by Robert Johnson
As a Presbyterian teaching elder for the last 26 years, and a church member all my life, I have been deep within our religious community. However, not too long ago I was seized by a rather embarrassing revelation as I assisted in worship leadership in a congregation I had not visited before.
This congregation’s worship pattern was strange to me, and the syntax they used in their prayers and congregational responses sounded as though they had been written by Yoda from the “Star Wars” series. (The liturgies: confusing they were — yes!). They sang hymns that were set in a musical idiom that was somewhat familiar to me, but sounded contrived and off-putting when compared to the music I had listened to on the way to church that morning. (Before the complaints start — I am classically trained as a vocalist and trombonist and play pop/rock/country guitar and bass guitar as well.)
While they were very friendly with one another, they weren’t quite sure what to do with me as a guest. They were uniformly polite but reserved with me although I approached several in an open, but not effusive, manner. Even as visiting preacher, no one offered me coffee or more than brief pleasantries. As I left that afternoon, I thought “What would drive people who were never part of a religious tradition to be a part of something like this when they could stay home and eat pancakes with their families?”
The answer is that fewer and fewer people are being driven to do just this. And we, as a church, are less and less sure of what to do about it.
In my present position as a development officer for a Christian mission college, I am in touch with many deeply committed, generous Christian people. However, I am also in touch with the larger higher education community, and I do not think the church really understands the high level of contempt in which the academy holds the church now. People who feel they have been aggrieved by the church in a whole host of matters are vociferously condemnatory of the “special status” of the church, and many in the academy and regulatory communities are beginning to deride the notion that there could exist anything resembling real academic freedom in a school associated with the church.
While those in the Christian community know what the church has done and continues to do to serve the world in the name of Jesus, the world sees something different. To the society at large, the church has become better known for its perceived homophobia, ignored child sexual abuse, amateurish political activism and mindless young-earth creationism rather than the Good News of Jesus Christ. Our mission efforts of the past two centuries, in which millions upon millions were served with education, healthcare and presentation of the Gospel, have been dismissed with general cheering by smear pieces like Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible.” However, maybe the church deserved that one since we have literally lost interest in the stories of the tens of thousands of unsung missionaries who gave their lives with integrity, selflessness and generosity for the sake of the gospel.
Essentially, I want the church to sit and look at itself with the eyes of the world. What, in these days, would bring someone to our door and bring them back again the next week? We can no longer pretend to be an underground movement hoping to establish ourselves despite the great tide of opposition coming from Rome. We are now a movement that is past its social zenith and now must try to establish that we have relevance, credibility or even usefulness in the modern world. It is not that Christendom has passed, but that people now look at the church and wonder what people saw in us in the first place.
Some will say this is no different than the days in which we were called “atheists” by Romans for not hewing to the civic gods. But I say that the difference is that people now associate us with the very idea of God and are rejecting both God and church. Some will say this is no different than Schleiermacher’s effort to act as erudite apologist to the “cultured despisers” of the faith. But I say that today differs because both the cultured and the larger public have little use for the church and what they believe are our fussy claims about life and how it should be lived. Some will say that if the world finds the church repugnant, it is to be expected since there is supposed to be a qualitative difference between the world we are in and ourselves.
I say that the church has gotten so interested in either biblical injunctions (conservatives) or biblical implications (liberals) that it has ceased being interested in the actual human beings for whom Jesus gave his life and then rose again to save. Some will say the preaching of the cross is always foolishness to those that are perishing. But I say it is not the preaching of the cross that makes the church foolish, but our own inwardness and preoccupation with internal matters of taste and insular preoccupations that have made us appear self-involved and clannish.
Waking up to this new reality doesn’t mean surrendering who were are, but it does mean the church must take what 12-step programs call “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” If the world is to be indignant at the church’s presence we must, for the sake of the gospel, do what we can to make sure it is for the right reasons and not because we have become so interested in suiting ourselves we could care less about what the world thinks, hears and sees.
ROBERT JOHNSON is president of Friends of Forman Christian College in Pakistan and a minister-member of Presbytery of the James in Richmond, Virginia.
