Rebelling Against Indifference

(This is a part of my Why I Stopped Going To Church series. You can read part one here, part two here, part two point five here, and part three here.)

Before I move on to the next part, I wanted to expand upon a point I made in part three: stepping away from the Sunday morning expression of church-for now-does not mean that I have stepped away from community, nor do I think one can easily do so while still claiming they are following the Christian tradition in any discernible way. The decisions one makes when they are left alone with their own neuroses and what they think their Bible is saying to them on that day, in what is often a strange historical vacuum, do not tend to be in accordance with the Christian witness.

As an example of what I’m arguing against, I’ll reference here the case of Sheila Larson, who is well known among sociologists of religion for this statement: “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith is Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Continue reading →

Read part one here, part two here and part two point five here.

This essay cross-posted from Jesus Needs New PR

“The greatest lie believed today,” my friend, and my pastor at the time, Tom, told those gathered that morning, quoting Larry Crabb, “is that one can know God without being known by someone else.” This statement, even if one chalks it up to hyperbole, is one way of getting at a truth we all instinctively know: we can’t do life alone. Whether one is speaking of life in general or of what we sometimes call the religious parts of life, as if there were a clear dividing line, we were not meant to be solitary creatures. In an attempt to explore reasons for spending time with fellow believers in a deliberate, structured context, Dr. Harold Best, in Unceasing Worship, writes: Continue reading →

Some of the thinking I’m doing around the blog series I am currently writing, Why I Stopped Going to Church, has to do with the larger question of what the church is, particularly in its local expression, and out of that comes questions about the role it plays in public life. So it was with interest that I read a review of Jordan Ballor’s new book, Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church’s Social Witness, written by Robert Joustra for Comment Magazine. (Robert and I have several mutual friends, and it was through them that I heard about his review.) Continue reading →

Read part one here and part two here.

This essay cross-posted from Jesus Needs New PR

I am still working on part three of this series, so in the meantime, I thought I’d post a passage from Frederick Buechner’s sermon Two Stories that a friend just reminded me of, from the same collection – Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons – as the Buechner sermon I mentioned in part two. I realize this means I’ve quoted Buechner four or five times in these posts so far, but one reason I do so is because I count myself among those who say they still call themselves Christians, at least in part, because of the writings of Frederick Buechner, and I’ll do everything within my power to convince others to read his work, especially his sermons and his memoirs – The Sacred Journey, Telling Secrets, and Now and Then are great introductions. Continue reading →

I’ve loved the work of poet Scott Cairns ever since I first heard him at Calvin College’s 2008 Festival of Faith and Writing. Scott is now blogging for – of all places – Huffington Post, and in his piece earlier this week on Rethinking Salvation: A One-Time Personal Event or a Continuous, Collective Effort?, he recounts what was my favorite story from the 2008 Festival, one I’ve mentioned in several blog posts over the last couple years (here and in Making Ourselves Known to Each Other and Jesus Lives in My Heart).

Read the full article here.

Read Part One here

This essay cross-posted from Jesus Needs New PR

Earlier this year, on the first Sunday in Lent, I walked into church hopeful that I would hear something of whatever it is we are all looking for, whatever we hope to find when we gather together with other believers, or, as Frederick Buechner says, at least would-be believers, part-time believers, believers with our fingers crossed.  And instead the congregation was treated to a bad morality tale.  The sermon delivered that morning to those hoping to hear some whisper of grace, some reason to believe or to keep on believing, some exploration of those big questions we all have, even the ones we are more often than not afraid to ask, was instead built around everyone knowing how “right” the speaker was in his opinions.  Like thousands of sermons I heard growing up, the speaker opened his sermon by assuring people how bad of a preacher he was, that whatever the sermon was about came from God and not from him.  It’s a brilliant set up, if you think about it.  It means that people know up front that if you disagree with anything they say, you are not disagreeing with them, but with GOD.  Using the phrases so familiar from my childhood, the words that provided the comfort and assurance that come from knowing you are absolutely right in everything you think, that not only is there absolute truth but that you have a complete grasp on it, the speaker that morning left no doubt that God was on his side – and you would be too, if only you weren’t so intent on rebelling against God (or him; the distinction was a little blurry by this point).

I walked out of the building that morning, squinting into the bright Nashville sun, shaking.

With anger.

With an overwhelming sense of loss. Continue reading →

This essay cross-posted from Jesus Needs New PR

In When You Are Engulfed in Flames, a collection of essays published in 2008 by humorist David Sedaris, he explains his decision to stop smoking by telling a story about a friend he once had, a German woman.  Her English was less than perfect, and on one occasion, when asked if a neighbor smoked, her reply was, “Karl has… finished with his smoking.”  Sedaris writes: “She meant, of course, that he had quit, but I much preferred her mistaken version. “Finished” made it sound as if he’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes, three hundred thousand, say, delivered at the time of his birth. If he’d started a year later or smoked more slowly, he might still be at it, but, as it stood, he had worked his way to the last one, and then moved on with his life. This, I thought, was how I would look at it.”

I’ve come to explain my decision about church attendance in much the same way, albeit without the same sense of finality.  Frederick Buechner has said that the sermons that have the biggest impact on us are those that we preach to ourselves in between the lines of whatever is being said from the pulpit, and the consequence of being in church every time the doors opened for twenty-eight years meant that the number of bad sermons I’d heard, filled with poor logic and faulty reasoning – all purportedly straight from God – had added up.  The result being that the sermons I tried to hear “between the lines” were drowned out by other voices that were disagreeing with nearly everything being said.  Every sermon point given, every phrase uttered, brought to mind the echos of a thousand past sermons, bringing with them a scrutiny of each idea presented for consideration, every word weighted down with the complex history of their past usage and the implications of the resulting arguments, as given in the Fundamentalist world. Continue reading →