The Broken Church

I recently finished reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s last book:

 I must say that it has touched me deeply.  In addition, in it I have found much with which I agree.  Over the next few days I hope to share some quotes that have been thought-provoking for me, as well as share some of these provoked thoughts with you.  Let me begin with a quote found near the end of her book.

All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it.  We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue living with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture.  We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own.  We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain our equilibrium.  If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful even when we are not.  When we are able to trust the gospel that our human love of God and one another is the sum total of what we were put on earth to do, and that we have everything we need to be human, then redeeming things will continue to happen, both because and in spite of us.  They will happen because God loves life so much that even at the grave we make our song Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. (Leaving Church:  A Memoir of Faith, pages 220-221).

Of course, Taylor is not the only one who gives voice to these ideas.  In a recent post, David Hayward, of the nakedpastor blog quotes from Jacques Ellul, the French sociologist and theologian:

… the churches are so debilitated and apostate that a Christian can hardly bear to remain in a church, and yet, on the other hand, no Christian can leave a church lest he fail to confess his own part of the responsibility for the very conditions in a church which provoke protest

Hayward goes on to say:

This ought to be, in my opinion, the dilemma of every church-going or church-skipping Christian in the world. I believe, like Ellul, that the church is horribly apostate and debilitated and borders on complete collusion with its fallen state among the principalities and the powers. I realize and accept my participation in its present condition. It’s time for transformation.

In yet another post, Hayward writes:

We’re not asked to tweak, adjust, reorganize, renovate or reform, which we excel in. We’re to be transformed. We’re to be raised by resurrection power. When Jesus raised Lazarus, he didn’t warn everyone to give the guy some time to perpetually compose himself and freshen up. He said, “Unwrap him and set him free!” Bingo! I think that’s what we need.

What this means for the church is too scary for us to consider, and this is what makes people angry. I believe we need to be totally re-created. Which means I believe demolition is necessary first. If we need resurrection, then first we must die. But no, we all want to hold on to what we have, or at least the good parts, and carry them with us beyond our fake funeral to our lovely new life. No deal! And the church insists on continuing this burnt-out strategy of reformation. Our number one fixation is with survival because our number one obsession is death. The church included! We get angry because we are required to die before we live. We’ll have none of it.

Darryl of Dying Church quotes From Common Grounds Online:

We are scared to death to boast in our weakness because it violates culture (best foot forward, turn your good side to the camera), but if all of us in the Church would boast in our weakness together, we would become a Gospel-suffused community of honesty, brokenness, repentance, grace, forgiveness and restoration. In short, we would be a community of joyful intimacy.

All of these quotes (and I am going to use a word here that I loathe, but which is nonetheless accurate) resonate deeply with me.  I have been a minister in the United Methodist Church in one way or another since 1985, and this year marks my 18th year in ordained and full-time ministry.  And maybe it is the churches that I have served (two of which were deeply conflicted before my arrival, and a third, my current church, which was  in a precipitous decline prior to my appointment), or maybe it is just me, but over the last 16 years of my ministry I have become increasingly cynical when it comes to the Church. 

Every church that I have been involved with has been more concerned with maintenance of itself rather than the ministry to which it has been called by Christ.  These congregations have sought out new members and done everything possible to attract them, not because they inherently want to save souls or bring people into a relationship with Jesus, but because their bank accounts are dwindling and there is no one to teach Sunday School or to serve in “important” church leadership positions.  The churches I have served have clung to and fought tenaciously for life, refusing to see how such a posture is antithetical to the gospel we supposedly proclaim.  And lest I seem to point the finger too much at congregations which have been saddled with my leadership, let me add that I am, at the heart of it, not very different from them.

But I have reached the point where I am very much sick of it all.  I am sick of the pretense of being the body of Christ.  I want the real thing.  I am sick of trying to save an organization . . . who cares about an organization or its building or its structure . . . I want to see some lives saved.  I want to be able to own up to my brokenness and weaknesses without having to fear that these things will be used against me.  I want a community where grace and forgiveness are offered, free of charge, and where the message of the gospel in all its power and audacity and repugnance and world-changing truth is proclaimed.  I want, paradoxically, both less and more from the church.  More of Jesus, less of me.  More honesty and less backbiting and power struggles.  More love and hope and faith, and less despair.  More talk and action about salvation, about what can make people whole, and less talk about survival and how we can “save” the church.

Maybe it is time for churches to implement their own 12-Step program, which I humbly submit for your consideration below.

1. We admit that we are powerless, even as the church, to save ourselves and that our life together has become a mere shadow of what Jesus intended for us as his body.
2. We believe that only a Power greater than ourselves can restore in us the image of Christ that we are called to show to those around us.
3. We have decided to turn our will and our lives solely to the care and grace and mercy of God, who alone can save us.
4. We will make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and our church, and after doing so,
5. We will confess to God, to ourselves, and to others the exact nature of our wrongdoing.
6. We will submit to God’s will in all things and ready ourselves for God to remove all these defects of character.
7. We will humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. We will make a list of all persons we have harmed (both inside and outside of the church) because of our survivalist/maintenance mentality, and then we will become willing to make amends to them all.
9. We will make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We will continue to take inventory of ourselves and our church, and when we discover we are wrong, we will promptly admit it.
11. Through prayer and meditation and other ”means of grace,” we will seek to draw near to God, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we will carry this message of grace to all people, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I am sure that this has been thought of before, but whether this is the case or not, I wonder if this might not be a way for us to begin recovery.  What do you think?