5 October 2025

Christ in Every Age: The Age of Authenticity (ii)

Matthew 16:13-20

Whenever it was possible during my traveling last summer, I tried to get off the interstates and drive on state roads, so I went through a lot of little towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Soon I began to notice some repeated patterns. For instance, I saw a lot of former church buildings that had either been repurposed as something else or were just shuttered and abandoned. You know the ones: red brick or yellow stone, steps leading up to a big wooden front door underneath a bell tower, side windows with gothic arches. Some of them were now homes to historical societies or other civic groups, but one of them stood out to me. Coming down a hill into one little Pennsylvania burg, I saw one of these obvious former churches at the foot of the hill on my left, and as I passed I read the brand-new sign out front. It said “The Goddess Day Spa.” I’ve been kicking myself ever since for not pulling over and taking a picture, because that feels to me like a perfect snapshot of our age. Where once people had gathered to praise God together, now people make individual appointments to be pampered. In rooms where generations of women’s groups and mission committees had met to plan food drives for the local pantry, people now have facials, massages, waxing. The building once dedicated to Christ is now dedicated to “The Goddess,” who is, of course, us. 

Last week I described how the booming White church of the 1950s, with its identical men in neckties and crewcuts and identical women in white gloves and stylish updos, gave way in the 60s and 70s to a church that celebrated the individual. And this wasn’t bad. As we read in Psalm 139, God cares about us in intimate individual detail. Christ doesn’t call disciples just to group membership; he calls us one by one to unique tasks. When we began to recognize that in the church, some of us began working to welcome more and different people into the family of God. Again, this was good. But turning our attention away from the group toward each individual came with drawbacks. We began to redesign our programs to cater to individual preferences – separate worship services for every age group, for instance – and began to plan new church starts around demographic data and survey results and specialized target marketing – using the same process to start churches that Blockbuster Video would use to identify prospective locations. Churches began to see themselves less as ministers to the community than as service providers catering to the needs of their members. Churches began to act and present themselves as retail religion outlets, where the customer was always right. In short, not like churches at all. We wanted to be like, well, like Blockbuster Video. And it looks as if we’re succeeding.

We read from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 16, verses 13-20:

13Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ 14And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ 15He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ 16Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ 17And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 19I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ 20Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. 

There’s a lot in this scripture, but I want focus on just one detail. After Peter’s confession that Jesus was in fact the Messiah, Jesus promises that Peter would be the foundation of his church. But notice that Peter was not the one who would build the church; he was just the rock that Christ had chosen as a building site. Christ would build it, and what Christ builds, no power can tear down. The gates of Hades themselves cannot prevail against it. So let me repeat what I said at the end of my message last week: the Church of Jesus Christ is in no danger. It would be if saving the church was our job, but we are part of something far bigger than we humans could ever have created, or can ever destroy. That does not, however, mean that the church is never going to change. One reason I’ve taken us through a five-week survey of Christian history is to remind us that the church is always changing. The church in the 15th or 18th centuries, or even 75 years ago, did not look our church, but Christ was there, and Christ is with us as we are changing, too. So as I conclude this sermon and this series, let me say a few things about the ways that our church is adapting to our rapidly changing world, and offer a few humble suggestions for how to keep Christ before us as we ride that roller coaster.

First of all, it does seem fairly clear that the day of denominations is fading, and our large church organizations are going to continue to grow less significant. This isn’t the fault of those denominations. Those structures were put together during the Boomtown Church of the 50s, but we don’t have the resources to support those structures anymore. Besides, as I’ve said, Americans no longer trust large institutions. In those little Pennsylvania and Ohio towns with the closed traditional church buildings, I nearly always saw a new church as well: a non-denominational church in a prefab building on the outskirts of town. But the fading of denominational identity is not all bad. Our denominations used to be in competition, but increasingly, Christians are moving easily between them. A study done about 15 years ago indicated that in any given church, half of the members started out in a different denomination. And this religious mobility is not just between denominations but also between individual churches. I made a list this week of groups and ministries of our church that include people from other churches. Men at Prayer (our Men’s Bible Study), United Women of Faith, IM Church, Friends at the Lake, the Sunday morning book group, and even the Thursday quilting group. Meanwhile, some of our members are involved in events at other churches, like the women’s Bible over at Hope Methodist. This is a significant shift. Let me try to explain it this way. Remember how we oldsters used to buy music? We heard a song we liked on the radio, so we went down and bought the album. Then we listened to the whole thing, even the really cruddy songs on the B-side, because it was too much bother to fast-forward. Every post-iPod generation thinks that’s insane. Now people just buy the songs they like and make their own playlists. Well, church is getting to be like that, and many are getting involved in multiple churches at the same time: Sunday worship here, prayer group there, women’s group or children’s club somewhere else. When you add in online options, it gets even broader. We have people in other states who join us online for worship, because they like our worship services. We’re on their church playlists. Now there are drawbacks to this new pattern, but there are opportunities as well. 

Second, the old way of doing separate children and youth programs is disappearing. There just aren’t as many children and teens as there used to be. This is partly because the average church is smaller, but even more because the average family is smaller. But here again, this change is not all bad. One of the things we began doing in the 70s and 80s was running completely separate programs for each age group. In retrospect, that was not such a great plan. Children and youth who never went to the grown-up worship service never felt that they belonged there, so when they became adults, they didn’t go. This is why here at Lake Street we are intentional about involving all ages in as much as we can. We encourage our children and youth to be involved in our worship, and try to make our services accessible to all ages. We cancel our Sunday children’s and youth classes on third Sundays specifically so that they can be involved in the family pancake breakfast. Our goal for our children’s and youth programing is not to teach Bible facts but rather to incorporate those young people into the larger church community.

And that’s the third and most important thing: community. As a church in the Age of Authenticity, we must provide genuine community. Everything else that a church does can be outsourced, can be found somewhere else, in another church or online. If your preacher’s dull, you can find a good sermon or podcast somewhere else. If you don’t like the music, you can get that elsewhere, too. But increasingly in American society there is nowhere else where people can find true community – a place where you know you are loved, a place where people take care of each other, give each other rides to the doctor, help each other move, meet them for coffee – even if those people are different from us racially, socially, or generationally. Even if they vote differently than we do. How many other places can you think of where you can find that kind of community? 

Last week I our current worldview “The Age of Authenticity,” and while there were good things about this new worldview, there were also some serious drawbacks. Among those were a tendency to become self-absorbed and a crisis of isolation and loneliness. Fortunately, the church in every age has had an answer to those problems: community. We are to offer and to model what it is like to be a group of people who love others at least as much as we love ourselves, who give willingly of our time and attention to care for others, even when it’s inconvenient, who look beyond our own fellowship to the community around us and seek to show love there as well. This is our task, our calling, our mission. But be careful: we can’t just talk about community. We have to live it. This is the Age of Authenticity, and people who come to this place must know that that mutual love is real.