Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [81]
All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it. We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue living with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain our equilibrium. If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful even when we are not. When we are able to trust the gospel that our human love of God and one another is the sum total of what we were put on earth to do, and that we have everything we need to be human, then redeeming things will continue to happen, both because and in spite of us. They will happen because God loves life so much that even at the grave we make our song Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Reynolds Price, who is one of my favorite novelists, now writes from a wheelchair because of a rare spinal cancer that almost killed him twenty years ago. His compelling book about that experience is called A Whole New Life, in which he evokes the healing vision of Jesus that he believes saved his life. While Price survived both the cancer and its cure, he was not able to avoid death altogether. “When you undergo huge traumas in middle life, everybody is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended,” he said in an interview in the Oxford Review. “Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?”
This is the gospel truth, as true of the church as of her members. All the church has ever needed to rise from the dead is memory, bread, wine, and Holy Spirit—that, and care for the world that is at least equal to her care for her own preservation. Where church growth has eclipsed church depth, it is possible to hear very little about the world except as a rival for the human resources needed by the church for her own survival.
A friend of mine, who was for a time in charge of continuing education at a seminary in lower Manhattan, challenged this idea by reversing the usual polarity between the school and the city. Instead of inviting people to General Seminary to learn about God, Harry invited them to stay at General Seminary while they learned what God was doing in the city. After days on the streets and nights at the theater, the pilgrims returned to the seminary to process their encounters with the divine.
The clear message was that God did not live at the seminary. God lived in the world. The seminary existed so that people had a place to try and make sense of their experience in the world, as well as a community to support them while they did. In the seminary library, they could find helpful field guides written by earlier seekers. In the classroom, they could learn useful language for what they had experienced, along with tested methods for discerning what was life-giving from what was not. In the refectory, over second and third cups of coffee, they could hash out honorable ways to respond to what they had experienced, and, in the chapel, they could voice their gratefulness for all of this to God.
If churches saw their mission in the same way, there is no telling what might happen. What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of