In yesterday’s AJC there was a picture of man with a colander on his head. It seems that he’s a Pastafarian, and he’s claiming that the head dress was a part of his religion. If, he says, other religions are allowed to wear their head coverings (yarmulkes, hijabs) in driver license photographs, he should be able to wear his.

The Pastafarians, as with all religions, have their own creation story, and they have exchanged the 10 Commandments for the 8 I Really Wish You Wouldn’ts.

Now this guy is at war with the DMV about whether he can wear a colander in his license photo.

Starting new religions isn’t a new thing. When I was in college we claimed that the only thing that kept us from starting one was that we couldn’t find a virgin to sacrifice. It was all done in good, clean and possibly heretical fun.

However, for people my age, there’s another trend in religion that’s a lot more serious, another fragmentation of the faith.

In my home town the first street north of Main is Church Street, so called because four of the town’s half-dozen or so churches were on it. Benson Baptist, then the largest in town, sat on one corner. Three blocks away was the Methodist. And a couple of blocks from that were the Pentecostal Church and the Catholic Church.  

One street over, on Hill Street, were the Freewill Baptist Church and the Presbyterian Church.

It was all very orderly. You could walk by all of Benson’s major religious establishments in less than 10 minutes.

The churches are still there. However, it’s a lot like the kindergarten rhyme:

This is the church.
This is the steeple.
Open the door, and where are the people.

The membership of every major denomination is falling, and according to several studies attendance as a percentage of membership is declining still more. According to one study, actual “regular” church attendance is about half of what the self-reported studies are showing.

Where did all the people go?

Some of them died. Some just decided to stay home. Some went to megachurches. And some join tiny congregations housed in storefronts on Main Street. Benson has three of them in one block.

It’s this group that really interests me.

I know from experience that orthodoxy is a very tricky thing. Some years back, I discovered that my explanation of the Trinity—admittedly convenient and simplistic—had been declared heretical in the fourth century after a hundred years or more of debate. I can’t help wonder what the storefront preachers, fervent but not necessarily well-schooled, bring to the Faith. Or even whether the fact that they are necessarily well-schooled is a good thing or a bad thing.

We don’t know what these storefront churches will mean to Christianity in our country. As somebody, maybe Niels Bohr, once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

However, we can look back at the Reformation and see a pattern. Of the churches started during the Reformation, some took root and grew. Some were popular for a while, then disappeared. And some started small and stayed that way. Any of these may be true for the church snuggled between the barber shop and the hair salon.

Whatever their future, in the spirit of brotherly love and having observed what is happening and has happened to organized religion, I have a few suggestions for New Year’s Resolutions these churches can have for today. Maybe they are sufficiently baggage-free that they can actually use them.

1.   Act like Jesus. It seems that we have gotten so caught up in denominational dogma that we’ve lost sight of the Biblical Jesus. He didn’t have a Recreational Building or a Fellowship Hall. However, he did feed the hungry, heal the sick, shame the proud, and lift up those who were down. In the 2000 edition of the Baptist Faith and Message the denomination took out the line that said, “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.” Maybe one of the storefront churches can put it back in.

2.   Don’t get horsey about your doctrine. No matter how certain you are that you’re right, you’ll never make a lot of friends by telling everybody else that they are wrong. Even Saint Paul knew that. When he was preaching at Mars Hill, he acknowledged that the Athenians were “very religious.” Then he linked his message to what they already worshipped. If Paul, with all his Pharisaic strictness, could do that, so should we.

3.   Remember that what’s outside the store front is more important than what is inside. Some of our churches have gotten so insular that their influence ends at their walls. It’s warm and comfortable inside, and it’s cold, messy and sometimes full of conflict outside. But that’s where Christianity is supposed to operate. A corollary to that is that what we do has more impact that what we say or even what we believe.

4.   Be known for who and how you love rather than who and what you hate. When I was young, the Baptists were noted for being “narrow;” that is, we had little tolerance for other opinions. Over the last couple of decades, we’ve been better known for what we didn’t like than what we did, forgetting everything that Jesus and St. John said about loving one another. (I’m not saying that the Baptists are unique in doing this; it’s just that I’m Baptist.)

I really don’t think God cares whether people worship in a steepled, brick edifice or a store front. I do think he cares about what we believe and what we do. Otherwise, we might as well wear a colander on our head.