When Is a Church Not a Church?

            When is church not a church? When it is SoulTable.

            First some background

            This morning I read yet another article in the Washington Post about how Millennials mostly don’t like church, leave churches, and don’t go back (http://tinyurl.com/y6j6sfhq). This trend is even more pronounced in Canada, which has always been a more secular country than the USA (“Canada to lose 9,000 churches over the next Ten Years” http://tinyurl.com/y2rrguzt).

            Of course, not a few of these articles note that the trend is not quite as pronounced among Evangelicals. This isn’t saying much, since Evangelicals are also sticking by President Trump, which doesn’t suggest a high level of spiritual discernment or cultural insight among this group. It’s an old Christian mistake. Align yourself with power, because that makes you powerful! But when that power turns out to be oppressive and evil, the church will get painted by the same brush. 

            So, churches are dying, everywhere. Or setting themselves up for a massive comeuppance.

            Does this matter? Well, I suppose your answer will depend on whether you go or not. I go. In fact, I am a Christian minister in a liberal church (our motto: United, Unorthodox, Unlimited). The members of my church certainly lament the aging of our congregation, the small Sunday School and Youth Groups. I love traditional church music (even if I rarely agree with the theology), and the warmth of my congregation. Though aging, it is slowly growing too. I love the good things my church and its members do in the community and the way the children of this congregation have been taught to be responsible, caring citizens. 

            Beyond my personal feelings about church, there certainly are greater cultural losses as the church declines: loss of community in an increasingly lonely society, loss of cultural depth when it comes to understanding how Christianity has shaped the literature, philosophy, and values of the West, for example. Imagine reading Margaret Atwood’s Madadam trilogy, or The Handmaid’s Tale or her new Testaments without a good grasp of scripture. You’ll miss a lot. In fact, lots of readers miss most of it.

            On a more positive note, the waning of the church also means that it is being stripped of the coercive power that has embarrassed it so often in the past. 

            Sure, the church has done good things too, but it has also been a dependable champion of those in power, of the status quo, of sexual repression, of sexual exploitation, a supporter of residential schools, a racist institution that happily relegated non-whites to ghettoes and prisons, and so on. And all that is just in the past 100 years. Dig a bit deeper and you get Crusades and Inquisitions and Indulgences and pogroms and moral justification for any empire the church ever found itself in. The American Empire is merely the latest.

            But the same critique that I just made with respect to the church could be made for just about any powerful historical institution of the past few thousand years. Whether political regimes or banks, corporations or guilds or invading hordes of Steppe Tribesmen, when humans work together they tend to do both good things and bad. The church is not different. Which is a disappointment of historic proportions. 

            Still. There is the gospel! There is the good news! If you can believe it. The church’s (as, perhaps, opposed to the Bible’s) singular focus on salvation and life eternal has more often served as an other-worldly reward than motivation to redeem this world. I love the moral exemplar that Jesus is, especially considering his context. I am inspired by it. But I will make no claims about virgin births or children raised from the dead or resurrections or Trinities. (Not anymore, that is. There was a day.) Millennials, for the most part, find this sort of stuff unbelievable too.

            At Lawrence Park Community Church we’ve watched all this happen with some sorrow, some regret, but also count ourselves as part of the resistance. We want our church to grow, to make a difference in the city of Toronto, to inspire people to be good neighbours, to act on climate change. We want to inspire people to be more like Jesus.

            So, SoulTable. I’ve written about it before, and promised an update. SoulTable is a weekly gathering in our church’s large community hall. We launched on September 22. The format is meal/contemporary secular music (with a spiritual angle)/and a TEDx type speaker on a topic that we hope will accomplish our goals. We serve wine and beer, devote a good amount of time to discussion, and don’t pray much or read scripture much (not that we’re against it, but there is a lot of other good stuff to reflect on out there too).

            On Sept 22 we launched with 160 people in attendance. They were there to hear Neil Pasricha, author of The Book of Awesome. Attendance has ranged, since then, from 35 (Thanksgiving weekend) to about 80 or so. On Sunday we listened to spoken word artist Micah Bournes (from LA) riffing on race, justice and freedom. Next week Gretta Vosper (the United Church of Canada's atheist minister) will speak about how she approaches death and dying, funerals, and families all over the faith map.

            SoulTable is not really church. It’s an event built around Biblical themes, with music, striving to be community, and encouraging people to love like Jesus did. Or is that church?

            It’s radical. It’s different. Naysayers will laugh or complain that we’ve caved to culture,  that we don't treat scripture as authoritative or infallible or inerrant. We don't. Millennials, of course, just say “no” and leave the naysayer churches. Anyway, we’re investing our church's endowment into this. We’re trying to be relevant  and inspirational. 

            Check us out 5pm, every Sunday, at Lawrence Park Community Church, 2180 Bayview, in Toronto. We’re just south of Lawrence, and across the street from Glendon College and Sunnybrook Hospital. We have (Sunday only) free parking across the street. We’re trying something different, and so far, it seems to be working!

What Do We Do about Gretta Vosper?

I just preached a sermon about the Gretta Vosper controversy in the United Church of Canada. She's been in the news, a lot, lately, for her "soft atheist" beliefs. I sat down with her for a cup of coffee last week, and this is what I think, riffing off Luke 6:37-39, just a bit.

           I just finished reading The Illegal, by Canadian author Lawrence Hill, who also wrote the acclaimed Book of Negroes. It’s about a black illegal immigrant, Keita Ali, in a rich white country.

            The book is a terrific read. I won’t give away Keita’s story. But I do want to describe one of the book’s central characters—John.

            John is a good but irritating person. For his high school graduation project, John decides to film a documentary about life in AfricTown, the slum where he, as well as many illegal immigrants, live.

            John is irritating because he is incredibly smart and cocksure about it. He never asks permission. His devotion to his project is so single-minded that people get hurt along the way and he doesn’t seem to care. For example, at one point he hides himself in a closet in order to secretly film what it is like to be a prostitute in AfricTown. He accidentally films a tryst between the white Minister of Immigration, who is trying to deport all the illegals and a black prostitute. Worse, when John is discovered, the prostitute—who is a citizen—is secretly deported anyway.

            This setback doesn’t slow John down. For the rest of the book John follows the Minister of Immigration everywhere, which the minister finds very threatening. In fact, everyone who encounters John feels irritated by him, even though, in the end, he turns out to be a hero.

            We all know people like John—people so devoted to their vision, and so good at getting that vision “out there” that they get under our skin. Gretta Vosper is like that. She’s a United Church minister just east of here, in Scarborough, and she’s an atheist—or as she likes to say, “a soft atheist.” Soft atheism is a lot like the post-theism that Ken Gallinger used to preach from this pulpit. Gretta doesn’t believe in a God who, when asked through prayer, intervenes in our lives. She thinks that the god-stories in the Bible are myths—important, insightful, but not factual. What matters to Gretta is not the God of tradition but more the lifestyle Jesus taught through his words and actions.

            This irritates a lot of people. Some people in the United Church—important people, mind you—would like to remove her from the ministry. Whether they succeed or not, the whole process looks heavy handed and coercive to anyone who isn’t a Christian; and it has created a lot of negative controversy within the United Church too.

            Now, this is where it all gets a bit personal for me. I’ve had my own struggles trying to be a minister in a denomination I didn’t agree with. I tried, for several years, to stay in that denomination, papering over differences and conflicts. I eventually realized that I couldn’t do it. So I sought sanctuary in the United Church. And, I have to say, I’ve found a home here.

            In the United Church I’ve come to experience doctrine not as a rigid set of required beliefs, but as a playground, as an imaginative and inspiring conversation about the meaning of life and how God fits into that—or doesn’t. Unlike Gretta Vosper or Ken Gallinger, I’m a theist—a weak theist in the mold of John Caputo, I’d add—though that is a discussion for another time. Still, my experience of doctrine as a playground is enhanced by Gretta’s questions and perspective. I came to the United Church for just this sort of openness and play, and I’ve found it.

            In anticipation of this sermon, I sat down for a coffee with Gretta last week. We talked about her journey, how it has caused both conflict and growth in her local congregation, and a little bit about her vision for what a church should be. I enjoyed our conversation. Gretta listens well, she’s interesting, and she’s smart. Along the way I learned that her legal costs will be considerable. The Toronto Conference of the United Church—in spite of the denomination’s current financial crisis—is probably paying a lot too. Not much of a playground—this is an intense conflict. I’m really sad about that. And I could tell from my conversation with Gretta that it is taking a severe toll on her, too.

            But, in all fairness, I also see that there is something about Gretta that is really irritating too, in the same way that John was irritating with his gung-ho filming. I think the root of it is that Gretta sometimes sounds less like she’s interested in a conversation and more like she’s an evangelist or proselytizer. Sometimes, in interviews or on her blog, she seems disdainful of those of us who disagree with her. For example, last year she wrote an open letter to the United Church’s moderator at that time, Gary Patterson, after the horrific Paris terrorist attacks.

            In the letter she objects to a prayer for peace on the United Church website, because she blames faith in God for the Paris attacks. She argues that such faith is idolatrous, and we need to be freed from it. She further argues that our religious values have no place in the public square, and that we need to be freed from them. In this letter, she’s not content to be an atheist minister who offers her congregation an atheist model for being a church; no, Gretta insists that her brand of atheism is the one way. It comes off as more confrontational than conversational.

            What is more, the thesis of Gretta’s letter is too simple. She wants to condemn all people who believe in God, and keep their values and beliefs out of the public square, because the terrorists believed in God.

            But the terrorists also had political beliefs and values. Should all political beliefs and values also be excluded from the public square, then, since political beliefs and values are also held by terrorists? Of course not.

            The problem is not “faith in God,” or “faith in a political ideology.” No, the issue is what you believe about God or what you believe about politics—the theological or political values that guide you.

            It is impossible to avoid the fact that everyone’s actions are always going to be rooted in personal experience and learning and values—and so why should, or how could, theism be somehow uniquely excluded from playing its part, while political ideologies or economic realities are not sanctioned?

            In any case, atheism unavoidably comes with its own values too.

            Finally, the letter also ignores the scholarly consensus here, well argued by Karen Armstrong in her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Armstrong makes the point that it is only very rarely that religion or belief in God leads to violence. Rather, Armstrong argues that political powers use religion—as they use race or weapons or economics—to get their way. In fact, at root, most religions are decidedly not violent however individual adherents sometimes act.

            The bottom line is that Gretta’s letter irritated people. It seemed to step beyond the, “let’s talk about this,” circle into the, “I’m right and you’re badly mistaken,” circle. Irritating—even threatening.

            So what do we do about Gretta Vosper?

            Nothing, I think. With respect to her letter to the moderator, I’d say that every minister stirs the pot about something or other, once in a while. Even playgrounds can get a bit rough sometimes. And when they do it is time for the adults in the park to help us kids step back, cool off, and start the game over. It isn’t time to shut the playground down. What do we do about Greta Vosper?

            Nothing, I hope, unless it is to offer her pastoral support and to ask the United Church hierarchy to stand down.

            Why nothing? For a few reasons, but they are deeply imbedded in the attitude of our text. For starters, Jesus says: “Do not judge,” and I think I could make a case for leaving Gretta alone—and perhaps for Gretta not writing her letter the way she did—on the basis of those words. When it comes to the issue of post-theism or soft atheism or weak theism or even fundamentalism, we ought to keep in mind that most of us have logs in our eyes when it comes to almost everything in the Sermon on the Mount.

            But what really sings for me in today’s passage is its central concern with doing right rather than believing right.  Jesus says, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you?” And he goes on to explain that anyone who hear his words but does not do them is like someone who builds a house without a foundation, so that when the floods come, it is swept away.

            For Jesus, in other words, calling him or God “Lord, Lord,” isn’t the main thing. An orthodox Doctrine of God isn’t what saves the house—the church. Not at all. Rather, trying to put Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount action priorities into play is what Jesus really wants.

            So the kind of house I’d like to build here at LPCC is a Sermon on the Mount House. Our house should be refuge for all, especially during storms that threaten us: racism directed against First Nations or immigrants comes to mind. The kind of house I’d like to build here at Lawrence Park is one that is a sanctuary for people with challenges: parents struggling with special needs kids, or poverty, or students struggling to figure out what sexual morality is all about. The kind of house I’d like to build here at Lawrence Park is one where people who are lonely, who are dying, who are angry, or who are confused will be embraced, and who will in turn embrace others. The kind of house I’d like to build here at Lawrence Park is one where all present are allowed to be unsure about God while being focused on being better people.

            If you want to make the ideals and values of the Sermon on the Mount, which transcend any single religion but are firmly rooted in our faith too, then you are welcome here—whether you say, “Lord, Lord,” or not.

           

            Listen, I’ve left a lot unsaid in this sermon, even if I’ve preached on such themes at other times. For example, I have not explained, today, my own theistic views on God. I have not explored the practical skills we need to enjoy and benefit from each other’s company at Lawrence Park, even if we have large doctrinal disagreements amongst ourselves. And I have not explored here what we are to make of scripture, or its presumption that there is a God, if some of us don't think that scripture is right on that score. Gretta has written tons of stuff and it would take a year of sermons to go through it all and we can’t do that today or even this year.

            But this much I know. Even if Gretta isn’t crying out, “Lord, Lord,” she is trying to follow the best of the program that Jesus laid out. Like us, she’s doing so imperfectly. I won’t –can’t—judge her for that. But as long as she’s trying like I’m trying to do what Jesus did, I’d like to keep her and her friends in the playground. I hope that in the end, the United Church agrees, and remains a sanctuary for both of us.