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Marks of a
Vibrant, Progressive Church
1. Looking In
by the Rev. Rich Smith
October 14, 2007
Psalm 111, Timothy 2:8-15
There is an old Doonesbury cartoon in which the Rev. Scott Sloan is
standing in an imposing pulpit, preaching the Sunday morning sermon. He
thunders, “This is an important moment for those of us in the mainline
Protestant church. People are tired of the nihilism of one side and the
over-aggressive claims of truth on the other. Now, the time for our
message of the kingdom of God and the fellowship of all people is at
hand. Brothers and sisters,” he says, “our time has come!” The final
panel backs up and shows the whole church, practically empty except for
a few solitary worshipers, one of whom says, “Thank goodness it’s now!”
For quite a while now, those of us who are in what was once the
mainline church have felt sidelined. Against the images of overflowing
conservative churches, whose pastors make news and sit at the tables of
power, the popular image is of the empty and irrelvant mainline church.
We wonder if the world is even paying much attention – two of our
national UCC leaders were arrested in front of the White House last
week, protesting the war, and it didn’t even make news. And the story
seems to be one of decline, the conventional wisdom that liberal
Christianity has been eclipsed by the evangelical mega-churches, that
people have been fleeing churches like ours, unhappy with our lack of
orthodoxy and our emphasis on social justice or personal salvation.
While it is true that we are no longer the dominant religious players
that we were for the first two hundred years of our nation’s history,
studies have shown that the numerical decline has more to do with
demographics than with theology or politics. There is actually more
movement from conservative religion to our more open brand than the
other way around. But even more people are moving out altogether, some
to Unitarian Universalism (known as the last stop on the way out of
organized religion - this was told to me by a Unitarian minister!) and
others to what Bishop Spong calls “the church alumni association.”
Still others, in increasing numbers, have joined, as we all will, the
“Church Triumphant.” On top of that, our memberships are aging, we’re
not having enough children to re-populate ourselves, and we’re moving
from the North and East, where we have lots of churches to the South
and West, where we have relatively few. We’ve done a rather poor job of
“church planting,” and we’re very nervous about evangelism. You know
what they say - cross a UCC-er with a Jehovah’s Witness and you’ll get
somebody who goes door-to-door but doesn’t know why. Well, evangelism
doesn’t necessarily involve knocking on doors, and I’ll talk more about
that tomorrow night at the Church Council meeting, but the fact is, a
lot of main line churches still act as if it’s 1957, a time when all
you had to do to be a successful church was put up a sign that said
“Church,” and people would come flocking in. Okay, that’s an
exaggeration, but fifty years ago, there was a general expectation that
if you were an American, you were a church-goer, and most likely a
Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Episcopalian
church-goer. It’s not 1957, but too many assume that if we just keep
doing church the way we’ve always done it, we should be as full of
members as we used to be.
And so the sense of decline, even possible gloom and doom. Of course
even the most successful churches cannot afford to forget that the
church is always just one generation away from extinction.
But, as I survey the ecclesiastical landscape, in my travels,
conversations, and reading, I do see some good news: there is a
vitality among us that cannot be measured by numbers.
Many of us have been reading the recent book by Diana Butler Bass, of
Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Christianity for the Rest
of Us, telling of her pilgrimage of several years as she sought out and
experienced “liberal” churches that are quite alive and successful,
counter to the prevailing wisdom that such entities are endangered
species. About the same time professor and Philadelphia pastor Hal
Taussig wrote A New Spiritual Home: Progressive Christianity at the
Grass Roots, in which he lists one thousand churches all over the
country that could be described as vibrant and progressive. And Marcus
Borg, in his latest book, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and
Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, has a concluding chapter in
which he describes what he calls “emerging Christianity,” churches
which take their tradition seriously but engage it in a lively way,
where people are there not because they are expected to be but because
they want to be, communities of faith that transform their members and
the world. He describes these as “conventional churches” becoming
“transformational communities.”
Both Butler Bass and Taussig describe a number of what I call “marks”
of these progressive, vibrant churches. Bass has 10, Taussig five, and
what I want to do today and in two weeks is to look at these and ask,
“Do these describe us?” “Are they something we would like to describe
us?” And I assume that we are already pretty much a “progressive”
community of faith – some would use the word “liberal”; our friend
Donna Schaper uses the term “open” (as opposed to “closed’). And for
purposes of making two sermons out of this, I have grouped their
descriptions or “marks” into two categories – those that describe what
we are and those that describe what we do – being and doing – faith and
action – looking in, and looking out. In the end, of course, you can’t
really separate them, it’s all of one piece – you can’t love God if you
don’t love your neighbor. But bear with me – this was the only way to
get two reasonably short sermons instead of one long one, or maybe
fifteen in “the series that would never end”....
One of the things that Taussig discovered at the core of these vibrant
progressive churches is what he calls “Intellectual Integrity.” That’s
basically what I mean when I say that we’re a church where you don’t
have to check your brains at the door, or that we take the Bible
seriously but not literally, or that you can believe, for example, in
evolution and still be Christian. It means you have freedom to explore,
to question, to think for yourself. I like the image give us by the
apostle Paul in today’s epistle lesson where he is writing to his young
protégée Timothy – Paul is a prisoner, held in chains,
but proclaims that “the word of God is unchained.” “The unchained Word”
would have made a good sermon title – it expresses to me this sense of
dynamic freedom, that we cannot capture the fullness of God in our
creeds or our words; it’s something we keep discovering anew, and like
the Psalmist in the first lesson, we too affirm, “Great are the works
of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.”
Diana Butler Bass calls this quality “Reflection,” or “Thinking
Theologically,” with the emphasis, I presume, on “thinking.” She
writes, “Once, not long ago, liberal was a good word meaning generosity
and openness. It implied a host of positive things: reform, freedom,
toleration, thoughtful inquiry, and lack of prejudice and bigotry.
Liberal meant opposition to dogmatism, authoritarianism, inquisition,
religious bigotry, theological intolerance.” This has always been a
mark of American Protestantism, but after the 1960's, as I said,
liberal churches began to lose members while conservative churches
started attracting large numbers. “Critics blamed the decline on
liberalism itself. Too much freedom...is a bad thing. People need
religious authorities to tell them what to think and how to
act....People hunger for order and authority in a confusing world.
People need answers.” That may well be true for a lot of people, but in
her study, she encountered many vital congregations where people
identified liberality – what she calls “theological generosity” – as
one of the most attractive qualities of their congregations. They
praised “openness, tolerance, and generosity as marks of mature
Christian character.”
I do think Westmoreland would score pretty high in this. Sermons.
Classes, like the ones Bob teaches and that Audrey used to teach. It is
why many of us are here. We just wouldn’t be happy in a place where we
couldn’t ask questions or where we’d be fed absolute answers. But
before we pat ourselves on the back too hard, another statement from
Butler Bass caught my attention. Referring to the overall decline of
mainline churches, she writes, “I began to wonder if the problem was
that mid-century liberalism had lost its sense of humility, becoming
overly institutionalized and politicized, and in the process sacrificed
its sense of wonder.”
She goes on to explain: “In the early twentieth century, liberal
religion became ‘establishment’ religion, with its beliefs and
practices dominating pulpits, seminaries, religious studies
departments...even the pews. Back then (you) would have had no trouble
finding an open congregation. But, as establishment religion, it became
politicized, and liberality gave way to liberalism. Until(this) was
challenged by conservative evangelical religion in the 1970's it was
the only game in town. Humility was not its strong suit. When
liberality hardened into hubris, Protestant liberals traded open
questions for easy answers–their own. You see there can be liberal
fundamentalists as well as conservative ones! As soon as certainty
replaces humility, it leaves little room to transport the faithful to
awe...” It became self-absorbed and secular, cold and spiritually
deadening. It forgot, as the Psalmist proclaimed, “the fear of the Lord
is the beginning of wisdom.” In other words, there is a connection
between the head and the heart.
And so a second mark of vibrant, progressive churches, is what Hal
Taussig calls “Spiritual Vitality.” He writes, “No longer satisfied
with clear thinking and good ethics, a new generation of Christian
communities has developed an emotionally textured, deeply
participatory, expressively creative, and globally eclectic spiritual
pattern..... That this consistency of spiritual richness did not derive
form some national church program initiative or media blitz, but from
the gradual integration of intellect, expression, democratic
principles, and values of inclusiveness at the grass roots, indicates a
well-grounded staying power to be reckoned with.” And both he and Bass
go on to describe an array of ancient Christian and non-Christian
spiritual practices that are being rediscovered and which are
revitalizing communities of faith – for example, prayers of the people
which really are “of the people”, sharing joys and concerns in ways
that cultivate emotional richness; beauty. drama, dance, wide ranges of
music and visual artistry; more emphasis on the sacramental life and
holy communion; healing services; intentional silence and discernment;
meditation and even yoga.
I believe there is a lesson for us here. As we have engaged in the
worship initiative over the past year, I haven’t heard anyone ask for
more intellectual freedom, for the chance to question. That’s a given.
What I do hear is that there is a great hunger and thirst for the kind
of connection with God that you cannot think or reason yourself into –
some indication that this holy reality that we talk about and sing
about and use symbols to point towards might actually be real. How can
we experience God? That can come in many ways – certainly in our
actions for justice, in our loving others, in our encounter with Christ
on the streets and with the least of these, and I will talk about that
in part 2. But there are a lot of portals into our deepest selves,
which open up connections to the holy. Some work better than others,
some take practice to open up and keep resilient. I can’t just say “Let
us pray” and expect that it will automatically happen. Someone once
called the organ “God’s can opener” – and music, whether organ or voice
or some other instrument can certainly open up a way for God to get in.
I like what Kurt Vonnegut said he wanted on his tombstone: “The only
proof of God he needed was music.” I would be more specific and say
“Mozart!” Bass and Taussig encountered a great variety of practices,
and I hope that we will be open to exploring more of these and making
them available. We already do such things as the occasional healing
service, the more mystical Maundy Thursday and Christmas Eve services;
we impose ashes on Ash Wednesday and tonight will invoke the Spirit of
Francis of Assisi in blessing the animals, not something that was ever
done at the intellectually adventuresome Congregational Church of my
youth. If our worship initiative prods us to a richer spiritual
vitality, then I think it will have been worthwhile. As Marcus Borg
says, “when the church is full of God, the pews will be full of
people.” I note that he didn’t say, “Where the pews are full of people,
the church is full of God.” That alone is not proof. And I believe the
church, our church, is full of God – we just have to have the courage
to open ourselves and be willing to listen, to allow that God might
have some different ideas for how we do things, to understand worship
as a genuine experience of God, not just a reflection about God. As
Butler Bass says, “At its core, worship is an experience that
transforms the heart.” Not just any experience, but one that celebrates
the life, teaching, and acts of Jesus; one that incorporates the full
range of emotions, from sorrow to mirth, and is in fact “merriment”
because it participates in God’s festival of life and shalom.
This is what C.S. Lewis refered to as the “great dance,” where justice
and mercy clasp hands, and the universe moves in rhythm “to God’s
intention for creation. Worship harmony....and enacts God’s dream for
the world. By learning to look for it, by opening ourselves to sensing
the awe and wonder of the dance (what the Psalmist really means by
‘fear of the Lord’), we might glimpse the ripples of God. Worship is
more than something we attend – it is something attend to, something we
make. And in making it, we join in the dance. So my question is: How
daring might we be, how open can we be, to listening for God, for
engaging some spiritual practices that we might find truly transforming?
Thus endeth the sermon, Part One - with head and heart joined together.
Something more is needed, of course, for a church to be truly vital,
which is the hand. So that’s where we’ll pick it up in two weeks. Next
Sunday is about the feet – it’s our second annual rock service, where
the aisles will be open and expecting you and your feet to quite
literally join in the dance!
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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