Out With The Olds

This is not a Babylon Bee article, I swear. A church in Cottage Grove, Minn., has gone slap crazy:

A prayer for survival rose from the back of the church last Sunday.

“I pray for this church, getting through this age-discrimination thing,” said William Gackstetter, as the gray-haired heads around him nodded in agreement.

Gackstetter and other members of the Grove United Methodist Church in Cottage Grove are upset enough that their church is closing in June. What makes it worse is that their church is reopening in November — pretty much without them.

The church wants to attract more young families. The present members, most of them over 60 years old, will be invited to worship somewhere else. A memo recommends that they stay away for two years, then consult the pastor about reapplying.

Officials say the church needs a reset, and reopening the church is the best way to appeal to younger people.

But the older church members say they see that as an insult.

“This is totally wrong,” said Gackstetter’s wife, Cheryl. “They are discriminating against us because of our age.”

After the plan was explained by a visiting pastor on Jan. 5, she said, “I called him a hypocrite. I said, ‘You are kicking us out of our church.’ ”

That little congregation is dying. They have only 25 people on Sunday. Something has to happen. The plan is to kick out the olds. Because they’re dragging everybody down, ad because Jesus wants them to

“Jesus said we are called to reach new people,” said Wetterstrom.

He said that Methodists’ regional Annual Conference is paying $250,000 to restart the church. They have hired a specialist in starting new churches — Jeremy Peters.

Peters, 30, has moved to Cottage Grove with his wife and two children. He is working with community groups, laying the groundwork for the relaunch, probably in November.

“It’s a new thing with a new mission for a new target,” said Peters, “and a new culture.”

Read it all.

Look, if the Methodist conference considered asking the black people in the church to leave, because they were scaring away new people, would that proposal have gotten out of the conference room? Of course not. But old people — hey, no problem. They’re getting in the way of progress. Their walkers are in the way of people getting out to the coffee bar in the lobby, I guess.

I don’t get it. Honestly, I don’t. I totally get telling people to stay away because they are unrepentant sinners. But being old is not a sin. Is it?

UPDATE: A reader posts an interesting comment:

As a theological conservative in a liberal mainline denomination, I would suggest that there is probably a lot more to this story than what is presented in the article. and I would not assume that it is a case of godless liberal bureaucrats vs. poor, faithful elderly parishioners.

There are a lot – a LOT – of seriously declining mainline congregations out there, and for most of these congregations there is only a limited time left before the work and expense of keeping the doors open become too much for the few people left. In almost every situation, the small band of elderly parishioners have no desire, motivation or idea how to grow their congregation, and are typically fully on board with their denomination’s liberal drift. They will refuse to change anything, but expect the minister to magically bring in a bunch of new folk who will bring with them invisible children, contribute large amounts to the church, but be content with having no say in how it is run. These folk will retain a death grip on the church governance.

I am in a mainline denomination and I see this ALL THE TIME. Most liberal denominational leaders are happy to let the congregation die out, then sell the building. Truth be told, most of these aging dying congregations are quite liberal and so the liberal leadership won’t challenge them. Most liberal leaders have no clue how to plant or grow a new church. Occasionally there are people (usually more orthodox/conservative) who are interested in renewing the church, but they are powerless to do anything because the elderly, liberal parishioners hold a death grip on power in the parish.

That leaves only two options to revitalize a church. One is to plant a new congregation in an existing parish (i.e., leave the dying congregation in place and plant a completely new congregation to use the same building). Two is to close the parish down, albeit earlier than you would have (but probably only +/- 5 years earlier than it would have closed anyway), let the building sit vacant for half a year and then plant a new congregation.

There are pros and cons to both models. In the first model, the aging existing congregation is typically very needy to their pastors, and they will often work to sabotage the plant. Furthermore, the aging congregation is typically liberal, while you need a conservative to successfully plant a new congregation. In the second model, the con is very obvious as described in this article — the optics are bad as a church is shut down a bit early. My strong suspicion is that anyone from the old congregation who is willing to be constructive in contributing to a new church plant would be very welcome to take part.

One last point — consider the wider issue of the dying older mainline denominations (e.g. Episcopal Church) vs. the young upstart conservative offshoot denominations (e.g. ACNA). The dying old denomination maintained a death grip on the denomination and refused to change. The folks interested in growing an orthodox church had to leave and start their congregations from scratch. It’s kind of the same dynamics.

This is really interesting. Thanks for it. I hadn’t thought that left-right ideology had anything to do with this Minnesota situation. Based on what has been reported, it looks like that congregation couldn’t survive, and probably needs to wind down. I can’t blame the Methodist conference for wanting to do something different to revive that parish. But man, to tell old people to go away and only come back if they have permission — that is just awful.

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