The difference surfaced while riding in the back seat of a courtesy van, as it drove us from a board meeting to the airport. “Jack, I am so angry at how the church of my childhood has been stolen from me,” he confessed. “The Presbyterian Church that raised me was faithful to the Bible, clear in its teaching, honorable in its work, respected in the community. Now I feel like the kid whose father he loved and respected so much in childhood has turned into the town drunk, the laughingstock of the community.” He was hurting.
“So that’s the difference between you and me,” I retorted. “I was raised Roman Catholic. The nuns told us that all Protestants are going to hell. Then,” I added, “I accepted Christ as a teenager in a Baptist church, and I heard that hell would be populated by everybody who couldn’t name the date they were born again, Presbyterians included. In fact, back in Bible college, before ethnic jokes became politically incorrect, the butt of our jokes was the Presbyterians. So when God called me to become a Presbyterian after seminary, I figured I was going onto a mission field.”
Oh, I had learned that the Presbyterian Church had been the seedbed of every great awakening in American church history, but I held no illusions of this being one of those eras. So I added, “I’ve been happily surprised to find so many people in the denomination that love the Lord, so many that study the Word, and so many churches that preach the gospel.”
“I think I need counseling,” he said.
I laughed.
“I didn’t mean that to be funny,” he said. “I think I need help to deal with my bitterness.”
That conversation ran through my mind the other day as I was reading the book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (Three Rivers, 2001). While recounting those Presbyterians’ pursuit of “Jacobitism and the effort to bring ‘the auld Stuarts back again,’” author Arthur Herman asks,
“So what compelled sensible, law-abiding, and enlightened individuals to admire and sometimes even support a conspiracy to overthrow the existing government? In a word, nostalgia. Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. … The average Jacobite wanted to return to a community that was stable and harmonious, two qualities that 18th-century Britain notoriously seemed to lack” (pp. 134-6).
Herman also reflects, “[Jacobitism] satisfied a deep utopian longing for the perfect society — except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection” (p 135).
What about the power of nostalgia today?
Could it be that some of the dissatisfaction and some of the talk of reinventing the denomination are growing out of nostalgic memories of the church we once knew?
Could it be that, as our lives and world have gotten more complicated, we have retreated into our memories of a place we once found to be simpler, more secure, more homogeneous, and more dependable?
Could it be that we are longing for something that never really existed even then — but was just perceived to be so pure, since our experience of it was limited either by the small circle of our own denominational relations or by our own youthfulness?
Are we today trying to create — or re-create — an incorruptible church while pretending away our own innate corruption? We are Calvinists after all, aren’t we?
To be honest, my generally sanguine perception of things can lead to a “golly gee, ain’t this great” blindness to the real heresies and ethical failings that do reside among us. It’s a tendency that attaches to toothy-grinned, first generation converts. My travel companion in that van understandably thinks me naïve as often as I perceive him cynical. But if I had to choose, I’d take naïve-and-happy over cynical-and-depressed most any day.
More than that, I’d rather believe that the one who said he was going to build his church is still busy doing the work, that he who prayed for us to be one is still interceding toward that end, that he who has called us to be church together has commanded us to abide tares growing among the wheat, goats grazing among the sheep, chaff surrounding the grain — until in his time he separates them. I’d rather believe that he intends, in fact, for the light and salt in some to brighten and spice the faith of the many.
Of course, “naïve-and-happy” and “cynical-and-depressed” are not the only choices available. Most of us live somewhere between these two polarities. We speak the truth in love as best we know it. We try to be open to the ideas others promote, knowing that prophets often speak in words that disrupt. In fact, my travel companion and I live in the in-between, too. We do learn from one another, and our differences provide insights and correctives for the larger body to consider.
Yes, there always have been and always will be those who see the cup half-empty and draining. For me, the resurrection says the cup is half-full and rising — whether the outward evidence proves it or not. How do you see it?
Jack Haberer is pastor of Clear Lake church, Houston, and president, Presbyterians for Renewal. .
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