The New York Times essay by Ross Douthat ("Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?") combined with Diana Butler Bass' rejoinder in The Huffington Post ("Can Christianity be Saved?") offer windows into current realities in American Christianity. Both articles raise seminal questions and offer provocative comments, but could easily -- though unfairly -- be interpreted as an internecine debate about things that matter only to the declining numbers of the institutional church.
Meanwhile, an increasingly large number of people in the United States have come to assume that ecclesial or theological conversation has nothing to do with them. This is not primarily because of formal objections, but is rather the result of a culture that considers history less and less relevant in light of the belief that life is fed from the future rather than the past. Things that sound, smell or feel like the past are unlikely to attract the focus of those who are anxious, if not desperate, for their preferred future. For many, few things spell "p-a-s-t" more than the their perceptions of the Church. In a speed-addicted culture, momentum more than mass is what fixes peoples' future-oriented attentions and aspirations.
The voracious hunger for hope is fueled by the desire for realities presumably as yet to be discovered, imagined or invented. Despair over (and disregard for) politics, leadership and the institution enervates the journey on traditional pathways toward the future. The more mired in what has been the conversation seems, the more lethargic and disinterested the response. This, more than theological, ethical or spiritual debate, explains the disregard so many have toward the Church. For them, the Church -- by definition and by ethos -- offers neither a hope nor a future.
The irony, of course, is that within the Church's self-perception, both liberal and conservative, "a future and a hope" are the very gifts they wish to offer. Depictions of that vision may vary, but to those outside the Church, it all sounds the same: irrelevant. What churches of the right and left have failed to inspire is a viable and compelling future that the Church universal can awaken and offer. If Apple can imagine and offer a future, so must any other competing hope. If Steve Jobs can create it, why can't God?
What the Church has to offer must center on an enactment of the life of Jesus. Inexplicably, the churches of the right, left and middle have tended away from Christ's vivid example of living and dying, offering church-likeness instead of Christ-likeness. Outside the Church culture, this appears to be a decision for form over reality, for tradition over people, for safety over risk; in short, for nothing over something.
One morning in Berkeley, I met a student named Tim who had been attending worship services at a church where I was pastor. He explained he was a graduate student newly back to school after a number of years as a touring musician. His neck tattoos were spectacular. He said he had shelved a lot of life's big questions while on the road, but now he was dusting them off and thinking about them again. Among his big questions were issues of faith.
"I am checking out churches and wondering about something. I go to some churches and I hear a lot about Jesus but very little about the world. I go to other churches and I hear a lot about the world but little about Jesus. I've been going to your church lately and I hear a lot about Jesus and a lot about the world. But here's my question: It's easy to find people in Berkeley like me, we are a dime a dozen; however, what I want to know is, if I hang out at your church, will I meet people who are like Jesus?"
Now there was a question to start a pastor's day. Tim was hungry for spiritual reality. He rightly expected that the Real Thing would be measured by lives that portrayed the Jesus we claimed to follow. Is this not what Jesus himself meant when he said, "The Kingdom of God is at hand"? In other words, Jesus defined a future that has come near.
Tim was paying close attention to what our church said, but what he wanted was to meet people who lived and loved like Jesus in the world. For a moment, I looked into his eyes for any sign of a cynic or of an accuser. What I saw instead, early one morning in the middle of Berkeley, were bright and honest eyes asking a clear, serious and unguardedly earnest question: does following Jesus show?
A life where following Jesus was readily apparent would be a life beyond the institution, off the scriptural page, out of ecclesial culture, radically free and vividly, sacrificially engaged in creating hope. Unless the churches of the right and left decide that this is the most compellingly important question, their survival will continue to be in question. If this is the direction they take, their survival may be even more in jeopardy, but for an entirely different set of reasons.
Follow Mark Labberton, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MarkLabberton
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Irrelevancy stems from a lack of credibility. This is because people believe the basic teachings of the Church are contradicted by the "truths" of science. In the popular mind the basic beliefs of Christianity have been relegated to myth status. It doesn't help that the church is split over the truth status Christian teaching. If the church can't agree on the truths of the Christian message then why should anybody believe it. This more than anything is why the church is considered to be irrelevant.
For anyone familiar with science and its theoretical underpinnings, this creates a terribly false picture. People are not aware of the conjectural basis of all so-called refutations to the traditional Christian message, both theological and "scientific". Yet, It is hard to overcome this view when it is projected by elements within the church and the secular news media. The fact is, we are in a public relations war being carried out in the popular media, which for the most part,we have been losing.
The original blog-post was directed to what I believe is an essential part of the debate between the church of the right, the left, and the middle: if Christians are going to make astounding claims about an invisible, personal, and loving God revealed in Jesus Christ, then they should primarily seek to let that divine life show. According to the New Testament, those who are followers are meant to live as unexpected, compassionate evidence of God’s love and justice, vital signs of the way of Jesus on behalf of a suffering world in need of shalom. If that were the Church’s reputation, objectors and critics would still have important things to argue. But they would perhaps have less to do with the all too frequent observation that we who claim to be followers fail to do what we say matters most. It is pathetic, if understandable, that it has always been easier for the Church just to talk endlessly to and about itself than to embody the life that is its only mission.
For me, the same the Pharisees had to offer to the woman caught in adultery: nothing but judgement and condemnation.
Nothing of God or of love.
It's been two thousand years, and not much has changed.
Witchburnings and crusades and pogroms were obviously good popular fayre way back when, but maybe not easy to translate to the 21st century.
More than a million people have been killed by Christians in the name of thier church and god. Yet the church is still in power, when other groups who have perpetrated these types of atrocities are now out of power.
I am scared of the church, because I do not believe as they do, and many people in the past have had thier freedom and life taken away for thier beliefs.
Some of 30 million african victims of aids in just the last 30 years have been the victims of abstinence-only idiocy.
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That change from being ruled by tradition to being ruled by aims, objectives, hopes and dreams has been underway since the Renaissance and picked up pace among the masses in the third quarter of the 19th Century. To treat of it as a recent phenomenon is very strange.
Why did I go through marital counseling before I had children? Because I did not want to pass on to my children the woundings of my own childhood. Alcoholics beget alcoholics, abusers beget abusers, adulterers beget adulterers...every psychologist studies the statistics. They know the truth about the power of our pasts.
In the end, Jesus was the only God who could address my wounds of the past in order to help me live in the present as a sane/healed person. Not only was he gentle...he was forgiving and he did not soft peddle...He asked me to face the past and be freed from it, through forgiveness. Jesus on the cross compelled me to accept a new and redeemed future. Do we not still love the story of redemption? I don't see how real hope can be cut off from the past. That narrative is truncated and is a lie...we all know that...we would never respect a film, a television drama, a play that denied the past...why would we respect a religion that does?
My experience has been that there's nothing harder than helping except maybe asking for help. Mostly we do not want what we need. We want what we want. So if helping means providing what is needed, it will often be rejected.
The future of life on planet Earth is forbidding--you can read the reasons in the daily news. Yet the potential for positive changes is equally great--if we can work together. That's a big IF. Did you hear anything about the conference on climate in Rio De Janeiro? I didn't either. So we have to look somewhere else for hope.