Since I’m just getting started with this blogging business, I think it’s not a bad idea to write a few touchstone posts on the major topics I’ll be nibbling on around here. As the title suggests, this is the baseline post for “church.”
A little personal history: I was born on a Thursday and was in church the following Sunday. Both my parents are ordained ministers in the Church of God, a Wesleyan/Holiness “non-denom” (that is, the COG defines itself as a “movement,” not a denomination), and I grew up in a series of small neighborhood churches where everyone knew everybody (and their business). Our family’s life was entwined closely with the church’s life, and in many ways, even though I have had very different church experiences since, the church-as-family of my formative years is what I’m looking for still.
The problem is, I think, that those close-knit faith communities of my yesteryears were successful, at least to some extent, because of their homogeneity: Most of us were white, lower-middle- to middle-class, Republican teetotalers with blue-collar sensibilities (a rather unforgiving Protestant work ethic, a tendency toward tribalism), if not blue-collar jobs. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. But it seems to me that many church-families, whether made up of people like those from my childhood or of those with a different set of commonalities, have a difficult time stretching and adjusting when one (or more) of their number no longer fits the mold.
I totally get why making these kinds of adjustments is scary: Everybody has to change—not necessarily to align with the black sheep’s wacky, newfangled ideas, but to make space for those ideas to exist within the community. With that change comes a load of uncertainty and questions: Where’s the line between wacky and heterodox? Does it matter? How will we decide? Who gets to decide? What effect will these conflicting ideas have on the church-family’s children? (Wow, that last sounds a tad culty and weird.) And nurturing close relationships becomes more and more difficult in the face of persistent uncertainty; doing so is not impossible, as any semi-happily married couple will tell you, but it demands high levels of grit, determination and sticktoitiveness.
Unfortunately, the evangelical church, to WAY over-generalize, has made uncertainty the enemy, a tell-tale sign of The Enemy’s attack and the first short step down the slippery slope to eternal teeth-gnashing and damnation. This stance is, in my view, the enemy of church-as-family. You can have absolute certainty or you can have close relationships; you can’t have both. (How’s that for declarative certainty? Sometimes I like to be ironic.)
This brings us, finally and thankfully, to the “where I am with church” bits of this jeremiad. I haven’t belonged to an official church-family for almost four years (I’ll post later about our unofficial church-ish goings-on). I don’t miss it and I miss it dreadfully. (“I don’t know how to quit you!” comes—ironically—to mind.) Lately, the latter feeling is overtaking the former; the reasons to belong to a people seem to outweigh the reasons not to.
That I will find a church-family stretchy enough to have me and my wacky ideas remains to be seen. Here’s to hope.
Filed under: church Tagged: | church family, church of god, heterodoxy, uncertainty, wesleyan-holiness
You could become an Episcopalian:
No wackiness too wacky; no heterodoxy too hetero.
test
Oh, man. I’m such a fan of the Anglicans for so many reasons: the liturgy and the church year, the centrality of the Eucharist, a connection to the community of saints both past and present, the female priests (and the gay ones, too), the unapologetically librul politics. But I’ve got two problems: (1) By nature I’m pretty low-church and (2) a tiny part of me still thinks there may be such as thing as too hetero a heterodoxy (yet I’m SO not confident which -doxies might fall into that category).
I’m a great admirer of Archbishop Williams’s—he seems to spend an awful lot of his time trying to find the sweet spot between making the Anglo-Episcopal communion stretchy enough for everybody and ensuring that it endures as something resembling the historic Anglo-Episcopal communion. I wouldn’t want his job.
Interesting…I hear where you are coming from. I’m still COG-ing for the time being. Married a COG PK even, but it’s a bit uncomfortable for us right now. Challenging some of the status quo we’ve known for years.
On the “family” side, we’re still fellowshiping with a bunch of people from the old ETCG. Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in! :)
You can never escape the vortex that is East Tulsa Church of God. (And who would want to?)
“What effect will these conflicting ideas have on the church-family’s children?”
No surprise to you, I’m sure, but this thought resonates with me. My children are in Sunday School most weeks, learning all of the old stories and songs, and piecing together the first steps of their theology.
I have two thoughts on this. First, I think all Sunday School classes should be taught by people over 60. They’re unflappable, they aren’t thrown by awkward kid questions about God, they’re mostly OK with a little ambiguity, they have tons of patience, and they have like 90% of the bible memorized (granted, in the KJV, but still).
Second, I’ve noticed in myself how much I want to shield my kids from my own process of doubt. Our daughter will ask things that, frankly, I used to have a ready answer for, and now no longer do. I often find myself reverting to the answers that the church has proclaimed for generations, even if it’s not where I am right at this moment.
I guess I don’t know how to introduce young children into a faith woven through with doubt and questions. A huge part of me feels like my job is to introduce them to the “believe” part of it, and then be ready to help them walk into the “doubt” part of it when it comes into their own life later.
Rambling thoughts, I know. Blame the tequila. How’s that for low church!
“they have like 90% of the bible memorized (granted, in the KJV, but still).”
Hey, it was good enough for Paul! :)
You make a great point Michael. The older I get the less black and white things become and I find myself questioning things that I would never have given a second thought to 15 years ago. There is so much to the teaching of Jesus Christ that is hard to process as an adult how do you expect a child to navigate issues that are that abstract?
Aly – It’s hard not to with people that love you that much! :)
I often find myself reverting to the answers that the church has proclaimed for generations, even if it’s not where I am right at this moment.
To me this seems key, and it’s both the reason I’m drawn to a community like the Episcopalians and the reason I’m leery. I LOVE saying together every Sunday a Creed that believers have said together for at least 1,500 years; sure, let’s wrestle with and rehash these beliefs in every generation, but at least let’s all know the baseline and let our brothers and sisters in the past have a say-so.
The Creeds are also what make me leery of the more theologically liberal spectrum of Anglicanism. I mean, it’s hard for me to understand how you can say the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed every Sunday for most of your life and then come up with something like this. Now, I enjoy reading Spong as much as the next girl (quite a lot, really), but I have a hard time excusing his kind of generational arrogance. Really? I think. We’re smarter than everyone who has come before, just because we have flush toilets and the interwebs? (Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that Bishop Spong and Bishop Tom Wright are leaders in the same church. They must have the craziest chats at potlucks and convocations.)
Spong is, let us be clear, a gigantic douche. I prefer my reactionary progressivism in Hauerwas flavor.
Ditto. I heart Stan. But are you really lumping him in with J.S.S., theologically speaking? I kinda think they occupy two totally different theological universes (the one broadly orthodox, the other broadly crazy).
I lump them together in that I perceive them as reacting against traditionalism. While they do it in different ways, their point of departure seems to be the same. I could be wrong on this, since I tend to read Roman Catholic writers more than anything – Maritain, Hittinger, Ellul, etc.
Yay, Jacques Ellul! Nothing as tasty as a little Christian anarchy for breakfast.
I should read more R.C. theologians. I enjoy several of the more devotional writers, such as Richard Rolheiser and Thomas Moore, but don’t dip often enough in to the rigorous R.C. thinkers. Hmmm. Note to self.
[...] theology” post Posted on February 6, 2009 by alymhawkins Yesterday I wrote a sort of touchstone post about the soap opera that is my on-again, off-again romance with the church. As time goes by and [...]
[...] posts to establish starting points from which the topics on this blog can evolve (previous entries: church and theology). I need to spend some time reflecting on why I can’t blog without a plan, but [...]
[...] February 11, 2009 by alymhawkins [Previous entries in the 423-part "where I am with..." series: church, theology, [...]
[...] “waking up” those parts of himself that had been taking a much-needed rest for awhile. I wrote a few months back that, over the last year or so, I’d begun to miss being part of a church. While I still [...]