What I Don't Miss (Part 2)

Part One of this series dealt with what I miss now that I am doing "secular" ministry after thirty years as a parish pastor.
Links to
Introduction
What I Miss: Part 1, part 2, part 3

This section is all about What I Don't Miss
Part 1
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"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
--James Baldwin

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Underlying much of what I don’t miss about the church is the remnants of Christendom. Christendom is the Church existing in essence as a non-localized nation-state. It began with Constantine in the 4th Century when he realized that he could conquer the world if he accepted this relatively new religion as the “official” religion of the Roman Empire. It only went downhill from there into state religion. The church controlled the state which brought along a high degree of triumphalism that comes when you, the church, have Kings and Armies and lots of money at your beck and call. Your missionary efforts become identical with the imperialistic efforts of the state. (Look at Spain in the New World, for one of many examples.)

Now, another disclaimer. I’m not one of those who think that the “true” church died with Constantine’s announcement. It is simply a part of the picture and a major watershed in Christian history. What I do think is the case is that when power was offered, the church saw it as a way of expanding the Kingdom of God. This was obviously God’s way to opening new ways and new doors. There were, I am sure, many other motives, but I tend to believe that the most basic was the desire to expand the Kingdom. The fact that the power was eventually misused and abused is simply a fact of original sin. Paul’s letters show that the 1st Century Church wasn’t a whole lot saintlier- just smaller and with no broad power-base to further corrupt them.

But this isn’t about corruption in the church. It is about the equating of being a Christian with being a good citizen of a Christian nation. You had a choice of course. But not much of one. When the church is in charge, you just fall into place. You become a Christian because that’s what people do. You go to church because that’s what good citizens do. It was an integral part of the culture, something I think Jesus would have at once understood and challenged just as he did with the established Jewish institutional religion of his day.

With that came a sense of Church entitlement that the Reformation didn’t break because the Reformation churches were just as much state churches as the Catholic Church had been. They may have lost some of the power, but they still had enough to maintain their position. They didn’t like new and different religious understandings coming along and threatening their supremacy. Look at England and the Anglican-Methodist fights or Germany with the Lutheran-Moravian misunderstandings and you will see how it could play out. Even in many of the American colonies there was an “official” church that you better pay attention to.

That leads to a real sense of entitlement on the part of the church and a high expectation that everyone understands and accepts your world-view. As I moved west over the past thirty years I witnessed over and over the extension of stores opening on Sundays. Starting in the Lehigh Valley in the mid-70s, into south central Pennsylvania in the early 80s, and Wisconsin in the late 80s - early 90s, cultures began to crumble and be rebuilt. The owner of a local department store once said to me that he hated to open on Sunday. But he had to do so. It started at Christmas season and moved beyond it. The same happened here in the Twin Cities a couple years ago when the local chain of Christian bookstores decided to open on Sunday afternoons in the weeks before Christmas. They still do it. The Christian expectations of culture have shifted.

And we spend so much time fighting it as if it was an entitlement of ours. We want it this way; therefore it must be this way. The world was better when…. Yes, it may have been, but I doubt it. The good, old days were probably neither. The natural extension of that can also be the political wrangling between the Christian Right and democratic ideas of separation of church and state or the incredible feeling that Christians are being persecuted in the United States. As a pastor from then East Germany once said to me, “You Americans get your American freedom and freedom in Christ all mixed together. That is not good.”

What a waste of our time and energy. What an incredible distraction of what we are supposed to be doing. If Evil were to plan a better way to subvert the mission of the Good (of any type or spiritual history) this would seem to be one of the better ones. Spend all of your time arguing with the culture, trying to secure something you don’t need to truly do your calling. Sure it makes it easier and opens up a lot of possibilities to live in a free country, but it isn’t a necessary condition for the survival of the church. The First Century Church and the Church in China are prime examples of the falsehood of our American Freedom-Centered belief.

What happens is we end up wasting time and energy fighting battles that we shouldn’t be fighting. We are often afraid to discover that people may actually rather go out shopping on Sunday than go to church. We fight the creeping secularism instead of preaching the Gospel. We get angry at out schools for having too many activities or too much homework on the old church night- Wednesday. We are not being positive- we are being negative. We turn Christianity and Church into duties in order to combat these trends. The result is often hostility or confusion or apathy. The loser is not the secular trend. The loser is the church. I will have some thoughts on that in a later installment.

The remnants of Christendom are still here. Perhaps, when they are finally gone, we can get on with being God’s people as a leaven in the bread of the world.