The Social Gospel Nag

My wife and I have been searching for a new church in our new city for just over a year. We’ve settled on one, for now. But the search has been disconcerting. 

There are a hundred-and-one reasons. One is my own, slowly, dissolving faith. I keep hoping for a church that will run with my doubts, rather than try to assuage them, or deflect them, or (God forbid) covert me to some sort of orthodoxy.

Shub Niggurath is a fictional H.P. Lovecraft god.
One that can, apparently, inspire preachers to nag.

The search has also been disconcerting, if I’m totally honest, because many—by far the most—of the churches I’ve visited have been mostly made up of elderly people. They’ve been faithful for long lifetimes. They deserve an opportunity to rest from their labors, to enjoy the next generation take on leadership and choir seats. I remember when—in a different denomination—I preached to churches full of young people, young adults, and young marrieds. It made for better singing, better after-sermon coffee klatches, better bazaars and picnics and volunteers. It’s all gone now—if not in the denomination I used to serve as a minister in—at least it’s very rare in the churches I’ve checked out in my new city.

But among all the reasons (I could go on for a while) why mainline churches (and increasingly, Evangelical churches) are failing, the one that irks me the most is this—they are consumed by a form of works righteousness.
 
Works righteousness is the idea you have to do something to get in good with God. In Evangelical churches, it manifests itself in the preaching of moral codes, which if you keep (more or less, and as defined by your denomination or minister) you get heaven as a reward. The Trumpization of the Evangelical Church in the USA has put the lie to that. 
 
But in the UCC, we have our own unique kind of social gospel works righteousness. It’s the notion that unless we’re busy doing everything in our power to set the powers that be—government, institutions, systems—to right, we’re falling short. 
 
United Church works righteousness is a never-ending list of “to-do’s.” House the homeless. Challenge Israeli apartheid. Fight racism. Pursue peace. Be LGBTQ-friendly. Change the system. Save the planet. Change your habits. Call your MP. Donate. Plant a forest. Acknowledge our wrongs vis a vis First Nations. And on and on.
 
Ironically, there is not a single one of these “to-do’s” that I disagree with. I embrace every one, without qualification. I preached or have written about each one. I have been guilty of what I’m going to rail against in this post.
 
The problem is one of balance. You see, the only church that can effectively make a dent on these issues is a healthy church. Such churches are multi-generational. They play and are fun. They meet in and out of the sanctuary. They are full of laughter and full of informed care for those in the fellowship who need it. They are full of people who are focused on each other as the closest neighbours at hand, a practical training ground for all our other neighbours. 
 
But preachers who wave their finger, endlessly, at people, telling them what to do, how to do it, why to do it all—they are weighing church goers down and making staying church, or coming for the second or third time, very hard. 

The preacher nag inspires the same sort of negative reactions that mask mandates did. It isn't that the mask mandate was a dumb idea. It is that people don't want to be told, over and over. It infuriates most of us--or exhausts us before we begin.
 
The preacher nag, perhaps unintentionally, serves as a constant accusation that we have not measured up. It is imitative, in an odd way, of how newspapers—on TV or the web or even real paper—work. You put the murders first, the car crashes next, and finish with scandal. Op Ed pages are full of negative reads on each and every political decision and economic trend. Good news is either absent or buried. 
 
Our churches are similarly focused on all that’s wrong. We put the latest injustice first, then the worst looming ecological disaster next, and finish with what we better do or else last. Good news?
 
Look. Once again, I’m personally engaged in righting injustices, responding to disasters, and being politically involved. But as much as the church as a public institution and its members as citizens need to address many urgent matters, we should do so because the church has inspired us to gratitude and thanksgiving first. Too much nagging muddies our motivation and saps our energy.
 
Let’s preach dreams rooted in hope. I want to hear sermons that celebrate the good—and even the privilege—that so many of us experience; that celebrate starry nights, great music and art, real caring, an ancient tradition, forgiveness, sex, shared meals, and friendship. 
 
Let’s preach out of our gratitude rather than our civic and cultural problems and fears and injustices. Where is the light yoke promised by Jesus? Where is the community in love with each other—not just for Sunday coffee time—but communities that prioritize the knowing and sharing and mutual support that the New Testament so often speaks of? That’s the foundation of our love for all neighbours and strangers.
 
I long for the consolations of the gospel. I long for a spirituality that isn’t so much marching orders as it a magical spiritual mystery tour. I long to be inspired instead of commanded.
 
Look, the seventy- and eighty-year-olds who fill many United Church pews are true believers in the social gospel. Most of them don’t need to be convinced anymore. They’ve hung around when the UCC was among the first churches in Canada to truly welcome women to leadership. We lost a third or more of our membership making sure that LGBTQ people were not only welcomed, but celebrated, but they stuck with us. Our older members also hung around when we called for an end to apartheid and as we made steps to work out reconciliation with First Nations. The people who still come to our churches have fed the hungry, housed the homeless, donated to the United Church and its favorite causes, and on and on. They don’t need to be nagged to do more.
 
And younger people are looking for hope, for inspiration, for meaning amid so many crises—they don’t want to be nagged to do more and more and more either. They’re busy with families and two careers. They’re struggling to make mortgage or rent payments and to hang on to their temporary jobs in a gig economy. Even if we, here in Canada, are living through the materially best of times, most peaceful of times, many young people don’t experience it that way. What do we have to say to them besides “volunteer. Do more. Support. Vote. Go. Go. Go.”?
 

I’d love to see the United Church commit to some sort of reverse-sabbath pattern when it comes to pulpit nagging. That would be a commitment to limit our nagging to one Sunday in seven. A commitment in the rest of our preaching and lives together to focus on the old, old story (and some new ones!) because the way to change anyone’s heart is through the doorway of the imagination.  

 
I’m not lazy. I do my part. But I’m filled with spiritual yearning. I want meaning. Maybe I'm strange that way. I wake up wondering what it is all about. I feel vulnerable in a world more dangerous than we realize and I want to know whether there is hope. I want my church to have a psychic playground out back, where we can laugh and play together, feed each other and party. Where I can be rejuvenated. 
 
I get that other people might want wildly different things from church than what I want. But if we did a reverse Sabbath, we could use those other six Sundays to explore what other people are curious about when it comes to God and humanity and this planet. Bring it on.
 
But, oh. I’m so tired of being told what to do.
 
 

A Mighty Fortress Is Our God?

If you go to church, you’ve probably sung Here I Am to Worship, by Tim Hughes:
 
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, they great name we praise.
 
I don’t sing this song. Though God has always had an outsize presence in my life, I’m trying to tone it down. An almighty God just doesn’t make much sense to me anymore—though I’m still good with “invisible.” I’ll get back to that, briefly, before the end of this post. But right now, you might well be wondering, “what? Haven’t you read J. B. Phillips’ famous book, Your God Is Too Small?” This was a big bestseller in the fifties and has been continually in print since then. 

Phillips’ book contains insights. He says we shouldn’t think of God as our resident policeman or as a grand old man or as a managing director, among other things. Phillips’ bottom line is that we must avoid caricatures of God. They often reflect our own wants, needs, or psychoses.
 
Ironically, some of these caricatures do make God seem big—though in distorted ways. So, if God really was a cosmic policeman, keeping peace for everyone in the world world, that would be a hugely impressive God. Or, if God was everyone’s (nearly eight billion of us) managing director, serving as everyone's judge and co-pilot, that would be impressive.
 
After rejecting these metaphors, Phillips says the best clue we have to the greatness of God is our longing for beauty, good and truth, longing that he says cannot be explained by science. This is odd because biologists, psychologists, and philosophers all have theories about how such longings evolved and why we experience them. 
 
Phillips also suggest that a key truth that magnifies God is that he reconciles himself (always a "him" for Phillips) to us through the god-man Jesus. And while this section of the book mentions several other doctrines Phillips believes make the case for a really big God, I didn’t find it very compelling. In spite of his frequent use of phrases like, “the weight of the evidence,” or “indisputable fact,” he gives too much credit to, and offers too little support for, his own thinking. All in all, Phillips doesn’t so much establish the bigness of God as give a very short course in evangelical theology’s description of a big God.
 
Even if Phillips misfired here, it doesn’t necessarily follow that God is small. Orthodox systematic theology includes lists of God’s "divine attributes," each of which makes for a huge God. He’s apparently omniscient (knows everything), infinite (that means really big), omnipresent (everywhere—quite something when you consider the James Webb photos), immutable (unchangeable—though since this seems silly on the face of it, many theologians have tried to reframe this as faithfulness).
 
Scripture makes some big claims about God too, claims on which these attributes are partly based. This matters if you think scripture is the inspired and infallible word of God. Ironically, people who believe this usually pass over, lightly, descriptions of God that they don't like. For example, theologians don't enumerate attributes that could be based on other, less impressive sides to God: killing forty-two children with bears because they teased his prophet for being bald (2 Kings 2:23-25), killing the first-born of Egypt (Exodus 12:29-32), or killing seventy thousand Israelites because their king did a census (2 Samuel 24). Well, and there are more, similar, portrayals of God all through scripture. 
 
The attributes of God that theologians do talk about are deeply rooted in Greek, mostly Platonic, ideals. And they put God, ironically, in a box. They make God so big that God must be responsible for every good or ill thing that happens in the world. Tsunamis. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. But also, on the theory if you can stop a bad thing happening, you should—all human actions, both good and bad pass through the hands of this big God. I recently read a post from a FB friend who wrote, “God is so good,” upon the safe arrival of a few guests from far away. Well, if safety after an eight-hour drive is a gift from God, then so too must car accidents and worse. Only double-predestinarian Calvinists, of course, would admit so gladly. 
 
I don’t like this line of thinking at all. I wonder if there are alternative ways of thinking about God. For example, I remember driving through Bali once, with my spouse Irene, to see Agung volcano.
 
The taxi-driver honked his horn incessantly, and it was bugging me. So, I asked him to explain. He said each honk was a way of honoring the Gods of the place he was passing through: the God of the bridge, the God of the great palm, the God of the dangerous corner. Gods, for him, were small and had limited scope. Their power and might was merely local. They were not omniscient, but could hear, so long as you honked loudly enough. 
 
God doesn't have to be big just because that's the sort of God we want. In truth, for most of recorded history, humans have often hewed to smaller-sized gods. Even the mighty Zeus had to share headlines with Hera his spouse, and a host of lesser Gods, many of them his children. For most of his history, the God of Abraham shared top billing with, variously, El, Baal, and Asherah. Judaism only became a mostly monotheistic religion just before, or during, the Babylonian exile. That development was then written back into, and mirrored, in the scribal compilation and editing of Hebrew scriptures. (More about this is coming in a follow-up post).
 
So, humans, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as King David and nearly all of his descendants—they all, more often than not, worshipped several wee Gods rather than one really big God.
 
This is not an argument for paganism. The wee Gods of most Old Testament Israelites were also wee in their morals, often vindictive and violent, as the examples above  remind us.
 
But a God with more limited scope would explain all our unanswered prayers. Such a God would not be responsible for Tsunamis because he or she couldn’t cause or prevent them. Such a God would not be choosing to be good to some travelers and not others. Such a God would not be coming to town, making a list, checking it twice, to find out who is naughty or nice.
 
What might such a wee God do? Perhaps haunt us with dreams of beauty, goodness, and truth. Such a God might be praying to us to fulfill all his or her dreams. Such a God’s greatest deed might simply be to come to us with a still, small voice.