c. 2007 Religion News Service

HELSINKI, Finland _ I figured the Lutheran Church of Finland didn’t fly me across the ocean to tell fairy tales to their church communicators. So I described this challenging new world in which mainline churches find themselves.

Picture, first, the shift from a vertical newspaper page filled with text to a horizontal Web page containing images, links and 100-word pieces of text.

Picture the shift from reading words to clicking on links. When reading does occur, it won’t be what the provider chose to present, but what the user chose to read. Forget 1,000-word articles; think terse, focused, designed for impatient readers.

Those readers, in turn, sees themselves as customers, not duty-bound institutional members waiting for direction. They will want to respond. To be effective, the church will need to listen more than it speaks.

This shift goes much deeper than style. This emerging religious world is no longer provider-driven, but user-driven. As political candidates are finding, voters have their own questions to ask. Churches cannot make decisions and pronouncements and expect many to fall in line.

Instead of listening for the magisterium’s voice, faithful people find each other and talk about what concerns them. Hierarchs in vestments still pose for pictures, but their photos stir little interest.

To serve effectively, the Christian community can no longer focus on explaining and selling itself to an eager audience. There is no such audience. The Lutheran Church in Finland no longer has 90 percent of the population as members _ it’s down to 60 percent, and of those, only 2 percent worship on Sunday.

The church is losing 35,000 members a year, mostly young adults for whom the Internet paradigm, not the Sunday pew, is normal.

Instead of talking about itself, the Christian community must listen for needs and yearnings and then help people find faith-language and community for ministering to each other.

In listening and helping _ as opposed to speaking and convincing _ the church will find itself on scary ground: no control, no certainties, no rules, no fixed definitions, no gates and walls.

Some consider this moment terrible and wrong. They shout for a return of certainty, a prowling of Scripture for unshakable rules, a reinvigoration of hierarchy, an end to competing voices and visions. Such is the addiction to control.

What I told Finnish Lutherans, however, was that this new moment is great news. For we are being forced to serve as Jesus served. From now on, we will be doing it Jesus’ way, or else we will find ourselves speaking to empty pews and sending out words that no one reads.

This is a time for stories, not for pronouncements. It is a time for parables that invite reflection, not doctrines that demand compliance. It is a time to go into the marketplace, as Jesus did, and there to ask people, as Jesus did, “What do you need?” And then, as Jesus did, to let the people’s yearnings and brokenness guide our ministries.

It is a time to listen, as Jesus did, to the questions that people ask. It is a time to form circles, as Jesus did, not hierarchies of power. It is a time to walk with people into transformation of life, not to require their signatures on the church’s creed.

It is a time, as Jesus discovered, to get outside ourselves and, by dying to self, to live for God and for others.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

KRE/PH END EHRICH

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