September 3rdHow to talk about church?
- by Maxwell Kennel
The church is at an interesting place in its history. We encounter church today, expecting much from it, and yet it has been around for a long time, with so much time and change behind it. When we’re young, we imagine that the church has always been this way: the way we experience it now. Our memories of church may go back over our lifetime, but they rarely go back more than a generation.
For some of us, if we were raised in the church, we follow in the footsteps of our parents. For others of us, we may be attending a church from a different tradition from the one we were raised in, or we may even be attending church for the first time. But regardless where we come from, our impressions of what it means to be part of a church are important, and they set the tone for our Christian faith and how we relate to others when church comes up.
Over 2000 years ago, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth were a small, informal social movement who did not know that Christianity would eventually become an institution, and a global religion with over 2.5 billion people. When Jesus was alive, there was no church, there were no Christians per se, and certainly no dedicated buildings or organizations claiming his name. But as Christianity grew, things changed immeasurably.
Today, it means something very different to call oneself a Christian than it did 2000 years ago. Some people say that the most important parts of the church have been lost along the way, while others see the church moving in new and important directions that are more advanced than those of the past. For example, historical figures from the apostle Paul to the emperor Constantine are often accused of taking Christianity away from its organic and grassroots beginnings and replacing it with rigid institutional structures. But I don’t think we need to feel too anxious about getting back to the original, supposedly pure, vision of the church. Nor should we sit back and passively accept everything that gets called “church” today.
Instead, we need a spirit of careful discernment that isn’t trying to get back to a golden age and isn’t staying silent on the unique problems we face in the church today. In order to do that, we need to reckon with the considerable baggage Christianity carries (often rightly so!).
I notice that I have to do a lot of work talking people down from their assumptions about what churches are and what they do. Maybe you do too?
In ministry and outside of it, I often notice how unfamiliar churches are for those who were not raised in them, and how challenging the idea can be that the church is a good place. For some of my friends, the church is associated with the fearful and coercive environments they were raised in, or the Catholic schools they went to, or the evangelical and fundamentalist ideologies they see on the news. With values that I sympathize with, they wonder:
Isn’t it true that churches are places of dogma and social pressure, where people are told what to believe and are afraid of change? Aren’t churches obsessed with making everyone think the same, and pushing “salvation” on people whether they want it or not?
These are just some of the reflections I have heard from people close to me over the years, and I wonder if you have heard the same concerns and ideas? If you have, I invite you to take them far more seriously. If you haven’t it may be important to reflect on why secular and critical voices might be absent from your life. As my friends ask these questions, implicitly or explicitly, I am left to wonder: what to do about the matter of the church? Is church a good word, is it a bad word, or perhaps - is it a category too big to evaluate with just one brush stroke?
Maybe you have had these conversations with people - your friends, your children, your coworkers, your neighbors - where the image that people have of church life is surely reflective of their experience, but does not necessarily match yours. In face of the complicated legacy of Christianity, we have several options when we talk about church today.
One option is to wholly accept the criticisms of the church that have been laid out for some time. After all, it’s true that the church has done serious damage and been guilty of significant violence as part of colonial domination and racist prejudice. (I take this seriously, and wrote my dissertation and subsequent book on violence because I believe that it cuts across our cultures and societies in ways we hardly recognize.) It is good to be honest about this, and to spend real time critiquing the past and present flaws of the church without bypassing such discomfort, but although it is important to avoid bypassing critique for positivity, it is not sufficient to remain in negative space forever.
An opposite option that we have is to become reactive, and reject the criticisms or negative associations that people have with churches. Maybe sometimes we think ourselves better than other churches or somehow exceptional, thinking that surely the problems with church are elsewhere, and not here among us.
But these two options are still too simple. We cannot insulate the church against criticism for its failures, nor immunize ourselves from the problems we resist, and nor should we abandon the idea of a church community to history.
Instead, less us think about the church in careful, critical, and constructive ways - both being honest, and being proactive in making it better. The need for this approach is very concrete, and it will show up in conversations you have about church with others. There is a very moderate and humble tone that we can take when we represent the church to other people - somewhere between a reactive defense of the church, and a passive acceptance of all criticism.
When I speak with my friends about church, I try to strike this tone and say: “Yes, of course, many churches use fear and promote anxiety, but I am part of a church from a tradition that is trying to work against violence and for peace, where Jesus Christ is both a moral guide and a way toward God.”
I hope that as you talk about your church life with other people, you can also strike this tone as well: both honesty and some real positivity, both serious criticism and a constructive approach, both suspicion and sympathy, all together.
-Maxwell Kennel is the Pastor of Hamilton Mennonite Church