c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The baby boom generation has changed every institution, tradition, folkway and just about every cultural “given” encountered on their journey toward maturity. They not only have altered the kinds of houses in which we live, but are now busily transforming the churches in which we worship.

Demonstrating their need for lots of room around them, they introduced McMansions that threaten to bulge over property lines all over the country.

These same boomers (that very large cohort born between 1946 and 1964) are causing churches and their services to be redesigned across the land. As with housing, they want lots of room; for ministry, they want service even more than sacrament to manage the everyday pressures and sorrows of life.

Exhibit A is the suburban church, usually a Colosseum-size structure that houses an arena-sized church _ complete with plush theater-style seats that sometimes include cup holders. Why not, since there is often a Starbucks-like cafe on the premises, along with an array of shops and meeting rooms to treat children, adults and whole families for the common colds of everyday life, including sadness and loss of every kind.

This the realization of a classic American dream: religion embracing capitalism with spiritual and material profits available for all. This is the kind of church designed for consumers and presided over by ministers who are not only gentle pastors but also knowing entrepreneurs. The Boomer Church is the Mall Church, a humming gathering place in which you can attend a well-prepared religious service, shop and schmooze at the same time.

For all the criticism they get for being self-centered and superficial, boomers may influence theology and church policy as much as they have church design. They challenged the notion, for example, that they had to accept absolutely what the churches laid down as a condition for being saved. Now religion’s need for sinners ready to be saved is being reshaped by an array of boomer needs for attention, service and affirmation of what is good about them. If the boomers have built a consumer-oriented church, they expect to get more of what they want than what is offered on any given Sunday.

One can imagine the boomers’ impact on hallowed teachings that clash with their expectations that culture should shape itself around them.

Think, for example, what boomers might do with the notion of purgatory, an apparently bland and boring place where you wait uncomfortably to be called to enter the heavens. Boomers do not like to wait for anything, and may turn purgatory into something more like a customer relations department where adjustments are made to satisfy the clients. Boomers may expect coupons or bar-coding to facilitate this transfer.

Boomers will also change the approach of such reasonable Catholic groups as Voice of the Faithful or Call to Action, who seek not only accountability but dialogue with their bishops in order to modify church structures. They make very little progress. The boomers who remain will simply put their demands on the table. They do not negotiate, they expect their needs to be met. This would change Catholicism more than any other initiative now under way by traditional reformers.

The boomers get a lot of criticism, but we should recall that it was they who took the hit on Sept. 11. Heroes of that day _ whether police, firemen, executives, office boys or good neighbors _ were members of the boomer generation. Although they revere their World War II veteran parents as the “greatest generation,” they may deserve the title themselves. They have changed everything, mostly for the good, and they will do the same for religion and churches.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE END KENNEDY

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