Canary in a Coalmine? A missional meditation on university statistics.

I was looking at the religious-related statistics for my university and it seemed a significant milestone had been passed. For the first time, this year the number of those who ticked the ‘Christian’ box as they enrolled at the University fell below 30%. A bit of context will show the significance. Last year there were just over 30% registered as Christian. In 2012, when these figures were first collected, the figure was just over 36% (and the national universities figure was 43% in that year). Let’s remember that the census in 2011 showed 59% ticking the Christian box nationally -that figure includes a higher proportion of older people as well as a smaller percentage among younger people.

It shows quite starkly that there is a declining proportion of young people identifying as Christian. It alerts us to a significant cultural shift taking place.

Our response is crucial. It can be disheartening to see such figures but we need to recognise that and work through our grief.

Christendom is now largely gone and we haven’t yet properly begun to wrestle with what it means to be church in post-Christendom times. And the Church of England, pillar and bulwark of Establishment is perhaps in the worst position of all. So it’s little wonder that we’re struggling; no wonder we are showing, collectively, signs of being in the first stages of grief.

We are called through and beyond our grief to a profound re-orientation of mindset -and that’s something that an aging population are less likely to be good at! (And the Churches are older proportionally than the general population).

So let’s start by making room for lament: to recognise all the things we have valued that are now gone; to lay to rest our assumptions that were formed in Christendom and  let go of our nostalgia for it. It’s hard but unless we do this work of letting go, we cannot truly enter God’s future and we cannot connect with solid hope. Let’s allow ourselves to feel our shock, despair and sorrow at the passing of the things we have loved and hoped for or at least grown used to. Maybe we should do this as churches: liturgically mark the end of the era and commit ourselves to discovering our calling in the era that is beginning. Services of laying down and lament are called for. A season of lament is needed.

We might then ask what these figures could suggest to us. I suggest that perhaps one thing that is happening is that people are giving up the label ‘Christian’ as they recognise their own realities and experience less cultural gravity pulling them towards that label. Perhaps it’s mostly a cultural identification that is passing. Perhaps it is that people now see more clearly the gap between their life-commitments and following Christ. But perhaps too, there as just as many people who are responding the sanctuary of their own hearts to the first wooing of the Holy Spirit. It’s just that they don’t associate that with what the churches seem to offer?

Our approach to mission now requires a re-orientation like the one I see played out in a modern secular university. In Christendom, the church and the Christian story was part of the cultural centre of gravity in our society. This meant we didn’t even know the word ‘mission’ except as something that happened overseas. The church simply occupied a place where it naturally drew in people who developed an interest in spiritual things and there were well-worn occasions of interaction around life-events, seasonal happenings, parish groups and community use of buildings.

Now people who develop a spiritual interest are more likely to join a yoga class, go along to a meditation group or diy-construct their own customised spiritual path borrowing resources from the internet, books and occasional events. And in this cultural moment, the church does not seem especially attractive or credible. It sits alongside other offers in the marketplace of ideas and causes and may even be held in suspicion because of scandals and newsworthy groups like Westboro Baptists not to mention the newsworthiness of sociopathic Christian groups.

So we have to learn to reach out without the cultural heft and social power that characterised our previous 1000 (or more) years. And that’s hard: so much of what we do and how we think and how we imagine possibilities is wrapped up with an imagination created by that social and cultural power. Imagining and thinking differently is disturbing and difficult. To borrow insight from the sending of the 72 in the gospels, we are now called to learn how to be guests rather than hosts. To do that we will need to join ‘their’ things and discover God at work where we do not control the agenda… or the building… or the purse. And then we can work with them and find Church growing ‘out there’.

In Advent we recalled the ministry of John the Baptiser. He dressed in camel-skin and belt and so looked the part of a prophet calling people to God. We are called to look the part of a people in touch with God, so that when they develop an interest in the things of God (prompted by the Spirit -and they do and will) we will look like we can help them connect with the love, hope and power of God. What does that mean for our church life, our outreach and our discipleship?