A friend recently said that the church is always 10 years behind. When he said this, I nodded as I thought through all the ways we are behind the world. Technology, marketing, human rights, anti-institutionalism, shifting political landscapes, family trends including divorce rates, break-ups, and coupling outside of marriage. I frequently point out that many of the couples I’ve counselled have chosen to live together and raise a child together, even buy a house together before getting married. Which leads me to ask how constraining have we made marriage that it is perceived as messier than buying a house and raising a child?

The more I think about it, the more I think we’re kind of lucky that it is only ten years.

The church is big and institutional and unwieldy. Comparisons to large ocean-going vessels which cannot turn quickly seem pretty apt. Maybe we expect too much to think that the church could change quickly, that we can adjust to the pace of life any faster than we do. The size of our institutions, with their rules and customs naturally produce gridlock and obstruction. It is only reasonable that they would refuse to change with the times.

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I wonder if we are ten years behind, not because of gridlock or our structural problems or that it takes a decade to actually make a decision on the grand scale, but because these structures ordinarily push us generations behind: decades and decades behind: but it is the initiative of those within pushing and driving us to be more present to our people in their current state that actually brings us up to ten years behind!

Institutional stagnancy is not natural to institutions. No corporation, nonprofit, or governmental agency is half as change averse as the church. It isn’t simply that it is an institutional problem.

I suppose it could have something to do with our faith tradition.

But it isn’t Christian, or a part of the gospel. It seems more akin to the Pharisees and legalism than binding ourselves faithfully to tradition. For it is tradition that drove the people to know that GOD was with them in the desert and tradition that GOD would be worshipped in the Temple and tradition that GOD would be worshipped in the Exile and tradition that GOD would be worshipped at the empty tomb. This changing, moving, GOD-is-with-us that is central to our faith. That’s the stability and the gold standard. Not that we are unchanging and unyielding people.

The question for us, then, isn’t how far behind are we, but why are we behind at all? Why are so few of us pushing and driving our church to be the locus of new birth and transformation in the midst of a torn and frightened world? What is keeping us from keeping up, let alone being ahead of the culture as Jesus was, as his disciples were, in bringing the Kingdom closer? In transforming the false economy of the world and replace it with the Great Economy of GOD?

Why aren’t we the place people turn to, the people others turn to, not only for stability and history, but for present and future need? Why isn’t the church the answer to our problems rather than, in many ways, the source?

Adult Formation

What is missing from our experience of church is robust and comprehensive adult formation. Not merely for indoctrination or for passing along our beliefs, practices, and incantations, but to build up a full community, focused on the wealth of the Spirit!

The reason we are 10 years behind and not 20 or 30 years behind is because of the hard work of the most committed. The reason it isn’t 0 is because the devotion to the institution has been made more important than the devotion to the gospel, to being formed by the gospel. We show up on Sunday, but we don’t show up on Wednesday night. We come for worship and fellowship, but we don’t come for learning. We come for the potlucks, but not the discipleship groups.

A telling moment in my denomination came three years ago at General Convention, the triennial gathering of the Episcopal Church. A task force was charged three years early to explore ways to help Episcopalians live more fully into our baptism. They gave four proposals that were simple, but a little radical, requiring constitutional changes. None of them passed.

One of them was to add one more criteria for service on vestry (our congregational governing board). As it is, vestry members must be confirmed, pledge, and regularly attend worship. These, of course are pretty low bars. Pledging can consist of $5 and “regular” attendance can be showing up for Christmas and Easter.

So in light of these really strict criteria, what horribly restrictive thing did the Standing Committee for Liturgy and Music suggest we add? Candidates standing for vestry should participate in formation. You know, show up to a class at least once per year. Join a Bible Study. Learn something. Crazy, I know! How dare they?

The Fear

Most of our struggling with culture and relevancy comes not from our structure or from the backwardness of our faith, but from poor formation and a weak understanding of our history and tradition. We aren’t looking at our whole story. It comes from not knowing our church and our ecclesiology (and what words like ecclesiology mean). It comes from not teaching our people to develop a rule of life or a hermeneutic for understanding scripture. It comes from not working at our faith or encouraging one another to try harder.

I certainly don’t make light of people’s faith or commitment to Christ who don’t show up to my classes any more than I would say that they have a weak faith. This isn’t about the personal, but about the church. About how little we expect of our people, how little we challenge our people to learn, and how low the bar is for who we expect our people to become.

A lack of intentional formation is producing underformed Christians.

Challenging our church to a robust and comprehensive adult formation is also in contrast to the evil that passes for faithful teaching, such as the Word of Life church in New Hartford, New York, in which parents beat their 19 year-old to death as a form of counseling, demanding he and his brother (who survived) confess their sins.

What they have done isn’t Christian, it is evil. But it is also deep faith in Christ built on isolated reading of Scripture without regard to history, tradition, or orthodox Christian thought. It is a church without connection to the church. And the result is an abused young man was beaten to death in a church.

Sharing

This call to a renewed, robust formation is also about sharing our faith.

Tonight at an event at United Campus Ministry, a pair of speakers shared their experience of getting married to one another. They are two deeply faithful, committed Christians who are gay. They shared moments from their wedding video, how they prepared, and what it meant to them.

One of the students asked how they respond to those who object to their marriage.

Their response was gracious and humble. They spoke to their lives and their faith. They appealed to reason and science. They spoke of personal experience with LGBTQ persons and the growing demographic shifts. And then the conversation moved in a different direction.

What I wanted to say, but didn’t was that it is important for Christians to share with other Christians that they are coming from a deeply Christian perspective. I know that’s what this couple was doing; indirectly, of course. But what I mean is that the student’s question was about deeply faithful people, speaking from the authority of scripture and tradition, naming something as wrong. As I just did with Word of Life church. The appeal to reason and experience won’t cut it.

We need to respond in kind.

We need to speak to the way Jesus appealed to the vulnerable and the weak, how it is our faith in a Christ who calls children and widows and prostitutes and traitors and adulterers first in the kingdom. I’ve gotta say, Jesus’s people are all the nons: non-cisgendered non-landowning non-dominant race men of his day. So what that he doesn’t use LGBTQ terms in the gospel stories. Jesus rewrites Levitical laws left and right.

It is Jesus’s ethic to support the marginalized, not to stone the condemned. It is to enable love and empower in the kingdom those outside the system. And Paul, often read as a misogynist, also wrote supportively of two women in leadership and the end of gender discrimination.

The church has been wrong before. But like Jesus, we’re trying to get our people to get back to the main point: we’re about building up the Kingdom of GOD. To do that, we need more people to know what it actually looks like.

Ask Yourself

Am I interested in knowing GOD or simply knowing about GOD? Am I committed to pursuing GOD, faith, and the work of Christ in our world?

What am I doing to make these pursuits real? Am I aware of the different aspects to a life of faith, or am I pursuing it like an academic pursues knowledge and mastery?

Do I think I’ll wake up one day, fully formed like a paramecium? Is the idea of developing into a multi-celled organism from there frightening?

What do I fear about faith? About church? About GOD?

What do I share of my faith? Who do I say that I am? Who do I reveal myself to be in my actions?

Do I have a mission? Could I write a mission statement for my life? Could I write out a plan for the next 5 years of the aspects of faith I want to develop? What would it mean to take to being formed in the image of GOD as seriously as learning a new language or playing an instrument?

Do I love GOD enough to change?

[This is Day 15 of How to start deconstructing church. The next in the series is “Bible Study”. To start from the beginning, read the introduction here.]