(Author’s note—this post can be thought of as Part I of a two-part series on the power of enforcing doctrine—and, indeed, of orthodoxy itself—in the contemporary church. Part II will be posted tomorrow, the 20th. –E.A.)
Sometimes, I feel like all I do on this blog is write about the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Writing about them is…I dunno…the Vatican and the American bishops feel so completely out-of-step right now that sometimes, pointing it out is like blowing up my toilet with a hand grenade rather than with a simple homemade cherry bomb. It’s overkill.
Yet Bill Keller, until recently the executive editor for the New York Times, wrote a…well, interesting column yesterday that, as far as I can tell, consisted of two things:
-A laundry list of complaints about how Bill Donohue, the perpetually pissed-off leader of the Catholic League, probably clubs baby seals and drinks kitten’s tears in his spare time.
-An offhandedly casual call to progressive Roman Catholics to take their ball and leave the Catholic Church because clearly their hierarchy has no interest in appearing welcoming to them.
As to the first, well, I would simply point you in the direction of South Park’s fantastic season 11 Easter episode, which, in true South Park fashion, rips into Donohue’s zealotry and single-mindedness with barely disguised glee. As is often the case when South Park takes on religious issues, you may not like their low-brow style, but they do get an awful lot of it right.
As to the second…ugh.
I’ve been a Disciple my whole life. And I simply can’t imagine being anything else right now.
I don’t think that she would do this (read: this is purely hypothetical), but if my church’s General Minister and President, Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins, were to, say, come out in favor of reprimanding Disciples academics for what they wrote, I’d be ticked off, but I probably wouldn’t leave the Disciples over that. I’d want to stay and try to change the Disciples rather than give up on them, because my Disciples identity simply isn’t something I can walk away from lightly.
Granted—if I personally were reprimanded by my GMP, I might well want to find the door myself, and fast. But the equivalent to that analogy would be Keller saying that the nuns should consider an exodus, not the entire moderate-to-liberal wing of the Roman Catholic Church.
I will also say that it does help that the Disciples are certainly less creedal and hierarchy-driven than the Catholic Church, and my own personal orthodoxy is fairly minimal (belief in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, belief in the priesthood of all believers, the inspired nature of Scripture, and maybe a couple of other goodies). But because my own orthodoxy is minimal, I feel like it is breathtakingly uncaring to suggest that a person abandon their lifelong faith identity as easily as Keller does, because such a suggestion implies that they can just shop around for another faith family like one would shop around for a better-fitting pair of jeans.
That mentality is not only denigrating to the person hearing that suggestion, it’s denigrating to the church.
Honestly, it bothers me terribly that we have taken the mentality of “church shopping” to such an extent that whenever our church says or does something we disagree with, we are encouraged to call it a day rather than stay and try to gently win minds and hearts over. I really do worry that doing this only makes churches act even more like echo chambers, where the orthodoxy of each church reigns, and where less and less actual teaching takes place because you’re already preaching to the choir.
This phenomenon, in turn, is one of the things that bothers me the most about a church using excessive means to police its own orthodoxy, and this includes massive statements of faith—sure, nobody can accuse you of false advertising regarding what you believe, but you’re also presenting, in many cases, a ridiculously long list of non-negotiables and saying that you will tolerate no dissent over a theological question as inane as which heresies are “damnable” or not (though you can scroll all the way to the bottom of this to find out!).
When we allow—or, in the case of Pope Benedict XVI, actively make—our churches to be such homogenous petri dishes of doctrinal sameness, it leads to more PR problems for the church. In the end, we may wind up only adding ammunition to one of the strongest stereotypes that unchurched folks have of us--that we are clergy-led automatons incapable of independent thought who delight in being told what to do.
And that’s unfortunate.
Question: How do you know if a church is right for you? What would have to change for it to not be the church for you anymore, and what would you do about it?
Part II of this series will be a discussion on the hospitality dimension of statements of faith—that is, the pros and cons of extensive statements of faith vis-a-vis the unchurched crowd. It is in part inspired by this recent post from Disciples writer Christian Piatt.
(Finally, full disclosure—my congregation’s statement of faith can be found here at the bottom of the page. It is fairly minimal, and it includes a point on the necessity for freedom of belief. Both of those aspects are by design.)
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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