Episode 85: Amy Butler on the future of the church

You won't want to miss a minute of this episode if you are concerned with the future of the church. Amy Butler offers some fierce criticism of the American church as well some ideas for how it can redeem itself.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: She broke the glass ceiling, we said, when she went to be the Senior Minister of the Riverside Church in New York City, and then the glass cut her on the way down. Well, we're going to talk to the Reverend Amy Butler about her rise and fall and her rising again after being the minister of that great church in New York. Stay tuned for Good God.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm here with my dear friend, the Reverend Amy Butler. Amy, welcome back to the program.

Amy Butler: Thanks George.

George Mason: We enjoyed a conversation in the last episode that was far reaching about women in leadership and about what happened in your relationship to your previous church, the Riverside Church in New York. But I think let's just start out with going back a little bit. We've known one another for, I don't know, 25 years at least. And let's just sort of get out there that we've gotten to know each other a lot better over the last decade or so, but maybe it didn't start out all that well between us. Go ahead.

Amy Butler: Well, I will never forget where I was sitting when I had the telephone interview with you for a job at Wilshire when I graduated from seminary and you didn't hire me. By the way, that was a really smart decision.

George Mason: Well, I've actually been in charge of a search for a position twice and didn't hire you.

Amy Butler: That's correct.

George Mason: All right. Now we-

Amy Butler: I don't know what all that ... Yeah, okay.

George Mason: I think God had other ideas and I'll just defer to God's will-

Amy Butler: God had other ideas.

George Mason: ... or something about that, right? But honestly, the trajectory of your ministry has been a remarkable one. I mean, when you didn't come to Wilshire, you went to New Orleans and had a ministry there among the homeless, and eventually you became the pastor of a church in Washington, D.C., Calvary Baptist Church in Washington. Also a historic church. Many people probably don't know the history of that church, but a really important church in baptist life too. Tell us a little bit about those two movements before the next one was to New York.

Amy Butler: Right. When you didn't hire me, that was a time when it was very difficult for women to break into pastoral roles. Also, I have always been a terrible number two. Terrible. And back then when I was, what, 25 years old, I was pretty sure I knew everything. So I had the opportunity to run a homeless shelter at a very large downtown gospel rescue mission that served about 200 men a night, and there was a little house in the back that they wanted to open a shelter for women and there was room for about six women, and it was terrible. The place was condemned. There were rats. It was disgusting.

Amy Butler: I always say that those years were so formational for my ministry because I learned about drugs, I learned about the sex trade, I learned about the crack epidemic, I learned about systems that perpetuate racism and poverty, and I learned about how women are treated in our society in ways I hadn't learned before. This was the lowest kind of shelter you could ever enter into. I think I learned how to be a pastor in those years. And I also met some nuns, Maronite nuns who really changed the way I thought about spiritual practice and the role of women in leadership. They were just phenomenal.

Amy Butler: But I always felt the call toward the parish because I thought if I could facilitate individuals finding the call of God on their lives and then going out to change the world, then my work could be amplified. So I had the opportunity to be an associate at Saint Charles Avenue Baptist, where I learned that I was a terrible number two. But I loved the parish and that whole idea of beloved community and who we can be in the world together. And that's when I started looking for a pastorate and Calvary and I met each other and I went to Calvary and was there for 11 years, some of which were very, very difficult because I went when I was 32 and also felt like I knew everything. But institutional change is really hard. And shifting a whole community's way of thinking is difficult, isn't it?

George Mason: Well, yes. I came to Wilshire when I was 32 and I'm just now celebrating 30 years here. And yes, it is. It is a long process that has moments when you take big leaps, but most of the time it's about gradually moving attitudes and helping people make changes until it feels normal, right? And I think most change happens well in churches when people aren't completely aware that it's happening, that it's just following their best instincts about what God wants for them. And leadership is helping them to recognize that and move toward it.

George Mason: But there are moments, right, when we have to have very big decisions. So three years ago here, of course we made the decision to ... it's remarkable to say so ... to treat everyone equally, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, and that was very pivotal. It wasn't something we could do incrementally. It was something that took a decision. Similarly about 28 years ago, we decided to ordain women. And so things like that take big moments of decision. But when the church, as you're describing it, when the church makes these decisions, what impact does that have on society? It feels to me like over time, we undervalue the modeling role that congregations have for the larger society.

Amy Butler: Right. Well, I'll back up a little and say churches cannot make these big shifts or small shifts without the strong relational leadership of a good pastoral leader. I mean, your people will step into the fear of the unknown because they trust you and that's what happened at Wilshire three years ago and I have great admiration for you for taking that risk and doing the right thing.

George Mason: Thank you.

Amy Butler: I think the church just cedes that responsibility of being a model for society over and over and over again. I would always say at Riverside, we cannot proclaim all of these big calls for justice and love and fairness if we do not do it inside the walls of our church. So here is where the hard work begins because our witness has no integrity if we do not live it inside the walls.

Amy Butler: When I left Calvary, it took them three years to call new pastors and it was a really rough time for them and for me. I felt guilty for leaving. I loved them. It was hard. And I remember the day that they called their new pastors, who are a married lesbian couple, I got a text from a church member at Calgary who said, "We called our new pastors. We are so over you."

George Mason: Oh my goodness.

Amy Butler: And then she followed up with another text that says, "We could never have done this without 11 years of you loving us to get to this point."

George Mason: Okay. All right. That's where it was going.

Amy Butler: Yeah. And I was just like, "Okay." So that's the kind of incremental change that good pastoral leadership puts in place, right?

George Mason: Sure.

Amy Butler: I hope.

George Mason: Absolutely. I think it's always interesting to me that churches tend to wrestle with this question of how much culture is influencing the church and how much church influences the culture. And in more evangelical circles, I would say, there is a fear that a kind of Hollywood culture of values, the cultural elite, a more permissive, liberal view of the world or ways of relating to people, will infect the church and it will lose its uniqueness, its ability to speak against the culture. And yet at the same time there seems to be this sort of blindness about how much a culture of racial prejudice, of patriarchy, of nationalism, the church being in service to the country as if we are the the country's spiritual guide in a sense, but not actually guidance but actually blessing, regardless of what our leaders say or do. There seems to be this blindness about that. And so culture influences us either way. And the question is, how is the church, right, supposed to make a difference in the world?

Amy Butler: Oh, this debate just drives me crazy. I think it's like the epitome of privilege to sit around thinking, "How much should we be in the world? How much should we not be in the world?" That just shows how much power and comfort you have to even ask that question, number one.

Amy Butler: Number two, the church is the culture. I mean, look at what's going on in America right now. I'm embarrassed to be a Christian if you define it by what's going on on Fox News. That's, to me, not Christianity, and I don't want any part of it. So don't give me any of this crap about the church, the culture. It's all mixed together. And it's sick. It's a sickness. I think, and I've always thought that the church has ceded its place at the table with a kind of arrogance that has made us impotent. Why should anybody in the culture who wants to change things listen to what we have to say? But we're to the point now where the Amazon is burning and the world is dying and people are in pain, and if we don't step up to the table and start, with all humility, contributing to the conversation of how we make good in the world for everyone, then the church deserves to go to hell.

George Mason: Whoa. There's a line. The church deserves to go to hell. Isn't it true though that the church is supposed to go to hell in a different way? That is to say, we're supposed to storm the gates of hell, right? I mean, we're supposed to be willing to go to where people are experiencing misery, where there is vulnerability and marginalization. When you say the Amazon is burning, that's not a metaphor. The Amazon is burning. Our world is heating up both literally and figuratively. And if the church has heaven to offer, it's only because we go to hell, because we are willing to be present in those places. And so this to me seems to be ... The transition I want to make when we come back from the break is to talk about what hope you have for the voice of the church. Where are we imagining the church's positive role to be in the coming generation as we look at our ministry in the years ahead?

Amy Butler: Okay. All right.

George Mason: Thanks.

George Mason: The Good God program is a project of Faith Commons, a nonprofit organization I founded in 2018 to help promote the common good. Doing public theology across faith traditions and across racial and ethnic lines is an important thing today in our communities. We hope you'll continue to enjoy Good God, but look at some of the other things we're doing also through Faith Commons at www.faithcommons.org.

George Mason: We're back with Amy Butler. And Amy, we were talking before the break about church and its direction going forward, at least the church in America, as we have understood it and as we have participated in it. Can you tease out some trajectories for us? Where do you think the spirit of Christ is leading the church in this time?

Amy Butler: So we started by talking about my pastoral trajectory and if you look back at my work, the homeless shelter, Calvary, Riverside, there's a common theme there, and that theme is desperation. And my coach says I should talk to my therapist about that. I'm overly attracted to moments of desperation because I think those are the moments in which we finally feel the pain enough to change. I think the church in America this next decade is pivotal. The transfer of capital and wealth within church denominations is staggering. I read something the other day that said this year alone, the United Methodist church is going to close 400 churches in the city of Seattle, right? That's happening everywhere. And as you know, people are freaking out. This question of like, "How can we reconstruct what we had?" is not even really a viable question anymore, which is great.

George Mason: Right. I mean, we just heard the news this week that the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida is selling off 90% of its footprint. Now, this was sort of the mega church before mega churches. I mean, this was a big fundamentalist, conservative Southern Baptist church that had pastors who were president of the Southern Baptist Convention and all of that. 90% of their property, they're selling off, and then they're going to redo because they're much smaller. They have much less need for all of this space. All over America, this is what's happening in churches. Why? Right? Why? I think, well, I'll just pass it to you and say, answer that question please. Why?

Amy Butler: Well, there's a lot of reasons, and I think fundamentally it has to do with the church's unwillingness to show up collaboratively at the table to talk about who we want to be in community with, our neighbors beyond our walls. We haven't done it out of a certain kind of privilege and arrogance and we're paying the price.

Amy Butler: I've gotten to know over this past year some amazing folks in Europe who are a couple of decades ahead of us around this, churches closing all over and selling land and property, and what they've found is when churches leave a community, there's a real gap there because people need places to gather and to ask hard questions. And so what's happening is sort of spiritual integrators are coming in and figuring out ways to build community while doing good in collaboration with neighbors at the same time, starting a farmer's market and then building a pediatric practice next to it and giving the kids prescriptions for fruits and vegetables whenever they come to see their doctor, things like that that are not like sitting in the pew singing out of the hymnbook, but that do reflect gospel work in the world.

Amy Butler: And so I think in this moment of desperation, let's think about this 90% of property that's being sold off. Where's that money going? What if we choose in this moment to invest in the future, take the properties that we're selling and all of these buildings that we're turning into condos and put those incredible amount of resources to work funding innovation? Because you know as well as I do that there are seminarians who come to that training called by God with lives that are committed to changing the world and then they get out and the institution squashes them and they leave. We are losing gospel innovators.

George Mason: Gospel innovators. I love that. So I think we should say that the gospel part is the church's role when we bring social transformation to to the fore. This is good news. Gospel. Good news. And I think we have an old dichotomy that is just so false, and that is the church should just preach the gospel on the one hand or it's just going to do social work on the other hand, and what I think both of us have been trying to say in our ministries for a long time is that these are not two things. You don't collapse one into the other, either. They have a holy synergy to them.

George Mason: I mean, we really are bringing a sense of God's presence and blessing and a wholeness to people's lives and an awareness of the role of being in a real relationship with God when we are engaging with people in making the world a better place as God has dreamed for it. And so when the church does that, it becomes a kind of advanced step for others to see what's possible. And then it can be scaled up beyond that, right? But to be a gospel innovator means to go to those places, find those ways in which we can do something about that, and then see where that takes us.

Amy Butler: Yes. Yes. And we've been so afraid of that for so long, but I think now we're desperate enough maybe to try to find these future leaders and help them re-imagine who the church is going to be and how the church is going to show up in the world to make things better.

George Mason: So that actually is a perfect segue to the question to Amy Butler. What's next, Amy?

Amy Butler: Well, I want to change the world, George.

George Mason: Yes. And? How do you plan to do that now when you have just left the pulpit at Riverside Church, THE Riverside Church? You have some exciting ideas about social venture capitalism and those sorts of things, investment.

Amy Butler: I'm still working on healing and closure. I didn't really get a chance to say goodbye to my congregation in the way that I wanted to. So I'm still working on that a bit and finishing up my book that will come out in the spring. And so those are projects that I'm immediately doing. But I've been asking these questions about investing in the future for some time now and it just seemed like now is the moment. There is a large group of millennial philanthropists in our country who are not investing in the stock market, who instead want to use their wealth to invest in efforts that do good in the world and they're doing it and they are lacking in a narrative, in some ritual, in some sustenance for keeping up their work.

George Mason: Wait, wait, wait, wait, a narrative, a story, the rituals of it, how to maintain the sustenance. That sounds an awful lot like ministry.

Amy Butler: Yeah. So I'm like, "So where's the church? Where's the church?" So against all odds ... My father thinks this is hilarious ... I will be speaking at the social capital investing conference in October in San Francisco. This is a conference that brings together the intersection of money and meaning.

George Mason: Money and meaning. Wow. You mean money doesn't just mean something automatically? We have to think anew about this?

Amy Butler: That's right. That's right. And so why shouldn't the church be in conversations about how we use our money or resources to do good in the world? The church should be at the front of those conversations, and we're not, because we've been so preoccupied with-

George Mason: Maintaining the institution.

Amy Butler: Yeah.

George Mason: Which, in defense to a certain extent of that, there are lots of little boys and girls and lots of people who need to be formed and shaped in the faith and we want them to have a place to come, a Sunday school class to grow up in, to learn their bible stories and to find who they are in Christ and what God calls us to and loving our neighbor and all those sorts of things. So yes, it would be wonderful if we could have both of those things. We're all about just preserving the institution, but also at the same time enlisting the institution in the mission of God in the world, which is bigger than just the footprint of real estate that we have.

Amy Butler: Right. So I'm imagining in my head, so maybe 98% of these churches and denominations and institutions that are dying are going to say, "No thanks, Amy Butler. You're crazy. We're just going to keep maintaining our institution until we die and then we'll close the doors and whatever," and maybe 2% of them will say, "Wait, there's a hopeful theological narrative? You mean our faith really is about death and resurrection?"

George Mason: Oh, this is beautiful. Keep going.

Amy Butler: "You mean we could send our witness forward? We could invest in the future? We could imagine a future where God's hope for the world comes to be and we could be part of it? All right. Let me hear more."

George Mason: Right. I can't tell you how many churches I feel like are on hospice. They are just in a routine and they've watched their members die off or their neighborhood change and they have not been able to adapt and they just know each other and they're in a routine about that. They are willing to just play it out until the last one is buried. And I had a man come to me. You'll love this. So our church was born out of a split with a church down the road.

Amy Butler: Shocker.

George Mason: Shocker. Right? And so to the credit of the people who started Wilshire Baptist Church, they did not want to carry all the baggage of leaving Lakewood Baptist Church and so they sort of made a covenant that they would think about the future and what kind of church they wanted to be and they wouldn't react all the time and they were only moderately successful about that, as you can imagine, because it just is what it is.

George Mason: But about 25 years ago now, a man named Roy Mason, no relation, was walking in the hallway. I'd known him a little bit through the years. He was a jeweler and he was the treasurer of the Lakewood Baptist Church. I saw him in the hallway here at Wilshire and I said, "Roy, what are you doing?" He said, "Well, I was looking for you." I said, "Well, what are you doing?" And he pulled out an envelope from his pocket and he said, "I just closed the doors on Lakewood Baptist Church for the last time and turned over the keys. And I have in my hand a check for the value of the property that we sold and I'm taking it down to the Baptist Foundation of Texas." He said, "Today, Lakewood Baptist Church is going to do more for the kingdom of God than it has done in many decades, and I just wanted someone to know."

George Mason: It broke my heart, and yet as I'm thinking about our conversation, that may be one of the most hopeful things. If churches could not wait until they die, but instead say, "We have assets here. We have massive assets. How could we mobilize our assets for the work of God in the world and do it in a way that could spur wellbeing and give an imagination to people about what God is up to through the church?" My goodness, what could happen? And you might just take that next step in helping us learn that.

Amy Butler: Who knows? It might fail, but I'm not afraid of failure.

George Mason: I think we've learned that about you. Amy, thank you so much for being with us for the wonderful friendship we've had through the years and continue. I can't wait to see what your next adventure will lead you to, and for all of us, too.

Amy Butler: Thanks, George.

Jim White: Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White, guest coordination and social media by Upward Strategy Group. Good God: Conversations with George Mason is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2019 by Faith Commons.