In the wake of Super Tuesday earlier this week, I've been drowning in talking head analysis about why Mitt Romney can't nail down the left-handed, auburn-haired soccer mom vote, or why Newt Gingrich has been reduced to a regional candidate, if by "regional" you mean "Marietta, Georgia," or why Rick Santorum is madly in love with all things Dark Ages, or why Ron Paul...well, in the case of Ron Paul, the jokes write themselves.
But amidst the punditry chatter, I read a couple of stories about how "perception matters" for these poor fellas, where if they do not win the media-spin sweepstakes, they begin tanking, and the next thing they know it, they're being asked to drop out by whichever money-fueled, patriotic-sounding super PAC their opponent is aligned with.
Man, do I feel the same way as a mainline Christian pastor.
Both in and out of the church, people ask why folks like me are dedicating themselves to propping up what they feel is a dying organization: the mainline church. Enough people start asking that, and it is cemented as perception. Church memberships decline, and suddenly that perception is accompanied by data. Mix with gasoline, and you have a Molotov cocktail that has claimed many a Protestant congregation with the explosion of weakened perceptions and horrible PR.
Sarah Morice Brubaker, a theology professor at the Disciples-affiliated Phillips Theological Seminary, wrote a column a couple weeks ago for one of my bookmarked sites, Religion Dispatches, in which she puts our perception problem thusly:
"Yes, yes, woe is the mainline! Somehow, through feats of ecclesial failure so masterful that they defy logic, we have managed to be:
—A narcissistic liberal echo chamber that tolerates no dissent.
—A bunch of please-everyone spineless wimps who stand for nothing except vague and gooey middle-class niceness.
—Clueless 19th-century rationalist holdovers who still believe it’s possible to look at things objectively because, I don’t know, our schooling was so full of Moustache Grooming 101, practicums in The Care of Tweed Frock Coats, and private lessons in Somber Intonation that we simply never got around to critiques of modernity, or something.
Pretty impressive, no?"
(Just in case you didn't notice, her tone is quite purposefully tongue-in-cheek here.)
It's funny because it's true, though, right? The mainline church had its day in the sun, when, as Disciples pastor and blogger Christian Piatt notes, "Back when institutions were inherently trustworthy, and back when churches were the social epicenters of a community, Sunday worship was more or less a given."
Put in election-year terms, we had our moment when everybody wanted a piece of us, but then we pulled a Rick Perry and started fumbling the message so badly that all people could do was laugh at us as they either stayed home on Election Day or jumped ship to one of the sleeker, sexier outfits around, like the Church of Rick Santorum's Sweater Vests, and now people are asking why we aren't getting out of the game already.
We mainliners made a simple, but fundamentally destructive, mistake: we mistook the enduring nature of our MESSAGE (that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God) as indicative that our MEDIUM (where we sing from hymnals to slow organ music and proceed to sit, stand, and kneel for an hour or so while our pastor ascends to the pulpit so that s/he can stand above us sinners when addressing us with a rigidly three-point sermon) was somehow meant to be equally enduring.
We've confused the two, when the reality is that even in Scripture itself, preachers and teachers used the communication styles of the time to spread the Word of God. New Testament writers like Luke and Paul used Greek writing styles to spread the word of a Jewish Messiah. Old Testament books like Genesis borrowed from the mythic style of Mesopotamian religious narratives in composing stories like Noah and the flood and the Tower of Babel.
Scripture already shows us in its own pages how we can communicate the same message differently from generation to generation. But church has often been resistant to any change of that sort, and we are paying a heavy price for it today, for our inability to realize that the medium was in the message this whole time.
And I truly do not think it is that people are resistant to the message of the Disciples--in fact, I think that what we have to offer is EXACTLY what people both need and are asking for from a church: the recognition that we are not judges, but healers; called to mend brokenness, not create it; to teach right action rather than right doctrine; to, above all else, communicate the Gospel not in terms of saved versus unsaved, or light versus dark, or sin versus righteousness but in terms of being LOVED versus unloved.
So, if ever you were wondering or worrying that as a mainline Christian pastor, I was one of those "please-everyone spineless wimps," please rest assured--I believe, with every ounce of my being and every fiber of my faith, that I have been called to preach a Gospel of love and equality, where social justice transcends political boundaries because it is taught as an issue of divine command rather than of political conscience, and where your faith is tempered in the fires and forges of your doubts by the lesson that your faith must be wrestled with and struggled with before it truly becomes your own.
If any of this appeals to you, the doors to God's house are wide open--not only in our sanctuary, but in bookstores, coffeehouses, wherever you may run into one of us.
I'll see you there.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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