The church at a new crossroads | Opinion
This 1997 file photo shows historic Trinity Church in the heart of New York's financial district surrounded by more modern buildings, including the now-destroyed World Trade Center. Ryan Sanders writes that the American church is perpetually at crossroads of progress, conflict, beauty and tragedy, virtue and vice. In 1936, a Dallas artist named Charles Bowling painted a simple, rectangular scene of a small country church, steepled, clapboarded and painted white, on the flat Texas plain.
There are the technological disruptions that have now become as mundane as a mute button. In the last few years, this is where pandemic safety and convenience met isolation and distortion. Some churches have continued headlong down the tracks of virtual worship, even virtual membership, shifting their entire presence online with “digital pastors” and sermons on demand. Others can’t abide excarnating an experience that has flesh and blood at its center.
Are churches the place to learn about gender and sexuality anyway? Fidelity, family life and child rearing? Is the mission of the church to build strong families? Or strong communities? Is it to care for a parish? Bless neighbors? Is it to preach the Gospel? Or wage culture wars? Or fund political action committees?
I like to think of Bowling’s little country church somewhere in Dallas, walled in now by the detritus of 87 years of progress: office towers and freeways and strip malls and homeless camps.
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