Remember the Beatles’ tune “Eleanor Rigby”? Now allow me a provocative thesis: most of our congregations are funeral societies, their pastors “writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; no one comes near.” That is not meant as a put-down, but rather as a sober sociological observation about “all the lonely people”—not out there in the world but sitting right in our pews. The funeral society was one of those Hellenistic institutions that early Christianity absorbed and made over. It performed a perennial religious function that in one way or another has to be taken care of. In the ancient world, intergenerational voluntary associations were formed among the urbanized masses so that, upon death, one’s mortal remains would be entombed, honored, and memorialized. Religious rites primarily had to do with the passing through the trauma of death. Beliefs were not nearly as important as ritual processing of that trauma.

The shrines and cult of the saints/martyrs, the remembrance of the departed at the eucharist, the development of the doctrine of purgatory, the sacrifice of the mass for the souls of the departed, the churchyard cemetery – all these have been signs of the ongoing sociological function of the funeral society absorbed into the new life of the local Christian parish. That continued all through Christian history. During my family’s six-year sojourn in Slovakia, we annually witnessed the All Saint’s Eve visit to the cemetery, complete with flowers, candles, and a picnic meal.

Since those days it has struck me how much this “funeral society” model explains the odd behavior of our congregations—odd from the perspective of prophetic and evangelical missiology and our urgent need to evangelize and cathechize a population increasingly lost to the gospel. The pastor is free to advocate Christianity as much as she pleases, but the minute the biblical agenda conflicts with the institutional arrangements of the funeral society, there is conflict. The beauty of the building, the sacredness of the space, the assets that guarantee future provision, the assertion of ownership by patron families, the hazing of new members to assure a proper “fit”—all this belongs to the funeral society. The recent fad of establishing columbaria on church grounds brings the underlying logic of the funeral society to consummate contemporary expression.

In my own pastoral experience, nothing subverted evangelism and incorporation of new people into the Body of Christ more than the dynamics of the funeral society operative in congregational life. Likewise, it was not programs and strategies tacitly assuming the funeral society model, but confessionally Lutheran preaching, liturgy and sacraments, Bible study, and perhaps most specifically a heavy emphasis on pastoral and trained lay visitation that built up the congregation and taught it to think of itself as missio Dei.

The situation today has become critical. An assistant to our bishop recently asked a group of theologians to discuss with him a reading from a new book on the so-called “missional church” movement. Vague and breathless, as this kind of literature tends to be, the book ignored critical theology in place of a breezy invocation of the Book of Acts as a paradigm to move our congregations out of an “attractional” posture to a “missional” posture. The classic “attractional” model doesn’t work very well anymore, the bishop’s assistant explained, which is to identify a growing neighborhood, subsidize a pastor-developer, gather a core of relocated Christians, found a congregation, take out a building loan, build a sanctuary, and grow a congregation. Indeed, he noted, 80% of such congregational mission starts nowadays fail.

The urgent challenge of “missional” ecclesiology thus arises. That means critical theological recognition of just how pagan contemporary American society has actually become. It means critical distance from the rival ways in which this paganism tries to make the church into its chaplaincy. We need to discover again theologically the compelling message which drives the agenda for congregational life and work that our forefathers in the faith called the doctrina evangelii. So we had a spirited discussion with the bishop and his staff about what these terms “attractional” and “missional” are actually supposed to mean. As ultimately unhelpful as this text’s shallow analysis proved, our discussion indicated that it rightly signals a tectonic shift in the North American culture taking place right under our feet.

As reluctant as funeral societies are to let in new people, they are also going out of style. This is the cultural shift, I submit, that Dietrich Bonhoeffer intuited when in his last days in Tegel Prison he wrote of the postwar period as “man’s coming of age” in a “religionless” future. For centuries, Christian community, organized as a funeral society of a higher order, has played on the natural fear of mortality, even hyped that fear as a motive for Christian life “so that we can go to heaven when we die.” That was the “attraction.” But with humankind’s coming of age, the jig is up. Religion cannot prey on human weakness this way any longer. The classical attractant no longer attracts. In fact, otherworldliness has becomeas culturally repulsive as a posture of resentment and weakness. This insight does not mean, simplistically, that we should just give up Christian transcedence (“if in this life only we have hoped in Christ we are of all people most to be pitied”). Rather, it means we are going to have to figure out how Christian transcendence is not the transcendence, alternately morbid and sentimental and always filled with resentment, of the funeral society.

In the 1960s Bonhoeffer’s insight into our religionless future was regularly misread in terms of the “secularization thesis,” i.e., that with the progress of science and technology the antiquated belief systems of traditional religious otherworldliness would wither away and be replaced by the this-worldly satisfactions of science, leisure, and art. In fact, the secularization thesis got the cultural shift only half-right. Secularism is an -ism, a passionate ideology, in fact almost a mythology (as in Nietzsche’s Dionysius) in its own right, which passionately affirms that this age, this world, this here-and-now is the only world there is. It opposes “dualism,” the belief going back to the Platonists that there is another, truer world above, a spiritual realm where God and the angels dwell and from which we humans have fallen away but to which deep down we long to return.

Contemporary religion, however, has fully adapted to the modern cultural shift from other-worldly dualism and is fully in sync with secularism. Religion has become “political,” from the Jerry Falwells to the Jeremiah Wrights, from the Ayatollahs and the Jihadists to the Liberationists, Post-Colonialists, and Feminists. My own ELCA wants with all its earnest heart to do the same and really be a “public” church. One might even say contemporary political religion is a major carrier of the secularist virus. In the process, the right kind of Christian transcendence (think of the coming of the Beloved Community of the Kingdom of God) and the right kind of hope in eternal life (to which Bonhoeffer testified in his own final days before facing the Nazi hangman) remains as obscured as ever.

Be that as it may, the end of a long dalliance with Platonism has come, i.e. that model of divine transcendence which thinks of God “up there” as a Mind without a body in a spiritual realm that is somehow more real than our realm of time and space. Consequently, for “humanity come of age,” the death of the individual is just a natural part of life, sad certainly, but natural. And for the shrinking remnant of the religious life, up there after death with “the Big Guy” is just as natural an outcome. If we are to continue in Christianity in this religionless new age, then, we are going to have reconceive our relationship to death and understand it once again as the Pauline power that overwhelms and corrupts the creation, which in turn waits in eager longing for the redemption of our bodies in the revelation of the glorious liberty of the children of God.

Thus the deeper problem for “attractional” churches in the throes of this cultural shift is that folks today don’t feel any need for the heavenly hope on offer, no matter how attractively packaged or subtly presented it is. When all is said and done, strip back the packaging and what you see in one version or another is a message predicated upon the longstanding but now disintegrating cultural assumption that death points us to timeless eternity. This has been my pastoral observation over many years. Most of our contemporaries could care less about death; religion that is about death is just deathly boring or deathly annoying to them: the notion of timeless existence in heaven is as cold as it is inconceivable to them. The handful of strident, fire-and-brimstone religionists who sense this breach from our religious past and loudly still try to terrorize people into heaven above only reinforces the vast majority in their secularism. Easy, indeed, when the alternative to dying naturally is to live life now by flattering a divine Egotist who eternally tortures those who don’t pay the bribe of living “religiously.”

Yet Bonhoeffer thought this wrenching cultural shift could liberate Christian community and mission. Imagine instead then a far more prophetic preaching of death as a contra-divine power assailing the good creation of God. Imagine a far more evangelical preaching of resurrection to eternal life as union with Christ in His Trinitarian relations, as the object in Christ of the Father’s free grace and favor, as the subject under Christ rising up in the Spirit to live toward the coming of the Father’s reign. Bear in mind theologically that only when natural death becomes the sign of God’s judgment on the temporal lives that we live does natural death become the spiritual death to God that matters to Christianity, just as likewise it is the infliction of violent death destroying the human person made in the image of God (Genesis 9:6) that becomes the sign of human sinfulness (Genesis 4:1-16). It is not our natural finitude as creatures, our inherent mortality as beings who are not God, that concerns Christianity as a message of redemption and reconciliation, but our unnatural forms of transcendence (as the serpent said, “You shall be like God!”) that is sin, even if not especially in its religious disguise, that is, hostility to the real God Whose kingdom comes.

Christians now are entering a moment of extreme peril but also momentous significance and real hope. The peril is that the disintegrative forces at work in our aggressively liberal-capitalist system will squeeze out the last vestiges of Christianity along with the antiquated social forms to which they cling, absorbing the churches into left-wing or right-wing chaplaincies.

The significant opportunity of this moment, however, is for a genuine purification and unification—a realignment of the Christian remnant from the ruins of the church. The present peril may, pray God, foment the emergence of an orthodox public witness and self-disciplined practice of Christian faith and life. In that case a numerically smaller but healthier Christianity will emerge. Having given up the idol of institutional clout and abandoned the sick dynamics of ambulance-chasing on behalf of a funeral society, such a new Christianity will become ironically more influential culturally in returning to prophetic and evangelical missiology; it will rediscover worship in and as trinitarian doxology as well. It will still conduct funerals, of course, but as the anticipation of the Pauline “redemption of our bodies.”

Paul R. Hinlicky is the Tise Professor of Lutheran Theology at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.