How Preaching Is Different in the United Church Compared to Evangelical Churches

            Preaching to a United Church of Canada congregation, compared to preaching to a Christian Reformed (CRC) or evangelical congregation, is both incredibly similar—and amazingly different. Here I want to focus on a few key differences, and the spiritual impact of these differences not on the congregation, but on me.

            The first big difference has to do with the audience. CRC and evangelical congregations have much less diversity of theological opinion than United Church congregations.

            So, in evangelical Churches preachers are constrained in what they can say by theological boundaries. The exactly-right theology is a rite of admission to the pulpit. Those boundaries might be confessional or they might be understood even though they’re not written down. In an evangelical church, for example, you wouldn’t preach that scripture is a wise-but-not-infallible book, or take a prochoice position with respect to abortion. The focus is on a discrete number of key doctrines that everyone must accept—and which most members (whether they think about it much or not) also accept. Different denominations are notable, in part, for their slight variations on what is in this critical core.

            In the United Church, however, the reality is quite different. Here theology is a playground rather than a minefield. As a big tent church, much less emphasis is placed on trying to define a core of doctrines around which there must be agreement. Instead, pastors need to be sensitive to the diversity of opinion in the pews. In my congregation some parishioners are post-theistic (like Greta Vosper) and others are very traditionally Trinitarian. We have members who think prayer is talking to yourself (which, if allowed, can be a very positive experience!) and others who think of prayer as a personal conversation with God. Parishioners, in turn, expect the pastor to be sensitive when speaking about such matters. Parishioners want the pastor to be inclusive rather than a champion of some view that the parishioner holds. That doesn’t mean the pastor can’t have a clearly stated opinion—but it means that the opinion needs to be part of a friendly conversation, as opposed to a black and white judgment against the opinions of those who disagree.

            In my previous evangelical congregation, I always felt constrained by the need to stay with the doctrinal core. Although I found lots of pleasure in studying the text and trying to lay it out in sermons, I also found that when I had done so, I was often bumping up against the confessional or church-culture limits to what could be said from the pulpit. So in my evangelical congregation I didn’t preach about universalism or gay marriage or abortion. My views lay outside the confessions and the cultural norms of my denomination.

            In the United Church, however, there is a mirror-image challenge. When nearly all opinions about spiritual matters are supposed to be able to find a home—or at least a respectful conversation—what is there left to preach? Some of my evangelical friends will say, “yup, when everything is relative, you have nothing left to say. Anything goes.” The key difference, though, has to do with the function of theology—in one group of churches the core truths are (supposed to be) the key thing; in the other group it isn’t that you can’t preach about theology, it is just that you can’t clobber people with one view, and one view only.

            Of course, I’ve oversimplified here. There is lots of unexplored or undefined theological, moral, and spiritual ground in the CRC and evangelical churches that is fun to explore and preach about. For me that included topics like creation and evolution, inclusive language, and contemporary cultural issues raised by media and mediums. I do wonder, however, how much the trend to health and wealth preaching, and the trend to five-point sermons on pragmatic issues like healthy marriage or raising your kids correctly is an unexpected consequence of both pastoral and congregational widespread boredom with traditional theology in evangelical churches.

            There is also a core of consensus in the United Church. Rather than focusing on theological topics laid out in confessions, the United Church core has to do with spiritual habits of the heart. I’ve already mentioned the consequence of one of them—the decided openness to engaging many different perspectives. The habit of heart here is hospitality. In the United Church we are supposed to be hospitable to people who have very different ideas. Another habit of the heart that is quite different has to do with the United Church’s focus on left-leaning social activism. I’m talking about the popular perception that the United Church is the “NDP at prayer.” I actually pastor a church where this isn’t a very strong tendency, but in listening to sermons by my new United Church colleagues, I notice that they hammer away at issues that involve the last, the least, the marginalized, the poor, the refugee, the orphans and so on. I suppose Jesus did too! The problem here is that this sort of preaching can become boring—and very oppressive—pretty fast too. It can become a kind of legalistic, works-righteousness focused drumbeat.

            A few caveats. First, in both evangelical and United Church congregations there are plenty of people who can’t tell the three Persons apart from the two natures. Both denominations are full of people who belong to their church for a whole bunch of cultural, family, or social reasons that have nothing to do with theology. And that isn’t all bad. One of the key things that has to happen in churches is creation of a community that mirrors the love God and Jesus have for each other, and the “in-ness” that the father and the son share with each other.

            Second, in both denominations, there are prophetic moments when the exact right time has come for the preacher to say a very difficult thing. And one of the gracious things God has always provided the world with is people (more than we realize) who actually do speak out as prophets, regardless of their views on scripture or even their religion. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and David Suzuki all come to mind—but there are many pastors in both the United Church and evangelical congregations who in their own small way have also said those difficult things in a timely way, in spite of their different scriptural bases and theological frameworks.

            Personally, I’m glad I made the switch. At times I feel a bit out to sea, like a gold fish dropped out of the bowl into a big lake. Too much freedom and space. Too much to reconsider, relearn, rethink. Everything is up for grabs and nothing feels solid. At the same time, the opportunity to freely rethink my perspective, to change my mind, to try to realign myself with what I think is the best in the Christian tradition, to examine myself—all without fear of retribution or exile or warning, is an exhilarating experience of freedom in Christ.

            And as I explore my new space, I’m reminded of what one of the denominational leaders who shepherded me into the United Church said. “We welcome your spirituality  and your doubts. We want to be a sanctuary for people like you.”

What Is the Clear Teaching of Scripture?

         In response to a posting on Bryan Berghoef’s excellent “Tomorrow’s Theology, Today’s Task” (http://tinyurl.com/q5vptko) at his blog www.PubTheologian.com.

         Language is a slippery thing. Where once we spoke (or more often wrote) about the perspicuity of scripture (of which more later), we now speak of the clear teaching of scripture. The historical link between these two concepts is relatively easy to trace. "The clear teaching of scripture," is a phrase that sounds, well . . . more perspicuous than perspicuity!

         I fear, however, that the phrase has no settled, agreed upon meaning that can serve as the basis for a discussion. In part it is because the phrase "the clear teaching of scripture," is most often a polemical one, used in arguments (say about Adam and Eve, or about homosexuality) to strongly suggest that the person who doesn't agree with you is rejecting some essential teaching of Christianity. And for most Christians (unfortunately) when you start talking about rejecting those teachings, you’re intimating things about heaven and hell.

         The phrase is also difficult to pin down because of the influence that Fundamentalist ideas about the literal meaning of scripture have had on the Evangelical psyche. That is, Fundamentalists speak as if Biblical interpretation is easy, because all you have to do is read the Bible for its propositions, as if it was a textbook or science report or newspaper. Many scholars have pointed out that Fundamentalism, probably in reaction to the rationality and linearity of the scientific method that was wreaking havoc on traditional Christian belief in the nineteenth century, adopted the same sort of methodology for themselves when it came to theology--turning it into a science so they could examine its propositions. So Hank Hart (with many others) writes, "To counteract the rational infallibility of scientific propositions, Christians responded with the (equally rational) infallibility of revealed propositions. But a focus on [rationalistic] propositions was common to both sides." Hart is pointing out that the whole Fundamentalist/Evangelical hermeneutic is based on a synthetic theological framework that has less to do the two-thousand-year-long discussion in the church about Biblical interpretation than it has to do with the unconscious and unhelpful adoption of Enlightenment rationalism as the lens through which scripture is understood.

         Third, another aspect of this Enlightenment thinking, following especially after Thomas Reid and the Common Sense school of thought is the presupposition (not very Calvinist, actually, in that it doesn't give much play to human’s depraved natures) that "all humans possessed, by nature, a common set of capacities--both epistemological and ethical--through which they could grasp the basic realities of nature and morality." Which gets back to where I started—anybody with a little common sense can figure it out. It adds up to a joyless, narrow, literalistic hermeneutic that is all about facts and truths that one is supposed to get if only one would read the Bible as if it were a junior high primer on matters of faith.

         So I just don't like the phrase "The clear teaching of scripture." It has too much baggage that isn't rooted in deep-church tradition. 

         Is the word perspicuity any better? I'm not sure. Historically, the phrase is used in our tradition to mean that the heart of the gospel's message (note—not everything by a long shot) can be understood by anyone--with the help of the Holy Spirit. The trouble is, for practical purposes, the heart of that message in the Christian Reformed Church (for example) turns out to be three creeds and three more confessions covering things as obtuse as the ubiquity of Jesus at the Lord's Supper (which, though it is found in the Heidelberg Catechism isn't something that even Calvinists can agree on) the nature of the atonement (using Anselm's late substitutionary model as its main peg), reprobation and so on. So much for a generous orthodoxy!

         Perspicuity--the notion that regular folk don't need the (Roman) church to interpret the scripture for them because they can do it for themselves--has ironically become imprisoned by the church's insistance on wide and deep confessional subscription. The confessions are long laundry lists of what people in certain denomination must believe, whether or not it seems obvious to those people based on their own study of scripture. Ironically, most Protestants can't agree on much of what is in the Confessions--baptism, election, the role of the Spirit, the nature of Jesus' presence at the Lord's Table, and so on.

         The problem, then, is that in a Christian world where most people can't agree on very much, we nevertheless try to multiply what adherents of particular denominations must believe to be in good standing. And this is doubly difficult when the real reasons most people belong to churches has nothing to do with their teachings, but with their tribalism or community (two sides of a single coin). My own view is that we ought to go light on confessional demands, and focus on community—on loving each other as Christ loved us. Rather than being collections of people who speak as if we know what God means, we ought to mean to follow Jesus in community. Even when we're not sure about much else.

         Of course, institutions need rules. They are voluntary associations, so if you can't agree with their teachings you can leave (I did). 

         My bottom line on perpspicuity? Honestly, I think scripture is a lot more obscure and difficult than most people give it credit for. And I wish we could own up to that. From translation to the presuppositions of the interpreter, from the strangeness of antiquity to our own radically different worldviews, from the variety of theologies and points of view one finds in scripture itself to the rich resource that modern science has become—there are a hundred and one reasons for finding scripture hard to understand. It takes a lot of study of scripture (which very few people do anymore), a lot of wide reading of all the various opinions out there and in the history of the living Catholic Church, and a lot of humility to come to "best guesses," about the meaning and import of even the most commonly written about themes in scripture. That's why there are huge tomes on hermeneutics, or "The Kingdom," or "Paul," out there. Huge tomes that often come to radically different conclusions. Do we go with Augustine’s allegorical method, borrowed from Tychonius the Donatist, as described in his "Christian Doctrine?" I doubt it--though I do like one thing he says (earlier) there. “Whoever finds a lesson [in scripture] useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way."

         To me, Augustine was right. The heart of scripture is about the building of charity in gratitude for God’s charity. But you may disagree!

Time to Put the Confessions to Pasture?

So the backstory goes something like this. The denomination I am a pastor in, the Christian Reformed Church, is what theologians call a confessional church. That is, as a denomination, we say we believe certain very specific things, summarized in three documents we call the Confessions, written mostly in the sixteenth century. These are the Heidelberg Catechism, the Canons of Dordt, and the Belgic Confession. The doctrines found in the Confessions are supposed to be the reasons we give others for why we’ve chosen to be Christian Reformed.

Well, actually, the vast majority of Christian Reformed people are so because they were born that way, and enjoy the community benefits of staying that way. Rodney Stark can explain the sociological reasons why that is so. And unfortunately, most Christian Reformed people have only a passing familiarity with the Confessions. Among those who actually know the Confessions, I run into more and more people—mostly fellow pastors—who are not convinced that the Confessions get it mostly right.

It gets more complicated. Whatever reservations pastors or other official office bearers in the Christian Reformed Church might have about the Confessions, we’re supposed to “subscribe,” to them. That means we’re supposed to publicly affirm that the doctrines (if not how, exactly, they’re formulated) are true. Some people, some time ago, thought that such subscription was too tough, and that many people were signing the Form of Subscription with their fingers crossed, so to speak. So we needed a new form.

Well, years later, Synod (the annual meeting of the Church) is being asked to approve a new Form of Subscription. But it isn’t much of an improvement over the old one, if at all. When office bearers sign it, I’m guessing there will still be a lot of people who do it with crossed fingers. Loosening the form of subscription has proved nearly impossible because many in the church see that as caving in to liberalism (as if that would necessarily be worse than caving into modern Evangelicalism or Fundamentalism).

Now, I've always thought that a confession, in its plain English sense, was something that lived in your heart and thus needed to find expression on your lips. Our Confessions—in spite of brave attempts to rewrite them in contemporary English—don’t do that. There is too much there, too linear, too certain, too abstract, and so on—for people to actually be able to confess the Confessions anymore. They fail as expressions of piety, unless you are talking about short snatches in them, like the Heidelberg Catechism’s description of our only comfort in life and in death: “That we are not our own, but belong, body and soul, to our faithful savior Jesus Christ.”

What the Confessions are good for is defining orthodoxy and theological boundaries. That means that their main function in the church—other than being used for educational purposes—is coercive. They keep people in line and keep the church pure (theologically, of course, though they also help keep us mostly Dutch and Korean).

What I wish is that we could find some new category for the Confessions that would give them some educational prominence, but take away their coercive edge. We could create a category of documents "even more important to our tradition than Berkhof's Systematic Theology" (another touchstone of real scholastic Reformed orthodoxy). We could, in other words, honor them, learn from them, but not be bound by them. The only official confession we really need anymore, as far as I can tell, is the one scripture suggests in Romans 10:9: Jesus is Lord.

Giving the Confessions some sort of status as teaching documents in the Christian Reformed Church would allow us to have a traditional Reformed anchor without presuming that they got it all right 400 years ago. Of course, that isn't practical, some will say. If we change the Form of Subscription, people will be angry, they’ll leave the church. They'll make threats. They'll make judgments. There will be schism. People who say so are probably right. Remember, after all, that the main function of these Confessions today is coercion. They make great clubs. We're in a pickle.

It all sort of reminds me of how some "Old First" churches plateau at a certain level. Change becomes impossible with its present membership because too many people have a stake—in the organ, or the pews, or a coffee break program that is only working for retired women, or whatever. So some members leave and start a new church where they can get with the times, and it flourishes. You know, unless a seed dies . . .

Well, as a Confessional church we're stuck with Old First's great memories and all of its problems, too. Meanwhile, our plateau days are past and we're actually in slow decline. Change has become impossible, unless it is change that sanctifies the language of modern commerce, such as Home Missions foisting "Enterprize Zones" on us. That's almost blasphemous! 

Sure, some traditional Reformed congregations are flourishing. But anecdotal evidence is very unreliable. After all, many traditional Reformed congregations are dying, too. Maybe it isn’t the Confessions that explains either trend. And anyway, if you look around, there are at least a few churches of all stripes (including more than a few liberal ones) flourishing somewhere. Ironically, the Mormon denomination, interestingly enough—is usually growing fastest of all. And they don't have confessions--they have a whole other Holy book!

No, I fear we're stuck. The Christian Reformed Church will muddle on. But the Confessions will never live again in this denomination the way they did when they were written. We'll just keep on pretending, though, that they might. And we'll keep using them as a means of last resort to make people sit up straight and behave.