Should Churches Hide Their Controversial Beliefs?

The He Gets Us campaign, with its billboards and Super Bowl ads, presents Jesus in a very positive and relatable way, as someone who was born to a teen mother, was a refugee, was fed up with politics too, hated injustice, and promoted love instead of hate, etc.

Now some people are complaining that at least some of the people who paid for those ads don’t believe in transgenderism! or same-sex marriage! They are evangelicals! And other horrors.

And the problem goes beyond that. CNN political analysis Kirsten Powers has written an essay entitled The “He Gets Us” Super Bowl Ads Brought Back Bad Memories: How the Christian “seeker” movement can cause serious harm. She tells about how she started going to a church in New York City that was intellectual, friendly, stimulating, and that really helped her. It wasn’t “fundamentalist” or “political,” and she got involved in its work. (She is pretty obviously referring to Redeemer Presbyterian Church, an evangelical congregation whose pastor, Tim Keller, has been a pioneer in successful ministry to young urban professionals.)

Then she learned that the church held to conservative theology and Biblical moral positions.

If the day I walked into that Upper East Side church service the pastor had given a sermon calling homosexuality a sin or said that women should submit to their husbands I would have gotten up and walked out. I only learned that these were core teachings after I had been attending a year and a half and was in too deep. Abortion was never addressed from the pulpit (at least to my knowledge), but once I started asking, I found the church community fairly homogeneous in their anti-abortion beliefs, a view that the pastor expressed publicly many years after I left the church.

Mark Tooley, an evangelical Methodist who heads the Institute on Religion and Democracy, discusses her article and her call for “transparency” in what churches believe. He sums up her argument:

Powers calls this “secretiveness” a “red flag” and complains that “seeker movements hide what they really are.” Instead, they “focus on the things that will draw people in, and that ironically ultimately play a tiny” role in the church’s overall ministry. Powers claims that the controversial views are only revealed “casually” after new believers are already embedded in the community, and feeling at that point that it’s “almost impossible to leave.”

Tooley responds,

Perhaps Powers has a least a partial point. Churches and Christian ministries should be transparent. But such transparency does not automatically necessitate heavy emphasis on potential controversial points. Powers, when she became active in Redeemer Church, could easily have researched the Presbyterian Church in America and its official stances.

Churches, modeled on Jesus Himself, if they are evangelistic, mainly focus on the simple message of Jesus as Savior who came to save sinners. They don’t, especially with new believers or visitors, focus on the intricacies of the Trinity, the detailed forensics of justification and sanctification, or the wide tradition across 2,000 years that informs the church’s ethical teachings. Jesus says: “Come, whosoever will.” So does His church.

Learning the details of the Christian faith, including the church’s ethical teachings that are often at odds with the world’s, typically comes later as new believers grow in faith and are catechized by the church. Powers seems to have found this process deceptive and manipulative. But St Paul distinguished between the milk and the meat of the faith, with the former reserved for new believers, and the later for more mature believers.

I suppose Tooley too has at least a partial point. But I am uneasy with what he says too. I suppose this is an intrinsic issue with the “seeker sensitive” approach, as opposed to the traditional congregations that I favor. The church should not orient its teaching and its services to non-believers, but to the baptized and catechized community of faith. Of course it should emphasize the Trinity, justification, and “the wide tradition across 2,000 years that informs the church’s ethical teachings.”

I think campaigns like “He Gets Us” can be helpful in challenging stereotypes about Christianity and bringing attention to the person of Jesus Christ. They can get people to come through the door of the church. But once inside, they should find Biblical substance and a sense of transcendence. Specifically, they should hear God’s Word, both the Law–which indeed should make them “uncomfortable,” to say the least–and the Gospel of how Christ has redeemed them and offers free forgiveness.

In evangelism I have argued that we Lutherans should lead with our most mind-blowing doctrines–with our conviction that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present in the Bread and Wine of the Lord’s Supper, that Baptism saves us, that God is actively present in our vocations, that God actually speaks to us in His Word, that we are all sinners as well as saints, etc.

Also the other mind-blowing doctrines that all Christians believe but do not always express: That Jesus took all of the evils and griefs of the world into Himself on the Cross. That Jesus is God in the flesh. (Why didn’t the “He Gets Us” campaign bring up that fact?)

As for the “controversial” moral teachings of the Bible, I have found that it’s helpful to make clear that Christianity is not, contrary to common opinion, about moralism. That it is about forgiveness when we sin. Many people in bondage to sexual sin feel more guilty than they will admit, which is why they are so defensive. They may be broken by the law already and be primed to hear the good news.

Unbelievers, hearing those kinds of things will see that Christianity is “other” than themselves, as well as different from the boring moralism that they probably expected. And the full-strength Word may be used by the Holy Spirit to capture their attention and bring them to faith.

Here is the irony: Tooley brings up a fact that Powers does not mention in this particular essay. She has quit Redeemer Presbyterian, as she says, and evangelicalism as a whole. She has become a Roman Catholic! Hasn’t she noticed that Catholics too disapprove of abortion, homosexuality, and all of the other things that bothered her about Redeemer Presbyterian? Does she think Catholicism is not “transparent”? Didn’t she look into what Catholics believe–indeed, wasn’t she catechized–before she became a Catholic?

Perhaps she has fallen in with “progressive” Catholics who do resist the teachings of their own magisterium. But I daresay that the reason she found Catholicism attractive is that it did hold out to her a sense of substance and transcendence. She must have perceived that in the liturgy–so different from the seeker-sensitive worship she was used to–and was so taken with it that she became willing to put up with the other stuff, perhaps someday to the point of believing it.

Image from Pxfuel, royalty free photos