My family’s roots are in Montana, especially in the southeastern part of the state. The Powder River that meanders through the dry, hot buttes and rangeland there has the reputation that inspired the title of this post. The image came to me as I was reading Heidi Campbell’s “Understanding the Relationship between Religion Online and Offline in a Networked Society.” She writes persuasively about the notion of “convergent practice” which, she writes, “encourages users to draw from traditional and new sources simultaneously.” So far, so good, right? It may well form the church of the future in beautiful and unforeseen ways.
But we will have to keep an eye out for each other! Campbell writes: “…it is increasingly being recognized that within Western society, individuals perform religion in ways that draw from multiple sacred and spiritual places, rituals, and meanings in order to create their own hybrid spiritualities. This is echoed by research that suggests people are ‘more spiritual and less religious,’ or less likely to affiliate with set religious institutions or forms of practice.” Fr. Thomas Keating only half-facetiously refers to this as seeking to be “spiritual without the inconvenience of religion,” by which he meant the inevitable conflicts, disagreements and emotional turmoil that always arise when people gather in community.
So what’s the response? A number of churches have been quick to accommodate, perhaps too quick, so that they have truly lost their “saltiness” by which I mean the very thing that gave them continuity and identity. It seems those are the churches loosing membership most rapidly.
Other churches have responded by deepening their own identities. Several AngloCatholic churches in the U.S. have done just that and find themselves growing, including in the Pacific Northwest, until recently the most unchurched area of the U.S. In apparent defiance of some interpretations of Cambell’s study, the presentation of depth seems to draw people of all ages. (The fastest growing parish in the Diocese of Olympia is St Paul’s, Seattle, stpaulseattle.org the primary AngloCatholic parish in the area.) So what’s the dance that moves and navigates between preserving deep tradition and roots, and responding to what God is asking of us from the future? How do we maintain depth without surrendering breadth?
paschalforman 