why I believe we are finally becoming ready to offer our church to the world.
Of course, it will take time and a lot of hard work. But I believe that if we continue to move forward as we have been, and take the necessary forward steps both nationally and locally, our church will begin a period of major growth. And I believe this new growth will not be followed by a period of decline as was our growth spurt of the 1800s. The foundation we are now building is a solid one, based on the bedrock of spiritual reality.
I am optimistic about the future of our church. And I would like to offer you a few thoughts from our experience at the Bridgewater Church to add some practicality to all this great theory. I'm happy to say that after a long decline similar to that in many of our churches, and in the denomination as a whole, the Bridgewater Church is now experiencing modest but definite growth. Our membership has increased by several people each of the last two years, and looks like it will do the same this year. Meanwhile, our average Sunday attendance has increased from the low twenties a couple of years ago to the low thirties now.
There are several elements that have worked together to make this possible, and they can work elsewhere. In fact, they are now working in several of our other churches.
One of them, of course, is good pastoral leadership. It is not easy to grow a church without a minister. And the more ministers we have who combine a knowledge of our church's teachings with perceptiveness and compassion for people--not to mention a willingness to do a lot of very intense work--the more likely we are to have growing churches. This is why I support any mode of training ministers that will move forward the ministry of our church. There can be more than one gate into our ministry, just as there is more than one gate into the Holy City.
However, a church's minister (or lay leadership) is only one part of the whole picture in a growing church. Even the best minister needs to be working with a congregation that is willing to lay aside old rivalries and work together to move forward in ways that may involve leaving behind some cherished traditions and familiar ways of doing things.
I believe that the most powerful way to get a church unified and moving forward is to look out into our communities and realize what a blessing our beliefs and our church family could be to many people who are searching for what we have. If we as congregations can move our focus off ourselves and our own survival, and think of how we can serve our communities in ways that uniquely express our faith in action, we can break out of our old patterns and begin to build a new and growing church.
Fortunately, we do not have to figure everything out all by ourselves. There are organizations and consultants out there who know how to grow a church, and who can teach us what we need to know in order to do it effectively. Yes, it will cost some money. But the results of acting with solid understanding and knowledge will be well worth the cost.
The harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few. But Jesus Christ started out with only twelve, and look what happened! If we redirect our energy, time, and money toward offering to the world the same blessings that our church has given to us, I am convinced that it will not be many decades before we will be filling our churches--and building new ones in places where there has never been a Swedenborgian Church before.
