It is human nature to insulate ourselves. We want a predictable, familiar community of people - and when we find it, we want it to remain the same forever. Too often we've built these insular communities and called them "churches," when that couldn't be farther from the original design. Intimate, connected, familial - for sure - but closed and private, certainly not. The whole purpose of the Church is to live out a specific lifestyle in the midst of the public square, to be an example of an alternative way of life.
This brought to mind a distinction I ran across months ago (so long ago I've now forgotten who to properly credit) that Christians, especially American evangelicals, intend to be counter-cultural, but have actually constructed a subculture, separate and distinct from the culture at large. This is the distinction between living differently in the world and living in a different world altogether.
Conservative Christians in the US - what's become commonly known as "the evangelicals" - have created their own little world and, instead of engaging culture, reject it and recreate it separately, expecting people to take notice. What's worse: so much of this subculture has very little to do with Christianity; it's largely a generic moralism that's vaguely related to carefully curated scripture passages - often entirely devoid of context.
In a subculture, your primary concern is checking the right behavioral boxes to live in a way that will qualify you for the subculture. The colloquial expression growing up was "don't drink, smoke, or chew, or go with girls who do." It was an out-of-touch joke even then, but it betrays a reality. It's not even that a distinctive set of practices (either done or avoided) is a bad thing - a common rule of life is a community-defining practice and often vitally important, even for a counter-cultural presence. The problem really arises when you start to look at "why" those things are done (or not done). If it's simply to bodily identify with a specific group or to check off the boxes for heaven, you're in real trouble. If it's to embody a different set of principles, foundational assumptions for life, then it makes a lot more sense.
One of the real benefits, though, of American evangelicalism becoming and ever more exclusive subculture is that it has less and less presence in the real world. Not having been in a traditional ministry setting the last few years has woken me up to the fact that most everyone, even many people very involved in Christian ministry, just have no clue this evangelical subculture even exists. I hear pastor friends lamenting some preacher/author/conference that's embarrassing themselves and Christ and I gladly don't know what they're talking about.
As a subculture prefects its isolation, it disappears. The only time evangelical leaders pop up in mainstream culture is when they're saying ridiculous, usually deplorable things. It's a strange novelty - a bit more offensive than the Amish or a hippy commune, but equally as irrelevant in everyday life. I suspect (and hope) that by the time my daughter's grown up, the average American will know as much about Franklin Graham as they do about snakehandlers.
True counter-culture makes it's present felt simply by existing. Subcultures fade from consciousness as they reach their goals. Counter-culture is generally painful for the mainstream, but largely by asking difficult questions about relevant issues. Subcultures are annoying to the mainstream, because they feign relevancy by making a scene (almost literally the original definition of geek).
The gospel of Jesus Christ is wildly relevant to this (and every other) time and place. It is a counter-cultural message of suffering, unconditional love. It does not always provide the safety, security, or privacy of a cul-de-sac - but those very well may be illusions anyway.
There is no question of whether Christianity will survive the current upheaval of culture and human understanding, but whether the organizations and institutions we now associate with Christianity survive the change is entirely dependent on them rejecting the human desire for subculture and embracing a truly revolutionary counter-cultural presence.
I recently read this fantastic book called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. It's essentially an otherwise stuffy religious history focusing on the first 200-300 years of Christianity, but the thesis is unique and powerful. Alan Kreider argues that the sole, key distinctive of early Christianity was patience. The first Christians were actively discouraged from what we might call evangelism today - they were convinced that faithful Christian witness was all that was needed. If they lived in the mode of Christ, people would be drawn to that lifestyle without the urgency or outcome oriented focus that's marked Christianity in the 1500 years since.
The moral quandry most prominent for Christians in this time was the exposure of infants. Unwanted children born in the Roman Empire of the time were simply left at the dump - exposed on the trash heaps. Christians took a stand against this moral outrage. They refused to expose their infants and they often wandered the trash heaps, rescuing and adopting those babies left to die. They did not make this a cause, protest, or fight. They simply lived differently.
I recognize that things are different 2,000 years later. We live in a world with free speech and the ability to share it widely and easily.
We live in a world with long traditions of activism. We live in a world where the established morality, at least in large part, aligns more closely with Christian morality than it did in Rome. Violent racists are now the minority and rejected by polite society. Things are different.
At the same time, listening to the rhetoric of opposition in Charlottesville, it was very difficult to differentiate the sides of the debate.
"These ideas aren't representative of the America I know and these people don't belong here." In our attempts to denounce racism, violence,
and hatred, we're exhibiting the same exclusionary ideas we're protesting (or at least, it's easy to do).
From a Christian perspective, protest and counter-culture means more than just choosing a different side; it means choosing a different means of fighting altogether. In general, it means being more creative with our words and actions. This has been a struggle for US Christians in most of the last century and probably the Church as whole over its entire existence. We protest consumerism, but end up with huge chains of "Christian"
stores, full of useless trinkets covered in crosses and music that's more worried about making money than facilitating real worship. The same goes for our approaches to violence, voting, and evangelism.
In Charlottesville, we're rightly outraged that so many people feel free to openly and publicly proclaim ideas and actions so entirely contrary to that of Christ - sometimes in the name of Jesus - but the response cannot be to isolate, condemn, and dismiss the people themselves. Showing up to protests with counter protest might be the right move, but it's got to be done differently. Opposing a mob with a mob - even one committed to non-violence, is still playing games of power - our numbers trump your numbers. It's an invitation to violence. Our voices don't need to be louder or angrier if we're embodying a counter-cultural presence. There is no point to spewing hate at the haters.
Saying, "I stand against racism" is better than saying nothing, I suppose, but it might not be if those of us with privilege aren't willing to sacrifice a bit of it to make our actions match our words. That's where much of the problem comes from. When the only times in which we white people interact with more than token members of the African-American community is when we drive 20 miles to volunteer somewhere for a few hours, we're not making much of a statement.
Early Christians change their entire lives, rejected respectability, often embraced poverty, simply to live out the counter-cultural gospel of Jesus Christ. Earlier this year I read the graphic-novel trilogy, March, that tells the story of John Lewis, one of American's Civil Rights heroes, as he engaged the movement and eventually participated in the famous march across Selma's Edmund Pettis Bridge. One of the things that struck me, was how much emphasis those books put on training for non-violence. It was not a movement where anyone could show up - they endured long periods of practice in non-violence and not everyone had the discipline to make the cut. It was a lifestyle change, a personality change - it was more than just falling in line.
Part of the reason the Early Church put so little emphasis on making converts was because the process was so long and arduous - catechumens endured years of training and observation before the Church deemed them worthy of baptism and the name of Christian. This wasn't so the movement could be exclusive, but because counter-culture is hard.
It's not enough for us to simply say, "Racism is bad. Violence is bad. Hatred is bad." We've got to understand what it means to live that out - not just in our safe little, privileged enclaves, but in the wider context of a very troubled world. We've got to work diligently to shape and form ourselves and our creativity to react differently than even those with whom we agree on some particular issue.
I've resisted giving specifics about ways in which Christians can faithfully engage in issues of immediate and ultimate importance in the world -
issues of race, violence, justice, life, and death - because I do think those ways exhaust and expand beyond my realm of vision. I do think,
though, that Christians must work to fully embody not just the emotion of the moment, but a truthful and fair representation of Christ. In this instance that includes the insanely difficult task of embodying true equality - not just in words or moments, but for the long haul.
Kreider recounts that Christianity lost its emphasis on patience when it adopted the mindset of ends justify the means. Instead of waiting for the truth to win out over time, heretics were persecuted, prosecuted, and executed. Politicans were brought in to use their power to favor one faction over another, to make decisions of right and wrong when it came to Christian thought and practice - this has been our habit ever since. We adopted the mode and means of the culture around us, but because we did so with a religious veneer, we've failed to see the compromising error of our ways.
I am continually troubled by the challenge to use my body, my lifestyle, to make statements of truth and justice, while also remembering the words of Paul, that I too, was once an enemy of God, and recognizing that my transformation was not wrought by violence, anger, or shame, but by the love of Jesus Christ. This is not a pushover faith, but it's also not a popular one; results are slow and it requires suffering - may I have the wisdom and creativity to make it my suffering before the suffering of others.
In the end, I don't have answers, but I pray that I'll have a gospel-infused patience that manifests itself in sacred, selfless action. Lord, have mercy.
Last week sometime, there was an email from David Busic, one of our General Superintendents I knew and interacted with before his election to the office. I appreciated what he had to say and I agree with much of it. I think congregations would do well to discover what leads young people to leave regular participation with a congregation or faith altogether upon reaching adulthood; it's an important issue of which to be aware.
I'm not sure, though, that discovering and replicating the reasons young people continue with congregational involvement is the right approach. In fact, I suspect this is precisely what we've been doing all along. I tend to think that the things we do that keep some young people involved are the same things that make it easy for others to leave. I'm not sure its healthy for anyone.
Within pastoral circles, Moral Therapeutic Deism isn't even a buzzword anymore, it's a cliche. It's very much a description of our civil or cultural religion - God wants you to be happy and behave, if you do, you'll go to heaven. It's a faith, as Scott Daniels likes to say, that's like Parmesan on the pasta of life, rather than the meal itself.
This is the faith we have largely passed on to our young people. Not to keep quoting Scott Daniels, but it changed my life when I heard him preach one Sunday, "Our children are desperate for us to give them something worth dying for and we refuse to do it." I think this is the issue with young people leaving congregational life AND those who stay.
We've set up a system of rules, boxes to check to confirm morality and goodness and salvation. If people follow the rules, they get the reward. This segregates faith from a lot of areas of life that aren't specifically covered in the rules; sometimes it lets those outside influences create the rules. But the bottom line is the rules: this is how you're supposed to live and if you do, you're in God's good graces.
Many of the young people who move seemlessly from adolescence to adulthood in congregational life are doing so because the rules work for them. Those who leave often do so because they have questions about the rules or the lack of depth and meaning contained therein; sometimes, those young people study the scriptures and question why some of the rules even exist at all, given those things we claim to believe.
I'm not saying every person who stays or goes does so because of this, but it's a significant influence and simply packaging the rules more attractively or selling them better is not actually going to address the problem. In the end, Christianity is essentially counter-cultural, even if that culture is one that labels everything "Christian." The notion of "fitting in" or "following the rules" works against the personal formation to which Christ calls each of us to undertake - even if those are "good" rules.
The best thing you can do to encourage all your people, young or old, to participate in the ongoing body of Christ, is to be comfortable with challenge and questions and uncertainty and doubt. People leave because they don't feel welcome, because they don't "fit in." The gospel of Christ calls us to welcome all, to not have any standard but love. The bar for entry in the Church of Jesus Christ is inconceivably low.
I know that makes running an institution difficult, which in turn makes our General Superintendents lives difficult (you know, since they run an institution), but maybe each of us needs to hear that perhaps the ongoing functioning of our religious institutions shouldn't be the goal. I'm not saying we should work against it, but perhaps the best way to keep these religious organizations working in sustaining and healthy ways is to be a little less worried about their sustained success and a little more focused on embodying the counter-cultural love modeled for us by Christ.
As a general rule, a Christian life should be open - open to inspection and question, suggestion and caution, open to correction, discussion, and outside influence. Privacy is not a luxury Christian enjoy. That's difficult for us, living in a society that prizes privacy as much as anything. We like the notion of independence, self-determination, and the ability to say, "that's none of your business." Building that wall around ourselves, one whose access is controlled by us, is comforting. No doubt.
I'm not sure it's helpful, though.
Recently, a large purchase by one of my denomination's leaders made waves because it got picked up by a big city newspaper. It was sort of unfortunate all around, especially because a lot of the discussion it spawned turned pretty personal, judgmental, and vindictive. That was sad. Obviously, one needs some sort of relationship with the guy to be able to truly ask questions about this specific purchase. At the same time, I was excited to see people willing to talk about something US society tends to avoid - money, spending, income, investments, giving, lifestyle, etc. I think these are important things, worthy of real examination.
Obviously there was a personal example floating around, so it wasn't like we could totally speak in hypotheticals - but I have some real internal conflicts between the way we're taught to behave with money (both culturally and within the Church) and the words Jesus used about money and the future and how we're best to respond to those things.
What became frustrating was how simply and easily such questions were shot down, even in the generic. I'd love to sit down and have a conversation with someone about my own finances, asking and evaluating exactly the same kind of questions we were asking about the leader in question. I think that kind of loving scrutiny can only help expand my perspective and energize my imagination for more and better attempts to be faithful.
One of the go to responses when people get uncomfortable with such conversation about someone else is, "why don't you lay out your checkbook for us and let us go over how you spend your money." In one Facebook thread I started to do just that - laying out some basic spending habits and decisions we've made for our family, with a promise of more detail if the discussion continued - I mean it when I say my life is an open book. The response was one of awkward negation, "I was only being rhetorical." I've had the same interaction with people many times, to the same result. It just seems like this kind of openness and examination should not only be normal, accepted behavior for Christians, but welcomed and encouraged.
There are problems inherent in this, especially when we're not culturally used to these discussions. They'll be awkward and floundering at times, but they're important. Yes, some people are too quick to speak and do so with unhelpful motives. But lots of other people are too reluctant to speak with equally unhelpful motives.
As Christians, the way we act, including what we make and how we spend it, is someone else's business. It's all our business, because we're accountable to each other and responsible for each other. I'm not saying it's easy, but we have to work hard to have personal discussions about things our culture generally names off limits. It's only going to do us good in the long run.
One thing for sure, though, as we move quickly to quiet those voices looking to challenge for selfish or unloving motives, we must be careful to just as quickly challenge those looking to maintain silence or exclusion in the interest of privacy. Questions are good. Discussion is good. New perspectives are important, valuable, and helpful. Yes we need relationship and context and all of those other things, but mostly we need to simply trust each other. If we really believe we're doing this journey called life together, we're going to get where we want to be quickest and easiest if we do it together.
It's not my business or your business; it's OUR business - and we can't forget that.
