We were having a break from the city, visiting a large country town. It was a Thursday afternoon and we noticed the doors to the hall of the Uniting Church were open. So we decided to check it out.

A small team of church volunteers had just provided a free hot lunch to a whole lot of needy town people and now they were packing up.

We got talking with the (recently) retired minister.

These folk who come to the lunch appreciate, and have come to rely on, the good intentioned church’s Thursday lunch. They are not part of the game being played out on the main street, where everything is geared up for tourists like us. And priced accordingly! 

And I guess, gathering weekly over the generosity of the food, they have also found a sense of belonging there too.

But then we discovered that the church is closing. The last service will be held in a couple of weeks. And those Thursday lunches will close with it.

There is a lot of grief here. How did it come to this?

I am sure there would have been many compounding factors. But, in a nutshell, the minister reckons that a gap gradually developed over an extended period of time, a gap between the spiritual life of the congregation and  its outworking as service to others. The core motivational life became eroded; the worshipping congregation lost its vibrancy and eventually its sustainability. And they got older.

I find myself in sympathy with their situation. 

The ‘outworking’ part of faith is easy enough for everyone to see and appreciate. It’s tangible. And relatively easy to do – if you have enough volunteers. But in this case, over time, the volunteer base dried up as the life of the congregation dried up. That’s how the current minister sees it. The obvious alternative now seems to be to move from intangible to create tangible motivation; and the easiest way to do that today is through economics.

So the service part of the Uniting Church, called Uniting, is going to take over the buildings. Uniting is booming as it has become a major social service provider across the state, with income streams coming through the Government and fee-paying services. In the process, it has loosened its spiritual connection with the church.

But could this seemingly depressing situation for the local church actually have a silver lining? Could this be an opportunity if one were to look past the grief?  I often wonder whether there are already hints and whispers from ‘outside’, and that those of us deeply concerned about what is being lost are too close to discern them.

Which may be why I suspect a good place to start, individually and as a church, is to adopt, nurture and enact Nouwen’s conception of hospitality, in all its dimensions as a touchstone for transformation; and embrace a determination to celebrate the diversity of the fruit of its outcomes. How we do that is another question!