The Big Tent Church

            A few Sundays ago, I was asked by the Youth Group of the church I serve, Lawrence Park Community Church (LPCC), to preach about prayer.

            Hmm. This is going to be interesting, I thought.

            Not interesting because I don’t have something to say about prayer. I do. But preaching about prayer will be hard because my congregation is a big tent congregation. People are all over the map on prayer and whether there is a God who listens.

• Some members at LPCC are post-theist. Post-theists believe sacredness is the quality that makes us fully human, the energy driving us to the fullness of life. They think sacredness is not up there, but in here and among us. For these church members prayer is sharing hopes and concerns and dreams with other church members.

• Some members at LPCC are traditional in their beliefs. They believe in God the Father (and Mother) and pray the Lord’s prayer expecting a divine audience.

• Some members at LPCC don’t have strong opinions about what they believe. But they are curious about faith, love worship and value trying to live like Jesus.

            We’re a big tent church, a place where people care deeply about spirituality, morality, and church community. Many members are also knowledgeable about these things. But few members are concerned when others don’t agree with them.

A worship dialog about Art and Spirituality

with Alice VanderVennen

            So, what do I make of this sort of church? After nearly three years I’m still figuring it out. But here are a few thoughts.

            For the first time in my career as a pastor, writer, editor and educator, I’m not looking over my shoulder, worried that someone is gunning for me because I have some moral, social, or theological formulation wrong—from their hallowed perspective, at least. Over time, I’ve learned that the pressure to conform to a small community’s doctrinal standards, to that community’s squeakiest wheels, can be very painful, intellectually and spiritually. The freedom to change my mind now comes as a great relief, even as I still treasure all I learned in my first community.

            I think that this sense of safety extends to my congregation as a whole. Many of these people have strong convictions. Many are well educated—including a few who are at ease in the worlds of theology and philosophy. I can learn a lot from many of them. Few, if any, however, insist that their way of seeing things is the only way. They know how to muse, how to throw out an idea for discussion, or how to get their oar in a conversation, all without clobbering others. This attitude is deeply writ in this congregation’s culture. I love it.

            Am I sugar coating a situation because I’m still enjoying the honeymoon, or because I’m in full marketing mode? Perhaps. On the other hand, it isn’t all smooth sailing. Not everyone is always pleased with everything that goes on at LPCC. Some gripe about the lack of contemporary music. Some think we’re missing the boat with respect to youth programming or adult education. Some people think I’m too focussed on stewardship issues. Like every church, we have our fair share of difficult personalities and recurrent building problems.

            Another difficulty is that where so many perspectives are present, preaching is challenging in a way it never was. I used to see my audience as a pitcher to be filled. Even when I tried to be imaginative about it, I didn’t leave much to the imagination.

            It’s different now. I’m trying to inspire people to do the right thing rather than think like me. Sure—that suggests I know what the right thing is, and they need to be told. It is more complex than that, though. The right thing is has more to do with a few general commands we do agree on—love your neighbour (for example)—than it does on specific demands—don’t get divorced. I try to encourage people to explore what to do, exactly, on their own. Jeremiads are not recommended.

            Another strategy I’m trying out is “sampling” spiritual treasures from different traditions, not to critique them so much as to ask what makes these treasures valuable to those who have them. And what might we learn from them? Understanding is more important to me than defining “us versus them.” My prayer sermon, for example, lays out how people with very different ideas about God can still do the discipline of prayer together.

            Still, I’m opinionated. Sometimes I rant about what I believe are badly mistaken ideas. I know that seems inconsistent with what I’ve said up to now. I’m working on that.

            Does anything go? I don’t know, yet. Certainly, by embracing and learning from people with post-theistic inclinations we certainly go a long way compared to most churches. But we do have standards. I think these are the implicit rules that govern where we are: love for each other is more important than being right; theological curiosity does not kill the cat; community is more important than getting your own way. Do unto others and all that.

            I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for the big tent church. Pizza? Every topping has its own flavour, but the whole would be less if the pizza was limited to one topping. Maybe a Biblical metaphor, like the body, works. A variety of limbs and organs are required to make the whole work. In the end, I think the best analogy is the Apostles’ Creed’s “one Holy Catholic (universal) Church,” shrunk to congregational size. The worldwide church today has Pentecostals and Liberals, Liturgical innovators and those who recite medieval chants, Unitarians, Arminians, five point Calvinists, and maybe even Mormons. At LPCC we’re like one Holy Catholic Church. All of us, regardless of our doctrinal distinctives, sit together in one congregation. Sometimes it is a circus, but always a big tent.

The Liberal Church: Anything Goes But Nobody Shows?

A few years ago, one of my children, new to the Toronto area, was looking for a church. He visited a lot of United and Unitarian congregations along the way. What he found, for the most part, were small struggling churches where most of the membership was female and older than 65. His comment to me was, “Anything goes, nobody shows.”

Really? Is that the best that can be said of the liberal church? Perhaps. Over the past month the press has been full of similar negative assessments of the liberal Church. This recent spate of articles began with Ross Douthat, a Catholic, writing in the New York Times, on July 15. In an article entitled, “Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved,” Douthat accounts for the steady erosion of liberal church membership by arguing that liberal churches, “often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism.” Then on July 28, Margaret Wente, writing in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail, argued that the liberal church’s move to a “more open, more inclusive, more egalitarian and more progressive” faith has been a colossal failure, in part because the United Church now offers, “intellect, rationality and understanding” instead of spirituality and social activism instead of the gospel.

And then, of course, there is the irascible Tom Harpur, who contributed his nationally syndicated column to the Northumberland Times on July 30. Entitled, “Tsunami Due for Religion as We Know It,” Harpur argues that, “the ‘half-gods’ of the old religion are in the process of being taken apart.” The half-gods Harpur refers to are a witch’s brew of the worst of Christianity: unbelievable doctrines, literalistic understanding of ancient texts, and disgraced priests and evangelists. Interestingly, Harpur doesn’t just go after the liberal churches, but all churches. Before the end of his article, however, Harpur also offers a note of hope for those of us who want the best for the future of faith. He writes that, “the end of religion as we have known it is the beginning of something much greater,” that is, “the evolution of the highest spiritual attributes of human kind.” Unfortunately, he is very vague about what these attributes look like, or how we might achieve them.

The most interesting of the recent commentaries on religion comes from Diana Butler Bass, author of the acclaimed Christianity After Religion: The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Writing in the Huffington Post on July 15, (“Can Christianity Be Saved? A Response to Ross Douthat,”) Butler Bass makes the point that it isn’t just the mainline churches that are declining—all churches are, including Evangelical churches. So, for example, the denomination I left this year has been losing members for years, and is a shadow of what it was twenty years ago. Recent commentators have pointed out that one in ten Americans considers himself or herself a former Catholic. Were it not for immigration the Catholic church would be a shell of what it is now. The most conservative large American evangelical church, the Southern Baptists, have also been declining for at least ten years, having lost, by some estimates, nearly 20% of their membership.

Like Harpur, Butler Bass is nevertheless hopeful, though she’s also more specific. She argues that that the future of Christianity is with churches where “a form of faith that cares for one's neighbor, the common good, and fosters equality, but is, at the same time, a transformative personal faith that is warm, experiential, generous, and thoughtful. This new expression of Christianity maintains the historic liberal passion for serving others but embraces Jesus' injunction that a vibrant love for God is the basis for a meaningful life.”

I like the direction Butler Bass is suggesting. In her book she argues that whatever is happening in our institutional churches, and no matter how suspicious people are of those institutions, it is clear that the public at large is still deeply interested in, and engaged in, spiritual pursuits.

But to get to young adults like my son, our churches have to be more than places where anything goes. They also have to be places where he can find warmth, community, friendship, purpose, and a humble longing and awe for God.

And come to think of it, that’s what I’m looking for too.

How Liberals and Conservatives Talk

            You’ve heard Liberals and Conservatives—and their extreme cousins, Radicals and Reactionaries—talk. Conservatives say, "Slow down! We need to hold the line on change for a while. Let’s wait till a consensus to emerge before we move ahead with new policies." Liberals, on the other hand, say, "Let's go! We are way behind the times. Let’s move ahead with ordaining practicing gays (or allowing kids at the Lord’s Table, or demanding that the government act more vigorously to alleviate poverty). Reactionaries—extreme Conservatives—say things like, "Now you've done it. I'm out of here. I want to start over with a new church that eliminates all recent changes. I want no part of them." And Radicals—extreme Liberals—say things like, “You haven’t done enough. I’m out of here. I want to start over with a new church (or no church) that changes everything.

            In this somewhat academic blog post, I want to explore how we, as Liberals and Conservatives (mostly) and even Radicals and Reactionaries (well, at least a few of us) talk about the church. Or, better yet, I guess I’d like to write about how our talk about change helps us understand our Liberal or Conservative selves.

            So first I need to define a few terms. First, structure. The structure of a church is its legal, organizational and cultural aspects--everything from confessions to church orders, from congregations to ethnic habits. Second, drift. Drift is how the pendulum swings within culture. Over the past fifty or even one hundred years, most commentators would agree that within most denominations, regardless of their starting point, that drift has been leftward. So, in Canada’s United Church, for example, the Primitive Methodist current has mostly been swamped by Unitarian and other theologically Liberal currents. In the United States, the original isolationist currents of Fundamentalism have been overtaken by political activism and media savvy. And, where Fundamentalists used to dress differently, watch no TV at all, and discourage higher education, they now (even at the beach) dress the same as everyone else, watch the same TV, and have many of their own institutions of higher education.

            My thesis is this. Conservatives and Liberals both accept current church structures. But while Conservatives and Reactionaries are suspicious and concerned about the current drift to the left, Liberals and Radicals are not. Ironically, however, Reactionaries and Radicals, unlike their more moderate partners, both reject current church structures. They want to break them down or start over. Reactionaries tend towards independentism or building new church denominations while Radicals tend to drift out of church all together. The following illustration might help keep these distinctions straight.

*******

A.

<<-----------------------Religious Structures----------------------->>

Radicals              Liberals        Conservatives             Reactionaries

(reject                   (both accept structure)                 (reject

structure)                                                                        structure)

B.

<<-----------------------------Religious Drift-----------------------------<<

                                                                                                 

(Radicals, Liberals                                   (Conservatives, Reactionaries

Accept the drift)                                       Reject the drift)

******

            Now, those on the left and the right have favored ways of trying to get their point of view across. While certainly not limited to these strategies, more often than not, these are the fallback positions.

            Liberals and Radicals, depending on how far left they are, tend to argue from circumstance or situation. They say things like, “We need to fix the inner city’s poverty,” or “Look at the suffering in the Sudan! What can we do to alleviate it?” Liberals are motivated by difficult realities like crime, illness, racism and illiteracy. They get to work to fix such things. Conservatives and Reactionaries tend to argue from purpose or principle. The say things like, “the Bible is inerrant!” or “Everyone has to subscribe to our denominational confessions,” or “we need to find the truth.” Conservatives and Reactionaries are motivated by the great ideals that have been handed down to them, by the laws of the universe, and by the rules that embody them. The get to work in order to bring people back to or rally people around their ideals.

            People on the left and the right also have peculiar ways of working together (or not). In the middle, the Liberals and Conservatives who want to stay with current church structures treat issues one at a time because they and the world we live in are complex. They understand the dangers of oversimplifying. Thus people who hold to middle positions tend to see many causes at work in the church rather than just a few. Causes that both Liberals and Conservatives are concerned about include secularism, less literacy, wealth, new interpretations of old passages, youth culture, TV, leisure, social pressures, and so on.

            The extremists, on the other hand, Reactionaries and Radicals, tend to treat all issues as related since the world, in their mind, is really pretty simple. Extremists love simplistic slippery slope arguments that suggest everything is headed in one direction. Thus they tend to reduce the causes to a very few, usually negative, ones: refusing to take the word of God seriously, or refusal to take alienation or poverty seriously.

            But Liberals and Conservatives are also different in how they tend to communicate. Conservatives and Reactionaries on the right argue deductively from principal (ie, if scripture or the confessions say so, we must accept that). Liberals and Radicals on the left tend to argue inductively from experience. So, if there is suffering, then we better do something about that. The right argues from written documents and cultural memory: laws, confessions, and traditions. The left argues from relationships and people, striving to improve the lot of people via equality, progress, or openness.

            The bottom line is that I think the past generation or two has seen a marked shift away from the center and towards the fringes. As people read and study less they are also less able to describe complexity or put up with bureaucracy. So they reject the structures while holding every more extreme opinions that make conversation ever more difficult.

            So what do you think? And where do you fit in?

(This blog post was informed by the scholarly work of the late Bernard Brock, a mentor and teacher for me. As a communication theorist at Wayne State University, he was especially interested in the political arena. But his ideas can easily be adapted to the church setting, and that is what I’ll do here.)