Roger Ray, D.Min.
Will churches see the vision and respond to it? Some will; most will not. Many churches would, if given the choice, choose to die rather than change.....
These faith-communities will emerge, I am confident, inside our existing structures. They will ultimately separate themselves from the pack. They will float freely, taking a wide variety of forms. They will attract the restless, the hungry, the alienated, the marginalized, the open, the honest, the doubters, the seekers. In time they will recognize kinship with one another, allowing them to coalesce and to build a new consensus.
- Bishop John Shelby Spong ( A New Christianity for a New World, 2001 pp. 244-245)
"Sire, it is in truth the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I am speaking, to endure blows, and not to strike them. But also may it please you to remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers."
- Theodore Beza, a 16th century French Protestant reformer, appealing to the king of Navarre (http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1601-1700/beza-last-of-the-great-reformers-11630054.html)
The famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in 1948 when he was only 33 years old and had been in the monastery for six or seven years. Though the book was very popular and drew attention to monastic communities all over the nation, it wasn't very many years before Merton was saying that he wished that he could gather up all of the copies and burn them.
Merton was born in France to nominally Protestant parents. His journey towards faith led him to the Catholic Church, then to monastic life and finally to the most strict of monastic orders, the Trappists.
His journey, which was profoundly intellectual while still being distinctive in its mysticism, made for a very engaging story. However, when he wrote his autobiography, Merton was still a very young man in the midst of huge life changes. His book was decidedly Roman Catholic, so much so that it was very nearly offensive to anyone who wasn't. Within a very few years, however, he became a leading world scholar in comparative religions and was in conversation with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh as well as scholars of Hindu and Muslim heritage. He wrote his most famous book long before it was time to write his definitive biography.
Awareness of how not ready Merton was to write The Seven Storey Mountain has plagued me during the writing of this book. Though I am now older than Merton lived to be and I have delayed writing this book for some years, the movement I am trying to describe is moving and evolving so fast that it is difficult to capture in print. What I know with certainty is that if I had written this book five years ago, I would now be screaming more loudly about gathering all of the copies and burning them than Merton did about his autobiography.
More than a decade ago, Bishop John Shelby Spong offered his vision for the future of the progressive church in A New Christianity for a New World. He predicted the emergence of new progressive faith communities that would not be a part of the old existing denominational structures and, in fact, we are one of those churches.
Shortly after we first established our presence on YouTube and iTunes, I received a call from a gentleman in Japan who was asking me if I knew of any churches like ours in Japan. Sadly, I informed him that I didn't know anything about any churches of any kind in Japan. The caller was very disappointed because he assumed not only that there would be a lot of churches like ours but also he assumed that we would know each other and that there would be a network of like-minded churches.
The Center for Progressive Christianity has tried to create a directory on their web site but it is anything but comprehensive and many of the churches that list themselves on it are still quite traditional in their theology though they are somewhat more open minded about social issues such as gay marriage and divorce and their meetings are often blessed with a wonderful beer garden. But being progressive involves a great deal more than accepting our gay friends, serial monogamists and drinking craft beer.
The original mission of the Jesus Seminar, to bring a more enlightened, progressive and academic approach to faith into mainstream churches has had, at best, only very limited success even after 30 years of impressive lectures and publications. A century of teaching higher biblical criticism in our better seminaries and a generation of really insightful publications by John Spong, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong and John Crossan and still almost all mainline denominations continue to parrot a watered down version of the more conservative evangelical line that Jesus is God's one and only divine son who was killed for the forgiveness of the sins of everyone who is willing to buy into incarnational and substitutionary death theologies so that your as yet unseen eternal soul will spend eternity in an as yet unseen place of reward and bliss.
Many people continue to try to persuade me to accept that everyone has a right to their own religious opinions and no one opinion is superior to another. This kind of religious tolerance is true enough if religion is the equivalent of choosing which color of paint you want to put on your bedroom walls. If it is simply a matter of personal taste that has nothing to do with life, health, politics or wars then paint your room any color you like.
If, however, your religion teaches women that they are second-class citizens because they were born women......or if your religion teaches homosexuals to hate themselves, then that is a different matter. And if your religion teaches that other religions are so wrong that they are evil, evil in a way that may deserve dehumanizing treatment or even warfare....or if your religion teaches you to feel that you are broken, sinful, a worm and to despise yourself for unavoidable human appetites then, you need to recognize, that is not a matter of taste. That religion is sick.
If you are neutral about neurotic religion that provokes wars, ethnic cleansing, racial and sexual prejudice, misogyny, and religious guilt and fear then you are not open minded, you are just heartless and that is nothing to be proud of. Many people try to mask moral laziness and indifference behind a facade of tolerance but we are not doing the future any favors by pretending that this is acceptable.
There are very many good things that can come from religious education and the practice of a spiritual life but we can't stick our heads in the sand and pretend that there are not many very damaging down sides as well. We should be civil in our engagement with traditionalists who want to keep the church mired in the Iron Age but we should not be passive and we should not mistake cowardice for open minded sophistication.
If the church has a future, we have to strengthen the good things and find ways of extinguishing the bad. Pretending that everything is just a matter of opinion and that serious scientific inquiry has the same value as wishing and magic is not helpful. We must clearly and adamantly refuse to participate in the indoctrination of another generation in the language and belief of false religion.
Still, the immanent death of old religions has been prematurely announced many times. The church has tried to silence scientists and philosophers from Galileo to Darwin, from Thoreau to Sartre, but in the end, they didn't need to fight so hard. As Theodore Beza observed five hundred years ago, the church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.
No matter how much science and technology have advanced, there is still a huge human appetite for a belief system that stands outside of reason, which defies rational thought and critical review. Maybe the real world is too complex, too frightening. Maybe it is just easier to have an imaginary world into which we can escape so that we don't have to feel the pain of hunger and homelessness, where we do not have to fear terrorism, war or being made to flee our homes and become refugees. Perhaps we can placate ourselves with the slow and subtle changes that seem to nibble away at the prejudices that have plagued race relationships and even the relationships found around our holiday dinner relationships with gay and straight family members. We have twice elected a black president and marriage equality is spreading to even the most unlikely states. But is that enough?
Maybe we can deny the vast earth killing pollution taking place as we burn more coal and fracture the earth harvesting natural gas because we recycle our plastic bottles and aluminum cans. It may be that the old religions of magic and superstition will die a slow death in the Americas and in Africa as it already has in Europe and most of Asia. Still, it does not seem to me that we have arrived at a place that is beyond an urgent need for a prophetic voice of reason and faith to cry out for more justice and more compassion.
I realize that my journey from the Memorial Hospital where I was born to the Memorial Gardens where my ashes will be interred is a lot closer to the ashes end of that trip than it is to the loud screaming start of my life's journey but I feel that I have a lot more screaming yet to do. How people of faith will find one another, network and work together in the next generation is unclear to me.
I don't know if free standing, bricks and mortar churches will still exist a generation or two from now. I don't know that the commitment of resources and the will to keep a community alive will support much of a future for the church as we have known it.
It may be that churches twenty years from now will look more like the Shrine Mosque looks to us today...a once strong and influential institution that just seems sort of silly in the light of modern reason.
I still write columns for newspapers though fewer and fewer people read newspapers. I am now written a new book project for a generation that does not read books. I preach to fewer than one hundred people every week while thousands look in on us through the portal of their computer screen who may never join us in putting our progressive thoughts into actions.
While I am glad to have a global audience and am excited that so many look for a message of progressive faith on their computers, realistically, it is the seated congregations that hire the pastors and scholars who generate that on-line content. If there was not a church that employed me, I would never have been able to earn the degrees or write the sermons and books that now help to feed the public's appetite for progressive religious messages. To date, every progressive congregation I know of is barely hanging onto existence and another decade may see a sharp decline in numbers of the now retired generation that still goes to church and donates significant financial support to keep the doors open.
As I write these last lines, it is only 7 degrees outside. I will take food, blankets and sleeping bags to the homeless of our city this week. Direct response to the needs of those who are in danger of freezing to death makes sense in my religion but none of those people will be kept warm because a few thousand people have nodded in ascent to my progressive ponderings while watching YouTube.
There is a profound need in our world for communities of faith to continue to exist. Clearly, most people are looking for whatever religious instruction and inspiration they want through in the internet and not in churches or classrooms or even from bookstores and published media. Face Book memes can have a certain cathartic satisfaction to them but they are not enough to stop wars, save the earth, or solve the challenges of poverty and prejudice.
One of the heroes of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era was Fr. Daniel Berrigan. Referencing the cross, he once said, "If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood." I hope that more progressive churches arise out of a shared conviction and willingness to sacrifice as ours has. I hope that more denominational churches will seriously choose to close the gap between what their pastor's learned in graduate school and what they feel free to say in their pulpits. And I hope that progressive persons of faith will commit to a disciplined search for one another to network with one another, join in community action and to build new communities of faith.
I hope that new, more relevant, more prophetic and honest communities of faith will rise up from the ruins of a failed form of modern Christianity but whether the church as an institution survives or not, persons of conscience must not stand idly by.
