Thoughts from Jeff
For archived reflections from Jeff click here.
July 2017
Going to Church!?
The Sunday morning Church experience is no longer what it once was. Fifty years ago pretty much everyone was at a Church on Sunday. A hundred years ago it was difficult for an individual to not be connected to one of the churches in her or his community. Church was community expressed through a shared worldview. This worldview was more foundational than any particular religious faith. As a social connector Church was engaging, even entertaining. It caused shared participation in enterprises that weren’t merely local, but national and international. Church was certainly serious, but also enjoyable. What happened?
An accurate, if simplistic, assessment might be: our culture evolved; the church didn’t. Our wider culture moved forward, shaped by growing scientific understandings, technological advances, and increased social engagement in a vast array of activities previously undeveloped, inaccessible or even unacceptable. These influences caused adjustments to our shared worldview. The church was slow to embrace such adjustments and was increasingly demoted as the primary voice of the culture. Failing to keep pace, the church often rejected central tenets of the emerging worldview. Regularly in the past hundred years it only adjusted or adopted such core principles with great reluctance or hesitancy. With hindsight such delays are now seen as disgraceful or even disgusting (there are numerous examples of positions held by the church now seen as prejudice, unjust, misogynistic or homophobic). Rather than a leader or even a member of our culture, the church stagnated and developed into a counter or sub-culture.
How is this evident on Sunday morning? It’s evident in many ways but perhaps the clearest example is in the area of music. In most churches the music is dated or reflects a genre tied to this sub-culture. In the past church music was the music of the wider culture. The overlap of musical taste was not merely accepted, it was assumed. Church music today is of a certain type, supremely expressed by the organ (or maybe the piano). Until the twentieth century lyrics sung on Sunday reflected the worldview of the culture. Today, we still sing the same pieces despite a culture and theology that has changed radically. Inadvertently, with each verse we sing, we reaffirm an old theology, morality and imperialism that is now out of step with the ethos of our times. The tension is heard in the assumption of an all-powerful supernatural male God who capriciously intervenes in human affairs. Or in our singing we perpetuate a discordant view of humanity as depraved. Or our songs promote the domination of others and our natural world. Such old views are increasingly difficult to maintain for a growing section of our population. Such views don’t keep pace with what we all now know about life and fulfillment. Beyond the much loved old music, these old views are echoed in other aspects of our Sunday morning event causing the experience to be distasteful for many.
From our architecture to our mode of governance, our message needs to be more basic. We would do well to return to an almost singular focus on love - the core principle of our founder. It might speak of a compassion that leads to self-sacrifice, or a genuine vulnerability for the benefit of others. This would not only more accurately reflect the ethos of Jesus, but would also tap into the best of our current culture. As a result we’d all be pulled further along the moral arc and further along the arc of knowledge and insight that humanity has been treading since the beginning of time. It is reflected in the magic penny, the grace of genuine mutuality, the ineffable nature of love. By internalizing an expansive love at our core church going would once again be of value, be a joy and a genuine expression of community.
An accurate, if simplistic, assessment might be: our culture evolved; the church didn’t. Our wider culture moved forward, shaped by growing scientific understandings, technological advances, and increased social engagement in a vast array of activities previously undeveloped, inaccessible or even unacceptable. These influences caused adjustments to our shared worldview. The church was slow to embrace such adjustments and was increasingly demoted as the primary voice of the culture. Failing to keep pace, the church often rejected central tenets of the emerging worldview. Regularly in the past hundred years it only adjusted or adopted such core principles with great reluctance or hesitancy. With hindsight such delays are now seen as disgraceful or even disgusting (there are numerous examples of positions held by the church now seen as prejudice, unjust, misogynistic or homophobic). Rather than a leader or even a member of our culture, the church stagnated and developed into a counter or sub-culture.
How is this evident on Sunday morning? It’s evident in many ways but perhaps the clearest example is in the area of music. In most churches the music is dated or reflects a genre tied to this sub-culture. In the past church music was the music of the wider culture. The overlap of musical taste was not merely accepted, it was assumed. Church music today is of a certain type, supremely expressed by the organ (or maybe the piano). Until the twentieth century lyrics sung on Sunday reflected the worldview of the culture. Today, we still sing the same pieces despite a culture and theology that has changed radically. Inadvertently, with each verse we sing, we reaffirm an old theology, morality and imperialism that is now out of step with the ethos of our times. The tension is heard in the assumption of an all-powerful supernatural male God who capriciously intervenes in human affairs. Or in our singing we perpetuate a discordant view of humanity as depraved. Or our songs promote the domination of others and our natural world. Such old views are increasingly difficult to maintain for a growing section of our population. Such views don’t keep pace with what we all now know about life and fulfillment. Beyond the much loved old music, these old views are echoed in other aspects of our Sunday morning event causing the experience to be distasteful for many.
From our architecture to our mode of governance, our message needs to be more basic. We would do well to return to an almost singular focus on love - the core principle of our founder. It might speak of a compassion that leads to self-sacrifice, or a genuine vulnerability for the benefit of others. This would not only more accurately reflect the ethos of Jesus, but would also tap into the best of our current culture. As a result we’d all be pulled further along the moral arc and further along the arc of knowledge and insight that humanity has been treading since the beginning of time. It is reflected in the magic penny, the grace of genuine mutuality, the ineffable nature of love. By internalizing an expansive love at our core church going would once again be of value, be a joy and a genuine expression of community.
