Creating Spiritual Community in a Post-Pandemic World September 24, 2023
Dr. Roger L. Ray
Click here to see the video
It has been my good fortune, for the past 30 years, to have enjoyed a close friendship with Dr. Charles Hedrick, the now retired religion professor at our local state university. And, for the last decade of his life, I enjoyed the friendship of the late Bishop John Shelby Spong. They were both founding members of the Jesus Seminar. They were both highly published in their own lanes…. Charlie is an academic and therefore he wrote a lot of books that not very many people have ever read, and John was a man of the church, not as deeply immerse in the weeds of the ivory tower as our mutual friend, Dr. Hedrick, but his books were very popular and made him famous.
Charlie had grown up in the Southern Baptist Church, and in spite of his path in academics that led him to doubt the beliefs he had grown up with and then, finally, to entirely repudiate them. A lot of traditional religious people tend to call progressives “atheists with rituals,” and that moniker may actually fit Charlie. He was certainly not a theist but to this day, he rarely misses a Sunday morning in his Southern Baptist Church. For many years, I and several of his other academic friends, just couldn’t understand why he kept subjecting himself to that backwards, anti-academic, superstitious religious balloon juice. Charlie’s patient reply was consistent, he just said, “I go because my people are there.”
It frustrated me, because they didn’t treat him well. After he had said some rather shocking things about the Bible and the historical Jesus, they would no longer allow him to teach his Sunday School Class.
A few years later, they actually added the restriction that he could no longer ask questions in the class. They allowed him to attend but during the class, he had to sit there quietly. I think that I may have cursed a bit when he told me about that. But somehow, those people were his tribe. They didn’t read his books. They didn’t honor his many academic accomplishments, and they didn’t show him the respect that he richly deserved, but, he had grown up Southern Baptist. He had, at one time, shared in their beliefs, and the mere fact that he had grown far past that simple childish faith did not mean that he did not still love them, even when they didn’t appear to love him back. Charlie is now quite elderly, his wife has died, and his own health is fragile, but he still goes, almost every week, to his Baptist Church.
A few years ago, Bishop Spong was having dinner with me in my home, and Charlie’s name came up, and John asked me, “Does Charlie still go to a Baptist Church?” And when I replied in the affirmative, Bishop Spong just shook his head and said, “I just don’t get it.”
But, of course, Bishop Spong continued to attend an Episcopal Church all of his life. And it isn’t like they were carrying him around on their shoulders either! We had John here to give us a series of lectures in three different years and even though he is the most famous Episcopal Bishop in the United States and we have more than a dozen local Episcopal Churches here in town, not a single Episcopal priest ever attended or acknowledged his presence.
I screwed up the courage to ask John why he still attended the Episcopal Church and his reply was almost identical to Charlie’s. These were his people, this was his tradition, the hymns and the liturgy was his native tongue.
And I pressed him, “when you participate in a baptism in the Episcopal Church, do you ask the parents if they renounce the wiles of Satan?” And he replied, a bit defensively, that even though he does not believe in Satan, nor did he believe that baptism actually carried the salvific weight he once believed that it did, these were the rituals and the language of his tradition and he was committed to it. They remained committed to the faith community of their roots . . . I certainly didn’t and, in fact, I don’t think that I even could have.
The Episcopal Church is certainly less offensive to me than the homophobic, misogynistic Baptist Church, but, still, why lend credence to that mythology by sitting there in a pew, appearing to endorse what is being said. But they did, Charlie still does, and I don’t, and I am not at all certain that I am right about this because we need community.
I don’t agree with going along with bad theology, just reinterpreting it inside of your own head. But there have been generations of female religious scholars who have continued to attend, volunteer in, and donate to Catholic Churches, Assemblies of God Churches, Mormon and Churches of Christ. And, of course, the Catholic Church still does not affirm homosexuality so tens of thousands of gay priests have to feign loyalty to a church that does not even fully acknowledge who they really are.
In spite of how many mega-churches have appeared and how big church buildings are in most of our cities, actual church attendance has been going down for 50 years. But then, there was the pandemic of 2020. Churches were asked not to hold services and when we did, we were not supposed to sing anymore and I and many others preached from behind plexiglass for a while.
Early in 2020, the numbers of our online viewers actually grew but something started happening to us and to most other churches.
A Pew study conducted in March of this year showed that actual attendance is down only about 10% but older evangelicals have not slowed their attendance at all. More progressive churches, especially those of us on the far left in Unitarian and Humanist congregations have fallen off the cliff and young adults report no longer seeing the point in it.
For centuries, the largest part of society has, at least to some degree, accepted that they would one day be judged by a supernatural theistic God, and that they would continue to exist for eternity, either in torment or in reward for their piety. While that kind of belief system still exists, it is losing its grip on people and so, what is the point of still having a church?
If church attendance was predicated on believing that I had an imaginary friend in the clouds who was in charge of what happens in the world, I would have left the church in 1980 when Ronald Regan was elected. I have a brother who says that he quit going after 9-11 when it seemed to him that religion was just more toxic than it was helpful.
But church for me has always been about community. It was in church that I was met with moral challenge and opportunities to join together with like minded people to serve the poor and victims of disasters, refugees from wars, and the victims of discrimination.
I have always had tons of reasons for wanting to be in church that had nothing to do with either fear of hell or lust for heaven but what I could get in church that I couldn’t get anywhere else, was connection to other people.
I grew up in a fairly progressive church, absolutely left-wing liberals for my “old Kentucky home.” But my home life was not exactly warm and nurturing. It wasn’t abusive either, especially not by 1950’s standards. We had plenty of food, a warm bed, and clean clothes, there just wasn’t much joy and affection was as rare as hen’s teeth. The church was where I had more of a family connection. If my parents were literate you couldn’t tell it by watching them read books!
But in church I met educated people. Our pastor was a Vanderbilt grad, we had doctors and lawyers in the church who had gone to Harvard and Princeton. And when I went to college, I fell into a campus ministry that was exciting, loving and amazing. It was the first time in my life that I really felt like I was accepted, cared for, and included. It was intoxicating and addicting.
Sadly, I thought that if I became a minister that I would experience that kind of love and acceptance every day for the rest of my life. That didn’t turn out to be true. But there were moments, and I was determined to create more and more moments like that. But the priority of attending religious services was declining before the pandemic and after the pandemic, many people just don’t feel the need for church, not specifically for a church, and yet, loneliness is often said to be the most common form of suffering in the world. Suicides have increased dramatically.
We still need the community that churches once provided but we have become suspicious of church as being the place to go get it.
My daughter, who is very much like me in so many ways, gave up on church as soon as she could. She doesn’t hate it and she has respected my work, she just doesn’t want what church involves. But she has an enviable tribe of close friends and they travel the globe to spend time together. Now that they are in their 30’s, they are getting married and having children, and I wonder if the bonds that have kept them together since middle school with continue to hold, but there is love there, and the things that the church claimed to offer . . . forgiveness, second chances, support in hard times, friendship, and sincere love. If we could bottle her life and market it to the world, we wouldn’t be able to meet the demand.
But we don’t all have that and most of us can’t even get pieces of it when we try. In a few months I, and this recording studio, will be moving to a little town in south-east Florida, and I just posted in a neighborhood chat, asking if there were other scuba divers in my new community, and I was bombarded by invitations to go diving, to get together for lunch or for coffee. The welcome has been so warm that I have been coaching myself to give up writing letters to the editor because I doubt that my welcome would be so enthusiastic if they knew what I thought of their governor and most of their legislature, but scuba diving…. We can agree on spending time under water with pretty fish.
Most of the churches that used to invite me to come and preach have been hit hard by the decline in attendance and donations. There was one in Florida where I used to go once or twice a year and they no longer meet as a church, but the members continue to get together for a shared meal and conversation. One of those church members said, and we find that we are still getting what we really loved about church. I wish that I could be a part of that group to see just how deep their conversations go.
In my new setting, as much a I love scuba diving, I know that talking about diving won’t feed my spirit. I will have to find or create a peer group of people who can have serious conversations about what is actually meaningful in life and not just entertaining.
I understand that the world is changing, just like in the death of printed newspapers, people have turned to twitter and Face Book to get their news and, forgive me, but, that is a poor replacement. I will enjoy meeting new people to go scuba diving with, and I am sure that I will meet people at the health club, and I may join a book club or two.
But I will tell you this: it was in church that I learned to give up both my racial prejudice and my judgement of homosexuals that I had been spoon fed in my family of origin. It was in church that my values around illegal wars, immigration, poverty, labor unions, and fair housing were formed. Church is where I met the people that I could go with to recover the homes of innocent people that were destroyed in a hurricane or a tornado. And it was in church where I first felt that my birth wasn’t just an unfortunate accident and that I was worthy of love and acceptance. And I don’t want any version of twitter style replacement for that.
My friends, John Spong and Charles Hedrick, may have been right to stay in close contact with their spiritual roots, even when they no longer shared any beliefs with that community. I still couldn’t do it. But I know that we were too quick to give up on newspapers, and local retail stores, and family owned restaurants, and those examples are nothing compared to living in a world where we cannot find a spiritual community.
So, I encourage you to suspend judgement where you can. Lower the ego driven expectations that everyone will immediately see things as you do. Be patient with those who will still talk to you and try to do what nurtures community and avoid doing what tears it apart.
There have been lots of problems with the way that churches have gone about being churches but before we give up on them, let’s see if we can put more love, and friendship, and forgiveness, and moral challenge into them, and see if we can save some of them.
