The Church is Not Just Another Social Service Agency

What we call the “church” is too often a gathering of strangers who see the church as yet another “helping institution” to gratify further their individual desires. – Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Resident Aliens, pg 138

100114residentaliensThis line from the excellent book Resident Aliens really shows where my head has been at in the last few months in my theological thinking and writing. In fact, I’ve lapsed into a serious form of theological grumpiness recently, probably thanks for reading a lot of Hauerwas (a noted theological grump) this summer and fall. And it all comes back to what this line is saying: the Church should not just be another social service agency.

I say this because, this seems to be where a lot of progressive Christians want to go with their church. Oftentimes, the worshiping is downplayed, the focus on God and Christ is downplayed, the spiritual and theological formation of congregants is downplayed, and instead, progressive churches highlight their social justice and service initiatives first and foremost.

And don’t get me wrong: those social services are vitally important. A lived faith involves working for justice in the world. Churches are important gatherings of like-minded people, and should put that collective effort to work in pursuing the Kingdom of God.

But, that last point is the key one: the work churches do is in service to God, at the behest of Christ, in pursuit of the Kingdom of God. Our first order priority as the church is not justice, but worship. It is following Christ in service to God. Justice necessarily arises from this, because our God is a God of justice. But, everything the church does should stem from its identification as a specifically Christian institution.

This means that members of individual church should avoid desperately being the “strangers” Hauerwas and Willimon mention, and instead, should be intent on cultivating real, authentic relation with other members of the church. This should extend to feelings of accountability, in our public and private lives, to one another.

It also means that our personal pet projects – our “individual desires” – should not override the stated mission of the church. What I mean is, any service or work the church undertakes should eventually occur because of the desire to make disciples, and of being the Living Body of Christ in and for the world.

I’ve gotten grumpy because I don’t want my attendance at church to feel like I’m attending a local meeting of MoveOn or the United Way, and it’s so dang hard to find a good, progressive church that still centers the Gospel in a way that doesn’t make you feel like they are ashamed to say the words “God” or “Christ,” or that still acknowledge the important spiritual aspect of communion or the confessions. I know there are churches like this, but they are increasingly harder to find. And I think this is because so many progressives, mirroring conservative evangelicals, are seeing their churches as extensions of their political parties and priorities.

The church is meant to be the church. In other words, the church is tasked with the Great Commission first, and all other work arises from that. The first order of business in that is being a place where disciples of Christ are reoriented towards God, admitting guilt for our sins and seeking forgiveness, embracing our joy of membership in the body of Christ, and reaffirming our place in the great traditions of the church. Then, our faith, edified through the weekly practice of worship, compels us to our works in the world, which does mean social justice work, but also sometimes means just loving our neighbors and our enemies, forgiving those who sin against us, and being a living example of Christi n the world. This is the church I want to be a part of.

Thesis Update: Reading List

I know I said I was going to use this space more for thinking out loud about my thesis work, so I suppose I better do that. I’ll come next week with a look at my thesis proposal, once I present it Wednesday. But for now, here’s some of the reading I’ve been doing in preparation.

whitetrashI just finished Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America this week. If you, like me, are interested in how we got to the moment we are in politically and socially, then I can’t recommend Isenberg’s walk through the history of the lowest class of whites in this country, referred to alternately as “white trash”, “rednecks”, “trailer trash” or a whole other host of terms she recounts.

In terms of the work I’m doing, it really was helpful to get a sense of the lay of the land when it comes to poor white communities, and how they have been perceived across time. The feelings of alienation and dislocation arose from a historical reality, and this book helped me track that. While the communities I’ll be focusing on in my work aren’t necessarily the poorest of the poor, they are in many ways akin to the people detailed in this book.

(Also, if you are a Hamilton junkie like me, Isenberg wrote the definitive biography of Aaron Burr. I read it about a decade ago and it still sticks with me. Can’t recommend it enough.)

flyovercountryI also read the entirety of The View From Flyover Country, a book of essays by journalist Sarah Kendzior. Drawn from her work at Al Jazeera, the essays, while not necessarily useful for my thesis, were enlightening and infuriating all at once. The essays were written between 2013 and 2015, and provide a snapshot of the ways working class people were, and continue to be, left behind. I do recommend it.

My current reading list is The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones, and White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity, by James W. Perkinson. I’m especially excited about the potential of the latter. I’ll update my thoughts on these once I get further in.

How to Not Welcome the Stranger

With a potentially bad election day looming for Donald Trump and Republicans next week, they and their propaganda machine have gone full tilt into promoting the story that a caravan of Honduran migrants is making its way north through Mexico, towards asylum in the United States. Predictably, the news is being used to mine fear among conservative voters and drive turnout in the midterms.

Among the groups most vocally speaking out against the migrants is, of course, white evangelicals, Trump’s most persistent base of support. At Vox, Tara Isabella Burton writes of the theological pretzels evangelical leaders are twisting themselves into to deny the very clear words of Scripture imploring Christians to welcome the stranger and the immigrant. Here is Burton:

This willingness to define seemingly straightforward passages in the Bible along politicized terms — reimagining what it means to be someone’s “neighbor” — speaks to a wider issue within white evangelicalism. The degree to which white evangelical identity is increasingly predicated on politicized whiteness — and on an insular and isolationist vision of community — reveals the extent to which white evangelicalism has become synonymous with Christian nationalism under the Trump administration. And, increasingly, white evangelicals are willing to selectively reinterpret the Bible to justify this.

“We’re seeing literal verses with long histories of interpretation, that favor the poor, that favor outcasts … redeployed in ways that fit now,” Bass said. “They’re inventing a new interpretation, whole hog, to fit the age of Trump.”

One of the most famous verses in the Bible is Galatians 3:28, which highlights how Christianity is supposed to transcend barriers of race, class, wealth, and nationality. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

It’s unclear how white evangelicals will reinterpret that verse now.

For many white evangelicals, the faith they subscribe to no longer credibly resembles Christianity in any traditional sense. Instead, it has become a form of white ethno-nationalism adhered to with religious fervor, fueled by fear and allegiance to Donald Trump.

Scripture is unequivocal: those who claim to be disciples of Christ are called to welcome the stranger and care for the needy, to love our fellow human beings as our neighbors. There is no grey area in this. The words of Christ in Luke 4 and Matthew 25 attest to this.

The migrants approaching our border are fleeing from their homes in Honduras, a nation with the world’s highest murder rate for at least six years running.  They are fleeing a nation that suffered the coup of a democratically elected government five years ago that we failed to counter in any way, and which is being racked by the violence of drug gangs, the result of deliberate US policy choices in Central and South America in the War on Drugs. In short, they are fleeing a problem created in large part by the United States. We owe these people. They are not a Soros-funded plot to destroy America. They are human beings who have heard their whole lives that America is the greatest country on the planet, and they took our marketing seriously. We have an obligation to address their arrival in a humane and logical way, rather than in a way driven by fear mongering and politics.

It is shameful that the loudest Christian voices are speaking words of the Anti-Christ about our suffering neighbors, but it certainly isn’t surprising. This is Trump’s America, and Trump’s church.