Surviving Church
Week of Monday, October 8, 2001
Let's admit it. Going to church can at times be a dispiriting
affair. For many people the idea of church attendance is a non-starter.
The sermons are predictably unimaginative, the music below average. The
overall dogmatic attitude can be offensive and to be sure runs counter to
the way life works in science, business or finance. At times, let's be
honest, we mix the truth with lies: the earth is flat, the center of the
solar system, and was created in 4004 BC; in Genesis God cursed the dark
races; America is somehow special to God in ways that other nations are
not; or God wants you healthy, wealthy, thin and tan. We pathetically
mirror and mimic our culture rather than engage and transform it. Then
there is the lamentable disconnect between the spiritual cliches we
blithely parrot on Sundays and what we experience the other six days of
the week. The list goes on, and I am sure that you can add examples from
your own experiences.
In his newest book just released last month, Soul Survivor; How My
Faith Survived the Church (2001), Phil Yancey ponders his own ecclesial
disenchantment:
I have spent most of my life in recovery from the church. Every
writer has one main theme, a spoor that he or she keeps
sniffing around, tracking, following to its source. If I had
to define my own theme, it would be that of a person who absorbed some
of the worst the church has to offer, yet still landed in the loving arms
of God. What allowed me to ransom a personal faith from the
damaging effects of religion?
If you have read and enjoyed Yancey's most recent books, namely, The Jesus
I Never Knew (1995), What's So Amazing About Grace? (1997), and Reaching
for the Invisible God (2000), you will once again thank God for his ready
pen. If you have not yet read a Yancey book, by all means do so. There is
a reason his sixteen books have sold over five million copies.
In Soul Survivor Yancey returns to a theme he addressed in his
slender volume Church: Why Bother? My Personal Pilgrimage (1998). Having
grown up in a strict, southern fundamentalist church where racism was
rampant, overt, and preached from the Bible, he is not exaggerating when
he says that he has been in recovery from some of the worst abuses of the
church. Like many, he almost abandoned the faith in reaction to these
abuses, but in the end he has maintained a love for Jesus and a commitment
to the church. He would, I suspect, resonate with what Martin Luther once
said: “Yes, the church is a whore, but she's still my mother.”
How has Yancey moved beyond his dysfunctional religious past to
his spiritual present? Here is where Soul Survivor is not what you might
expect from the title. After a brief introduction, in separate chapters
Yancey profiles thirteen people whom he considers mentors in the faith.
- Martin Luther King (civil rights leader)
- GK Chesterton (essayist)
- Paul Brand (missionary surgeon among India's lepers)
- Robert Coles (Harvard psychiatrist)
- Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky (writers)
- Mahatma Ghandi (famous pacifist)
- C. Everett Koop (surgeon general)
- John Donne (poet and pastor)
- Annie Dillard (writer)
- Frederick Buechner (writer)
- Shusaku Endo (Japanese novelist)
- Henri Nouwen (pastor-writer)
What we have here is Yancey's personal pantheon of saints, his own “cloud
of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) that has cheered him on in the journey with
Jesus.
How can we survive church? Yancey and his pantheon give us three
clues.
If you know even a little about some of these people, you realize
they are anything but paragons of perfection. No one would ever accuse
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky of psychological stability. Ghandi was decidedly and
deliberately non-Christian. Chesterton was obese. Nouwen was probably gay
(but celibate) and despite all his talk about inner peace was
pathologically insecure. King was both a plagiarizer and a womanizer.
But herein lies a first lesson.
Cultivate accountability with a fellow, fallen pilgrim. Yancey
does not overlook the sins of these saints, but neither does he “pick at
the scabs of the famous.” Despite their flaws, these travelers have kept
him on the journey with Jesus. We too must find friends and mentors,
people who will tell us the truth (especially about ourselves) and with
whom we can live in community, accountability and encouragement. Who in
particular has influenced you in your Christian life? As Yancey suggests
in his epilogue, “Make a list of the people who have shaped your life for
the better, and try to figure out why.” Ideally, he suggests, their own
failings and unfulfilled longings might help you to handle your similar
human frailties.
Give due diligence to both your head and your heart. What makes
Yancey's many writings so effective, I think, is that he holds in tension
rather than separates these two essential realms of human existence.
On the one hand, as believing people there are important questions
of critical inquiry and the dilemma of doubt. In my own experience these
typically boil down to four questions: the historical-critical reliability
of the New Testament story, the problem of evil (Yancey's personal
nemesis), the relationship between science and faith (an over-rated and
over-wrought problem, in my mind), and the question of how the
exclusionary message of the Gospel (Acts 4:12, John 14:6) relates to the
seventy percent of the world that is not Christian. Related to this are
all the many ways the church has denied and denuded the Gospel, from phony
preachers to genocidal crusades to “liberate” Palestine. On the other
hand, there are the matters of the heart whereby we nurture a warm and
personal relationship with the living God, follow Jesus fully, and
identify with His people the church.
Too often, we separate critical inquiry and passionate piety, and
end up with critical doubters whom the church alienates, or mushy-minded
spiritualists who spout spiritual cliches and Bible verses to solve every
problem and squelch any doubt. Without ever white-washing the church's
faults or candy-coating questions of critical inquiry and doubt, Yancey
maintains his evangelical piety. I like to view this as something akin to
what in the British political tradition is called “loyal opposition.”
Protest is never stifled because it is rooted in an unswerving commitment.
Finally, beware of the constant temptation of judgmentalism.
Given his past church experience and present occupation as a journalist
who has interviewed the likes of presidents, Yancey has had to struggle
with a sort of reverse discrimination. As he wrote elsewhere in an essay:
Remember those Christians who peeve you so much—God chose them
too. For some reason, I find it much easier to show grace
and acceptance toward immoral unbelievers than toward uptight,
judgmental Christians. Which, of course, turns me into a
different kind of uptight, judgmental Christian.
Who are the Christians you scorn? Who do you look down upon in moral,
intellectual, political or financial condescension? God loves them too.
If you think of the church as a hospital for the sick rather than
as a hall of fame for the spiritually perfect, and understand yourself to
be seriously ill, then it is much easier to drag yourself out of bed
Sunday morning and show up one more time. As one wag put it, when you
find the perfect church, don't join, because you'll ruin it. We are all
pilgrims on the way, far from our destination, but by God's grace headed
in the right direction (Philippians 3:12–14).
The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself
Copyright ©2001 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.
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