{"id":4,"date":"2010-04-25T11:28:20","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T11:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/christianityfortherestofus\/2010\/04\/congregations-in-the-public-square.html"},"modified":"2010-04-25T11:28:20","modified_gmt":"2010-04-25T11:28:20","slug":"congregations-in-the-public-square","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/2010\/04\/congregations-in-the-public-square.html","title":{"rendered":"Congregations in the Public Square?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I’m on my way
\nto New York today to speak at Middle Collegiate Church<\/a> on the subject of “Congregations
\nin the Public Square,” the sort of topic socially aware Protestants like to
\ndiscuss.  <\/span>When I learned of the
\ntopic, I thought, “That won’t be too hard.”  <\/span>But, the more I stew on it, the more difficult the
\nassignment seems.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 The
\nreason?  <\/span>All three
\nwords–“congregations,” “public,” and “square”–are up for definitional grabs at
\nthe moment.  <\/span>Congregations are
\ngoing through profound change; the public is nothing short of surly; and square
\nseems an inadequate term for our common life. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

First,
\ncongregations.  <\/span>The traditional
\ncongregations (mainline, evangelical, Catholic, and otherwise) in which
\nreligious people gather are in a persistent pattern of erosion.  <\/span>Only about 15%-18% of Americans attend
\nreligious services on a weekly basis; somewhere between a third and a half of
\nthe population “rarely” or “never” attends a religious service in a building.  <\/span>Patterns of churchgoing–and synagogue,
\ntemple, and mosque going–are much different in the US than they were a
\ngeneration ago.  <\/span>The FACT 2008 (Hartford
\nSeminary) survey<\/a> found that there exists “<\/span>An emerging, but persistent and broad based
\ndownward drift in congregational vitality…” in every religious group in
\nAmerica.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, public.  <\/span>Exactly
\nwhat is “public” anyway?  <\/span>Recently,
\na friend worried that I was talking about “private” things too much in “public”
\non Facebook.  <\/span>I didn’t know how to
\nrespond to this concern. 
\n<\/span>Essentially, the line between public and private has become a picket
\nfence–if it hasn’t completely disappeared.  <\/span>Since the Civil Rights and feminist movements of the late 20th<\/sup>
\ncentury, theologians have argued that the “personal is political.”  <\/span>Indeed, in the 21st<\/sup> century,
\nwe could rightly expand that thought to the “private is public” and vice versa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Third, square.  <\/span>When we
\nthink of the American commons, is “square” the image that comes to mind?  <\/span>The language, of course, is an old
\nmetaphor for the square park that used to exist at the center of many America
\ntowns.  <\/span>That square typically had a
\nchurch on one side, city hall on the other, with other civic buildings on the
\nremaining sides.  <\/span>The lovely and
\nnostalgic image of such a square is a deeply inadequate rendering of
\ncontemporary American common life. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What does all this mean? 
\n<\/span>Except for the fact that the words congregation, public, and square mean
\nnext to nothing in our social imagination, I’m not entirely sure.  <\/span>But when we think of how faithful
\npeople engage in politics it would be helpful to rethink these three words by
\nasking three questions:  <\/span>1) How do
\npeople gather now and how do the ways in which we gather inspire political
\naction?  <\/span>2) Who and what
\nconstitutes “public” in a deeply pluralistic and often divided society?  <\/span>3) What image might replace the
\nold-fashioned square in such a way that we open our imaginations to new ways
\nof engaging concerns of justice, peace, and poverty? <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I don’t really know the answers to these questions.  <\/span>But I humbly suggest that we might go
\nfurther today if we think about “Faith Gatherings around a Communal Circle”
\ninstead of “Congregations in the Public Square.”  <\/span>What do you think?  <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m on my way to New York today to speak at Middle Collegiate Church on the subject of “Congregations in the Public Square,” the sort of topic socially aware Protestants like to discuss.  When I learned of the topic, I thought, “That won’t be too hard.”  But, the more I stew on it, the more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-history-and-theology","category-religion-and-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nCongregations in the Public Square? - Christianity for the Rest of Us<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/2010\/04\/congregations-in-the-public-square.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Congregations in the Public Square? 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She holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Duke University and is the author of seven books including A People\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s History of Christianity: the Other Side of the Story (HarperOne, 2009) Her best-selling Christianity for the Rest of Us (2006) was named as one of the best religion books of the year by Publishers Weekly and Christian Century, won the Book of the Year Award from the Academy of Parish Clergy, and was featured in a cover story in USA TODAY. Diana regularly consults with religious organizations, leads conferences for religious leaders, and teaches and preaches in a variety of venues. She regularly comments on religion, politics, and culture in the media including USA TODAY, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, CNN, FOX, PBS, and NPR. From 1995-2000, she wrote a weekly column on American religion for the New York Times Syndicate. She has written widely in the religious press, including Sojourners, Christian Century, Clergy Journal, and Congregations. From 2002 to 2006, she was the Project Director of a national Lilly Endowment funded study of mainline Protestant vitality\u00e2\u20ac\u201da project featured in Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Diana also serves on the board of directors of the Beatitudes Society. Diana has taught at Westmont College, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Macalester College, Rhodes College, and the Virginia Theological Seminary. She has taught church history, American religious history, history of Christian thought, religion and politics, and congregational studies. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia. She is a member of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in downtown Washington, D.C.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/author\/dbbass"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/66"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christianityfortherestofus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}