Big Tent Day 2 Part 2: A Holy Spirit Thing

I just finished a 90 minute workshop titled "How to Start and Grow New Immigrant Worshiping Communities led by Angel Suarez of the PMA.  It was disappointing at first that there were only three participants who were not already leaders of Immigrant Worshiping Communities.  The disappointment abated, however, when we realized that the three of us got to have a unique experience: just us for 90 minutes with PMA staff, a local presbytery staff person and pastors of communities representing south Asia, Haiti, west Africa, Indonesia and Latin America.

To put it mildly, I learned a lot.  I think I took more notes in that 90 minutes than in my first Barth seminar!

The conversation was incredibly helpful and I had some of my assumptions about ministry with an immigrant community affirmed and some turned upside down.  I learned how I was overestimating the challenges in some areas while underestimating them in others.  I learned strategies and models for ministry, some theological context for doing ministry with immigrant communities and heard stories of worshiping communities represented.

Beyond all that, though, I learned that the Holy Spirit can find a small group of Presbyterians even when they are tucked back in a corner of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY.

At the end of the meeting, after all of the conversation, one of the pastors in the group asked if they could pray for the three of us who came to the meeting and for our ministries.  That is when a pretty extraordinary thing happened.  A dozen or so brothers and sisters in Christ from around the PC(USA) representing congregations made of immigrants from around the world came together in that moment, laid hands on us and prayed.

I am not one to throw around Holy Spirit language.  I am pretty staid and almost rigid in my Calvinist reserve sometimes.  But in that moment, sitting in that room, feeling my colleagues hands on my shoulders, back and head and hearing the prayers being offered for our ministry, I felt the Spirit in that place.

Over the last couple of days as I heard the same old song about changing church culture and the need to change the church, about membership decline and all the plans we have to stem the tide, about how this curriculum or that program promised to turn things around, I began to get a little disheartened about the church.  Sometimes we seem to act like the first class passengers who didn't want to get in the lifeboats just yet because the deck on the Titanic was cold.  Then this happened.

In that awkward annoying Holy Spirit way, God reminded me that despite our best efforts, God is nowhere near done with the Presbyterians.  If I God was done with us, the small turnout in that workshop would have been the story.

But it wasn't.

And that is pretty damn cool.

Big Tent Day 2: Pick Your Battles

A recent opinion piece on National Review Online has caused some stirs in the PC(USA) and some quiet chatter among attendees at the Big Tent event in Louisville.  The piece responds to a decision of the PC(USA)’s new hymnal committee as reported in the last issue of First Things.

The committee, by a 9-6 vote, chose not to include the contemporary hymn “In Christ Alone” in the new 800+ song hymnal hitting pews this fall.  The rationale offered publicly by the moderator of the committee is a discomfort with the line “till on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” The lyric refers to St. Anselm’s theory of penal atonement arguing that the salvific power of Christ is as sacrificial lamb slain to satisfy God’s anger.  Jesus died for our sins and in our place.

I can think of few more thankless jobs than serving on a hymnal committee.  I can’t manage to keep the people in worship happy week to week and I only have to pick three at a time!  So I want to start by saying I think the hymnal committee made far more good choices than bad and have produced a hymnal that will serve the church well for many years.  Theirs was a hard job and they did it pretty darn well from where I sit.  The church owes them our profound thanks.

On this one song, though, I have to say I think they dropped the ball. 

“In Christ Alone” is a good song for modern church music.  It is not the usual pedantic academic attempt to write in the 19^th century tradition nor is it a fluff piece like most 5-3-8 contemporary Christian worship songs (five words, three chords, sung eight times).  There is theological substance to the song and there are not many contemporary songs you can say that about.

Still, the committee felt this was the place to draw the line on substitutionary atonement.  I agree with the committee that there is a problem when the church’s ONLY language of atonement is Anselm’s model, however I’m not sure this decision was the wisest course for a few reasons.

First, substitutionary atonement is still present in the hymnal.  If the problem is substitutionary atonement, the decision lacks consistency.  “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” remains in the hymnal along with its words on the “imposition” of Jesus blood. 

Second, substitutionary atonement is still present in the theology of the church.  Although much has been written and argued in recent years against a reduction of atonement to nothing but substitution, the PC(USA) has taken no steps to declare Anselm’s model outside the orthodoxy of the church.  For some in the church, myself included, who hold to a multi-fold understanding of atonement, substitution is one of many parts that create the whole. 

Third, and really most importantly in this context, excluding this hymn for this rationale picked a battle that just didn’t need to be fought.  The PC(USA) has been under constant bombardment in recent years for perceived departures from orthodoxy.  Most of the theological criticism is baseless and rests on Glenn Beck style “logic” and extrapolations of conclusions from scraps of irrelevant evidence.  David French’s adolescent rant on National Review is a case in point. 

French takes the committee’s decision on a Jonathan Swift worthy flight of the absurd to conclude that because this one hymn was not included in the hymnal, the PC(USA) has abandoned orthodoxy on the theory of the atonement.  French writes, “The core of the dispute is the mainline break with orthodoxy on the very nature of God and mission of Jesus.” Of course, the core of the dispute was disagreement among 15 people about the inclusion of a song in a hymnal.  

When it comes to these ridiculous debates with hysterical commentators who want nothing more than to tear down the mainline church, I have learned one important lesson in my ministry; there are no victims of their vitriol and venom, only volunteers.  And it is time that we quit volunteering to be their punching bags.

Hindsight being 20/20 and acknowledging the unfairness of Monday morning quarterbacking the committee’s decision, I think it is worth asking, “Would saving the church yet another round of bomb throwing be worth including this rather benign hymn that is already being sung in many of our churches?”  In other words, is this really the battle we want to pick and is this the place to pick it?  It is a question we do not ask often enough in the church. That is especially true when we tackle issues on a national level.  We have had groups tackling issues from peace in the Middle East to hymns we sing in church and there are important issues that come up in all of those conversations.  There are important things that the church needs to say and there are some battles worth choosing.  But not all of them.

Not every theological battle worth fighting has to be fought right that moment.  Yes, we need to be mindful of our theology of atonement and yes, there are reasons to question the theology of some music.  But I would much rather read about how the PC(USA) is boldly standing against violence in schools, the use of drones to spy and kill and other matters of life and death.  A small church like ours is only going to get so much ink in a religiously diverse world and although it may be tempting to pick every battle that comes along, it may not be the wisest course for us to take.  

The criticism from French and others on this and so many other small issues is overblown and a bit silly at times.  Still, I’m tired of the denomination I love volunteering to stand in front of their firing squad so often.

Big Tent Day 1: Millenneal Musings

Greetings from Louisville, KY and the PC(USA) Big Tent gathering.

Big Tent is advertised as a "family reunion" for Presbyterians and it has been great to see friends from around the church and catch up on news of ministries and families and friends.

So this morning I was having coffee at a place across the street from the Convention Center and struck up a conversation with a few other Presbyterians (easily identifiable by the yellow name tags and the theological pun t-shirts).  Two of the group are recent seminary graduates seeking calls and one is still in seminary.

We started talking about ministry in general and the future of the church and eventually the conversation came around to generational shifts in the denomination (shocker, I know).  Born in 1970 I am right in the middle of Gen-X.  The other three are part of Gen Y or Millenneals depending on which name you use for those born 1983 on.

After a few minutes of talking about ministry in different contexts and the growing number of bi-vocational pastors, one of the three said, "the problem with the church is that your generation thinks the institution is so important."  As a Gen-Xer, I reveled in the irony of that declaration being made by a participant in the largest annual gathering of the institution that is the PC(USA).  Irony is important to my people.

I spent a few minutes doing what so many people have done for me over the years and listened patiently as he worked himself up into a lather about the need to re-imagine what it means to be the church and what it means to be the people of God in an anti-institutional post-denominational age.  And if I am fair, I have to admit he made some good points.  There are some pretty substantial chinks in our denominational armor and this guy had a pretty good bead on most of them.

Once he had completed naming the sins of my generation (an I assume he was lumping the Boomers in with us), I posed a question.  "If not the traditional institutional church, what should the church look like today?"  In other words, he had a pretty good idea what is not working, so I wanted to hear what he thought would work.  That's where the conversation got really interesting.

Some of his ideas were familiar: stop worshiping Sunday morning and start worshiping God whenever the people gather; get more creative with liturgy and stop being so staid; Communion should not be saved for special occasions.  Those I had heard.  I was looking for new information.

What else should we be doing/being to reach the Millenneal generation?

His answer can best be summed up as "be different than you are now." There were not any new suggestions beyond what we needed to stop doing.  And that is the problem with so much of our generation focused ecclesiology.  It is too often based on what a generation does NOT want the church to be/do/say.  Want to attract young people, stop doing X, Y, Z.

I don't mean to beat on Millenneals.  My generation did exactly the same thing.  We came out of seminary declaring all the things we were going to fix that the Boomers and the WWII generation messed up.  It is a right of passage for church leaders to criticize past generations of church leaders.  The difference now is that we are at a turning point in the life of the church and we don't have the time or luxury of generational recriminations.  There is work to be done.  Serious work and we need all hands on deck.

So perhaps to move forward we need to stop romanticizing the wisdom of the Millenneals and demonizing the perceived follies of other generations.   At the same time perhaps we should stop putting the salvation of the denomination on the shoulders of one group;  we need to get past generational differences and rely instead on our common calling in Christ;  we need to stop TALKING about how the church needs to change and START CHANGING it.

I'm glad I got the chance to talk to those guys this morning.  It was good to hear the energy and excitement they have about the church (even the institution!) and to share our different perspectives on the form and future of the church.

I guess this is what they mean by Big Tent.