Saturday, October 31, 1998

Christian movement has new look: less tradition, young members -- and a death clause

By Sally Macdonald

The Seattle Times

SEATTLE -- If Christianity doesn't become the church of what's happening now, it might not be around for the Second Coming.

At least that's what the Rev. Doug Murren, former pastor of the Eastside Foursquare Church in Kirkland, Wash., reads into all the statistics and survey results running around in his head. He cites them all, his voice rising with each unhappy number:

Church attendance hasn't changed in 60 years. Only "one-half person" is converted "per church per year." For every dollar spent on the poor, the average church spends $6 on facilities. Nearly half of adults are functionally illiterate and can't understand the King James version of the Bible, the one most often read in church.

The troubling stats are the inspiration for Murren's new endeavor -- Track One, possibly the first Christian denomination born as much out of research as evangelical zeal. It is almost certainly the first new denomination with a built-in "death clause," promising to abolish itself after 20 years.

Track One was started this spring by Murren and the Rev. Steve Sjogren, pastor of a Cincinnati megachurch, with the encouragement of George Barna, a leading religion pollster.

The co-founders of Track One, an evangelical movement aimed at baby boomers and younger generations, aren't proposing ground-breaking new theology. Instead, the movement is offering a makeover of how Christians worship -- shedding Christianity's traditional ritual trappings as so many wrinkles that say "I'm old."

About 100 small churches nationwide have affiliated as Track One churches, Murren says. That includes four congregations started by Murren in the Seattle area known as Hope Community churches. Most members are independent churches on the East Coast.

Track One churches hold services in rented bars or basements -- anywhere but in expensive stained-glass edifices. Congregations are small. People gather around tables, in close-knit circles. If they have a question about a sermon, they interrupt and ask.

There are no rituals, little mystery.

The problem is that traditional churches have lost touch with the younger generations, Murren says. His answer is to make the church adjust and fit in with modern society.

"Society reinvents itself every three to five years," says Murren. "We spit out a new cultural mentality -- how we view reality -- about that often. We use the same words, but the way we think about them is different.

"The church doesn't change, and people have quit going. The boomer generation and the Gen-Xers are virtually unchurched. This is a church for them."

Murren says he believes traditional churches are drained by the way they've evolved. Pastors have been "ultra-professionalized." Too much money goes from the collection plate to administer the denominations and not enough to the poor in the churches' own neighborhoods.

"For a lot of people, the old model just doesn't fit," says Barna, whose latest book, "The Second Coming of the Church," outlines what he and Murren see as a need for change. "For them, the issue is to find out whether religion itself is relevant."

Murren says the name Track One has no significance, other than: "We didn't want anything that sounded ecclesiastical. We just liked the sound of it."

Track One is a spin-off of Square One, a church-consulting business Murren started in 1996, after he resigned from Eastside Foursquare. Murren started that church with a few followers in his home in 1981. By the time he left, attendance was about 4,000 each Sunday, and he was burned out after working 65-hour weeks.

"I didn't mind leading, but I really wanted to get out to do some evangelizing," he says.

Murren calls Track One "a soft denomination" and says it's more of an association than a denomination in the usual sense of the word.

Fees are based on several levels of membership -- some Track One churches might do mission work or evangelism together but have few other bonds. Others also might use the association's help-wanted list.

Although the churches have a commitment to contemporary forms of worship and evangelism, they have no common theology other than the Apostles' Creed, a neutral statement of Christian faith many churches use that begins: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord."

"The churches are really cross-denominational," Murren says. "The blur of all that is consistent with the age we're living in. If you buy a car, you don't care where the parts are made. You just want the car."

Perhaps the most unique characteristic of Track One is what Murren calls "a death clause" -- after 20 years, the denomination will cease to exist.

"We feel we will have served our purpose by then," Murren says. "The academics and seminarians are saying churches rarely if ever keep up peak performance more than 15 or 20 years. The pace of cultural change in the century ahead will magnify, and the likelihood of remaining relevant 25 or 30 years is zero."

Oddly enough, Murren's inspiration comes from a church father some people would consider an antique: John Wesley, the 18th-century founder of Methodism.

"There was a huge sociological shift then from an agrarian to an industrial society, with many industrialists like Bill Gates," he says. "And there were huge shifts in population to the cities, comparable to shifts today to suburbia. There were cynicism and issues of racism. The church was largely irrelevant. It required a new kind of structure to change things."

Wesley's followers met in small groups they called "cells" in people's homes or rented rooms -- not steepled churches. Congregations were headed by circuit-riding ministers and lay leaders were appointed to help out in each cell. One of the most important tenets of Methodism was evangelism -- recruiting new people and starting new cells.

Wesley's brother, Charles, wrote hymns for the church in a style that was "in" for its time.

That's pretty much the way Murren's Seattle-area Track One churches work.

He leads congregations in Seattle, Bellevue, Kirkland and Federal Way. Each has a core group of a few families who meet wherever Murren can find a place for them -- a middle school, the basement of a Lutheran church, a dingy room that once served as a nightclub in a motel off Interstate 5.

Murren's music director is Gary Verrill, who has played with groups like Taj Mahal and the Steve Miller Band. Like the circuit-riding Wesley, Verrill and Murren drive the freeway from one church to the next on Sundays.

Verrill gets there first and starts the music -- one recent Sunday he performed a Christian takeoff of a John Lennon peace song.

Murren arrives in time to give a sermon and moves on to the next church.

A recent service in Seattle's University District was held in a dark and musty basement that once was a bar. The congregation of about two dozen people sat around circular tables.

"Lined-up chairs speak of schools," Murren says.

When Murren thought he was losing them in a sermon about Lennon's song, he stopped:

"Is that making any sense? Bear with me a few more minutes and maybe you'll understand."

Murren takes no salary from his churches. His money comes from consulting and speaking engagements that keep him on the road most weekdays, eight months of the year.

Track One will have to rewrite and scrap even more church tradition to stay ahead, even in its short lifetime over the next two decades, Barna says.

"In the third millennium, church will be a place where people can have a religious experience without the trappings of the church," he says. "We have to develop new models for how people experience spiritual growth.

"Even the schedules will have to change. People are not going to be there every Sunday morning. The truth of the matter is, the Bible doesn't say you have to meet at 11 o'clock every Sunday morning to worship God. What it does say is you worship God all the time."

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