Gray Temple writes that there is nothing on earth quite like North American religious congregations. They are centers of worship and the arts related to worship, such as music and drama. They are community centers. They serve as extended families for people. For many, they are the first priority for free time apart from family or work. The churches of childhood show up in our fondest dreams.(1)
But there is a lot of change going on in congregations. According to research recently published by Robert P. Jones, the median age of white Protestant as well as white evangelical congregations has risen in the last decade to 53 years while the median age of Americans has held steady at 46 years old. And the percentage of people in the youngest age cohort has decreased by nearly half.(2) If you look around you, you already know that our median age (the midpoint between the youngest and the oldest) is probably 20 years higher, with the average of all our ages adding another ten years.
We are a homogeneous bunch according to the demographics. In spite of all the backgrounds that each of us brings, we are a bland bunch. We are thankful for Sharon for adding a little spice to our mix. The few growing edges of the church in America are of the spicy kind. America is no longer a white bread society with some pumpernickel thrown in. The present trends predict that not only is white Christian America becoming a smaller piece of the pie of churched people, but the same is true for the makeup of the whole population.
That creates a lot of contention. Listen to the rhetoric of this year’s presidential campaign. Reflect on the increasing visibility of frayed relations between African-American and Euro-American communities. The presidential election eighty-eight years ago battled over Roman Catholic Al Smith running for President. That was less of an issue in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected. Four years ago evangelical Christians were tied in knots about voting for a Mormon. Today there still are people trying to claim that President Obama is a Muslim, even though he’s not, and he has preached very competently overtly Christian memorial service sermons that rival the best of Christian preaching.
We like to think that we are family. And we are. Like any blood family, there are folks who always do right as well as those who are the black sheep. There are conciliators as well as whiners. There are optimists as well as pessimists. There are people on opposing sides of every imaginable issue. As a rule we get along in a bite-the-tongue-and-don’t-talk-about-it way. There is tacit respect for differing opinions, even when someone else’s opinion is obviously wrong and mine is right. A recent Facebook post noted that if a person is 100% certain of what they believe, it’s not that they are right, they simply have stopped searching for the truth.
A radio preacher was once heard to cry, “When the devil fell out of Heaven, he landed in the choir loft!” Other landing locations could be committees and leadership teams. The natural tendency to think of church as “family” risks importing into the sanctuary or committee room all the strife we flea from when we leave home. We would like to keep everything bland and inert. Don’t make waves.
Contentiousness, however, is energy. As you know, energy is what makes things happen. It turns on the lights, it runs our cars, it comes from the food we eat to fuel our bodies. Centuries ago, Isaac Newton determined that a body at rest tends to stay at rest while a body in motion tends to stay in motion. More recent physics has shown that things aren’t quite as simple as that. But for our church purposes, Newton’s law works.
When there is inertness, nothing happens. A body at rest tends to remain at rest. An inactive congregation will remain an inactive congregation. A congregation that keeps its differences well-behaved and under control, not to mention under the surface, rarely achieves greatness. A congregation that struggles with its differences openly, a congregation that is in motion, tends to remain in motion. The energy of contentiousness, if properly used, can be transformed into adoration of God, loving respect for one another, and service to the needy world.
Far better to be contentious than to be inert. The energies that make our churches sometimes painful to occupy are actually signs of life.
Our reading from Hebrews 13 offers much that is essential for making our transition from inertness to contentiousness for the sake of God’s work in the world.
It all begins with worship: “So let’s continually offer up a sacrifice of praise through him, which is the fruit from our lips that confess his name.” When the New Testament churches thought of worship, they didn’t talk about making quick dash from page 48 to page 78 of the Book of Common Worship, while religiously hitting all the topics laid out in chapter 3, section 3 of the “Directory for Worship” in the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and doing it in under 60 minutes. That approach offers worshipers all the spiritual scenery of a subway ride. That isn’t early church worship. They described it as “a sacrifice of praise to God.” Worshiping God is a happy occupation. The work of actually praising God – and meaning it – is transformative; it changes us.(3)
Gray Temple says that we come to resemble what we admire. People who admire money get green and crinkly (a polite way of saying obsessive). People who admire computers become user-unfriendly. People who actively and deliberately admire Jesus Christ come to resemble him as he actually was and remains today, unchanged from age to age: generous, merry, tender, fierce, courageous, somewhat mischievous, fully open to others after his self is sorted out. Real worship is the engine of personal transformation. When we create and participate whole-heartedly in worship out of love for our Lord more than out of love of respectability we move from inertness to vitality.(4)
The next thing about vitality as God’s people is where the author started this series of thoughts – fellowship. “Keep loving each other like family.” When we leave a worship service where everyone has actively admired and praised God, it is like coming out of a spa or a soak in a hot tub. We are relaxed, amiable, pliable like clay. The issue is, how will we set up? Will we revert to our normal routine and let ourselves be pushed once again into the world’s mold? Will we meekly accept as gospel what the next person tells us, as if it were pablum which we need because we can’t chew on the meat of the gospel for ourselves? That isn’t growth in faith. Far better to spend the fellowship time with someone who has the same wide-eyed wonder for God and share in a mutual transformation. “By doing this some have been hosts to angels without knowing it.”
And that moves us to ministry. Not church work, not paper shuffling and phone calling, not boring committee meetings or columns of mind-numbing budget numbers. You don’t have to have prayer to do that, even if the pastor does it. The Hebrews author uses the word “remember.” Just try to remember prisoners and people who are mistreated without an act of prayer. Just try to honor marriage, avoid relationship cheating, sexual immorality, and adultery without active prayer. Just try to avoid the black hole of greed without prayer to focus gratitude on the grace that you have.
Our Hebrews author says that all three of these things are essential. Not two out of three, not one, but all three.
Worship that does not melt the soul and lead to deepened relationships with fellow servants of our Lord becomes a museum of moribund customs, causing strife rather than a fresh way of directing our love to God. Fellowship that does not grow out of spirited worship and point into courageous ministry becomes boozy, gossipy, and incestuous, draining energy from a life with God. That is little more than circling the wagons on the congregation’s arid prairie. Ministry that does not grow out of friendship forged in worship becomes stale and sour, something to fight with others about, rather than something to invite them into.
Trevor Huddleston was an Anglican Bishop in apartheid South Africa. He was forced out of the country because he was an early opponent of apartheid. He said in a sermon: “The Christian, if he is true to his calling, is always an agitator....At the heart of our religion there lies a principle in absolute contradiction to the principles by which the world speaks and thinks and acts.”(5)
The Spirit of Christ always calls us from inertness to contentiousness. It began at the table which Jesus hosted and it is reaffirmed every time we break his bread and drink from his cup.
May it indeed be so.
(1) Gray Temple, “Hebrews 13:1-8, 16-16 – Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 14.
(2) Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 55.
(3) Temple, op. cit., 16.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Piers McGrandle, Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest (London: Continuum, 2004), 123; cited in A. N. Wilson, The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible, (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 79.
(1) Gray Temple, “Hebrews 13:1-8, 16-16 – Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 14.
(2) Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 55.
(3) Temple, op. cit., 16.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Piers McGrandle, Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest (London: Continuum, 2004), 123; cited in A. N. Wilson, The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible, (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 79.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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