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[Editor’s Note: The following presentation was delivered at a Convocation on Small Christian Communities held at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, on August 2, 2002.]
My title somewhat alarmed Bernard Lee, SM, because he thought it might take me too far away from problems of Small Christian Communities in North America into speculations about the world situation. I will have something to say about the world, but I do plan to stick closely to the topic of this conference, which is how do Small Christian Communities relate to Church and society in North America. My title, however, is meant to remind us of the problem of scale. In an era of megachurches that provide everything from ballet lessons, to car washes, to fast food, Small Christian Communities might seem to be unimportant. In an era of global markets, the World Wide Web, and American military and political domination of the world, even megachurches don’t seem very important. But in the greatest empire of the day, Paul’s little church in Corinth wouldn’t have appeared very important either, though what Paul started in Corinth has lasted far longer than the vast empire in which it was situated. But just as Paul had to think seriously about that empire, so do we have to think about the one in which we live.
I will take as my point of departure the data presented by Bernard Lee in his book The Catholic Experience of Small Christian Communities (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), singling out for particular attention a couple of issues about which Lee and his associates express concern. One concern is the generational imbalance in SCC membership, with more than half being over 50 years of age, and more than 75 percent over 40. What is it with the younger people? Why aren’t they more engaged with the Church generally and Small Christian Communities in particular, especially when we have data that they still consider themselves Catholic and still agree with the Church on such fundamental issues as the divinity of Christ, the real presence in the Eucharist, and life after death? [1] The other question has to do with the understanding of the fundamental mission of the Church, which applies to SSCs as much as other parts of the Church, namely that the Church is both gathered and sent. North American SCCs are better at feeling gathered than feeling sent, or, to put it bluntly, better at taking care of each other than of the rest of the world. On this one there is a significant exception: The Hispanic/Latino communities, about 20 percent of the total, are more engaged socially and politically than the other kinds of groups.
In thinking about the generational issue, we have to realize that what we are seeing in the Church is part of a tendency that exists throughout American society and in every sphere, often in more extreme forms than in the religious sphere, namely the disengagement of younger generations from every form of commitment—political, civic, social, religious, even familial. Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone [2] gives an incisive analysis, based on an extraordinarily extensive collection of data, of what we have come to in our society today. The picture is not entirely news; in one sense it is a massive empirical confirmation of the argument of Habits of the Heart, although it is more than that. In the book Putnam describes the sharp decline of what he calls “social capital” in just about every sphere of American life for the last thirty years or more, all the more remarkable because the first sixty or seventy years of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in social capital. By social capital Putnam means social connectedness of every sort and finds all of them—from voting, to political activism, to membership in a wide variety of civic organizations (he takes his title from the stunning decline of bowling leagues), to informal socializing, including even having dinner with one’s own family, to church-going, membership and giving—weaker today than they have been for decades. In a nutshell, I can summarize Putnam’s findings by saying we live in a very different society from the one I grew up in. Rather than give the bad news across the board, let me summarize his findings in the field of religion.
For a long time many people, including me, thought that religion was relatively immune to these trends, that both church membership and church attendance were remarkably stable, except for the unusual bump up in the 1950s; as it turns out, both membership and attendance have been in decline during the same period as other forms of engagement, that is, since 1960. Though a wide variety of groups, just for example the PTA and the League of Women Voters, but also the Jaycees, the Kiwanis, and the Shriners, have been in decline in this period, the decline in the churches has been more gradual and has taken a bit longer to become evident. In fact, church giving has declined more sharply than church membership or church attendance, but all have steadily fallen for forty years.
While it is the quantitative data that are most reliable, there