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.

We All Have Our Moments

We all have our moments.

I remember one, in particular. I was seven or eight years old, and had just graduated from Beginner Swimming at the neighborhood pool on Geneva St. in St. Catharines. A summer earlier I had merely earned a participation certificate for that class--so passing was a big deal.

Privileges accrued to those who passed Beginner Swimming. The largest was permission to dive from the high board--if you dared. Many kids didn't. Some climbed the ladder, walked to the end of the board, looked down, and turned back. Climbing down they had to squeeze by all the kids on the ladder waiting their turn to dive. Not pleasant.

Well, I passed, and so Ernie and John and Art and several other neighborhood kids dared me. Even now I remember clinging to the chrome railings, standing nose to back of shin of the kid ahead of me, and the sandpaper-like feel of the plank. Soon I was above all, looking down at the postage-sized pool fifteen feet below. I see it all as clearly as if it was yesterday.

Then--the moment. Flex knees, bounce up and down an inch or two. Notice friends out the corner of my eyes. Wonder about bright reflection of sun on pool. I think that maybe I can still back out. Maybe I will! But my body is ahead of my brain, overriding my caution. I realize I'm committed. The dive is a go.

My moment has arrived. It is too late to back out. But the actual terror of my headlong dive hasn't yet begun. Already triumphant in my emotional brain, the rational part of my brain is nevertheless still thinking belly flop, mouth-to-mouth, and giving up the ghost. I remember this moment. It is almost unbearable but also, mysteriously, lovely.

And then it was past. I swam to the edge of the pool, and like an idiot lined up to do it again. But what amazes me, even now, is that I don't remember my (by all accounts, graceless) dive. Or hitting the water. But I do remember my moment before.

I've had a few more since. The moment between saying, "hi," on the telephone and asking her out on a date; the moment between stretching out my hands and catching my first child at his birth. Last night, there was the moment I stood in the pulpit before my new congregation for the first time, just having been introduced, but not yet launched into my sermon.

Once again, it was mysteriously lovely--a reminder that there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the sun; a time for endings, but a time for new beginnings, too. Thank God.

Playing at Doctrine

  

          The study of doctrine has always been a pleasant preoccupation for me—one of my favorite things. There is no explaining it, really. Why do some people like getting their hands dirty gardening? Why do others spend hours scouring Kijiji.ca for bargains or Ancestry.com researching family roots? I don’t know. But I love reading about, thinking about, and sometimes even writing doctrine. It’s a hoot. Except for one thing.

          You see, other people, and even whole institutions (churches, usually) are also preoccupied with doctrine. Except that for them it doesn’t seem to be a fun thing so much as a weighty thing. Some take doctrine so seriously, in fact, that if you don’t agree with them they will argue with you. They might even send you nasty letters and emails, or publish articles denouncing your views, or even threaten to have you tossed out of the church. All of which seriously deflates the doctrinal imagination and takes the fun out of doing theology.

            Early in my ministry, for example, I was asked to give a talk about God’s creation to a lady’s society from a neighboring church. I broached the topic of cosmic and biological evolution. I had just spent a year of full-time graduate study, at seminary, exploring these topics and so I was eager to share what I had learned. However, a few days after my talk I received a letter from this society, signed by all of its members, warning me that if I didn’t repent of my evolutionary theology I was headed for hell. I had been having fun trying to fit the Biblical and Scientific pictures together; the women were so aghast with my musings that they made sure I was never invited to speak or preach in their church again.

            And that is the problem with doctrine. People take it far too seriously. One imagines that getting doctrines right about creation and or evolution, about infant or adult baptism, or about pre- or post- or a-millennialism—one imagines that if getting these doctrines right was important to God, he would have been a lot clearer about them in scripture than he actually was. Which brings up another doctrine, of course. Is scripture’s teaching about so much that we take so seriously divinely inspired, or is it a result of the limited knowledge of merely human writers—or both?

            The truth is, for the first millennium and a half of Christianity, when most followers of Jesus could neither read nor write, it was sufficient for Christians to know the basics of the story, memorize the Apostles' Creed and Lord’s Prayer, and do as your priest told you—especially when it came to the obligations of neighborly love. And theology? Doctrine? Well, that was the preserve of a tiny minority of scholars who carried on a lively debate about many things that never entered into the consciousness of most Christians.

            These days, a lot of scholars bemoan the fact that people are not reading anymore, and that the doctrines and teachings of the church are therefore beyond most folks’ understanding. As a result, Christians now tend to go to their churches not out of a deep intellectual commitment to its doctrines, but for community or out of habit or for some other reason. I’ve bemoaned this fact myself, in articles published in scholarly journals. I guess, in a perfect world, we’d all wish that everyone had a lot more knowledge and wisdom.

            But there is another, brighter, side to this coin. You see, when people are no longer preoccupied with theology or with making sure that everyone else toes their church’s doctrinal line in the sand, people are freed to focus on the main thing. The main thing isn’t assent to pages and pages of truths Christians in other traditions disagree with. No, the main thing is loving our neighbors. In fact, for most of us loving our neighbors is hard enough all by itself.

            Nevertheless, I have to admit that for the sheer joy of it, doctrine is still my playground. And for the times I mess up I expect God will just pick me up again, dust me off, and say something like, “That’s okay Johnny. Go and play some more.”

Not Getting What You Expected

When I was in grade one I took a city bus to the parochial school I attended. My bus stop was in front of the Bank of Montreal at the corner of Geneva and Niagara. I had to cross a couple of busy streets all by myself to get to the stop, but I remember feeling pretty good about being street smart enough to meet the challenge.

In an era when my father took home barely forty dollars a week, the bus ride cost a nickel each way, 10 cents a day, 50 cents a week. Those nickels were precious. In spite of that, I was known to lose them from time to time. On those days, denied entry to the bus, my early-morning return home was not nearly as pleasant as my walk to the stop.

One morning, nickel lost, I decided that rather than go home and face my mother’s displeasure, I’d go to the Bank of Montreal for a loan. So at 8 o’clock in the morning I knocked on the big glass doors as loud as I could. Sure enough, a woman answered the door. I was a bit surprised to see that she had a mop in her hand, but I explained my need for a loan to her anyway. I asked her for a 10-cent loan and promised prompt repayment. She told me I had come to the right place. I followed her in, and she reached into a purse and gave me two nickels, one for the ride to school and one for the ride home.

I was a bit surprised that the nickels didn’t come out of a drawer behind the wickets. But when you’re in grade one, life is full of mysteries. The next morning, having raided the piggybank I kept on my dresser, I knocked on the bank door again. The bank lady showed up again, forgave my loan with a laugh, and sent me on my way. That afternoon, feeling quite pleased with myself, I spent the dime on a paper bag full of blackballs, three for a penny. A real feast.

In the years since, I’ve sometimes thought about that day. How often do we go to God in prayer like I went to that bank—as if we have to make some sort of a divine transaction? We pray for Aunt Sally, or even some personal crisis, intending that we’ll somehow make it up to God out of the little piggybank of good intentions we keep in a musty corner of our hearts.

But even for the spiritually mature, prayer turns out to be full of mysteries. You see, the one who hears us turns out not to be in the banking business after all. In fact, He may turn out to be a She. And She isn’t anything like what you expected, and She isn’t keeping tabs, and She isn’t even in the business of giving you what you want. However, the good news is, when you knock and the door is mysteriously opened, no matter what you ask for, or even if you’re tongue-tied, the main thing has probably already happened anyway.

Style and Class

 It is getting awfully close to Canada Day. And that reminds me that I'm of Dutch heritage, too. A favorite story told by Dutch immigrants to Canada and the United States, retold by Sietze Buning in his book of poetry titled Style and Class, concerns Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. Juliana was the mother of the current Queen, Beatrix. Juliana ruled from 1948 to 1980. 

Early in her reign, in 1952, Queen Juliana made a visit to a college campus where a number of Dutch immigrants taught, and many more attended. Professors in cap and gown lined the sidewalks as an honor guard while the college president escorted the Queen and her husband Prince Bernhard into the chapel for a convocation.

One elderly professor, too deaf to realize how loudly he spoke, stood waiting for the queen to pass by. As she passed, he broke the honorable silence of the royal procession by saying, to nobody in particular: "Wat heeft zij tog dikke benen!" which translated means, "My, what fat legs she's got!"   

Everybody in the procession heard him. Queen Juliana too.

   

The queen stopped, backed up, faced the old professor, smiled, and said to him, with a smile: "Mijnheer, daar moet het hele Oranjehuis op rusten," which translated means, "Sir, these legs need to hold up the whole House of Orange."  Everyone who heard this cheered.

            Now, it seems obvious that most of the dignified professors who stood in cap and gown along the sidewalks had good style. The old professor who spoke too loudly lacked style. But nobody minded, because Queen Juliana had class.

            This little story is a kind of parable about what it takes to be a good Christian—though I’m sure the story could be applied to being a good Jew or Muslim, too. You see, on the whole, people call us Christians because we have a certain style. We dress up and go to church Sundays. We make sure our buildings are attractive to look at, preferably with a steeple or some stained glass. We have councils and synods and presbyteries. We pray before our meals, some of us even in restaurants. We resist the use of foul language. People see our style, and they figure we must be Christians. Big deal.

            We cannot do without this kind of style, of course. But there has to be more to being Christian than just style. Just as Queen Juliana rose above everyday style on account of her being a queen; so too, we Christians must rise above our everyday style. Christians, after all, claim to be ambassadors of reconciliation for the Lord of the Universe. We really ought to have class.

            What we need when it comes to authentic Christianity is faith, hope and love. But the classiest of these is love.

The Land of Tears

Like most men in our culture I was not taught to be comfortable with tears.

So, for example, when I was a little boy, and fell and skinned my knee, someone was sure to pick me up and say, "Now, now, little man, don't cry!" By the time I was eight, I had figured out that if I cried in the schoolyard the whole class would laugh at me. By the time I was sixteen, whenever someone broke out in tears, everyone else stood around feeling awkward. In our culture we have made a secret place of the land of tears.

We’re not alone in this. The ancient Egyptians believed that when they died and they arrived at heaven's gates, the god Osiris would ask them two questions. The first question was, "Did you bring joy?" and the second was, "Did you find joy?" Answering yes to both was the only way into heaven. Not much room for tears in the Egyptian afterlife.

But these days even Christians tend to speak as if finding joy is the main thing in life. Health and wealth television preachers like Kenneth Copeland say awful things like "prosperity is a sign of divine reward" and "if you are not happy, then you lack the Spirit." Robert Schuller, the former pastor of California’s famous Crystal Cathedral, before it went caput, wrote a book about the Beatitudes entitled, "The Be-happy Attitudes." People sentimentalize the Christian faith. The whole sum of religion comes to be looking on the bright side of things and spiritual highs. And, in the meantime, we have made a secret place of the land of tears.

The Jews in the Old Testament, on the other hand, did know how to weep. In fact, large parts of the Old Testament are lament, songs of loss, sadness and tears: Job, much of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the book of Lamentations. One third of the Psalms are laments too. For example, “I am weary with moaning,” says the Psalmist in Psalm 6. And, "My tears have been my food day and night," (Psalm 42:3). 


The New Testament is much the same. Jesus groans to see a deaf and mute man and weeps at his friend’s, Lazurus’ grave. Paul had unceasing anguish because few of his fellow Jews were inclined to follow Jesus. And in Romans 8, Paul describes how the whole world groans under the weight of sin, how Christians groan as they wait for renewal, and how even the Spirit of God groans in wordless intercession on our behalf. There is no special grace that exempts Christians from shedding tears.

And why shouldn’t we weep? Over one hundred Syrians, including babies with pacifiers in their mouths, were executed in Syria this month, in a single incident. There are more than 1000 endangered species in the world today—even though the story in Genesis states that God created us humans with the express command that we take care of all of life. Gruesome and senseless murders made the news this week. People we love have died. 

The thing is, in the secret land of tears Christians can be agents and advance people for divine reconciliation. When Jesus said, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted," he was instructing us to be open to the wounds of the world. Look at the world through tears. You will see things through your tears that dry-eyed you could not see and you will do things that are Christ-like. And then the world will be a slightly better place.

The Joy of Belonging

Last week I announced my intention to resign from the ministry in the Christian Reformed denomination. That also means I’ll need to leave Grace Christian Reformed Church, in Cobourg, where I am the pastor.

I resigned because I’ve drifted away from the teachings of the Christian Reformed Church. I never intended to. I was hoping to finish well in about ten years. But over time, small gnawing doubts about my denomination’s official teachings grew—sometimes slowly, sometimes with surprising swiftness. The kinds of issues I changed my mind about are contentious in many denominations: gay marriage, evolution, the inspiration and authority of scripture, and so on. I don’t really want to get into all that stuff right now. I won’t be able to say much about any of these issues that is helpful in five hundred words or less.

The decision to resign is painful for me. I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, was loved and nurtured into faith, and even today it feels like the home I will always be welcomed back to, even if I’m now something of a prodigal son. The Christian Reformed Church is the skeleton around which I’ve built my life. Leaving it is going to feel like an out of body experience.

The decision to resign is especially painful because I love my congregation. They have been kind and gracious to me for the entire time I’ve been their pastor. While I can’t say I’ve never heard a harsh word, I heard such things from no more than one or two people. Grace members visit their sick, bring meals to the shut-in, volunteer around the community, and try hard to imitate Christ’s love. Most people at Grace laugh easily. They’ve kept an eye on my wife and I, to make sure we were doing okay. They’re easy going, willing to try on change, willing to invest in their church, and generous to a fault for all kinds of causes, religious or not.

The irony here is that if I was not the pastor of this church, if I was just another member, sitting in the pews from Sunday to Sunday, I’d probably never leave. I’d be able to keep my intellectual doubts to myself. Non-leaders have much greater latitude to have differing sentiments. But as a leader, my deepest convictions are supposed to find expression in my preaching. I’m supposed to define the benchmarks. I can’t do that anymore. And if I I tried to do so, I would end up rocking the boat badly. That wouldn’t be good or fair to the congregation. I wasn’t hired to be a loose canon.

But there is a second, perhaps deeper, irony, here. Remember, my pain at leaving Grace Church is in direct proportion to what a wonderful experience it has been to be a member of that church. So what the pain of leaving leads me to think about are all those people out there in my little town who do not know the joys of belonging to a church community. Many people who profess, for example, to be spiritual but not religious, are missing out on the concrete mutual love and support that a church offers, and don’t realize it. They are lonelier than they need to be.

My suggestion? Give church a try. Instead of the pain of leaving, you may well discover the joys of belonging.