Making New Ways Out of Old Ways: Alternative Churches

Growing up, I was raised ELCA Lutheran and attended Catholic school through high school. I got the church experience from both sides. Sit, stand, pray, kneel, sing, sit, stand, sit. While both churches I went to differed in many ways, they had some things in common. For the most part, both services were very traditional.

Many people, including myself, associate the image of “church” with large sanctuaries inside a large building, with the pastor or priest wearing vestments (the fancy clothes you usually see them wearing during services,) sometimes incense, wood pews, a number of crosses and images of Jesus.

For some people, this traditional style of church is intimidating.

This intimidation has affected the church as a whole in America. Primarily, the Protestant church is seeing a rapid decline in membership. A leading response to this decline happens to be the rise of religious Nones. More and more, people are becoming less associated with church because of their disinterest, discontent, or discomfort with it. Declining numbers suggests that traditional ways of doing church are becoming less effective as they have been in the past.

For most, it isn’t that they don’t want to go to church. In fact, a lot of people have said they miss it. More and more, people are “shopping” around for services that are less traditional. There are places that offer more contemporary, alternative styles of worship. A couple examples are right here in the Twin Cities.

Places like Humble Walk are a response to the traditional forms of church. They’ve heard folks’ discontent with traditional styles of worship and styled a new kind with what they felt was most needed. While Humble Walk is more community-based, Mercy Seat, a Lutheran church in Minneapolis, is more liturgy-based. While maintaining a sense of ease and inclusivity, Mercy Seat uses chairs with backs instead of pews. Pastors Kae and Mark don’t wear the fancy vestments, but they do wear the white tabby collars you see most pastors wear. The music is entirely written and composed by the people performing it. There are babies and old people and everyone in between. The worship space is in a community center that’s shared with four other churches.

What is distinctive of the feel that Mercy Seat provides is the openness to questions. Their mission as an urban church is to provide “a creative response to a growing need for critical-thinking, grace-based Christian orthodoxy.” With a firm commitment to the arts, as well as children, Mercy Seat is what I would call alternatively traditional. It maintains the liturgy you would expect to see at a Lutheran church service, but throws in some spunk that keeps the punks-at-heart interested.

Churches are moving away from more traditional styles of worship and developing new ones. They recognize that some folks are looking to maintain some traditional aspects of worship, while others need to steer clear of it all together. They are acknowledging the feelings we are having about doing and being in church and are responding to us in alternative ways that say, “Come. Your questions are welcome here.”

A Humbling Walk in Questioning Faith

I am very overwhelmed.

I’ve been going to church services for a couple weeks and it’s been great. A rabbi gave a sermon at one service, I painted a tiny wooden ninja at another. At the Sunday evening service I attended at Humble Walk, something happened. As most of you know, I’m not the most expressive person when it comes to talking about my feelings. But what I experienced at Humble Walk Lutheran Church was everything having to do with feelings.

Whether it was the art gallery space that we were in for the service, the painting of the wooden ninjas beforehand, the snacks, the kindness of everyone, the fact that Pastor Jodi Houge was in jeans, or when she talked about just how simply weird church is in her sermon, I’m not sure. It was probably a combination of all of those that lead me to trying to hold back tears in the back row in my comfy chair. I was in the midst of the one of the best practices of community I’ve witnessed in a long time. It is that sense of community I’ve been waiting to either stumble upon, or have thrown at me.

I’ve never reacted emotionally to a church service before.

My girlfriend and I joke about how we can’t be seen doing cute things because “it’s not punk rock” and that’s sort of how I feel about talking about church. And as a young adult in America talking about church, I realize that it’s rare to hear of other Millennials talking about it as well. I get nervous about talking about my project and this blog because so many people I know and am friends with get uncomfortable with just the mentioning of the word “church.” I get uncomfortable too. It’s become such a taboo thing to talk about that people are leaving the church as an institution to go elsewhere, or nowhere at all.

More and more, scholars are finding a rapid increase in religious nones, or those categorized as “not affiliated” to a place of worship or tradition. This makes me a little bit anxious because of my current plans to attend seminary and eventually become a pastor. 

If people aren’t going to church, is what I want to do relevant?

As a young adult, and maybe as someone who you could call a "none", I want to find out why people are leaving church. I want to learn what people are doing to try and bring us back.

 

That’s a question a lot of faith leaders are asking these days. In response to that, a lot of churches are changing how they do services while maintaining their identities as faith communities. In an interview I had with Rob Fohr, Youth Catalyst at the Presbyterian Mission Agency, he argued that churches need to continue to be who they are and not change in ways that people will like them more (that sounds a lot like some of the relationship advice I got in high school.)

This whole experience is forcing me to come to terms with the fact that if I am to work in a church in my future, I need to start talking about it now so I don't have a breakdown in front of my community members in the middle of a sermon. I need to become comfortable with church again. With going to services and just simply saying it. Church.