We're Only Human After All

I am often surprised to find that other people think the same way about the church that I do. Again, as I mentioned in a previous blog, I have a tendency to think that I am the only one going through "the change" of church life. I know this is not true, but it feels that way a lot of the time. This is definitely the case for my journey to the postmodern world/emergent church or whatever you want to call it. I finally read Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy which I should have read years ago, but just did not want to. Why would I not read a book that pretty much describes my feelings about faith and the church and where the world is headed? Precisely for these reasons. I knew what the book said, because I have said many of those things in churches, in the classroom, and with like-minded friends who are/were worried about the state of the modern church and what on earth could happen next. The thing is, I have been dealing with these struggles since the early 1990s, so I guess I was emergent before I even knew how to define what I was feeling.

As a youngster growing up in the Assemblies of God, we were big on spiritual gifts. And because I could clearly see many problems and struggles within the church, I thought I had a prophetic gifting. I no longer believe this is my gift, but it led me to be very concerned about where we were headed, but with no real answer to the question. Some of the questions did not exist for me back then. In looking back over my short adult life, I have noticed several turning points that brought me to divest myself of most of my modernist leanings that I once held dear (especially my love for easy answers to "biblical" questions).

1. After graduating from high school (private, Evangelical school) I went for two years to an Assemblies of God college. So, for all intents and purposes I never gave myself the opportunity to be around people who did not at the heart agree with most of what I believed. UNTIL, I went to real university. For the first time, I was around non-Christians, people who smoked and drank (GASP!), Roman Catholics, and gay people. I mean, my voice teacher and my accompanist were both gay, so I had to be around them every week quite a bit. There was no getting away from it. I found that within the course of the two years that it took me to graduate from university, I was beginning to see a change in how I thought about the world. A face was growing on the body of the sinners I never met due to my inability to engage the world.

2. During graduate school, at Southern Methodist University, a very liberal school, I was around not only musicians, but theology types who did not believe at all what I believed. I remember taking a course on Russian Orthodox music and liturgy. I fell in love with the liturgy and symbolism of Orthodoxy. I still love it and, in fact, my office is filled with icons from the Greek and Russian traditions. One day we were discussing the legend behind a certain icon of the Theotokos (mother of God) and I commented that I thought it was a bunch of malarkey. The professor, one of my favorites to this day, asked me if I believed the stories of the Bible. I told her I did because they were in the Bible. And she looked me in the eye, smiled and said, "Well, I'm not going to go into the fact that there are two Creation accounts, ... Why do you believe the Bible to be true?" I told her I took it on faith, because it was the Bible. And she said that that was exactly how the Orthodox believers took these stories. A student behind me in the class muttered that he did not believe any of that s*** (and he was one of the theology students). It was eye opening in many ways. I also had the opportunity to visit an Episcopal Church to sing the Exsultet for Good Friday and the Easter Service. My wife went with me and she felt very uncomfortable with the ritual (which I loved, but I wish they had told me when to genuflect during our processional) and the fact that a woman came and encouraged her to take Communion with the wine smell still heavy on her breath. It was not time yet.

3. After graduate school, I immediately thrust myself back into the world of the Assemblies of God by teaching at an AOG university. It was good for me in so many ways. I learned to teach and to think about what I believed in what I thought was a safe environment. But my time away from evangelicals (and Pentecostals) brought a different spin to my belief system. I remember preparing for a church music history course, one for which I wrote a textbook, and in so doing, learned a lot about church history. I began to look at what the early church actually believed, not from the standpoint of how we read our own stories back into history, but from the vantage point of what they actually had to say themselves--about worship, practice, and doctrine. It was incredible, and scary all at the same time because I began to question many things that I held dear throughout my life. I mean, what would my grandmother think if she knew I questioned the whole idea of dispensational eschatology or that I was wavering on whether or not one had to speak in tongues to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit or that I began to see wonderful faith moments while attending Mass or that I had begun a meaningful dialogue with a United Methodist Church?

I have to admit that I went and visited an Orthodox priest (and a Roman Catholic one to boot) to get some advice about what I was feeling. I did not feel that I was in a place to safely experiment with my faith. We were told to keep it simple. Prepare church leaders. You do not want our future pastors to be asking the hard questions when they need to tow the line for their flocks. The Orthodox priest (complete with long beard and cassock) gave me some of the best advice I have ever received. He told me to wait until my wife was ready to make a change. I am grateful to Father John for that. The Catholic priest was just so amazed that someone from my background would even be asking these questions about apostolic succession and other things I had learned about. In the end, I think we have chosen a better path for our family.

Ultimately, I realized (and taught my students) that there are wonderful traditions within every church/denomination. I loved the charismatic flavor of my Pentecostal heritage, the Bible-loving Baptists, the liturgy loving Anglicans, the multi-sensory approach to worship of the Orthodox, the mysticism of Roman Catholics, and the social activity of the Methodists. I needed it all in order to fully realize God's plan for all creation and specifically for me. This was not the stance of someone who needed to tow the party line and it caused a great misery upon my life and my family's life. It could not last forever and now, sitting on the other side of the struggle, I am glad it did not last forever.

The hard thing for me now is that I work within a church that is still heavily rooted within the modern paradigm and it is sometimes frustrating to worry about issues that do not worry some (and to not worry about issues that others seem to be worried all too much about). I believe it takes all kinds, so it is likely that these areas are still important, even if they are not important to me. What I do not want is to become so enamoured by the trendiness of the emergent conversation that I can no longer function within the modern church. I do not want to become arrogant about how God has changed my life and way of thinking. Jesus is about humility and grace (there I go with the grace card again) and I want to be about those things. I love my church and where I am planted for now, and I completely intend to stay within the United Methodist Church for many years to come, so these comments are no indicator of unhappiness or restlessness in the least. I just think that wherever I am, I will be a catalyst for thought-provoking discussion and change. It is horrible and wonderful all at the same time. As Vincent Donovan was quoted in A Generous Orthodoxy:

The day we are completely satisfied with what we have been doing; the day we have found the perfect, unchangeable system of work, the perfect answer, never in need of being corrected again, on that day we will know that we are wrong, that we have made the greatest mistake of all (Christianity Rediscovered, 146).

In the end, I guess I never read McLaren's book because I could have written it. I am glad that I bit the bullet and read it, if for no other reason, I can say that I am not alone in this journey. I just want to love God and love the Church (and some times it is hard to do the latter). But as someone told me many years ago when I would complain about the church, the Church is the Bride of Christ, and therefore beloved of Christ. So, it is not my place to speak ill of the One Christ loves.

So my question is: How can we love the Church, still speak of her illnesses and idiosyncrasies, and not devalue her relationship to Christ?

Additionally: Can you count the number of missional catch words I incorporated into this blog post? And which ones do we hate now? I get behind and forget.

Peace