One of my passions is church history, and my particular area of study is Methodism in post-Revolutionary America. What you find in that period is a time of phenomenal growth, energy, conflict and struggle, which is where I focus. What you also find is that almost all of the history of the time focuses on the clergy rather than the laity. This includes my own writing which includes caveats like, "although methodism during this period was a lay driven enterprise, this paper will focus on the ordained clergy who made up only a small portion of those running the church."
Clergy provided support for local congregations, they did not run them. The laity served as class leaders, they served as preachers on most Sundays, they did the pastoral care, they led classes, they did everything except serve the sacraments (and if you go back just a little ways you will find them doing this as well, which is what leads to the formation of the church). The clergy helped "order" the church, but they weren't there to help run the church.
This changed predominantly after the Civil War, although the change began when the Bishops located themselves starting in the 1820s. But the decline of the Methodist class meeting, and the localization of pastors to serving only one congregation occured at the same time, and with that movement I believe we lost a lot of what drove Methodism. I know that is rather simplistic, because there were lots of other things taking place at the same time, but I don't have time in a blog to full explain everything that was going on.
Now there are some who are pushing for the return of Methodist class meetings, but this too often appears as trying to find the "thing" again. "If only we could return everyone to class meetings, we would solve all our problems." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. We cannot just take an 18th century creation and drop it onto a 21st century reality. I do believe strongly in small groups and believe that they can help us, but will they solve all of our problems? Of course not. We need to be much more comprehensive in our approach.
I do believe the early church has a lot to offer for us, but we need to look at it and see how we adapt it to our reality rather than trying to force something onto the church simply because it worked in the past. As a recent cartoon I saw of someone trying to teach a Sunday school class, which said "felt figure story telling worked when I was a kid, and it will work today." Meanwhile the little kid is in the corner playing with his PSP.
We also need to look at the early church and recognize the mistakes that they made which have burdened us with unsustainable structures, such as large gothic cathedrals that simply cannot be maintained. We need to fundamentally rethink what it means to be church, what membership means, what our buildings mean, what clergy represent, and we need to do this sooner rather than later.
In many ways the conversation is alreay too late as we are facing crisis daily that will force us to make decisions that we may regret, but we also need to begin now. This annual conference is going to look radically different in 10 years. Less than 25% of our churches will be filled by full-time clergy, and the vast majority will have less than 30 people in worship on Sunday.
We can either let this reality come up on us, or we can choose to do something about it: "the future is now."
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