Between Churches: The Dance of the Christ-Culture

One of the tricks of looking for a new church is the presumption that this new place will not suffer the shortcomings of the old place, that "different" is somehow inherently equal to "better"--although "too different" is more often thought to be "worse."

Presbyterians with a highly developed sense of personal space, for example, might chafe at the hugging and laying on of hands at a Pentecostal service down the road. Meanwhile megachurchfolk wince at the smells and bells (and scarcity of jumbotrons) at an Anglican communion. "Different" is the order of the day for those of us who find ourselves between churches, but it has to be the right kind of different.

The "right kind of different" has, in fact, been a question plaguing the church for the duration of modernity at least, and maybe, in a sense, for the length of the church's existence. In his 1951 book Christ and Culture Richard Niebuhr identified five postures the church takes toward the culture surrounding it. Examples of all five could be immediately called to mind by Niebuhr's contemporaries, and can still be easily found sixty years later. Is Christ against, of, above, paradoxically related to, or transforming culture? The answer to the question is necessarily historical, because whatever their relation, Christ and culture are the central organizing motifs of history: What has God done in the world, and what has the human race made of the world?

That's what makes the search for a church home so tricky: it's not just a question of where and how a person fits; it's a question of how this potential church home completes, even fulfills, the history of the world--even the history of God. To declare a church "home" is, at least in a sense, to declare to the whole world (even to God) "This is where you belong; what are you doing out there?"

I'm serious: there's an undeniable ego in the mix when you go hunting for a church. It's not entirely conscious, and it's ultimately not as heartfelt as I made it sound above (this is far too vulnerable a quest for sustained pomposity). But to the person on such a quest, the dance of Christ and culture starts to look like a slow song at homecoming, where in the shadows the dance partners look less like two separate beings and more like one indecipherable thing--too close for the onlooker's comfort. A church, to the church-hopper-shopper, looks like a "Christ-culture"--whatever that is.

That's not a bad way to describe a church, I suppose. But whatever a Christ-culture is, we need to remember, it's a bunch of people gathered in one place. Your mind will play tricks on you, trying to convince you that you're looking for the holy grail, the fulfillment of history, the ladder to heaven. You'll be faced with the optical illusion that these people are Jesus, that the Holy Spirit is in the planks and drywall of that building, that God looks like this pastor and likes those ushers best. In reality, however, you're looking at a bunch of people gathered in one place--in good, albeit fickle and faulty faith. Every Christ-culture is like a kid at a school dance, trying not to look ridiculous, trying to remember the steps. Our faith is lived out in such stumbling, but such stumbling is not the object of our faith. The perfect love of God is where our stumbling Christ-cultures are headed, and where we should be headed as well. As theologian Donald Bloesch reminds us in his Crisis of Piety:

God's kingdom is to be associated with a new heaven and a new earth. Moreover it will be manifested in God's time and in His own way. . . . We cannot build the eternal kingdom, but we can pray and hope for its realization. . . .

Since the kingdom of God ultimately lies beyond history the Christian life is one of pilgrimage. We can anticipate and approximate the goal of perfect love, but we can never finally arrive in this life. Ours is a theology of wayfarers.

Between Churches: Merton on Basic Pseudo-Christianity

I have the privilege of working for a "long tail" publisher, whose business model involves looking past the BIG BOOK OF THE MOMENT to work on books that will endure over time. Some books may sell modestly in their first year but continue to sell steadily every year after that, and before you know it, the editor who acquired it has retired while the book keeps selling.

I occasionally, then, reread books that were written thirty, forty, fifty or sixty years ago, when they're up for a new cover or a new edition or approaching a milestone anniversary. Most recently this was the case with Basic Christianity, fifty years old in 2009. John Stott wrote this book while he was rector of a church in post-WWII London; he went on to become one of the most influential people in the world. If you've not heard of him, that's not our fault.

Anyway, Basic Christianity is what it claims to be--a simple, straightforward presentation of what is, in the mind of Stott and the evangelicals of his era, basic to Christianity. As his later career proved, Stott has remarkable clarity, enabling him to transcend the cultural quirks of his era to declare something timeless that nonetheless speaks prophetically to his times. No wonder it continues to sell like hotcakes.

But I'm not writing today about Stott. I'm writing about Thomas Merton, Stott's Roman Catholic contemporary whose books leave Stott's in the dust in terms of sales and whose name you are even more responsible for not knowing. Merton entered monastic life in roughly the same time period that Stott entered pastoral ministry and went on to publish numerous books of theology and social commentary before his death in 1968. One late entry in his corpus, which I'm currently reading, is titled Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. (Let me here acknowledge that his publisher has more fun titling books than mine does.)

In this book, mostly sketchy thoughts and commentary on the "interesting times" we inhabit and our inherent responsibility to such times (and our all-too-common failure to live up to that responsibility), Merton devotes a couple of pages to "the basic Christian faith." I find myself wondering whether he's responding to Stott here; perhaps he glanced at Stott's little book on a shelf in the library at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and thought, Hmmm, maybe I should do something like that. Such a plainspoken, presentational book is not his cup of tea, however, so he journaled about it and moved on. Here, digested from its already digested state, is Merton's perspective on basic Christianity--and, perhaps more interestingly, its corrupted form as experienced today:

The basic Christian faith is that he who renounces his delusive, individual autonomy in order to receive his true being and freedom in and by Christ is "justified" by the mercy of God in the Cross of Christ. His "sins are forgiven" in so far as the root of guilt is torn up in the surrender which faith makes to Christ. . . .

The Church is the place in which this surrender of individual autonomy becomes real, guaranteed by the truth of the Spirit and by His love, and by the pardon of sins: for the Church herself takes upon herself all man's sin. The Church at once confesses the sins of all men as her own, and receives in herself the mercy that is offered to all men.

But now, supposing that, instead of confessing the sins of the world which she has taken upon herself, the Church--or a group of Christians who arrogate to themselves the name of "Church"--becomes a social mechanism for self-justification? . . . Suppose that she becomes a perfect and faultless machine for declaring herself not guilty? . . . SUpposing that, instead of conscience, she provides men with the support of unanimous group approval or disapproval? . . . The "Church" becomes simply a place where men gather to decree that others are guilty and they themselves are innocent. . . .

It is characteristic of pseudo-Christianity that, while claiming to be justified by God, by faith, or by the works of faith and love, it merely operates a machine for excusing sin instead of confessing and pardoning it--a machine for producing the feeling that one is right and everyone else is wrong. . . . Thus gradually the determination to pervert the Christian conscience becomes a function of the "Church"--perhaps even its prime function. And this becomes, inevitably, the sign of God's judgment upon that "Church."

So here's my confession: I don't want to go to that kind of "Church"--except that I kinda do. And assuming that the church is portable--that it's a "we" embedded in every Christian's "I"--to the extent that I nurse and nurture this "Church" in me I threaten the vitality of every church I visit. God help us all.

Between Churches: Excursus on Mission

I've been writing intermittently about my ongoing experiment in finding and re-settling at a new church. (Read my earlier posts--in reverse order, I'm afraid--here.) Today I want to interrupt myself with a question that came to mind the other night: Should I be looking for a church, or do I need to find a mission?

The question came up while I sat in on a gathering in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago--close enough to home that I could crash the party, but far enough away that I didn't need to worry about getting committed. It was intended as an initial discussion about how people in this particular community could be more missional--more actively and thoughtfully engaged in showcasing the Christian faith where they lived. But it quickly became a recruiting opportunity for Forge America.

Forge is an international missionary-training organization formed in Australia by Alan Hirsch. I became a bit of a Hirsch groupie earlier this year--a little late to the party, I freely admit, since his books have been circulating for nigh on a decade now--and as it happens, Forge America is being established in the Chicago area. I met the people who are launching it here, and they're very cool--just months into this new initiative, they're bubbling with enthusiasm and creative energy. I like to be around people like that; it makes me feel more enthusiastic and creative myself.

One of the main elements of the Forge methodology is a year-long residency, in which people develop the theological grounding for their perceived mission and get skill-training in doing the work of a missionary--cultural anthropology, sociology, theology, what have you. I should hasten to add that this isn't primarily a means to the ends of the earth; Forge emphasizes the notion that being on mission is what it means to be the church, so wherever you find yourself is, to borrow a phrase from Jesus, ripe for the harvest. Some people who are trained by Forge go on to travel internationally, but the vast majority start or continue work where (or near where) they live. A year of anything costs money, of course, so my eye went quickly to the bottom line: $2500.

Gulp.

Just above the bottom line, however, was another requirement: participants in the residency program have to be (and continue to be) actively engaged in an ongoing mission. That is, of course, open to interpretation, but I found myself deferring the money question and fretting instead over the mission question. What, I wondered, would I write on that line of the application form? What is it that I'm actively giving myself to? In the midst of window-shopping all these churches in and around my community, what am I producing, creating, engaging? What in the world am I doing?

Big gulp.

In the grand scheme of things, $2500 is not a ton of money; a college or graduate student would easily spend that in a semester (maybe a quarter, maybe a week) and not blink. But a mission you can point to and say with confidence "This is what God has me doing right now" . . . For a melancholic cynic like me, saying anything so emphatically is hard; for a suburban sloth like me, locking in to such audacious activism is even harder.

I know for a fact that I'm not alone in carrying a certain amount of ennui about how to relate to church. I've heard from enough people over the past several posts, over the past several months--over the course of my adulthood, really--to know that contemporary people struggle to identify with churches as institutions. But maybe we're asking the wrong questions; maybe we're setting off on the wrong quest. Maybe instead of searching for a church to consume, we should be discerning the mission God has for us, and letting whatever then passes for church coalesce around it.

OK, enough of that. I'll get back to deconstructing churches as institutions soon, I promise.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part Four

Part four of an occasional series. I'd suggest first reading parts one, two and three. As always, I welcome your feedback and insights.

Hope and disillusionment are key characters in the drama of church, and so they will be key characters in this drama of church as it unfolds. I set out, with my wife, in the wake of our leaving our church of six years, not immediately to find a place to land. We know too much, I’m afraid, for that to serve any purpose. We weren’t really on a search for a church anyway but rather something more elusive, more elemental to life lived to the full. We were disillusioned; we needed to be reminded of hope.

So we set out to be reminded of hope, without losing sight of the reality of disillusionment. We set out to find not one or the other but the right mix of both—that sweet concoction of hope + disillusionment that could generate more than the sum of its parts.

This was going to take time, we suspected. And so we set out not to shop for a church home but to see what God was doing in the churches in our area—in all their diversity, in all their varied interpretations of the meaning of life and the mission of God’s people. We also wanted to see what churches in our area were doing to God—where these collections of people were falling short, as humans inevitably do, and how God was working through those shortcomings and failings to nevertheless accomplish his purposes. We wanted to cement in our own minds, at least, the reality that there aren’t actually multiple churches but rather one church, whose one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord, before landing on a location in which we could join our efforts to something beyond us.

It’s worth mentioning that we had occasionally been told by friends that they could see us starting a church of our own. In particular, one new friend and one old friend were quite explicit about this, although I couldn’t really tell whether my old friend was joking or not. I thought it was funny, in any event, but it’s an idea that continued to populate a corner of my brain, one that invariably influenced how we interacted with the existing churches we visited. Full disclosure: I’m writing this introduction at the front end of this experiment, so it’s entirely possible that when it's all over I’ll be my own pastor. But I doubt it: I like autonomy too much--and I don’t like people enough--to be a pastor. As my old friend once said, “Being a leader means not getting to do what you want.” And that doesn’t sound fun to me.

But then again, who knows? This cocktail of hope and disillusionment I’m currently nursing hasn’t gotten me to that question yet. Before we look seriously at that, we’ve got some churches to visit. I'll be organizing these visits according to what’s considered “conventional” and what’s thought to be “alternative.”

“Conventional” churches include churches that can’t yet be considered “traditional”; there’s been no shortage of experimentation in church forms over the past fifty years, but you’d sound awfully funny, for example, saying “Remember the old days when our church had four hundred people, equally representing the Latino, Arab, African American and Caucasian communities?” Nevertheless, in the context of discussing churches, there are some words that evoke a particular imagination—“mega,” “traditional,” “multiethnic”—and so some observations about a particular church can be extrapolated to describe a particular movement.

There are some expressions of church, however, that are best described as “alternative,” mainly because they as yet have not gained a significant foothold in the ecclesial imagination. Even their practitioners identify them as different. I plan to include the “Christian concert” in this group not because anyone seriously considers such a gathering as church but because it functions as much like a church as like a concert. Sometimes they even take offerings. In any case, my wife once left a Christian concert by the great Sarah Groves and told a friend of ours, “This is like worship for me.” She’s not alone in that sentiment, by any stretch of the imagination. That needs to be taken seriously, and so I’ll take it seriously here.

This is a real experiment. I visited these churches for real, out of a real desire for myself to find a local Christian community to call home. I’m writing because I’m convinced that my experiment, for all its particularities, has some resonance for people like me whose hope-disillusionment continuum has gone askew. These churches are, by and large, in the Chicago area, although my travels often bring me into contact with other churches elsewhere as well. I don’t see any need to identify most of the churches I visit by name, although I see no real harm in doing so where appropriate. You may take offense at how I characterize some of these churches and their practices, but be assured that I consider all these churches to be acting in good faith, embracing the audacious calling to be the people of God in local witness to the goodness of God, conducting the mission of God in the place God has placed them. These are finite people with an infinite agenda. These are congregations of the disillusioned hopeful, and I count them as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part Three

Third in an occasional series. Read "Why I Left" part one here; part two here. I welcome your comments and questions.

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I am a firm believer that disillusionment is at least value-neutral and quite possibly a dispensation of grace. By disillusionment Moses forsook his Egyptian upbringing, later embracing his identity as a Jewish deliverer; by disillusionment King David ended his silence and confessed his sin; by disillusionment Jonah sang inside the belly of a whale and changed his course, which eventually changed the destiny of the Ninevites. By disillusionment Peter told Jesus to go away from him, only to hear Jesus bid him to follow; by disillusionment did he weep at his own betrayal of Jesus before his execution, only to be restored after the resurrection. The evangelical account of conversion demands disillusionment—a turning away from our past life, with all its sins and self-assertions. We sing things as audaciously disillusioned as “This world is not my home,” “I once was lost,” “I was sinking deep in sin.” We don’t repent of our disillusionment; we repent because of it.

Nevertheless, in and of itself disillusionment doesn’t deliver the goods. A disillusioned Moses would still be wandering the desert, too jaded to waste time on a burning bush. A disillusioned King David would have ceded the throne and retired to a cave somewhere. A disillusioned Peter would have let Jesus leave, would have rejected Jesus’ offer of restoration. No, disillusionment is intimately connected, in the evangelical story, with hope.

Hope doesn’t necessarily replace disillusionment for us; rather it counterbalances it, offering our Christian experience a dynamic constructive tension that keeps us from settling into either despair or naïve optimism. Like those desk toys in which two magnets exert equally repulsive force on a metal pen or ball or some sort, hope and disillusionment conspire to leave us hanging. They keep us unsettled, shimmering with the kinetic energy of a propulsive faith, ready—-whether we want to be or not, whether we’re conscious of our readiness or not-—to be changed, uprooted, rerouted, freshly commissioned.

But nobody likes a state of perpetual tension, no matter how dynamic or constructive. Disillusionment, for all the negative energy the word connotes, by itself is at least a fixed state. We know what to expect from disillusionment, and we know what not to expect. It’s comfortable in its own way. That’s why we get so thrown when we’re surprised by hope; it disrupts our settled state, stirring up feelings we thought we’d dispensed with or been drained of.

Likewise hope--and perhaps even moreso--is a comfortable condition. Hope without disillusionment assumes that this is the best of all possible worlds and that tomorrow will be better than today. Nobody likes a person who lives entirely in the realm of hope, but that person doesn’t care—tomorrow will be better.

No, there’s an important alchemy in the collision and collusion of hope and disillusionment. These two tastes go great together, if by “great” you mean that they do a great thing. They keep us moving: they keep us expectant while assuming no great change; they keep us grounded in reality while waiting for the happy ending; they allow us to survive and even thrive in the here and now, rather than retreating into the elusive future or sulking in the perpetual present. “An optimist,” my daddy always tells me, “can never be pleasantly surprised,” but a pessimist can never be enthused or excited. Without each other, neither can be much of anything, quite honestly. But together—together brings the magic.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part Two

I left my church for, I admit, relatively petty reasons. I was irritated; I was burned out; I was out of sync with the culture of my church. It hadn’t always been that way, of course. My wife and I had come six years earlier, having left a far-off megachurch as an act of discipleship, a decision made when the megapastors began talking about a local witness, being salt and light in the places we live. The place we lived, we determined, was too far from the church we belonged to for us to be meaningfully engaged in both. So we found a comparatively small church within walking distance of our home, a fifty-year-old fellowship in our community, with an apparent respect for the arts and a clear commitment to the spiritual gifts of women, both of which were impressive to us. They had a new pastor with a commitment to evangelism and a connection to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which, full disclosure, is my employer. While they were, like so many churches in our suburban setting, lily white, they had a nice mix of ages, which was a welcome change from our demographically organized now-former church. We had a good feeling that we had hit the motherlode, and a few weeks of comparison shopping at other churches merely confirmed our suspicions. We liked the place so much, we spent our Valentine’s Day there; they hosted a dance featuring a jazz band populated almost entirely by church members, and while we didn’t dance (not my thing), we spent most of the evening talking to the pastor and his wife. I can, I almost certainly thought to myself, work with this.

And work with it we did. Within a few weeks we were taking membership classes. A few weeks more and we were participating in their small groups program. Not long after that we were leading a group; not long after that my wife was running the program. I got involved in an adult education course that soon morphed into an Easter play; not long after that I was acting in and then writing scripts for sketches during Sunday morning worship. Before too long I was describing myself, to friends and family and even in the bio for my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, as an “actor.” My wife participated in and then led the annual summer short-term mission to Appalachia; I participated in and helped lead the confirmation program and adolescent Sunday school. I became an elder; my wife became an employee.

Less than a year after that, my wife quit her job at the church. Fifteen months after that, my term as an elder ended, and we quit the church.

Six years of our lives, suddenly done. It didn’t end in scandal; I guest-preached four weeks before our last service. My wife quit her job despite the pastor’s effort to keep her and the church’s repeated declarations that they wanted her to stay. We didn’t unfriend anybody on Facebook, and to my knowledge, nobody at the church unfriended us. It wasn’t shocking or blistering or anything other than, I suppose, disappointing.

We were disappointed, and our disappointment gradually became disillusionment, and it gradually became clear to us that our future lay elsewhere.

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The second in an ongoing series. Keep coming back to read about what we learn about God, the church and ourselves when we leave one faith community in search of another. Feel free to weigh in, too; when it comes to hope and disillusionment, everyone (and no one) is an expert.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part One

There are many in American Christianity who survey the landscape and complain that the church is under attack. I am not one of them. I look around and see, in American Christianity, an embarrassment of riches, both metaphorically and literally.

The church in America is unusually powerful, exerting remarkable influence on the cultural and political system it inhabits. A few complainers notwithstanding, the general public sees no problem with the longstanding practice of presidents employing “spiritual advisors”; the military faces no serious critique for continuing to sponsor a chaplaincy program; the most constructive programs run in the nation’s prisons are sponsored and maintained by religious organizations; no one as yet has mounted a serious challenge to the tax-free status of any organization that claims religion as its reason for being; and every week—though not as pervasively as in years past—Sunday mornings are widely accepted as sacred, with communities ceding the time to religious observance. This is the influence of Christianity in America: the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, and the Islamic Sabbath is Friday, but Sunday—the Lord’s Day in Christian tradition—gets all the press. So, despite paranoid protests to the contrary, I’m not terribly concerned about the security of the church as an American institution.

The church in America has benefited from the laissez-faire posture of other powerful institutions. Without significant intrusion from government, business or other social movements, the church has been free to flourish. Diversity of belief and practice is widespread. Whole industries undergird and append to the church’s secure base.

And yet the church fails to thrive. Membership rolls in churches across the country steadily decline every year. Congregations and denominations split in bitter disputes over money, power and piety. Adolescents complete their confirmation and confirm to their parents that they’re done, thank you very much. Revenue to churches from wedding planning and hosting is shifting to hotels and resorts. By some accounts, the church isn’t simply failing to thrive, it’s free-falling.

Oh, it’s not as dire as all that. But there are some serious, unchecked, intrinsic problems in the shared space of Christianity and contemporary culture, with its peculiar philosophies, politics and priorities. There was a time that a church centered a town; the tall steeple oriented the surrounding terrain, the bell tower kept everyone apprised of what time it is. That time is now past; the church is on the peripheries of relevance, the steeples themselves are quaint anachronisms that embarrass some and whisper sweet nostalgic nothings to others. The church as we know it is failing to thrive; it’s dying on the vine.

But that’s not why I left.

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This is the first of a series of posts--"Between Churches"--chronicling my departure from our church of several years and our exploration of the church in our area. I welcome your feedback.