Traditional religions facing issues of relevance

Stacy J. Willis

Wednesday, Oct. 14, 1998 | 11:24 a.m.

Vegas Vic is over-extended in time and money.

He is fairly well educated, interested in health and fitness, and likes contemporary music.

And he's skeptical about organized religion.

Vic, his wife Victoria and their children Vince and Vickie, are demographic profiles of the typical Las Vegas Christian family, assembled by administrators at Shadow Hills Baptist Church.

"Vegas Vic is just one of the tools we use to see who we're targeting," said the Rev. Michael Rochelle, who has been at the helm of Shadow Hills for 12 years. "He prefers the casual and informal over the formal, large groups over small, and he likes where he lives in Las Vegas."

Shadow Hills, which has 2,200 Sunday attendees and ranks as one of the larger Southern Baptist Churches in Las Vegas, has been strategizing for years to accommodate the changing preferences of "modern" Christians. Although the church holds onto its Southern Baptist affiliation, Rochelle said that in order to stay relevant to his congregation the church has become "less Baptistic than some other Baptist churches."

But Shadow Hills is not alone in negotiating the compromise between formal denominational traditions and the preference of a growing portion of Christians for the contemporary services offered by nondenominational churches.

Nationally, membership in once overflowing churches such as Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist is on the decline -- with growth rates dropping more than 30 percent during the last 30 years, according to the 1998 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches -- while membership in nondenominational and evangelical Christian churches is on the rise.

In order to stay afloat, many denominational churches are making changes in their services -- and in some cases their teachings -- to compete with the contemporary flavor of the nondenominational churches.

But making changes to tradition is often met with resistance. Members and leaders of many denominational Christian churches are divided, and some think the divisions are serving to further erode their church's strength. Should they adapt their services and beliefs to reflect popular culture -- or stick to traditions at the risk of becoming obsolete?

The "modernizing" changes some churches have made run the gamut, from what seem like benign details to complete theological overhauls:

Thee and thou vs. you.

Organs vs. guitars.

Liturgy issues -- when does the congregation speak? Is there a script?

And finally, the beliefs -- the significance of the blood of Christ, the baptism, the role of women in the church, the acceptance of homosexuality, and the very nature of the relationship between humans and Jesus Christ -- is man innately a sinner? Is God working for humans, or are humans working for God?

"Most folks out there have been asking 'Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?"' said the Rev. Hoyt Savage of Foothills Baptist Church. "And a personal faith relationship with Christ does help a person understand those questions.

"The essence of being a Christian is in receiving Christ -- confession of sins, repentance -- a willingness to change, and faith. Faith that Jesus paid our penalty and provided salvation for us.

"But it is a different question to ask, 'What need does that meet in the Generation X or Boomer person?"'

(SUBHEAD: Clinging to tradition)

To some mainline Christians, the latter question -- that of modern relevance -- is irrelevant. Biblical and denominational liturgical traditions rank first, at all costs.

On Sunday evenings, one such group -- members of Las Vegas's St. George's Episcopal Church -- meet inside a borrowed room at a Lutheran church to hold services based on a prayer book written in 1928.

There are about 20 members, their funds are limited, they have no church, and they were able only recently to hire a full-time priest.

"We're trying to cling to the old ways, you might say," said Irene Schwarz, a member of the church.

St. George's belongs to a group of Episcopalians that broke with other Episcopal churches two decades ago in objection to the modernization of the prayer book, which they say caused a watering-down of liturgy and a liberalization of beliefs.

"The problem with human nature is the desire to go with the trends," said Father Gordon Hines, the priest at St. George's. "But truth is eternal, and there are absolute standards with respect to morality, and the Episcopal church made some liberalizing decisions we don't agree with."

Among those decisions, Hines said, were the acceptance of females into the priesthood, increased tolerance of homosexuality, and a de-emphasis on worship practices such as baptism, confirmation, and the Holy Eucharist.

"At times it does feel like an uphill battle," said Hines. "But I try to look at the leaders throughout history who went against the tide, and they've been unpopular, but you're not here to please men, you're here to please God."

(SUBHEAD: Signs of change)

Call her Mother. As male priests are called Father.

Several years ago, Gae Chalker ran a Las Vegas Barbizon beauty school. Today, she wears a priest's collar.

"I think what is feminine is to be valued," she said. "It is a gift from God. It has a very definite place within an ordained ministry."

Chalker, 44, is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. She is the first woman priest at Christ Church, which is one of the oldest Episcopalian churches in Las Vegas, built in 1965.

"I don't come here with what I would call a feminist agenda, oh no, definitely not," she said. "If anything, I'm on the conservative side. But there has been a denial of the feminine in the church. God is both (genders) and neither, and all of the above."

Chalker, who is married and the mother of one son, was raised in the Episcopal faith. When she was 18, she left the church and "went searching" for spiritual fulfillment in other traditions. One year, she studied Zen Buddhism from which, she said, she learned more about prayer than she had learned in her first years as an Episcopalian.

"I learned about prayer in the sense of not always talking to God, but learning how to listen to God," she said. "The thing is, that's always been a part of the Christian tradition, too, but it's been on the back burner because it's mystical, and there was a time when the mystical was avoided. So a lot of folks ended up looking in Eastern traditions."

Today she tries to incorporate that style of prayer, whether it is from the Buddhist or Christian tradition, into her teachings.

She also draws on her years of teaching teenagers at the Barbizon school in her priesthood, she said.

"Since I worked with youth, it's important for me to speak to them," she said.

Teens and 20-somethings, she said, often do not respond well to the formal language and music in traditional Episcopalian liturgy.

"We're working on ways to make it more comfortable for them," she said. "Kids want a community, too -- an environment where they can be accepted."

Still, she is cautious about straying too far from the church's traditional, more formal roots.

"I have mixed feelings about it," she said. "We have to be flexible, but we also have to be leaders, the ones who speak out and lead the culture, rather than following it."

(SUBHEAD: Bureaucracy is shunned)

This summer Methodist leaders grabbed headlines by ruling that ministers should not perform gay marriages. Presbyterian leaders recommended that members rid their homes of handguns. Baptists issued a pronouncement on the supportive role of wives.

But official statements, issued with vague authority by a remote group of appointed or elected leaders through a sometimes cumbersome hierarchy, are enthusiastically ignored by many a church-goer.

"Denominational statements are hardly studied or understood by people in the churches," said the Rev. Jerry Blankenship, a Methodist chaplain.

"It takes time and countless hours and blood and sweat and tears and effort to hammer out some of these statements. I'm not sure why they do it. That kind of bureaucracy may very well be something that turns some people away."

For those who are not turned away from attending, however, the bureaucratic authority may serve only to erode any real sense of denominational loyalty.

Many Presbyterians did not even hear about the Presbyterian (U.S.A) General Assembly's recommendation against handguns, and those who did were indifferent, according to the Rev. Rick Karns, associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Las Vegas.

"I don't think it will affect members much," he said. "It's only a recommendation. It's up to each individual church to choose to share with people about the recommendation -- probably through brochures inserted in newsletters. But the General Assembly issues a book of recommendations the size of the telephone white pages."

"I don't think people react to a pronouncement from the General Assembly," Karns said. "Most of us have our minds made up about what we think is right and wrong before we get to the church."

Members of the church agreed.

"I stay so far out of Presbyterian politics," said one woman who attends the church regularly. "To me, it's just a lot of gobbledygook.

"I've been a Presbyterian all my life, but I don't know why," she said. "If someone asks me what (religion) I am, I just tell them I'm a believer in Jesus Christ."

(SUBHEAD: Can denominations survive?)

So what's the point in having denominational governing bodies if their messages are routinely ignored by the regular worshipper?

"It used to be that the denomination was the facilitator, but that funnel turned upside down. Now churches are saying to the denominational hierarchy, 'Why do you have the authority to tell us what to do?"' said Shadow Hills Baptist's Rochelle.

"The programs they recommend are irrelevant. It's particularly true in the west, because with the Southern Baptist Convention, the strength is from Texas east, so they design programs for them, not for western churches, which are more casual and often more independent," Rochelle said.

The main advantage to staying in the Southern Baptist denomination, he said, is the ability to pool resources with the 36,000 other churches to send missionaries overseas or help disaster-stricken areas. Denominations should focus more on those types of efforts than on top-down "how-to-run-your-church statements," he said.

In 1997, when the Southern Baptist Convention recommended that members boycott Disney because of the corporation's liberal stance on gay issues, Rochelle did not ask his members to follow suit.

"There is a lot of disunity among Southern Baptists," he said. "They can't make us do anything. Some of my members refused to buy Disney products, some continued to do as they always have.

"I don't think we'll see denominations completely dissipate yet, but if they don't structure themselves differently, they'll lose their effectiveness...Who runs the Southern Baptist Convention now? Men who are 50 or older. We're dragging people kicking and screaming into the 1980s. We're nowhere near the 1990s yet."

Karns said he expects the denominational systems to give way to revised, more contemporary churches, not unlike the nondenominational megachurches which are drawing thousands of former denominational Christians.

"I think we're seeing the death of denominationalism, and that's not necessarily bad," Karns said. "That's part of the cycle of things. When things are no longer useful, they die, and there is a resurrection, a new life."

"That doesn't mean we don't hold sacred as Presbyterians what we always have, but we've been trying to reach people using colonial messages," he said.

Historically, Karns said, Presbyterians have been known as upper- to middle-class whites, with a mild-mannered worship style, and a "think-for-yourself" brand of theology. Now, the church is slowly loosening up its worship practices, making its language gender-neutral, offering more contemporary music, and setting its sights on increasing racial diversity.

"I don't think we've done a good job of conveying the richness of our spiritual convictions historically," Karns said. "We've done a good job with 'Fold your hands and bow your heads,' but people want more than that now.

"We've been asked by the General Assembly to increase to 10 percent our ethnic participation by the year 2000...We'll try to be more sensitive to ethnic differences -- but how do you reach out to them in a much different socio-economic class? How do you reach out and make them feel important, which they are, but we never re-affirm that. We're going to work on that."

(Subhead: Increasing the offerings)

At the Country Western Gospel Contemporary Lutheran Sunday worship service, the Honky Tonk Angels get the Lutherans on their feet. After services, some may engage in a little "spiritual journaling," or join a "caring ministry" in which they raise money for the indigent in El Salvador.

"We are a full service church," said the Rev. Ray Christenson, of Community Lutheran Church in Las Vegas, where the 2,500 or more members have a choice of six different weekend services -- ranging from country-western to contemporary/ light rock to traditional Lutheran liturgy to Spanish-language services.

"That's a trend that's occurring more and more: Why not do internal segregation -- give the people who want contemporary services what they want, and give the people who want traditional services what they want.

"The difference is mostly the music, but it's also little things, like do I stay behind the pulpit, or walk around," Christenson said. "In the traditional services, they like me to stay behind it. I'm probably more comfortable walking around, but I can do either."

For now, the diversified menu of worship services at Community Lutheran is proving to be a successful strategy in retaining and attracting members who otherwise might attend contemporary services at a nondenominational church, Christenson said. But the road to diversity has not been without controversy.

"It divided the church," Christenson said. "Two-thirds of any major denomination say 'Don't you dare compromise who we are' -- they don't want to compromise the traditional values to what they think are the values of today."

Christenson has been the leader of the church for 25 years, and seen the church adapt and grow with the times.

"I think once you know where you're going, you attract some people and you lose some people, and that's just the way it is," he said. "But what is happening nationally is happening in Las Vegas -- and that is, we're becoming a secular society, and also, there is a larger spectrum of people coming from backgrounds we can't embrace in the Judeo-Christian traditions, so we have to adapt."

Other changes in the church include an increase in small study groups, on topics ranging from Bible study to arts and crafts. One thousand people per week attend one or more of the 70 small group meetings at Community Lutheran, Christenson said.

Additionally, people are showing an increased interest in community involvement, he said.

"People want to do ministry and not just be ministered to more now," he said. "In the old days, they just wanted to hear the minister. Now, they go out and visit more sick people than I do."

Christenson is aware that Community Lutheran's offerings seem overwhelmingly similar to those at a nondenominational megachurch, if not identical. He said many Las Vegans consider his church to be nondenominational -- referring to it as Community Church, dropping mention of "Lutheran."

But he is emphatic that the church is still Lutheran, noting that members still use the Lutheran Book of Worship, and that traditional liturgy is still available.

"Other people may think we're not Lutheran, but we know we're Lutheran," he said. "Martin Luther would be comfortable here."

(TAG:)

Sunday: Catholics -- who make up the largest religious group in Las Vegas -- are striving to accommodate a growth in the number of parishioners.

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