The Uprooted Church: New Church Rising (5 of 6)

Is it possible that something new might emerge out of the decline of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and mainline Protestantism as a whole?  This is a dangerous question to ask in the American context, where we already have such a fetish for novelty.  When the English Puritans crossed the Atlantic in search of religious freedom in the early 17^th century, they understood themselves as the New Israel venturing forth to the New World—a baptism of sorts, separated from the strictures of an oppressive tradition, past the cleansing waters of the Jordan/Atlantic, and moving into the wide open possibilities of God’s promised future.  This myth of creatio ex nihilo has continued to endure throughout our history, so that “America” is understood as a land of unlimited opportunities where all people can create themselves anew.  The church easily falls prey to the same mythical temptation.

The problem with this emphasis is that it results in a future without roots, which means a future that is fleeting, lacking depth, lacking stability.  Children sometimes grow up and reject their parents, along with their parents’ institutions, which gives them the illusion of freedom.  But in this lack of rootedness, they often end up in one failed relationship after another, unable to truly commit to or trust another human being.  As I have discovered in my pastoral counseling, the result is deep alienation, loneliness, emotional illness and inability to sustain long-term committed relationships. In this state of mistrust, they are like an uprooted tree.  Cut off from their roots, and therefore having lost all sources of life and vitality, they slowly wither away toward barrenness.

This ethos of suspicion, distrust and break with authority, as we have seen, owes much to Protestantism.  The 16^th century break with the Roman Catholic Church unleashed a flood of dissent and schism.  How many times must we experience divorce in the church before we admit that we lack the internal resources and maturity to bear with one another in our differences?  Are we able to reconcile with one another through hurt and betrayal?  With what authority do denominational leaders address their local congregations in conflict when they themselves continue to fracture over petty disagreements?  Or how does a local church provide counsel to a married couple on the verge of divorce when the congregation itself is the product of a prior split?  If we can’t work out our differences in the church, then the only option seems to be to break with the past, with tradition, with the family, and start over again—and again.  The result is a barren, uprooted church.

Jesus’ ethic was simple: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Mt. 7:16).  I suspect that the sharp decline in membership amongst mainline churches that began in the 1960s is related to the fundamental hypocrisy of proclaiming the Good News of reconciliation with our lips, but failing to embody it in our institutional and congregational life together.  Can we blame the Boomers and the generations that have followed for leaving a church that has borne rotten fruit or become altogether barren?  The Presbyterian Church is still 92% white in a two-thirds white nation, despite the denomination-approved goal of being a 20% ethnic minority church by 2010 set in the mid 1990s.  The average age of our members is over 60, and most of our churches cannot afford a called pastor, and most don’t have a youth ministry.  By their fruits ye shall know them.

The responses of Conservative/Evangelicals and Liberal/Progressives to this situation mirror each other.  The former fear the loss of authority in the modern age and rightly seek to reclaim a sense of rootedness in the midst of uncertainty and alienation.  The latter fear the loss of freedom and rightly seek to critique anything that hints at modern forms of triumphalism and supremacy.  But in their zeal for a secure foundation, how do Conservatives avoid an idolatrous reification of some time and place in the past that results in further division in the church and further oppression of others who differ?  And in their concern for personal rights and zeal for progress, how do Liberals avoid complete detachment from human and institutional relationships, which always require a certain degree of trust?  Is there a way beyond this ecclesial bi-polar disorder, where the past and the future, authority and freedom, are pitted against one another?  Are we stuck with either a hermeneutic of blind faith or a permanent hermeneutic of suspicion?

The Lutheran pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, famously spoke of a “world come of age.”  Sitting in a cell as a Nazi resister in the midst of World War II, he pushed for brutal honesty: the assumed foundations of the Christian faith had failed and now lay in ruins.  This had to be confessed rather than reacted to defensively.  The West assumed that it had emancipated itself from servile dependence on the otherworldly God of metaphysics.  But the so-called progress of the European Enlightenment that granted (some of) humanity increasing power, control and autonomy through rationality and technological progress was now unveiled as a menacing form of enslavement and death.  How was the church to respond in the midst of this loss of innocence—in the shame of World Wars I and II, where so-called Christian nations destroyed one another, and in the church’s complicity for the rise of the Third Reich that so brutally persecuted the Jews?  Is there a correlation between the virulent anti-semitism of Martin Luther in the 16^th century, and the extermination of Jews by a predominantly Lutheran Germany in the 20^th?

The Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Tegel military prison.

Whereas a number of Bonhoeffer’s colleagues detached themselves from the world and the church’s witness by proclaiming an abstract, ahistorical Christ, he refused to succumb to this temptation.  Instead, he explored the “this worldliness” of the Christian faith by seeking to live into the implications of God’s becoming human in Jesus Christ—responsibility with and for others, bearing the burdens of others, and risking sin and guilt on behalf of others.  He did not flee the guilt of the German Lutheran church or the nation as a whole, but claimed it as his own, confessed it corporately, and took responsibility for it in his words and actions.  He called us to embrace our creatureliness, and named our longing for divine reincarnation in the form of a feckless perfectionism as idolatry rooted in Platonic dualism.

The reason Bonhoeffer remains such a compelling witness for the church today is because his theological reflection was so rooted in the risks he took as a disciple.  Much like Jesus, Bonhoeffer’s life was parabolic.  His final words, as he was stripped naked and led to his execution, were: “This is the end.  For me, the beginning of life.”  Commitment, sacrifice, responsibility, risk, and suffering alongside others, even to the point of death—these are the marks of the church in a world “come of age.”  His hermeneutic was neither one of blind faith nor of permanent suspicion, but a hermeneutic of trust.  To be a Christian witness is to risk loving, to experience betrayal in the midst of this love, and then to continue loving through the betrayal.  Out of death, new life; in the end, the beginning—this is the Christian message of reconciliation.

It is here that the local church must play an important role in the reconstruction of our Christian life together around the globe.  Just as Bonhoeffer’s life was a living parable, we need local congregations that will serve as a parabolic witness to new life and reconciliation.  Unlike the dominant mythology of the United States, however, the new does not emerge ex nihilo, but is always deeply rooted in, and contends with, the old.  What we need, in other words, is a New Church Rising from the ground, out of the ruins of the failed logic of Protestantism, the bankruptcy of Enlightenment rationalism, the breakdown of community in the West, our Machiavellian ways of relating, and the guilt we all share for global sources of oppression.  As the mainline church rooted in Christendom slowly declines toward her death, can we discern these rumblings of new life from the ground up?