A baby of another kind

Anger of another kind-new territory for the church

It is not news to anyone that there is a much cynicism about the church. It was certainly there during my college years in the 60s. But I believe that today it is more visceral and angry. The church is increasingly seen not as an irritant to be tolerated in a pluralistic society but as a positively bad thing that hurts people and culture. It is seen as a social structure that actively seeks to disenfranchise, set up unnecessary boundaries, point fingers and get in people’s faces. Even those who “go to church” often have a substratum of disregard for church as church. It’s a place they would never invite their nonChristian friends and where they do not feel “safe.” It doesn’t take very long to hear their stories of “church hurt.” It’s right there on the surface.

Can we create churches for those who feel this way? Can you raise up a deeply Christian congregation out of those who are so alienated and suspicious of church structures, motives and doctrines? A lot of pastors are deeply concerned about “church usual” that discounts these realities. These pastors  are seeking to sensitize their congregations as to what is really going on. There is some bridge building that has to be engaged, they tell their congregations. The Gospel message has to come across as less combative, less harnessed to conservative social forces, and more ready to examine some basic assumptions that need to be questioned. Other pastors are saying the only answer is new churches. And still other pastors are saying bear down and bring out the old gospel cannons and topple the walls of secular culture.

My observation is that any alive evangelical church is a real mixture of these forces. Church leadership sees all these balls in the air in any given week. If one of those balls drops the church begins to lean, and when the church leans people begin to leave and the giving begins to drop and a core constituency is absent.

What’s a church to do? If you go into the blogosphere with any regularity you see the options full blown. The battle for the soul of the evangelical church is up for grabs. Hybels and Warren are holding the middle ground between the outright conservatives and the newer emergent paradigms. They are rejected by both but their sheer weight and influence keep them in the dialogue. They are both clear on a very short Gospel outline but know that moving beyond that Gospel outline will put them in territory where they begin to show their affinities. This must be avoided at all costs. They stay pretty far away from the Gospel and culture dialogue that both the conservatives and emergents are ready for. And that dialogue will increasingly be center stage. Driscoll will force it. Tony Jones will force it. and the referees in the middle will end up exhausted.

And in the middle of all this is the Roman Catholic Church. It just is. My concern is that as evangelicalism exhausts itself with epistemological uncertainty and floating identity, it will just lose its will to live. Where will the traditionalists go? It’s very much a pick and choose thing for now. Until evangelicals begins to see that for all its faults, the RCs are their best ally in the war for the soul of a culture. I can hardly think of an issue where the evangelical subculture to date has not adopted the predominant view of its host culture-whether it is the ordination of women and abortion rights in my college days or today the redefinition of marriage and the legitimacy of sex outside of marriage (with this or that qualification). The RCs have not budged an inch. Why don’t they budge? What is it in their church that keeps them morally conservative? That is the question evangelicals will soon start to explore. Some of the answers they won’t like, like Aristotelian philosophy (but which I applaud). Some they will.

Put on your church pew safety belts and your crash helmet. Rough weather ahead.