Church Good and Bad

I’ve been in church since I was about two-years-old, and it has tormented my mind most of those years. The rest of the story is that almost everything good in my life has come through the church. But unlike me, many of my childhood friends with church-tormented minds didn’t stay. With a variety of emotions they left the church and went off in every direction.

Some who have been long gone don’t seem to miss anything about their church experience: hymns, sermons, Sunday School, Bible, Jesus, they’ve shed it all. Others continue searching incessantly for alternatives. They’ve tried other churches, different denominations, Zen, Buddha, Transcendental Meditation, Shirley Maclaine, and anything else that offers any hint of sustenance to the human spirit. Another large group, although they have completely rejected the religious establishments, continues, in some sense to believe in Jesus, pray, and live an approximation of a Christian ethic. Often they dismiss the Bible along with the church. They may accept and appreciate parts of it, but they owe it no authority. I understand them, know how they feel, what they think, and am their near kinsman.

Unlike them, some of us uncomfortably have stayed with the church because even with all of its perversions we still believe that deep within its shell we can hear the heartbeat of life, truth, and hope. We are waiting for, and some of us are working at the restoration of this frail, limping institution that too often mocks any idea of the “body of Christ,” God’s agent of hope for his broken world. We remain more or less marginal members of an eccentric, disturbed, and stagnant social institution. To our friends we look like fools, and within the church we seem rather powerless, losers all the way around.

Where does God, relative or absolute, fit into this picture? Ultimately the whole thing is a God issue. Although those who left have many reasons, and likewise those who remain are variously motivated, at heart it has all developed out of our understanding of who God is. This is the great divide: who is God, and what is God about?

Christians live with contradictory answers to the God question, and for at least sixteen centuries they have made their uneasy peace with the resultant tensions. They have lived with the contradictions for so long that these mental and emotional conflicts are submerged in the unconscious. Thus Christians rarely realize the contradictions that keep them from attaining integrity. Two different ways of talking about God, each working counter to the other, repeatedly lead to the disintegration Christian efforts to bring God’s healing the a world that sees only too clearly the lack of integrity.

Both ways of understanding God are rooted in the Bible. One is nourished by the Spirit who is the source of life; the other grows out of and is maintained by the human quest for certainty and security. The contrast between them matured in the fourth century, and continues vigorously. Two different readings of the Bible, two different ideas of God, lead to two contrasting but often intertwined ways of life: one destroys, the other heals and enhances; one closes, the other opens. One gives power the primacy in the heart of God with love being at best secondary, and often only one of many attributes that are under the control of God’s power. The other knows that in God the primacy goes to love, with the divine power in the service of the divine love. One typically deals in abstract statements about God, the other deals in concrete relationships with God.

Look at the Christian churches in your own community or anywhere around the world and you will see the contrast. Listen to Christians speak and read what they write; you will hear two different ways struggling for attention. Read Christian history and discover the ongoing demonstration of the dissonance. But if you hear only one, either one, of these voices it can seem so clear and convincing that the other way is completely blocked out. If one of them is dominant, it often leads to immediate rebellion, atheism, or secularism. If the other is dominant, it often brings faith, hope, and love to those who hear it.