The Church in an Age of Scarcity

A couple of weeks ago Jason Evans started to post about the recession and the church which started me thinking as I was reading Howard Kunstler’s excellent book, The Long Emergency (Wikipedia summary – Full text available on at Google Books) for about the third time. If you haven’t read it, you need to.

I don’t know if I totally accept all of Kunstler’s findings. While I accept that technology today does not allow us to deal with the problems of living in age of scarcity, technology in a capitalistic society does tend to bridge a lot of gaps when the capital is there for innovation as it will be in the future. At the same time I accept his statement that the western world as we know it is not based on democracy, Christianity, or the pursuit of liberty, it is based on cheap oil and natural gas. Of course we are running out of those two commodities…

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.
And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world’s second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China’s surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places — the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia — and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world’s remaining oil in the process.
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

Which will mean that we need to make some changes

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Over the years I had a lot of discussions on what this will mean to the church. Chris Marshall is wondering the same thing

My truck is paid off but the gas prices are killing me. I don’t drive that much and its over $300 per month, not including my wife’s car. So what does this project to as a national economy? Recession seems inevitable, will it go way beyond that? A nation already ruled by fear and over-spending with no margins by individuals and the government, what will be the consequences?

How will this impact churches and mortgages and credit lines that can’t be fed? As builders pass on who are the committed givers what is left? 1/2 of boomers are there to give and the other 1/2 are driven past their financial margins with consumerism and can’t help. Gen X and Millenials have very little value in long term commitments, are all about instant gratification and consumerism is their native language. Commonly this group of up and comers are living on 125-140% of their income taking on exponential debt per year. What will be the result of these decisions having no margins when the shoe drops?

Will American churches go the way of their European counterparts? Becoming really funky coffee houses, restaurants, art galleries and dance clubs. Just things I wonder about.

I know a couple of people who are the boards of Bible colleges and seminaries who talk about getting new projects done in the next couple of years before the builders who give most of the money to churches and institutions pass away. After that they know that the money will be in far less supply. On top of that, while churches like to talk about sacrificial giving and committed tithers, most studies show that people give when the economy is good and are more casual tithers. When faced with higher heating costs, much higher fuel prices, and more money to go to food, will the cash go to paying the churches bills or their own bills?

One thing that economists have been saying for a long time is that our lifestyle is being financed by VISA and when a recession hits, it will hurt those that are carrying debt the most. In 2004, Maclean’s ran this story about Canadian’s personal debt being at record levels.

And so this summer Russell Kent and his wife, Mary, joined the legions of other young families in opting to ignore the admonitions they’d heard from their parents and taking the plunge into home ownership. They bought a house in the suburbs north of Toronto – and in the process have run up their debts far above anything they’d ever imagined. The house cost more than the top amount they’d intended to spend. They had to drain much of their savings and load up on personal lines of credit to muster a 25 per cent down payment. In total, they now owe roughly $340,000, spread across a mortgage, three lines of credit and two credit cards. Every month, $920 goes to pay interest on the cards and bank lines, and another $1,460 toward the mortgage. Mary also spends $300 a month to lease her car. Debt payments eat up close to a third of their after-tax income. Russell says making ends meet over the next few years will be “like stretching a gnat’s ass over a rain barrel.”
If the Kents feel intimidated by the debt challenge ahead of them, they’re not alone. Collectively, Canadian consumers now owe $752.1 billion, according to Bank of Canada, up 36 per cent in the past 10 years when adjusted for inflation. Over the same period, personal disposable income, or take-home pay, has risen 15 per cent. In other words, Canadians are piling on debt more than twice as fast as their income is growing.

It is conceivable that many churches in a particular region of the country could find themselves in a horrible financial mess when funds drive up and the demand on church and other social services intensifies. While many recessions are relatively short lives to the last big one in the 1970s, there are many who are forecasting the next economic meltdown to last much longer. Of course this will hit the church in a couple of ways.

The Church, Powered by VISA. Several friend who are pastors bring up the point that their churches have some serious debt and if giving goes down then things will be really tough… of course the good news is that banks aren’t all that thrilled with foreclosing on banks but have been known to demand spots on church boards as a condition for continued solvency. For churches who are owing to their denominations, the money that comes from those investments is now tied down which impacts other areas of church life. Depending on the denomination, it could have a serious impact on church planting/missions or other areas that are dependent on investment income (as if the downtown in the economy won’t have a big of enough negative impact). Even in a church of people committed to tithing (which Barna reminds us is a rarity), 10% of a reduced income is still less. Add on top of that rising food and fuel costs, we may have a lot less to give above and beyond.
Running on Empty| With today’s gas price at $1.31, Wendy and I are driving a lot less then we ever have before. I am walking to work and if Wendy wasn’t on medical leave, she recently was transferred down the street to 33rd Street Safeway. She says that even at -40 degree Celsius she is walking (I’ll believe it when I see it) to work. I was listening to a podcast with Todd Hunter who talked about that at a church he previously pastored, they would track how far people were driving to the church. At Lakeview, we used to talk about being a city wide church where people used to drive in as far as Borden to attend church there. Will people drive at $1.50 a litre, $1.75 a litre, $2.00 a litre? Kunstler talks about a localization of the economy in The Long Emergency and I wonder if that applies to the religion as well. Will the small Baptist church at the end of the street look more attractive then the regional megachurch on the outskirts of town? Especially when you can do as Charlie Wear blogs about where he found his sermon to listen to last week on YouTube. Of course some are going to say, video churches are the answer and they might be if you believe that only dominant alpha males have the right to speak about how to deal with stress in your families for 14 weeks straight. I personally prefer the idea of local expressions of Christian community throughout the city.
Expensive Natural Gas | When natural gas was cheap like borscht (which itself is becoming more expensive) I hated visiting mostly rural churches that lowered their ceilings to save on heating costs. Now they are looking smarter and I look out of date. Most churches are really costly to heat and keep functioning for what is still primarily a Sunday event. Of course you can keep it cold in there during the week and hot during the summer to keep costs down but churches are pretty expensive to run considering many of them aren’t used that often compared to other facilities their size. There are other options that can be used. Look at how the Freeway uses their space for the community or as I have blogged about forever. Of course there are a lot of options for making it cheaper to heat but perhaps going the other way and making them useful spaces again is the better option. I keep thinking to what Steve Collin‘s did up as his efforts for rebranding the Church of England. He was re-imagining church interiors as public spaces again in the city, the local church as a third space, a place to work, rest, and pray and being surrounded by spiritual resources as opposed to something that was open from 10:30a to 12:30p on Sunday’s. To answer Chris Marshall’s earlier question, maybe the future of the church is to embrace what the Europeans are doing to churches before the churches themselves die off. Of course the other alternative would be to start weaning ourselves off our addiction to church buildings. Look at what ReImagine is doing in San Francisco or what the Hawthorn House is doing in San Diego is doing without a traditional church facility.
The one other thing that needs to be addressed is the issue of the Clergy Class. I don’t have a problem with highly educated and well taught clergy but the process to get them to this point is expensive and this is paid for by one of three methods. 1) Rich parents 2) Marry rich (this idea was suggested to me in college) 3) Student loan debt. All three of these funding options have advantages and drawbacks but the most popular option is often student loans which tends to make hiring clergy expensive. I am not badmouthing clergy but if we stick with the current method of church leadership, the economics will need to be rethought out and since our current best idea is debt financing, I doubt there is a pile of money out there to fix the issue. Either we figure out a way to make private education a lot cheaper, we accept the fact that only wealthy churches get qualified church leadership, or we rethink ways to develop leaders. During the Great Depression, my grandfather’s theological education came through correspondence classes. During the age of YouTube, I am sure we can come up something as least as effective and maybe quite a bit better.

I am a disciple of Thomas Homer-Dixon and I tend to think that there will be an upside of the coming age of scarcity. I think the church has a tremendous opportunity during this period of change. Of course a lot of things we think are sacred cows will be turned into black angus burgers but c’mon, it isn’t as if we did that well during the age of abundance anyways. While managing to start a bunch of megachurches, we also managed to usher the church into a very long period of decline and irrelevance and that was after spending billions and billions on church growth. As we enter into a new age of global warming, scarcity, and perhaps conflict over resources, maybe the church adapt a little better this time.

Also: Alan Creech has posted some more thoughts on his blog