the Outlook Blog

Beaver-Butler is sending an overture to GA to allow "theological, non-geographic" Presbyteries, in order to promote a greater flexibility in government and to stem the tide of congregations leaving the denomination.

In January of this year, the Presbytery of the Pacific defeated a similar motion.

I've thought long and hard about this, and I said to the proponents, "I'd be willing to vote favorably on this if you were willing to send an overture to GA for the removal of G6.106b, thus allowing both groups to proceed with their agendas. 

If we are to be a church truly flexible, then let's go for it.

But my friend said, "Oh no, the evangelicals would never go for the removal of G6.106b."

In other words, putting it crassly, they want their cake, but won't let me have mine. 

As I thought about this, it occurred to me that allowing for non-geographical Presbyteries could well allow for the formation of a half-dozen new Presbyteries, each able to send overtures to GA, vote on overtures sent down, and POSSESS THE POWER TO DISMISS CONGREGATIONS!

Am I being cynical?

Perhaps, but I've learned to be cautious - for years now, I have felt that leaving the denomination is a high priority, and similar in priority is crafting devices to keep their property.

A non-geographical presbytery, once formed, could hold but one meeting and then dismiss, carte blanche, all of its churches to the EPC, or whatever status they so desire. 

I believe the assertion of theological interests is less than honest here. It's not about theology, but about practice, and for the majority of evangelicals in our ranks, it's about denying ordination to GLBT persons.

Even as I seek a change in our constitution to grant ordination to whomever gives evidence of a calling and can pass the tests leading to ordination.

We've all done our theological work; now, it's a question of practice.

I've written previously about the coming time when the respective theological camps of our church will sign the papers, break up the house, and form their own new homes.

It may yet come to that.

And it may be the only way to prevent further harm.

But everyone must realize that "gracious separation," no matter how gracious it be, is still a separation, and, thus, a failure of love. We cannot love one another, and why it should be so is profoundly complex, I'm sure. But complexity aside, we cannot love one another.

Someone might said, "Oh, but of course, we can love one another. We just can't live together any longer." 

But love is love - it's not just some distant sentiment - it's the enjoyment of one another, and the realization of mutual need; it's the discipline of staying together in the face of difficulty.

These thoughts are prompted by my reading this morning in Jacob Needleman's book, What is God?". On page 133, while discussing "rationalists" and "empiricists," he suggests that Kant's position helps these respective groups "find their own true place - a sure sign that a higher reconciliation has been achieved. The true reconciling force," writes Needleman, "never destroys, it always preserves and rescues the truth of both previous 'adversaries' [bold, mine].

 Neither side compromises, but through a "higher reconciliation," each side finds its place, as each recognizes the inherent truth in one another.

Gracious separation and moving away, or some kind of in-house separation, with non-geographic Presbyteries or Synods, only demonstrates our inability to find ways to talk to one another and, perhaps, talk our way through.

Having said that, I'm clear that our current distress is more than just theological discourse, but practice.

As one conservative said to me, "We'd just like to have a place where we can hold to our theology."

I replied, "But it's more than theology. It's practice, and the heart of the practical question is ordination for GLBT persons, and for me, it's a question of justice."

There were those in the years leading up to the Civil War who wanted to maintain theological discussion, but there were others who saw the condition of slave-labor and said, "It must cease."

For me, discrimination against GLBT persons must cease!

For others, the bar against ordination of GLBT persons must remain in place.

How do our respective camps work our way through this?

Think again of the Civil War. Abolition for the Union, or States' Rights for the South? 

Our nation fought a war over it, and we may yet sign the papers of separation and divorce. 

Yet, we all must pause and think.

I have no answers, but to invite us to share together whenever we can and maintain mutual prayers. 

Been thinking a lot about Genesis 15, since I preached from it Feb. 28.

Been thinking about the small promises of God - God promises Abram a bleak 400 years of slavery for his descendants, and though God will rescue them at the right time and bring them to the land, there's no promise here of bliss, but only of life.

Abram, at least, is promised a long life and a peaceable death.

God's promises are small, but real ... more real than all the bloated, artificial, self-seeking, egotistical, manipulative, fear-driven, promises of our world - buy this, get this, do this, be like this, and you will ... (fill in the blank).

Been also wondering why Christians have bloated the promises of God.

Pop christian music is particularly bloated ...

TV preachers are pretty bloated, too ... and hungry for our money.

How many good and decent preachers have stood in a pulpit, compelled (by what forces?) to offer bloated promises, "If only we give our life to Christ - then, by golly, our teeth will whiten, we'll lose weight, popularity issues will be resolved, employment and promotion will come our way, parking places will magically appear while our godless neighbors have to circle the block endlessly, like some bizarre scene out of Dante's Purgatory ... while others die in freeway crashes and airplane accidents, our guardian angel will shelter us. Our kids will grow up to be successful; we'll live in a beautiful home in the right part of town. We'll be free of illness, and if you should get sick (silly me!), Jesus will heal you. And, then, when we die, off to heaven we go. All we need to do is ...."

What is up with this?

Are not the real promises of God good enough?

 

Reading Jim Wallis' Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street.

Makes me wonder: Where has the church been the last 50 years?

What kinds of questions have we been asking of ourselves? Of our politicians and our financial captains?

Have we been asking questions at all?

Or have we retreated into our theological havens, our self-help retreat centers, our feel-good-and-be-prosperous  church growth stategies?

Have we offered a creed without a conscience? 

Jesus without justice?

Heaven without earth? 

A spirituality without a witness to the culture?

Have we been so preoccupied with numbers and buildings and programs and projects that we have missed the heart of the gospel?

If any of the above questions can be answered, in full or in part, with a yes, then we have failed, and our failure is part and parcel of our nation's plunge into economic chaos.

Whether we have been liberal or conservative, the tide of culture has weakened the church, turning the church into a little afternoon tea-party or Monday-night pub discussions about supralapsarianism. 

Conservatives have sought refuge in bedroom theology and politics; liberals have found similar refuge in various causes - but all of us have been afraid to ask the deep questions so badly needed by our nation.

We have winked at the accumulation of wealth without restraint; we have blessed the stock market with a carte blanch; we have made happiness the supreme goal of life; we have lost our sense of the common good, and are morally adrift on Pinocchio's Pleasure Island - which, by the way, is a parable of the times in which we have lived for the last 50 years!

Where and how has the church failed to ask the good questions needed to keep our nation's moral compass rightly calibrated?

How have we failed to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world?

If we've failed, there is sufficient fault to go around - neither the conservative nor the liberal wings of the church can claim exemption.

I look forward to some comment here, and let it be confessional, not accusatory. 

A friend asked me to put some thought together to define liberal as I see it ...

Here's what I wrote:

Hi John ... I think both ... a freedom to think broadly, experimentally - but clearly, for me, the term represents the best in America's political story - that which gave us the National Parks and child labor laws; that which abolished slavery and established civil rights for people of color and women.

The liberal spirit busted the trusts under Teddy Roosevelt, gave us Social Security under FDR and promoted unions to protect the working class and build the middle class.   John, you ask good questions: For the church, a place of free inquiry because of a solid faith, not in spite of it, with less emphasis on "winning souls" and a lot more emphasis on living the faith, and letting God do the winning through our witness (my Calvinism is showing!).

I think the struggle today for Gay Rights is akin to the struggle for civil rights and women's suffrage and ordination. Why the church tends to be last in line on so many of these things astounds me. We talk of heaven, but seemingly close our eyes to the hell in which so many millions are forced to live their days.   Socially, a safe society - where aliens have an easier time of it, where employers are penalized for illegal hiring rather than gathering up these poor families late at night and deporting them.

We have to recover our manufacturing basis - if there were a crisis and the shipping lanes disrupted, we couldn't make our own refrigerators anymore. We need to sever the link between employment and health care and put it where it belongs - in government.

We need a major public transportation effort to curb our fuel usage and rebuild our cities around it rather than freeways (and I live in LA) We have to learn how to curb our spending, learn to live with less, pay more for what we have to support our middle class and keep jobs here in America.

Our corporations have to be leashed; and super-wealth taxed! Junk food and corn syrup banned! Feed McDonald's executives their own crap three times a day for a month, take away their cars and make them use public transportation.  Oh well, you asked ... a lot of random thoughts.  John, tell me more about your vision, for the church and for our society.

A good friend and his congregation were recently dismissed, graciously, to the EPC, and though he and I differ significantly on quite a few things, he and I have known one another for nearly 20 years and each respects the other.

Knowing one another, there can never be charges of any kind, because of our mutual regard and respect - for we have come to our differences via much the same path: prayer and study, faithfulness to Christ and a love for the church.

Yet, like Paul and Barnabas with regard to Mark, here we are, on different sides of some major issues.

In our conversations with one another, one thing we agree upon: we're both terribly tired and mutually eager to get on with the mission of Christ as the Holy Spirit unfolds that mission in our respective lives.

I told him that I would daily pray for him, his congregation and the EPC. Frankly, at first, praying for the EPC wasn't the most pleasant sensation, but I stayed with it, even as I prayed for him and his congregation.

Interesting phenomenon - my spirit is healing; I find myself praying for the EPC more agreeably, as I know he prays for me and my gang - prayer without prejudice, but simply a prayer for blessing.

All in all, we have reached an impasse of major proportion, and it's time for us to deal with it rather than attempt the humanly impossible, and we have to quit deferring our struggle to some distant hope for a miracle - church history reveals its better, after a long siege, to go our separate ways, lest even more damage be done.

Like Paul and Barnabas, there was a separation of the ways. Yet, I suspect, they prayed for one another, and we can do the same.

History has seen the deck shuffled many times. In this land of cabbages and kings, it's not likely to be any other way.

One thing for sure, we have to cease the court battles.

And for the churches who leave, I would hope they have the means and the will for some financial remuneration - it's only fare.

Yet Paul says this: owe no one anything but love, and that we can do.

The words "apostate" and "heretic" have no place in the life of the church today; we are all sisters and brothers of Christ in the family of God. We must stop vilifying one another - it only brings hurt to the Body of Christ and shames us in the eyes of the world. And it's time to bid farewell to one another; we won't live that far away from one another, and I suspect there will still remain plenty of opportunities for us to enjoy fellowship and engage in local and regional mission. Who knows, there might be union Presbyteries in the distant future. It happens all within the family.

So, ca we really pray for one another?

We can, and we must!

We compliment one another …

Some can sing and some can pray with a special gift that blesses someone else.

Some can teach and some can preach.

Some have a way with dollars and cents.

Some can plan and organize.

Some have an extraordinary sensitivity and compassion.

Some are visionary.

Some are filled with the passions of justice and social reform.

Some dream dreams and see visions of God.

Some are quiet and some are loud.

Some are hard and some are soft.

Some are heaven-drawn.

Some are earth-anchored.

Some love the past.

Some love the future.

But take all the someones, and we have

The sum of it.

We all add up to the church of Jesus Christ.

And he loves us all.

And needs us all.

To finish his work!

Everything is up for grabs at the start of the 10th year of the 21st Century.

Not unlike the years surrounding Calvin's tumultuous and creative life. At any point in time, it was impossible to predict how the next ten years would unfold in Geneva. Yet Calvin wrote prodigiously and hopefully, anchored in God's sovereignty and with a passion for the person in the pew, so to speak.

As I begin the year and look back over my 40 years of ordained ministry, I turn to the future of mainline denominations with hope for our emergence from a "dark" period of time. Or was it so dark?

One man's darkness may be another man's light.

The last 40 years have seen us RECOVER from the supreme success we enjoyed after WW2 and during much of the 20th Century; we built our megachurches all across the landscape in American cities - talk about 24/7, with incredible programs, jammed worship services, gymnasiums and full-service ministries. Our pulpits were manned by princes, our seminaries were guided by theologians of immense ability, missions were expanding and especially after WW2, thousands of new congregations sprung up in the growing American suburbs, many of which became the second generation megachurch.

Yet in the midst of this, there remained small town and rural churches, places of energy and pastoral strength, but with huge shifts in American population, the disappearance of many of them was inevitable.

Our first generation of megachurches in the cities have clearly suffered huge transitions, and many of them are long gone, tough there are plenty of remarkable exceptions - e.g. Fourth Church in Chicago. And in our older suburbs, where so much of the post WW2 growth occurred, changing cultural patterns and the aging of the inner-ring suburbs have shrunk many of our second-generation megachurches, and many have closed their doors.

During this period of time, new forms of worship and music emerged, inaugurating what came to be known as the worship wars, and bloody they were, but out of the noise and smoke emerged a third generation of megachurches, beginning with Schuller's Chrystral Cathedral, a hybrid of sorts, of mainline and independent trajectories. Then came Willow Creek and Saddleback, and the rest of is history. All across America, the emergence of flagship megachurches - stripped down buildings, 24/7 small groups, high-tech worship, preaching that was both biblical and pastoral. Yet thousands of smaller congregations continued their work, though overshadowed by the media exposure of the large churches.

And there emerged, during this period of time, a truism: Conservative churches are growing and liberal churches are shrinking.

The problem with a truism is that it’s always a half-truth; it surely reflects a pattern, but some took that pattern as if it were the absolute and final blessing of God, and they became legends in their own time, if not their own minds. And the growth and creativity in other settings was ignored, if not ridiculed.

What with America's fascination with "leadership" and growth, folks forgot that church growth is largely the result of two factors: God's grace and location.

Stats in the last few years are beginning to reveal cracks in the truism; conservative churches are experiencing what the mainliners experienced 50 years as the tides turned. Their ranks are rife with debate, if not full-out rancor, with plenty of heresy trials underway, moral failures (nothing new there, but a reminder that everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time, even the superstars of the megachurch stages - pulpits, of course, no longer used), and slight declines in attendance – is this small change preface to the larger changes that occur inevitably in the shifting sands of time?

The megachurch and its success has stilted its creativity. Look at a 25-year old video and one shot last Sunday, and there is no difference: the clergy wear jeans and shirts pulled out, use high-tech tools, and preach pretty much the same message, and for many these days, the message has become a pop-psychology mix of personal triumphalism infused with Old Testament stories and a lot of Pauline materials.

The vaunted success of the "conservative" church is no longer a sure bet, and the churches that hung their heads in shame over their lack of or negligible growth are beginning to emerge from the shadows only to discover their worth, and that God is in their ranks as well, doing mighty things.

It's too early to tell, but the truism that propped up the pride of some (yes, it was pride, wasn't it?) and caused thousands of good pastors and fine congregations to hang their heads in shame and exhaustingly chase after every new program that came down the pike from the publishing houses or was touted at the megachurch teaching seminars, is clearly shifting. And sadly, thousands of congregants bought the truism and blamed their pastors, their denominations, their seminaries when the "thousands didn't show up,” even as the truism pitted enthusiastic pastors against their congregants, charging them with lack of vision and willingness.

But new images and ideas are emerging! The culture wars are subsiding. Mainline congregations, battered and bruised, are recovering, and books like "Christianity for the Rest of Us" by Diana Butler Bass are a part of the reconstitution of the mainline church.

Things are a-changin' ... God does that; lest we build our towers to the heavens, God comes down and confuses our language, spreading us out to the world.

All of us are learning, and perhaps we're learning how to bless one another, help one another. Megachurches are grappling with Barna-type studies that reveal embarrassing failures in their efforts to make disciples and nurture their own children into the faith.

Mainliners are catching their breath and regaining their confidence.

Sure, the church as I knew it when I was ordained at the First Presbyterian Church in Holland, Michigan, is long gone, but new energy is emerging all over the place, and we will find new ways of being Presbyterian, connectional and missional. Leaner, for sure; but not meaner. Humbler and contrite, as we discover God's grace anew.

I think the next ten years will be very good for the mainline churches, and the megachurches, too - as we learn how to humbly love one another and appreciate our respective visions and ministries.

After all, we’re all in this together … for the glory of God!

 

Fun to read Calvin defending his views on the Lord's Supper against the literalists (4.17.22 ff) who accused Calvin of being loose with Scripture. Calvin extols the need for interpretation rather than an impossible literal reading of "this is my body," etc.. Interesting in light of debate today on GLBT ordination. Calvin expresses his weariness in the attacks on his faithfulness and his scholarship. But literalists always accuse those who engage in thoughtful interpretation of faithlessness. Calvin notes: there is a certain comfort in literalism, but it ultimately asks us to believe a contradiction - specifically, Christ cannot be present physically to us in the Sacrament because he is in heaven, with the constraints of the flesh. He is present to us spiritually by the Holy Spirit. His careful interpretation was rejected by the literalists. They opted for the easy answer. I'm glad Calvin didn't! Beware the easy answer, especially when the answer shuts the door and bolts it tight against "those who don't belong."

A friend from long ago has left the PCUSA for the EPC, along with his congregation.

I sent a note wishing him well, in the hope that he will find peace in the EPC and be able to serve the Christ he knows in a manner consistent with the how the Spirit has shaped his soul.

Needless to say, I'm saddened by his decision and sympathetic with all the emotions.

Perhaps like a divorce, there's the temptation on the part of the one leaving to eliminate ambiguity and doubt - to justify the leaving and ease the conscience by an over-simplification: that God is the cause of this and the leaving is right, and the one left behind had it coming.

And for the one left behind, the same process tempts: to vilify and damn.

All such efforts fail to grasp the complexity of a divorce - and both must eventually face their own frailties and faults. There are no innocents abroad; all alike are sinners, saved by grace.

But Paul and Barnabas are helpful - they reached an impasse beyond human management, and apparently even beyond that of God, and before they did further harm to one another, they decided to go their separate ways.

I've always been thankful that the Book of Acts records this tragic, and oh-so-human, event.

It happens! And continues to happen throughout history, in church and in marriage, and virtually every other form of human relationship - there is a tragic element in our souls. Our love for one another can never quite rise all that high, and we mostly thrive on like-loving-like. 

Maybe that's the point of confession, but tragic or not, life goes on. Barnabas mostly disappears from the text; Paul proceeds to center-stage.

Was Paul right? Was Barnabas right?

Like most such questions, it's the wrong question to ask.

They had a deep and bitter disagreement about Mark. Barnabas wanted to forgive and include him; Paul couldn't forget Mark's desertion of them.

And so it goes.

I think it's time for us to admit our tragic character - that on the question of ordination for GLBT persons, we are unable to find a compromise: either we do, or we don't. There can be no half-way covenant on this one, or so it appears.

So, like Paul and Barnabas, we go our separate ways, before we do any more harm to one another, and who knows what life lies on the other side of the divide?

As much as my friend longs for the day when the debate is finished and he and his congregation can get on with the work of God as they see it, so I long for the day when I and the churches I've served can get on with our work, too - including the full acceptance and ordination of GLBT persons.

This issue has shaped most of my ministry (40 years this coming January) and has consumed enormous amounts of energy and money - all of which could have been spent more effectively on the ministries to which Jesus calls us.

I wish my friend well, and I'm sure he wishes the same for me.

It's time for us to get on with the work of Christ!

Until the next chapter, the next issue, the next whatever ... until Christ returns and brings the final healing for body and soul.