THE LAST HISTORICAL CHURCH

The Last Historical Church

Coleman, Phil

302

Church History II BM

The Last Historical Church

As Deisher and Gibbs (2000) have observed "the only show in town." It had little or no competition for people's attention. If they wanted to go anywhere, if they wanted to get out of the house, they went to church or Sunday School. There were few other options.

The Sabbath was sacrosanct. They didn't see people mowing their yards in those days, or even raking their leaves on Sunday. It was a day of rest, and few dared challenge the conventions of the day. Church, home and state worked together in a three way partnership to instill "Christian values" in people. And when most people looked around them, they saw a society that was "good, wholesome, and reasonable." (Mariden 1990) It was as if God was on his throne, and all was right with the world.

But then things began to change. The manager of a local Zayre store in Winston-Salem opened his doors on a Sunday. People were outraged and appalled by this act. It was as if Satan had decided to set up shop in town. Pastors protested this profaning of the Sabbath, but ever so slowly other stores extended their hours to Sunday as well(Miguel Torre 2009).

Slowly, but surely, people began to discover that they had options other than going to Church on Sunday. Restaurants, Movie Theaters, Malls, a whole host of alternatives to the church began to offer themselves to folks. And in surprisingly short order, what had been a day of rest, had became little different from any other day of the week. (Shelley 1996)

A lot of things began to change when that happened, but one thing remained the same. The Church went on as if nothing were different. Miguel and Torre (2009)describe this refusal to acknowledge this changed reality with a striking image. They contend that the institutional Church acted very much "like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her, but acting as if her family still controlled the city. Churches and Church leaders, Deisher and Gibbs (2000)argue, "have continued to think and act as if they were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid."

Even today, the church has yet to accept the fact that the world has undergone a profound change. In the fifties and sixties, folks went to church because they were supposed too. That's what they did on Sunday's. But today, people can make choices about how they would like to spend their time, and they do. It no longer works to have a sign out in the front yard announcing services, and then to wait for people to file in dutifully. In the world in which we live, the church has competition for people's time and attention, and they're not going to spend their time in worship on Sunday mornings just because they're supposed too

From the time of the nineteenth century, from Schleiermacher ...