It’s Sunday, around noon when I started writing. Have a houseful of guests–relatives of my husband. We’ve been married just six months so this fun time has been one of learning much about his family. Think “Our Big Fat Greek Wedding” except they are Polish.
Unquestionably, I’m the repressed quiet WASP.
Not one of them even brought up the idea of going to church this morning. In our relaxed conversations, we spoke of their Easter traditions: brunch and egg hunts with children. The two Christmas’s I’ve spent with other members of this large extended family saw me as the only person who wanted a Christmas Eve service.
They’re good people. Hold responsible jobs, serve their communities in multiple ways, generous, kind, honest. Older generation loosely connected with the Roman Catholic church. Younger ones, nothing as far as I can tell.
I spent many Sunday mornings standing at the church door of the fairly small semi-rural church I where I served as pastor wondering when the crowds were going to swarm over the parking lot. They didn’t, of course. The vast majority of those in that community never or rarely bothered with church.
"... It’s a good move away from a fear-based God to an understanding that it is compassionate love that holds the universe together ..."
My new relatives are among the many “unchurched” and more, the “don’t care” group. They are part of the trend described in this article, They are essentially “irreligious.”
My years in evangelicalism says, “But aren’t they going to hell because they don’t believe that Jesus died for their sins?”
Well, I don’t think so. And, by the way, therein is the problem for a wider gospel for those of us who call ourselves progressive Christians. We have pretty well given up on preaching hell.
In my opinion, it’s a good move away from a fear-based God to an understanding that it is compassionate love that holds the universe together AND that the universe is a vastly larger than any of us can conceive AND that having a “ticket to heaven” is probably not what the message of Jesus was about anyway.
But what do we have to offer?
I’ve long been a daily newspaper reader. Two papers are delivered here daily, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. We get the local newspaper on Sunday. I read multiple online news sources.
I’ve started my day for years by reading the papers and praying my way around the world.
After a lifetime of this practice, I know this much: the world throbs with pain, with uncertainty, with despair, with fear, with crises stalking from every side.
We have unstable world leaders with fingers too close to weapons of mass destruction.
We have terrorist cells scattered everywhere, caring for no one except their need to destroy others and bring in their own versions of “heaven” with them as kings and rulers.
We have grinding poverty shoving hard-working people face-down to the barren ground.
We have an over-sugared world exploding the epidemic of metabolic diseases, the most common being diabetes.
We have political leaders who have no concept of the common good, driven instead by personal ambition and a need to take down the “other,” whomever that may be.
In other words, we’ve got “hell” all around us.
And we have a Christian church that . . . well, it does do a lot of real good, but primarily turns inward on itself, arguing over minutia, seeing its own power plays and back-room dealings.
I speak best to The United Methodist Church, my own denomination, but we’re no different in the minutia of our fights than other religious groups.
Soon the United Methodists shall meet for our once-every-four-year General Conference.
We’ll bicker for days whether or not to open the doors fully to those who don’t fix the sexual binary as defined in a pre-modern world when all was described in terms of “clean” and “unclean.” No mixing the two permitted.
We’ll spend precious energy peering into the bedrooms of other people of faith, condemning only the so-called sins of the “unclean” LGBTQI world, never bothering with the sins of the “clean” oh-so-pure heterosexual world.
Why? What it is about answering the classic question, “How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?” that grabs our attention and separates people by an unbridgeable chasm?
Why? It’s just easier. It’s easier to turn on our own than to risk our own deaths as we courageously face the danger-filled issues of injustice and oppression.
That’s the state of irreligion in the US. The easy way. And so we, i.e., people of the church, die. Because people aren’t called to “easiness.” They are called to discipleship. Disciples change the world, either for evil (think “terrorists,” or Osama Bin Laden or Hitler) or for good (think Dorothy Day or Nelson Mandela but most are unnamed and un-celebrated).
Jesus called disciples. But disciples want to do something–not get stuck arguing about the dancing angels. The bureaucracy-laden church has no room for them.
Christy Thumb
The Rev. Christy Thomas
The Rev. Christy Thomas of Frisco, Texas, is a retired clergy member of the North Texas Annual Conference. A columnist and author, she blogs at The Thoughtful Pastor on Patheos.com, from which this post is republished with the author's permission.