Will Churches Become Spirituality Management Systems?

Indeed some already have. And that trend will move to smaller congregations as they seek to compete with mega-churches as providers of social relevance and personal spirituality.

The shift away from church to SpiritualityMS is partially driven by technology. Already there are more that a dozen products available to churches for managing the spiritual growth of members of the congregation. And these integrate an even larger number of online providers of Bibles, Bible studies, meditations, personal worship, and nearly endless recorded sermons. 

The term integrate here is important. The purpose of these systems is to constantly analyze and evaluate the spiritual needs and growth of congregants using artificial intelligence and then to offer both human and virtual resources to meet those needs. Using smart phone apps as an interface they become the 6 day a week church that both compliments the church worship on Sunday and links multiple campuses together on Sunday. By constant monitoring of use of the app the SpiritualityMS can alert pastors of emerging needs as well as offering reminders to the user to do everything from engage in daily devotions to make a contribution to the mission fund. 

This allows for far more efficient use of human resources since most pastors become SpiritualityMS managers responsible for hundreds of parishioners they may never meet face to face. And arguably it allows church staff to focus on the individuals most in need of face to face contact. 

It isn't just technology that drives the evolution of the church into an SpiritualityMS. It is the cultural shifts that have led Americans in particular to think of a church as two distinct activities rather than a single community. One is the attendance at public worship and ministry, and the other is personal spirituality. 

In a sense this is a return to the original Latin definitions of religion and piety respectively: the public attendance of great public rituals that solidify group loyalty to a set of common values and private beliefs and practices that cultivate the well-being of the soul taking place in smaller more personal settings. As these two become distinct, and can thus be distinguished, it is inevitable the SpiritualityMSs will be adopted for the second, just as television and now internet links enlarge and extend the first. And ultimately of course, and indeed already, the SpiritualityMS will link the teaching plan of the church with the personal spiritual development of the members into a seamless whole: potentially a formidable social force. 

But is this really a church? In a sense it has to be, given the way both Mainline and Evangelical Protestants understand what it means to be church. Both groups, despite their differing political views, understand church as a public institution engaged in the formation of the larger society. And both have largely succeeded in detaching public worship from community building, adopting a rather Roman-like love of spectacle and entertainment for Sunday morning. 

Now with declining numbers of Christians the survival of "church" in this sense requires reaching a much larger user base, a base whose primary concern is personal spirituality and political and social solidarity rather than actual community. If the church doesn't become an SpiritualityMS and use all the digital tools available it simply cannot maintain its social position. It is the SpiritualityMS that will draw people to public worship, rather than worship becoming the entree into personal spiritual growth and community. And it is the SpiritualityMS that will make the church competitive in a culture of competing forms of piety.

The way to avoid this is for the churches to abandon their desire to shape society by force of numbers and political influence. And to abandon their desire to compete with that same society in the vague realm of spirituality. Instead we must see, as did the apostles, that the intense desire for spirituality is the opportunity to invite people into a relationship with Christ, whose Spirit's presence in the community of the saints, after all, defines both authentic community and spirituality. Whether such communities can compete with public spectacles and personalized forms of piety isn't really important. We are called to fidelity, not victory. 

Yet if in fact churches decide to become churches they will discover that all the tools of a Spirituality Management System, like those that open new possibilities for worship, can be theirs to use for Christs glory. If, to borrow John Wesley's idea, we can escape from Egypt we will find ourselves able to plunder its treasures for the glory of Christ.