I’ve been on vacation for the past few days, getting caught up on my reading and sleeping. A number of things that caught my eye on the internet have me reflecting on my work, the work of the church, and the nature of religion.

Bishop Greg Rickel of the Diocese of Olympia (Washington) parallels much of my thinking about the future of the church:

… churches do not yet know how to measure what this means. “What denominational metrics people are asking—how many people are in church on Sunday, for example—may not be the right measure for today. The measures that contemporary churches need may be more intuitive and more spiritual in nature.”

Rickel points to a small church in his diocese that is located along the Columbia River. The population of the area is declining, and membership growth is not a realistic goal. Never­theless, the congregation is a dynamic and important part of the community, because it is a community and service center. Rickel likens it to a base camp—a place along the journey where people stop to receive nourishment, training, basic supplies and encouragement.

“We’ve only been paying attention,” Rickel said, “to the people who stay. But maybe that’s not the purpose [of the base camp]. Maybe we’ve been treating base camps as permanent residences.”

In order to operate as base camps, Rickel said, congregations need not give up their identity or cease offering a challenging “rule for living.” In fact, he said, young adults are eager for such a challenge. But churches need to be able to witness to the gospel when they have only a few chances to reach any one person.

The article by Amy Frykholm is insightful and challenging. She details the cultural changes taking place, highlighting the work of sociologists like Robert Wuthnow and Wade Clark Roof, as well as pastors who are experiencing these changes in their ministry. At the same time, she reminds us all about the importance of community, and the central NT idea of membership.

Then, thanks to  Counterlight’s Peculiars, I read this thoughtful post from an atheist who attends church regularly:

So, I remain a non-believer in the pew. I don’t make a point of it, because after all I’m choosing to be there. I’m sure most of the folks in church don’t know or notice. Those that do, may think I’m simply “earlier on the journey” than others. (I think some people think I’m Jewish, based on the occasional question. This is a frequent assumption because I’m dark and strong-featured.)

Instead, I tend to think that I’ve gone much further. I’ve gone past being religious, through my religion-bashing phase and to some extent am post-religious. Now I can find the common ground with my socially progressive instincts and faith groups who articulate it on the ground.

Besides the music is great.

I find this perspective hopeful, much more so than that of the New Atheists or even this.

There was also this article from the National Geographic yesterday. Based on excavations in Turkey, Klaus Schmidt concludes:

The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with hundreds of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.

While he is open to changing his interpretation of the data, Schmidt concludes: “I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind.”