ie:missional teaching. glocalizing. living. serving. repenting. incarnating. loving. repeating.

Last week my friend Matt McGee of the Duke Law School emailed me with an interesting chart tracking the total membership of SBC churches as a percentage of the United States population since 1971. After seeing his work (the top line in the graph), I asked him to check the total attendance figures for the UMC (US members, second line), the ELCA (yellow line), and the PCUSA (purple line). It is plain to see that, as a percentage of total US population, the SBC has been in nearly unceasing decline since about 1985. Keeping in mind that “active membership” is only about twenty-five percent of reported membership, it appears that current active SBC membership represents about 1.3% of the U.S. population. With that as a backdrop…

By most reputable accounts we are entering or are already into an economic slowdown that will almost certainly turn into a recession. The housing market collapse in much of the country, the burst of the sub-prime mortgage bubble and related financial market uncertainty will take our country into places unknown to people under the age of 20. Writing in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Nouriel Roubini gives five falling dominoes which will lead to a “financial pandemic”: a drop in trade, the weakening of the dollar, worldwide bursts of housing bubbles (already happening in France, Greece, Hungary and Italy, on the verge in Britain, Ireland and Spain), falling commodity prices (projected to happen as the economies of the U.S. and China slow, though drops in oil and grain prices would be welcomed), and faltering financial confidence. He summarizes,

During the last recession, the United States underwent a nearly 6 percent change in fiscal policy, from a very large surplus of about 2.5 percent of GDP in 2000 to a large deficit of about 3.2 percent of GDP in 2004. But this time, the United States is already running a large structural deficit, and the room for fiscal stimulus is only 1 percent of GDP…President Bush’s fiscal stimulus package is too small to make a major difference today, and what the Fed is doing now is too little, too late. It will take years to resolve the problems that led to this crisis.

The Economist seems to agree. A lead story in the May 3-9, 2008 issue says:

The malaise that started the crisis-the American housing market-is still getting worse. The month-on-month decline in the Case-Shiller index of house prices in 20 large cities is accelerating; on the latest reckoning, it was down by 12.7% over the 12 months to February 29th.

Also, this:

After a long period with scarcely any bond defaults by companies, there have been 21 failures this year, according to Standard & Poor’s, a rating agency; some 122 issuers, with debt of around $102 billion, are deemed vulnerable to default. Ominously, corporate debt is the shaky foundation for trillions of dollars of derivative contracts.

Consumer confidence is in the tank and both individuals and churches will soon begin, if they have not already done so, making the difficult choices about which budget items will stay and which ones will go. Add to this (at least in the SBC) Dr. Frank Page’s warning that 1/2 of all SBC churches will close by the year 2030. Do we really think that 22,000 churches will suddenly call it quits on December 31, 2029? No, there will be a consistent downward slide as aging churches, refusing to move to a missional mindset, simply die away with neither pastor nor members to keep them alive. This recession may prove to be more than scores of small churches of all denominations can weather.

Many churches that do survive will, for the first time, begin to scrutinize their support of their denominational structure. They will begin asking about waste, mismanagement, bureaucratic overlap, and redundant ministries concluding that far, far too much of their donated funds are not making it to benevolent ministry, education or missionaries, but are going to support a structure. Many will conclude, as many already have, that if the only vision offered is to “keep Denominationalism alive” then it will no longer hold any appeal. (I recognize that giving has bounced back from recessions of the past, but during those times there were no legitimate options for “doing missions” except the denominational structures; that has now changed.)

Denominations’ tenuous relationship with technology will exacerbate the situation going into and leading out of the economic downturn. Most denominations would be satisfied to have their annual sessions broadcast live via streaming video and that would be fine…for a year or two. Why is it so stinkin’ difficult to grasp the concept of satellite feeds to multiple locations?

Way back when Dr. Jimmy Draper alerted the Southern Baptist Convention that the “younger leaders leaving the SBC” was at the “Severe” level, one of the commonly seen online suggestions was the exploration of multiple meeting sites and the ability to vote either online or at a satellite site. The ignoring of the money saving suggestions will come to haunt any denomination as a generation arises that is hardwired for efficient spending of Kingdom dollars. Through a video conferencing website called Genesys, I simulated an SBC meeting being held in Denver. The total estimated costs of video conferencing 7,000 delegates was about 17% of the cost of flying from various U.S. cities to Denver, saving an accumulated 31 years of cumulative travel time and 8,555 metric tons of carbon footprints.

The former print mag, Business 2.0 (now online here), in an August 2007 article entitled, “The Rise of the White Collar Nomad,” told of Anthony Page and Simon LePine, among others, who had ditched their offices (and sometimes homes) to spend the majority of their working hours out of doors. Armed with a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of wireless connectivity equipment, these folks have taken moofing to a whole new level. Their offices were the entire outdoors. Mountains, lakes, London, Canada, India, they simply live where they want at the time, get paid through Pay Pal or other online account and see as much of the world as they desire. Sure, most of them are in consulting or sales, but it is technology that makes this wireless lifestyle possible. The same kind of technology could, and should, be helping denominations make better use of kingdom funds.

The Siemens corporation, as reported in Fast Company, September 2007, is working on a wireless check-in system for airports by which there would be no paper ticket, no kiosks, no boarding passes, only a bar code downloaded to your cell phone scanned at the gate and presto, you’d be good to go. Wouldn’t that be nice at the annual meeting? New Bethany’s partnership in Siberia is going to be strengthened as the M there takes advantage of a satellite connection that will allow video conferencing. Last year we hosted, via Skype, our missionary in Eastern Europe who actually taught three sessions through the video hookup and cost us absolutely nothing. Completely free. This while many M’s routinely have monthly meetings requiring multiple day excursions from their country of ministry. Some Regional Leadership even fly back to the states for meetings that could easily be held online or via satellite saving their denominations thousands and thousands of dollars.

Trustee meetings, board meetings, Executive Committee meetings (state and national) could all be streamlined and made much more efficient if advantage was taken of existing and developing technologies. In the Southern Baptist Convention alone, the six yearly meetings of one entity’s trustee board costs $500,000 of Cooperative Program missions giving. With almost no effort, change could take place immediately. But it will not and we all know it.

Instead, denominations will hunker down and try to ride out the coming economic storms. (In fairness, per capita SBC giving has been increasing over the past few years. IMO, that trend will change within five years.) As they prove more inflexible structurally and wasteful economically, churches of all sizes will conclude that money given to support the inherent denominational bureaucracies is no longer good stewardship of God’s money.