One thing you should know about me is that I work in this big church. Some people would probably call us “mega” but I don’t because I don’t like that word. So I call us big. Anyway, working in a big/mega church isn’t really any more or less interesting than working a no-so-big/mega church. But that’s really here nor there.
Anyway, in staff meeting today our senior pastor was giving us a little talk about a vote coming up in our synod. I’m not going to mention the name of the church, our location, or the synod with which we are affiliated because none of that really has anything to do with this story. So he’s talking about this vote that’s coming up and sort of laying about the different sides and where the pastoral leadership comes down on this issue theologically and then pauses and looks off into the distance, as he often does, and says, “We’re living in a post-denominational world.”
Whoa.
Growing up I can remember very distinctly this conversation with one of my teachers:
Teacher: Where do you go to church?
Me: We’re Christians.
Teacher: Yes, but what kind?
Me:… We’re… Christians.
I wasn’t old enough to know any of the difference. Now it seems I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life studying the theological discrepancies between the mainline denominations, primarily Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist with a little Baptist and Pentecostal thrown in for good measure. During my freshmen year of college I had a crisis. I found that I didn’t agree with one of the doctrinal stances of the church to which I belonged. What to do? I had been through the whole confirmation and youth group thing and had been well-indoctrinated with “good Lutheran teachings.” But now I found myself up against a road block. No matter which way I looked at this issue, I just couldn’t come to the conclusion that that was what the Bible really said. So I left. And it was kind of a big deal because at one point I was set on becoming a pastor in this synod. Today I can’t imagine…
When we were growing the only differences we recognized in our churches is that we used different colored hymnals, sang different songs on Sunday morning. Obviously the differences were and are much bigger than hymnals and songs, but when you’re a kid those are the sorts of things to which you pay the most attention. For a long time I thought it was really important which denomination you claimed… now I’m not so sure. Also hear me when I say that I don’ think denominations are all bad, but here are some things I’ve noticed over the years…
1) Denominations tend to divide instead of unite. One of the things that concerns me the most about denominations is that it is a system of labels. Pastor and writer Nanette Sawyer of Wicker Park Grace Church in Chicago wrote:
He [Sawyer's childhood pastor] was defining Christian identity as assent to a list of certain beliefs, and he was defining Christian community as those people who concur with those beliefs. This didn’t leave any room for questions, doubts, or growth in faith. It made community acceptance of each other completely conditional on having already arrived at a particular intellectual destination. In asking me if I was a Christian, and accepting my preteen answer, he essentially told me that I wasn’t part of the community. I wasn’t in; I was out. And so I found myself spiritually homeless. (from essay, “What Would Huckleberry Do? A Relational Ethic as the Jesus Way”)
The great irony innovative thinkers like Luther, who is credited with “starting” the Lutheran church is that Luther never wanted to leave the Roman-Catholic Church. In fact, he loved it. He cared so deeply about it that he set out to reform its way of thinking, believing that the church which he so dearly loved was headed in the wrong direction. He didn’t come in and say, “Hey these guys got it all wrong… let’s get out of here and start our own church.” When one thinks in terms of denominations there is something at work that is almost always damaging: the desire to know who is right and thusly who is in. If I subscribe to a denomination, I can easily know who is in and who is out… and if our primary concern as the Church is who is in and who is out, then we’ve probably got larger problems to deal with. As Sawyer writes, “Even if we could answer the question of who is and isn’t a child of God, it wouldn’t help us be better followers of Jesus; it would only help us divide people into categories.”
2) Church Shopping. Okay, this is going to happen whether denominations exist or not. What I think we all fall guilty of doing is attempting to “sell” our specific church of denomination like we’re selling a product… or even worse a lifestyle. The aforementioned senior pastor said that we don’t want to encourage people to think about our church purely in terms of where we stand on social hot-button issues. As he said that, I turned to my friend The Digital Pastor and said, “But that’s how people shop for a church.” Instead of asking the question, “What does this Church do to love God and love people?” People come in and ask questions like: what’s the church’s stance on gay marriage? What about the death penalty? Pro or anti war? Contemporary? Conservative? Liberal? Are the church’s stances on these issues important? Yes! But only insofar as they reflect what the church believes to be Biblically founded truth and not a marketing campaign in disguise. I believe that denominations make it easier for people to make assumptions about the church before they’ve ever set foot in it, like religious window shopping. And that usually ends one of two ways 1) You leave with nothing or 2) You go home with a bunch of crap you don’t need.
3) Majoring in the Minors. We (the Church) are really, really good at this. I know that this isn’t intentional, but a lot of the time what happens with denominations is we end up focusing on the things that are not important… what is referred to as majoring in the minors. I believe that it stems from our desire to know and understand everything… that sort of post-enlightenmentism that we are still combating in a lot of ways. One could write countless blogs about this… and many people have… so I won’t dwell here.
What I will do is end with a quote by Mark Scandrette:
And we are reminded that kingdom love is not so much something to be exhaustively understood as it is a present reality to inhabit through action. (from the essay, “Growing Pains: The Messy and Fertile Process of Becoming”)
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