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Val Tollefson's complaint about Pastor Ingqvist of the Lutheran church in Lake Wobegon is that he mumbles and he murmurs; it's a lot of on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand that. "He never comes straight out. He never puts the hay down where the goats can get it."
Putting the hay down where the goats can get it is a challenge for the church in every era. Perhaps it is no more so in ours than in others. But the goats seem to be moving more rapidly these days. They are more mobile, more consumer-oriented, and busier than they once were. They have more options for amusement; more claims on their allegiance; less loyalty to a denomination, and higher expectations for fulfillment than any flocks of recent memory.
Indeed, thinkers as various as David Wells and Martin Marty wonder if, in our preoccupation with reaching the goats, we have not forgotten the hay. Meanwhile, church-growth consultants insist that those who reckon themselves guardians of the hay do not understand the goats; Rich Mouw writes in Consulting the Faithful that the goats themselves may have wisdom we're not hearing. Getting the true hay to real goats is not a simple job.
So the work of sociologist Nancy Ammerman and her colleagues in Congregation and Community is both welcome and timely. It is an ambitious project, intended to serve as a sequel to H. Paul Douglass's classic 1925 study, Church in the Changing City.
The scope alone sets this work apart: a team of 17 researchers and writers studied nine communities scattered across the United States, identifying 449 churches and doing extensive research on two congregations in each community plus five mini-studies of other congregations. Congregation and Community is more empirically based than, say, Habits of the Heart, but it also aims to be a reflective consideration of the state of the church in America. It is painstakingly meticulous, thorough in detail, and will clearly be the definitive sociological study of the church for many years to come.
Ammerman is focusing on the interaction between congregations and their surrounding communities. Perhaps the most important metaphor here is the notion that churches exist as part of a religious ecology. As with any ecology, as the environment changes new life forms emerge and old ones fade from the scene. Although such change involves pain, Ammerman is enough of an ecclesiastical Darwinist to see it as a good thing. Ability to adapt to the environment becomes key to survival. This dynamic is increasingly important to the flourishing of the church.
For most of the 2,000-year existence of the church, the ecological system has changed relatively slowly. Gregorian chants held up pretty well from one generation to the next. Any given neighborhood in Sweden was likely to remain Swedish a century later, unless the Norwegians had been particularly restless.
But today, all bets are off. Musical tastes, ethnic composition, economic conditions, geographic mobility, and educational background shift like plates along the San Andreas fault, and churches that fail to respond to these changes are likely to fall through the cracks. Ammerman echoes a point made by Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, that the lack of an established, state-recognized church may be one of the most important factors in allowing the church to flourish: "With no government regulation or subsidy to keep outmoded religious institutions in place, the social processes of community formation govern the rise and fall of congregations, and the spiritual energies generated in congregations help to shape the social structures of communities" (emphasis Ammerman's). This makes all the more serious the central finding of the study: the most common response to change in the environment on the part of churches is inertia:
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