Neo-Christian Myth #4: The Sweet Tooth of American Christianity

February 27, 2014 By K. Mulhern

When we study church history, the prevailing tension is one between continuity and ingenuity—between preservation of the gospel tradition and the adaptation of it to new languages and cultures.

Sometimes that tension collapses when we entrench ourselves in the “this is the way we’ve always done it” syndrome, and invariably those ruts embed us in coded practices and symbols that eventually become part of the belief system entirely. Then any challenge to the method becomes a challenge to the meaning.

Other times the tension spins away as we play with new traditions and explore curious cultural corners, dancing ever farther into distant orbits of Christian faith and practice until all of a sudden we realize that, hey, we’re not even Christians any more.

The two thousand years since the time of Christ sounds like a long time. Forever ago. Yet really, it’s not that long. In Wendell Berry’s book, Jayber Crow, the main character reflects toward the end of his life about the place of memory and how really close we are to one another.

“I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room.”

Would Jesus recognize us?

Sometimes I think we’ve been playing a spiritual version of Telephone Tag: Jesus whispered something in the ears of, say, John, and he whispered it into Paul’s ears, who whispered it into Lydia’s ears, who whispered it into the ears of a merchant from Gaul, who whispered it into a Roman soldier off to build Hadrian’s Wall, who whispered it to an Irish slave, who whispered it to a … The question is always, is what we proclaim and practice anything like the original message? Do we even assume that it should it be like the original message?

There have been some major variations in the life and practices of the church. Some are good, some are bad. The question of this series is, which of those adaptations fundamentally change the trajectory of Church by tinkering with its DNA? Donald Miller’s posts, here and here, seem to represent for me the DNA tinkering that will make us into something else. I’m merely asking us to consider some of the changes he is reflecting, how they will fundamentally change our course, and whether we really want to go there.

Miller writes:

“God has no problem with us enjoying Him, each other, nature and for that matter a worship experience. And if we don’t enjoy a specific kind of worship experience, He could care less whether we go choose one we enjoy more. … God has no problem with you having pleasure enjoying Him, and when we don’t through a specific methodology, He has no problem with us switching things around so we do. He’s not calling us to be sanctified through dutiful boredom.”

Myth #4: Our spiritual practices should be shaped by our personal preferences, which reflect our learning styles and result in our pleasurable feelings.

Let’s call this a version of Freud’s pleasure principle, translated into religious language. In that paragraph above, Miller pits pleasure against dutiful boredom, and he suggests that our church-choosing and church-going should be driven by personal enjoyment of “a specific methodology.”

To some degree, he’s got a point. I go to a liturgical church because I enjoy the liturgy; I love the steady diet of the rites and rhythms of Anglican worship. I wouldn’t enjoy some other church traditions. But I can also assure you that through our years of church attendance there have been many occasions when the duties of being a part of community gave me no pleasure.

Don’t get me wrong. I like pleasure. I prefer worship services that are well-orchestrated and creative to services that bump along in old ruts; sermons that are stimulating and witty, with some humor and one or two really good insights to those that are boring, stream-of-consciousness memoirs of the life and times of the pastor; music that grabs me by the gut and throws me down in abject worship or lifts me up in ethereal feelings of praise. I even seek pleasure in church architecture, the flowers on the altar, and bulletins without typos. I’m a pleasure addict.

But that was a disclosure, not a confession. Meaning, there’s nothing wrong about enjoying something and finding pleasure in it. But this has never been the gauge of obedience. Oh no. Miller seems to think that if we do not act on our feelings, we’ve marginalized something central to who we are.

I can assure you that if I had acted on some of my feelings over my many years of church-going, there would have been considerably more prayers for the repose of souls. The Good God knows that my feelings are not always the best guide for my words or my actions.

Miller goes on:

“The subtext of these comments seemed to insinuate that God wants us to suffer for Him. But not suffer by reaching the poor or by being outcast, suffer, literally, by standing in a church service singing songs you don’t find catchy. Really?”

We are all pleasure addicts, but I can assure you that dutiful boredom or singing dull songs is not what it means to suffer. That’s not to say that community never involves suffering, for it does. Yet enduring the ups and downs of a community as it passes through seasons of tedium, frustration, failure, and even pain, is part of belonging, and to belong means to bear all things.

One of the comments left on last week’s blog mentioned affluence. And here is where the myth really comes home to us. In our American arena of privileges and endless possibilities, our reckless obsession with individual choice, we have made our own preferences the fullest measure of our spiritual obedience. Any impediment to pleasure is now an experience of suffering. We live in a candy store of options, all of them geared to satisfy our cravings for entertainment, inspiration, novelty, exhilaration; to deny us our cravings is inexcusable.

No wonder we can’t remain in a church. Who can ever please all the people all the time? And what about other Christian practices? We call them “disciplines” for a reason. Ancient Christian practices were never about pleasure; they were about transforming us, helping us make that long transition from being children tossed in the wind to being ammas and abbas trained in ways of holiness. God likes us to see us happy, indeed. But there is more. Even dutiful boredom has its place in the rhythms of a mature Christian life. Or it used to.

Neo-Christian Myth #2: the Preaching Pickle

February 12, 2014 By K. Mulhern

Poor Donald Miller has been web-torched for his post. It has, at this writing, 479 comments, and let’s just say some of them are not very nice. (In fact, he wrote a follow-up post as a defense, which you can read here. Believe me, though, he’s loving the traffic, even if he is in Yoda-with-a-light-saber mode.) While I continue to probe some of his remarks and what they reveal about contemporary Christian (American) spirituality, I’m not trying to call him out. This is not “his” problem; it’s our problem. We are reinventing the very core of what the Christian Church has found essential: the apostles’ teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.

I could be a scold here, and shame us all for these reinventions. Bad, bad Christians. And we can throw around accusations of narcissism all day long, but the much bigger question is this: In what sense are the historical traditions of Christian practice essential to Christian faith and in what sense are they only temporal expressions of faith that may or may not be necessary to support and foster Christian faith?

Let me be clear: I am not talking about cultural or time-bound articulations of Christian traditions. I am not talking, for instance, about “Church” as any of the following: buildings, Sunday mornings at 11.00am, pews, organs (or bands of any kind), coffee in the foyer, potlucks, etc. Church in Rwanda, or Church in Brazil, or Church in Malaysia may look very different.

But “Church” as I’m using it here, is assembly: gathering and celebrating. It is not just an amorphous connection between believers. Therefore while we may all be 24/7 members of Church and actors of Church, we are not always constituting Church unless we are in intentional assembly. Of some kind. In explaining his disinterest in going to church, Miller writes, “But I also believe the church is all around us, not to be confined by a specific tribe.”

I hear this a lot. Church is all around us. Church is who we are. Church is what we do. Church is what we believe. I do church at home with my family. I do church at my office. And there’s just enough truth to all that to assuage any sense of tiresome communal obligation.

While the Church is, of course, the Body of Christ, composed of all its members and evident (for good or ill) in all the actions of its members in all the places that they are, its synergy flows out of a communal identity that becomes visible in assembly. This means that when I gather with fellow believers over coffee and bagels, we may indeed all be in relationship as members of the Body of Christ (Church), but we are not assembling as the Church and doing the kinds of things together that simply cannot be done solo. It is that business of assembling that Donald Miller finds dispensable, and he does so, I believe, because he has bought into some of the myths of neo-Christianity, myths that feel quite natural and even spiritual, but which are ultimately perilous to the work of faith.

Myth #2: A sermon is a lecture, and it is only meaningful if you can remember it. Therefore it’s helpful to auditory learners, and not so helpful to kinesthetic or visual learners.

To say anything at all about a sermon is dangerous. Dangerous because there are so many bad sermons and so many bad preachers. Honestly. You and I both know this. So I can only address this myth by first acknowledging that many sermons are not what they’re supposed to be, and that we all too often have to live with that. And even when we hear a good sermon, we may erroneously call it good simply because it was witty, or entertaining, or passionate, or articulate. And yet that too isn’t what signifies the value of a sermon. So, shall we abandon the sermon all together?

Well, yes, perhaps we should if we think of it as a lecture. I’m all for lectures, especially when I’m the one giving them. And I most certainly hope my students remember my lectures, both at exam time, and, well, I hope they remember them forever!!! (Ahem, sorry, getting off topic here.)

Miller writes:

I can count on one hand the number of sermons I actually remember… [T]o be brutally honest, I don’t learn much about God hearing a sermon…. I’m fine with this, though. I’ve studied psychology and education reform long enough to know a traditional lecture isn’t for everybody. There’s an entire demographic of people who have to learn by doing, not by hearing. So you can lecture to them all day and they’re simply not going to get it.

Miller’s comments are completely understandable. Really. I get this, totally get this. The reformers, in their earnest desire to refocus our attention on the scriptures, made the sermon the highlight and center of assembly. And their emphasis on the text, and the exposition of it, combined with an academic inclination (who else studies Greek? learns how to think in three-points-and-a-poem patterns? and now PowerPoints an outline?) has led to our lecture mentality. Some of us like all of this; some of us don’t.

The myth here is not that traditional lectures aren’t for everybody; that part is true. The myth is that the point of “going to church” and listening to a sermon is that we get “information” about God, which we then file away and recall as necessary when faith gets cloudy. Sermons as lectures are about knowledge and categories and systems and facts. But this is not what sermons are really doing. (I’m including homilies here, and though some of you might smugly insist that homilies are a different animal and therefore free of these aspersions, they are not. Most of them are just shorter lectures, a little quippier, perhaps, but in the same genre.)

So to dispel the myth, we have to address the much larger issue of the niche that sermons fill. We have to talk about not only what sermons ought to be, but what they may even now serve as if we let them.

Sermons/homilies are proclamations of the Word. They are the apostles’ teaching rumbling and ruminating down through the centuries, and the sheer act of listening to them, week after week, year after year, is a slow seep of truth forming our faith, not necessarily informing it. We hear the Word, we receive the Word; we listen and we inwardly digest. We may not remember last week’s sermon, but if we’re in a community that really preaches the Word of God, we don’t have to remember last week’s sermon in order to move within this historical arc. We are being shaped by the proclamation through the very discipline of attending to it. Together. Yes, with our minds (it isn’t a magic spell), but also with our wills. As such, listening to a sermon is an act of worship.

Like a gentle massage of our souls, the work of being preached to loosens the tensions created by the other six days’ constant barrage of untruths, half-truths, warped truths, and warms our spiritual muscles to the greater work of worship. It is not mere serendipity that the Nicene Creed follows the sermon. We hear the Word, and then we stand and reaffirm our faith. This is why in the liturgical history of the Church, the proclamation of the Word, the liturgy of the Word, precedes—and must precede—the liturgy of the Eucharist, that culminating act of thanksgiving and remembrance and adoration.

The Word makes our hearts receptive and sanctifies them. Yes, I can study the Bible on my own or with friends, and yes, that is extremely valuable. But that is not the same as an assembly listening together to the proclamation of the Word and replenishing our faith.

My dad is a preacher. A really great preacher, I must say. I sat through many, many of his sermons. Sometimes our church provided little outlines in the bulletin so you could take notes. Sometimes I did that. Outlines were helpful; I wrote down some memorable things, some of which he said, and other really brilliant insights that came out of my own brain. It’s almost all gone from my mental file cabinets now. Out of all the sermons he preached, I can remember a small handful. (The one about Elijah comes to mind often.)

But do I feel therefore, that all those sermons were a waste of my time? That because I cannot pull out those notes and remember the lessons, I have failed somehow? No, oh no. Sermon after sermon after sermon has dripped down into the caverns of my soul and shaped the inner constructs of my faith, my practice, my very confidence in God, whose Word remains the same.