Nash is right: churches as we have known them are finished. They no longer bring people to God. They are modern in a post-modern world. They are stuck to the old ways in a world that has moved and changed. People under fifty just don't get the way they worship. They need worship that is more like WALMART - lots of options, quick access, nothing regular, not a lot of investment, and great printing. When Nash talks about how church posters are apt to be hand-lettered - and how this makes people think the experience is going to have the same flavor - many of us who still love the old church say "ouch." We know what he means.
We may not understand how bright people can so easily believe in angels, a capacity long lost to Protestants, but we do understand that our hyper-rationality blocks people from the mystery they believe God is. Whereas main-liners are often quite brand loyal, the new age is extra-ecuemenical. The Buddhists are as right as the Jews as are the Christians about God, as far as the public is concerned. It is high time religious institutions caught up with the generosity of its pluralistic constituents.
Joining this correct if painful analysis is a deep faith that God is still active in the world. Church is not where God is! Nash speaks of a God who has moved beyond the church, of a new revelation, of a capacity in God to overcome human idolatry, even if that idolatry is to a nostalgia. Readers leave this book inspired and hopeful: there is nothing to fear in the loss of the old. "Behold, I am doing a new thing" is not a biblical promise the author quotes but he could have. Instead each chapter is introduced by either Paul's words or a new wineskin gospel promise. The author believes that the root cause is social and the root answer is scriptural. This combination allows him to go back to go forward, back to a deeper tradition than the one for which most church members pine.
He dedicates this book to his father who is a preacher. He quotes his own son who wants to know why church is so boring.
He gives a half dozen practical tips, like quality printing, shorter sermons, joyful worship, changing worship times, using different instruments to complete his mandate for change.
The introduction by Loren Mead is congratulatory as well it might be. Nash is not saying anything Mead hasn't already said. Rather he says it in a more populist framework and in one that is less formal and intellectual. A Baptist, Nash is as concerned about his people as Mead is about his Episcopalians. Their root problem is the same: the changed context in which God will be revealed.
I might have liked a bit more economic analysis, a bit more of the prophets and their sense of what happens to the poor when times change. I might have enjoyed a bit more humor in a book that advises "humor." Nevertheless, this is an important book with a shrewdly accate metaphor. If we listen to Nash, the churches will enjoy a magnificent resurrection. If we do not, we will spend a lot more gloomy Fridays together.
