This morning, I went to church for the first time since the semester started. I attended a UMC a couple of times last semester, but it lacked vitality, hospitality, and mission. There are several United Methodist churches in town, but the one from this morning is the only other that is centrist. Though I know it shouldn’t be an issue, I couldn’t ever attend a politically conservative church. I prefer liberal, but I’m in southern suburbia. It was refreshing to be back in the sanctuary. There was some things the church did that I liked, others that I really did not, so I have material I’m excited about for the next month of blogging.
For starters, though, this new church has me thinking about how the American lifestyle means we can’t relate to the Gospel.
We say a lot of words about Jesus’ ministry with the poor, “the least of these,” and how that shows us who God is. He’s not a ruler who keeps company with the powerful, but with the meek – he turns the social order upside-down. And all that’s true. But I don’t think the middle-class Americans that make up most of mainline Protestantism can understand how much.
We describe the Apostles as being us. Thomas doubts, Judas betrays, and Peter doesn’t know when to shut up. Except the vast majority of American mainline Protestants are nothing like the Apostles. We don’t live in an empire where our families will be killed if we speak out. We don’t work 16 hours days to keep a few hundred calories on the table. We definitely don’t live in a religiously regimented society. Do I live in constant fear of disease, war, and exploitation? No way, Jose.
Even the poorest Americans have access to secondary education, clean water, and food hand-outs. These are luxuries for most of the world, like one of us winning a Corvette. Except the Corvette keeps us alive. If Jesus lived today, he wouldn’t make Apostles of the trucker from Ohio, who we think of as oh so lowly. He’d tell the Colombian plantation hands to drop their coffee baskets and follow. He wouldn’t have to visit Benny Hinn to overturn the tables; our modern temples, colloquially known as “malls,” would suffice.
The upside-downing of the world is much closer to home than we think. It’s also much bigger. Christianity has a tendency to stuff God into a box. We can’t, though. He’s too transcendent. Lion and the lamb, remember. Lion and the lamb.
Take this example: think if the president ate dinner with illegal immigrants from California. He’s not even a king, he was elected by “the common people,” and it would still be a scandal. We’d say he was condoning illegal immigration. We can only imagine how mad the Jews must have been when their dream king, the messiah, ate with the tax collectors.
At the Duke Youth Academy 2010, one of the preachers said, “We must always remember that what we see now is not God’s plan for the world.” We can’t settle for small changes. We’ve got to set hearts on fire. We’ve got to stop imagining ourselves as the helpless 5,000 beside the lake. We are the little boy with bread and fish to spare. Time to use them as God intended.
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I find your comments very interesting and I agree with most of them. However, I do not understand why you could not attend a conservative church, Methodist or another denomination. In my area of America, it is only the conservative churches that are doing what you say you think they should be doing, but even more. I am not aware of a single person from a liberal church doing Kairos prison ministry in our area. I am not aware of a single liberal person who is involved with feeding the local hungry. I am not aware of a single liberal person who is involved with spreading the Gospel in 194 countries around the world placing bibles. In this part of America the liberal church want the Government to do it all or they give a few dollars on Sunday so they don’t have to personally deal with the problem . They want the government to do what Jesus and his followers (the church) were told to do.
Again, I found your comments interesting but not realistic in the area where I live.
Charles, your experience is consistent with mine as well. The liberals generally talk about those things and push for lobbying legislative changes or improvements through government policy. The conservatives tend to be involved one-on-one with the actual poor and marginalized. I know this is a broad stroke, and there are certainly exceptions, but as a general pattern this has been true in my observations.
i agree with you; Jesus talked about money more than any other aspect of our lives, and certainly much more than most American Christians ever talk about it. but you leave something out: evangelism must come first– in the words of John Piper at the 2010 Lausanne Congress, “Christians care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering.” i just get concerned that liberal churches often sacrifice orthodox doctrine and spend so much time preaching change that they don’t spend enough time actually preaching the gospel.
In my experience, we see what we want to see. How many hours have you spent in a liberal church? Where does your perception that they do less than conservative churches come from? Where I am, the liberal non-church attending would tell you that they are the ones working the trenches, and that the church-goers do nothing but spew hatred down on the non-church goers. Why do they think that? I know what my congregation does – and I assure you it isn’t what you think it is based on what you say here.
Honestly, I have to say that your comments about what we do vs. what they do reminds me far too much of my children complaining because (from their vantage point) they are cleaning up more than their siblings are. And my response is therefore the same: if every one of us paid more attention to what we are doing ourselves and less on what other people are doing or not doing, a whole lot more good would get done.
Wow, I’m sorry to have created a debacle. I have seen churches on both side of the spectrum do the will of God – different methods perhaps, but also the same ones – and fail to do so. And though liberals and conservatives may have different definitions of “witness,” I believe they both do it.
I don’t feel comfortable in conservative churches because of doctrines more common to conservatives. I can’t sit through a sermon about the evils of abortion and homosexuality, or worship in a sanctuary with an American flag. As a Christian universalist, traditional doctrines of wrath and blood-sanctification are contradictory to the fundamentals of my faith.
I did not mean to imply anything about the holiness of either side.
Thank you. Heather. My experiences tell me that those churches perceived as conservative spend a lot of time telling the rest of us what we are doing wrong, while those on the left spend a lot of time watering down the Gospel so everyone can be comfy at church to the point that we lose the Trinity.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the political Chrisitan Right stopped telling me government is too big, but should be involved in my reproductive rights, my sexuality, and my prayer life; and the Christian Left took public ownership of its faith while doing all those “good works in the trenches?” Maybe that evangelism you are taling about could be uncovered in such an environment?