A Rudder

No one wants to be that strenuous being - the single individual. But men everywhere are in the service of that deceitful substitute - a group.  Let's a few of us join together, form a group - then we can surely do something. This is the most profound demoralization of the human race. 

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 The task is not, as human stupidity believes it is: to justify Christianity to men, but rather to justify oneself to Christianity.

 -Soren Kierkegaard

The task that confronts me, as a practitioner of institutional Christianity at this particular time in history, is trying to figure out how this particular institution is going to survive the postmodern world.  To some extent, I know it's a task of vanity (the biblical sort not the "how's my hair look?" sort).  I believe that the work of God's Holy Spirit in this world is not a function of church attendance or stewardship campaigns, it is a pillar of creation, it is the Word, the Breath, the Holy Fire that makes all that is and was and shall be, all that mystical stuff.  Woohoo, but I've got a mortgage to pay and kids to put through college.  For better or worse, I have hitched my wagon to this thing called the Church.

A lot of times though... it just makes me kind of sad, not because of the usual stuff though, not because of the emergent postmodern griping about the church.  I don't really begrudge all the former evangelicals who have migrated out of the "toxic" waters that spawned them and found their "true home," among the liturgies of the Episcopalians or the Orthodox.  I think it's cool when people "discover" a system that has been around for 1000 years and it seems new.  But that's the problem, it seems like they are just in it for the novelty or the contrast, or the change from what they knew.  It's essentially teenage rebellion (a lot of them are 20 somethings).  The problem is that it is cool, or trendy, or whatever.  Differentiation from  your originating system can seem "cool" at first, but ultimately it becomes hard work, and if you don't do the work you will probably end up dissociated and having a difficult time forming healthy relationships.

Sorry, that might seem a little psycho-babble-ish.  Let me provide some context.  I didn't start down this path out of the blue.  Here are two more voices from outside my bubble that I came across this morning.  The first is Bret Stephens of the New York Times talking politics and how we seem to have lost the rudder of "The West." The second is Timothy Carney writing for the American Conservative, with a longish read about how the much vaunted support of Trump by Christians may be something of an illusion created by the peculiar animal called nominal Christianity.  I will state, as I usually do, that these folks are not Liberals, nor are they "cultured despisers" of religion.  They are, in fact, making a rather crucial point about how both liberal iconoclasts and right-wing propagandists have done damage to the moral and religious structures that we took for granted, perhaps took for granted for too long.

As a laborer in the field, I know all too well that, just because folk check the "Christian," box on a census form or slap an ichthus on their bumper (that's the little fish thingy), doesn't mean they are actually a follower of Jesus, or even a genuine participant in an actual church congregation.  By the by, the more time goes by, the more I actually do believe that going to church is an important part of actually following Jesus. When I was younger, I thought that maybe the "me and Jesus" kind of faith was a thing that could bear fruit, but time and human sinfulness have convinced me otherwise.  You need a community to grow, you need other people, you need Christianity in order to be a follower of Jesus.

You don't need Christendom necessarily, that's a chimera dire, a fusion of institutional church rules and political power-grabbing.  You don't need blind obedience to an institutional expression of Christianity, but you do need community and communion.  Carney, for all the relevant points he makes, is somewhat limited by an empirical approach that can only track numbers.  He relies on things like church attendance and polling data.  I think those things are only a tentacle of something much larger and more dangerous beneath the surface.  Many forms of church that are available to people these days offer attendance opportunities with little or no connection.  Mega churches are the obvious offenders, but smaller congregations can do it too: "Just come to our church, we promise not to ask too much of you."  Churches can play the game of clubs and cliques as well as the game of thrones, we're not above it, or immune from it, in fact, it's safe to say that most churches are probably a mess in their own special little way.

So why go? Why put yourself through it?

The theological answer is that God is about relationship, in the Trinity, and through the Incarnation.  God became a human being to demonstrate that the Spirit and the body are not enemies. Reconciliation, redemption, salvation, atonement, all that church sounding stuff, what it comes back to is that God is all about relationships and community.  In community you find people who challenge you in so many different ways, and you also find people who support you in ways you can never comprehend.  Community of that sort gives you a rudder, and a sense that there is something to steer by rather than just whatever you happen to feel at the moment.

Which leads to the second, more practical answer, religion, among other things, provides a moral framework.  Even if we disagree somewhat about what morality might be, there is a certain bedrock standard in Christian (and honestly in many other religions) faith.  That bedrock is what Jesus uses to sum up the Law and the Prophets: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself." You can spend a lot of time unpacking those things, but they are pretty easy to remember, and they are useful benchmarks for anything else that you might try to build on to your religion.  They are the rudder we need.