Doug Muder’s notes on Why Christianity Must Change or Die by John Shelby Spong

Chapters 11 and 12 describe where Bishop Spong thinks the church is heading.

11. The Emerging Church: Reading the Signs Present Today

Pages 168-173 describe what churches have been and what church attendance has entailed: buildings with steeples that point to heaven, worship services in which prayers are said, scriptures are read, hymns are sung, special services to mark life passages. All these seem tied to the pre-exile theistic God.

If our destiny is to live in a world where people can no longer pretend to relate themselves liturgically to a heavenly parent figure who fixes anything or who rewards and punishes worshipers according to their deservings, then is there a future for those structures we call churches or for those worship activities and liturgical observances that have been conducted inside those structures? -- p 173

Beginning in the 1950s, Tillch and others taught non-theistic images of God to theological students, but did not preach to the people. Their students had to figure out how to be priests and ministers with this new understanding of God. Now this revolution is reaching significant numbers of the congregants. Pages 175-182 collect how the symbols of this change have affected church practice already: Altars now face towards the people rather than away. Kneeling is no longer common practice. Liturgies are being re-written. Prayer books no longer contain as many requests for changing the weather or other direct intercession. The authority of the clergy is declining. The costumes of the clergy are being toned down.

These are the signs even in the midst of the present religious world that a new consciousness is being born and a new concept of God is evolving. -- p 182

12. The Future Church: A Speculative Dream

Can one really worship in a meaningful way if there is no concept of a theistic deity to receive that worship? ... Some in the religious community are sure that traveling this path will result only in the death of the religious past with no hope of a religious future. I do not agree with that judgment. -- p 184

The world is taking part in a spiritual quest, but many citizens of this century no longer believe that the Church is an asset to their quest. ... Worshipers have already noticed that the traditional words of worship are no longer capable of embodying literal truth. Some have already begun their exodus from Church life. Next, those who remain will struggle to translate these archaic forms into usable concepts. At this task they will ultimately fail. Finally, out of this practice of muttering nonsensical concepts in worship will be created the life-or-death scenario. Substantive changes will be irresistible when the alternative is death. -- p 188

Worship in the future will be marked, rather, by a self-conscious awareness that all of us are or can be God bearers and life givers and that our deepest religious task is to give ourselves away. -- p 187

The worship of the future is found "by clinging to the essence while allow the forms to wither away." (Page 189) Pages 189-191 apply this idea to the standard church holidays: Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. Pages 191-193 does the same for the stages-of-life rituals: baptism, coming-of-age, marriage, and funeral.

The various liturgies of the Church surrounding those defining moments continue to call believers to recognize themselves as sharing in the Being of God. We are God bearers, the revealers of the God who is present in all of life. ... Once we refocus these services designed to mark the turning points of life, we will discover that much of their meaning can be preserved. The Church might well come out of the exile with its rites of passage intact, even if they have been redefined. -- p 193

The people beyond the exile who gather to celebrate the God in whom they live and move and have their being must build community around a common meal, for there is no better way to acknowledge the God who can be met, indeed revealed, in the life of the world. -- p 196

Confession is not a peasant sinner groveling before the king, begging for forgiveness in order to escape punishment. This is only the warping of our reality with the images of a theistic god. Confession is my being confronting the Ground of all Being, and forgiveness is my moving beyond my limits into something more real, more whole, more life giving than I can now contemplate. -- p 197