No stress? No way!

Ever heard of a No-Stress Sunday?

Those are the events where people are invited to join the church after the worship service has ended.

They can take place in a couple of different ways. Sometimes the people wanting to join walk down to the chancel and meet with the pastor right after the service. Other times, they might go with him back to his office and have a chat there. But the point is the same: It provides people who get nervous or bashful about standing up in front of the congregation the option of professing their faith and answering the "prayers, presence, gifts, and service" question in private.

I think this is one of the worst things the church has come up with ever, and I write about it in my current column in the UM Reporter.

The church has always held that public witness is an essential part of Christian identity. We get that from Jesus himself: "Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven" (Matthew 10:33).

So how in the world did No-Stress Sunday ever come about? I suspect this has to do with the privatization of religion in our culture (or heck, the privatization of just about everything). When we start to assume that one's faith is just about a me-n-Jesus relationship, then joining the church the way you might sign up for the gym or subscribe to a magazine becomes okay.

Well, it ain't okay. And we should put a stop to it in our churches. If someone isn't willing to stand up in front of the body and openly declare his faith in Jesus Christ and a desire to join the congregation, then he probably isn't ready for the kind of discipleship the church will ask of him anyway.

Letter to a reader

Sometimes it is interesting to compare what gets responses from a United Methodist Reporter column versus what gets responses on the ol' blog. My post last week on the "Cheating on your church" Reporter column got almost no response from blog readers.

But when the actual column went into the print edition of the Reporter itself, I was inundated with e-mails from readers of the newspaper. As always, some were positive and some were negative. But the difference was that the negative ones were from people who were genuinely upset with me. They perceived the column as threatening, intimidating, or harsh. This was a surprise to me (as it always is when I get that kind of response). My writing is intended to help others think constructively about important issues related to our common faith, and this column was no different.

Nevertheless, I make goofs. And sometimes language I use can be interpreted in ways I did not intend. So in case you read the column and didn't like it, I wanted to offer some explanatory comments. To do that, I will print an excerpt below from a response I sent to one reader's concerns. For the record, this wasn't one of the angry readers, but was rather one who was writing to ask about the implications of switching from one denomination to another. Here's the excerpt:

Dear _______,

... Let me say a bit about why I wrote the column: As a pastor in the UMC, I am concerned about the path our church travels. I want us to be faithful, and I want us to proclaim the gospel of salvation to the needy. Some people have written me concerned with a perceived harshness in tone with this column in particular. Of course, I would never write anything to try to intentionally frighten or intimidate those in the church. I do, however, think it is important to think critically about what church membership means. And I think it is especially important in our current cultural climate, when we are taught to think of ourselves first and foremost as consumers who deserve to have their 'felt needs' met on demand. The way of salvation that Jesus Christ offers us is a far cry from the shallow version of happiness offered by secular culture today. My principle worry about church shopping is that it ingrains the consumerist habits of the secular culture rather than replacing them with the discipleship habits of a follower of Christ.

In addition, we do make vows upon church membership, and those vows need to be taken seriously. My comparison of them with marriage vows was only intended to highlight that fact. In a sense, I wrote the column because of the very high view I have of the role of the church in our salvation: it is where we are taught about Jesus, it is where we hear the Word preached, it is where we receive the Sacraments, it is where we are formed as disciples, and it is where we learn to be in relationships of sisterhood and brotherhood with Jesus' friends. That's all really important stuff!

Thanks again for your letter. I am very happy to hear that you have found a home in the UMC that is nurturing your faith!

Yours in Christ,
Andrew Thompson

Cheating on your church

Sometime ago I began developing an idea for a UM Reporter column on church membership. I moved that idea off the backburner after reading this blog post by Amy Forbus on the Methoblog. Frankly, the understanding of United Methodist church membership is about as shallow as our ecclesiology in general. But it is also an issue with which many people can relate, and because of that, engaging it might be a helpful in getting Methodist folks to think more broadly about the doctrine of the church.

The central problem with the idea of church membership in a society of 10,000 denominations is that it inevitably takes on the characteristics of what social scientists call a 'voluntary association.' Like a civic club in many respects, people join churches today with few requirements and little expectation. You get out of it what you put into it, so to speak, and no one is going to bother you too much if you just get your name put on the rolls for social reasons. When the 'voluntary association' mentality is combined with a market economy where all like 'products' compete for 'customers,' it means that churches will tend toward treating their evangelism as a form of marketing veiled in religious language. And that only waters down the understanding of what commitment to the church through membership means even further.

This is true of American church membership in general, but of course United Methodist church membership is a leading example of this norm. Our anemic understanding of membership is ironic in many ways, particularly with respect to the language of current membership vows in the United Methodist Hymnal. In our Hymnal, the pledges of membership we take to both universal church and local congregation are true vows spoken in a public setting. The fact that people then feel free to disregard them in such a cavalier fashion is remarkable.

There are some legitimate reasons to leave a church once you join as a member, as I argue in my current Reporter column. But they are few in number. And most reasons people leave amount to nothing more than ecclesial adultery. When you promise fidelity to both Jesus and a congregation of his disciples and then break that promise over matters as simple as boredom with worship or frustration with a committee, you are running out on the bride of Christ. It's cheating on your church, folks.

I can tell you that my comments on Amy's blog post and my Reporter column have generated quite a few frustrated comments and e-mails. The response is always, "Yes, but..." As in, "Yes, but you don't understand that in my case, it was justified." And like I said, there are a few justifiable cases. But not many.

There is, of course, an underlying reason why people instinctively think that seeking out a church that meets all their felt needs is a God-given right. And it has to do with consumerism and the aforementioned market economy. Most Americans simply cannot conceive of the idea of not being able to choose their church the way they do their cell phone plan or where they'll get tonight's take-out. But think about what that mindset does to the Bride of Christ: it turns her into a cheap prostitute, who peddles her wares on street corners in the hopes that you'll condescend to choose her over all her similarly cheap competitors.

If you want to do something truly radical for Jesus (and 'radical' is a relative term in our historically weak era), commit to his bride the way you did to your own bride or groom on your wedding day. Stay with her through thick and thin. Help your fellow brothers and sisters there to grow in discipleship. And whenever you get mad at some perceived slight in your church, realize that you are committed to that community in such a way that you are called to reconciliation rather than self-chosen alienation.

Meaning of Church Membership

There are a number of posts up on several blogs I read having to do with the meaning of membership in the church. I'm not sure if this is all coincidental, or whether there is rather some story or event I have missed. At any rate, I have also just finished a column on the meaning of church membership for the United Methodist Reporter. I'll link to that when it comes out.

In the mean time, here is a summary of several posts that are worth checking out:

On his Accountable Discipleship blog, Steve Manskar posts about the way we often treat church membership as membership in a civic club (and how at odds that is with an understanding of the church as the body of Christ).

Amy Forbus posted on the Methoblog on the way that an 'open door' membership attitude allows for easy exiting as well as easy joining.

Also on the Methoblog, Jay Voorhees has posted on membership as it relates to the deep longing for family, as well as the vows of membership as similar to marriage vows (I agree with him strongly on this count).

(Both Amy's and Jay's posts are drawn from still other blogs, to which they link, and those are worth a look as well.)

Matthew Johnson has an excellent post on pastoral responsibility in helping determine readiness for church membership, something that most pastors are probably to intimidated (and too eager for new members) to do.

And Gavin Richardson quotes himself on the nature of the church: "At its best the church is a family, at its worst the church is a family."

My own column, which I'm tentatively calling, "Cheating on your church," focuses on the implied seriousness of our vows of church membership as well as the poverty of contemporary church life today. It is that deep poverty that keeps people from understanding the meaning of membership in Christ's body. The church's failure to truly be the community of Jesus' friends leads to a situation where people treat church as any other consumer choice. And that causes them to make terrible choices both for the church and for their own discipleship. As I argue in the article, leaving your church for reasons of personal preference is nothing more than a form of ecclesial adultery.

Are we the church??

Several days ago I wrote about the ambiguous nature of "membership" in the United Methodist Church. Membership has become an almost meaningless category, I argued, and we would do well to examine how we go about inviting members into the church and holding them accountable for the vows they make.

In response to that post, Casey, a friend and fellow student here at Duke (who is from the Free Methodist tradition, I might add), wrote the following:

"This is, of course, assuming that Methodists are 'the church.' Methodists still need to engage in a robust conversation, both internally and externally with other Christian traditions, about ecclesiology. We have a serious breach with other episcopal traditions over apostolic succession. Are we church or are we still voluntary societies? What's the difference?"

Casey raises some very important points. (They are the very points that brought me to Duke to work on a doctorate, so I guess I think they are important, at least.) We began as a renewal movement within the Church of England. If John Wesley had had his way, the British Methodists would never have separated. Wesley realized that the political reality of the new United States of America made the separation of American Methodists from the Church of England an inevitability, but that shouldn't preclude our having a serious and sustained discussion about who we are in relation to the catholic (universal) church.

Specifically, how do we justify our separation from other Christian churches?

A common (and patently wrong) reason that is given by lots of Protestants is that the unity that Christ desires for the church is spiritual rather than physical. I believe this is a cop-out answer given by people who don't want to think that the very fact of their separation from the larger church might constitute a form of sin. And besides, it is non-biblical. From Acts to Revelation, the NT treats the importance of the unity of the church as embodied (i.e., a physical and spiritual whole).

So how can the Methodists continue to justify their separation? Christ will call us to account for this, I have no doubt. And I don't think he will see "inertia" as a good enough answer.

It is a question of ecclesiology, as Casey points out. And to start, we have to ask questions on at least a couple of different levels:

1) Who are we, as a church? That is, what makes us distinct from other Christian bodies?

2) How do United Methodists justify their separation from other Methodist bodies? How do Methodists in general justify their separation from other Protestant denominations? And how do they justify separation from the Roman Catholic Church?

If you don't think these are crucially important questions, then you are not paying attention. I invite thoughts and comments, as I honestly do not know how to answer these questions.

"I am a church member"

Are you?

If so, what does that mean exactly? Are you committed to your membership in your local congregation through thick and thin? Do you confess your sins to brothers or sisters within that fellowship? Do you submit to the authority of your pastor? Do you engage in a discipleship that causes you to sacrifice your own desires in favor of service within the community?

A professor of mine at Duke is fond of saying that, in the early days, it was much easier to become a Methodist than to remain one. All one had to do to join a Methodist society was exhibit a "desire to flee from the wrath to come." But once in, that pilgrim had to show that he was walking the way of discipleship on a quarterly basis or else his name would be stricken from the rolls.

Some people today think that such a severe membership policy would be a good idea for the UMC. But we have to take into account what Wesley was kicking people out of - not the church, but a voluntary fellowship of believers who wanted to engage in a more intentional form of discipleship. For us to kick people out of the church, we are kicking them out of the church. So the case can be made that we would be hindering their access to the means of grace, whereas Wesley was not.

Of course, it is even more complicated. Because American Christianity is the land of denominations. So if a person is removed from membership in a United Methodist Church, she can always find another denomination down the street to take her in (whereas such was not the case in Wesley's England). So, to counter my above point, it is conceivable that Wesley would remove people from our church rolls with as much gusto as he did from society rolls in his own day. In either time, access to the means of grace (and hence, to salvation) is still present.

The issue of church membership has been front and center in our denomination since the incident in Virginia sometime back when a pastor refused membership to an openly homosexual man who refused to repent of his homosexual practice (and the distinction between orientation and practice is important). As I remember, the Judicial Council eventually ruled that the issue was one of pastoral authority and that it was the elder's duty to determine fitness for membership.

Now I know United Methodists are all over the map 0n the issue of homosexuality. But we should not let our differing views on that hot-button issue cloud our thinking on another very important one - that of pastoral authority and standards for church membership. Questioning whether to admit a person onto membership rolls is admittedly different than discerning whether to allow a backsliding member to remain.

But both beg the question of whether church membership means anything at all.

United Methodists wring their hands that we only have 8 million members in the U.S., but what difference does it make if 7 million of them care nothing about holiness of heart and life?

For the record, I do believe the elder in charge of a local church should determine fitness for membership. The church is not a place where anything goes. As a professor of mine back at Vandy used to say, "Jesus invites everyone to his table; but once you accept that invitation, you are expected to behave with the table manners of the host." That means that we must accept God's grace to be conformed to Christlikeness, repenting of our sin and walking the way of discipleship. And if a bishop, or a district superintendent, or an elder or deacon, or a lay member does not like the process of discernment that the elder in question goes through with the prospective member, then that process should be examined with prayer, holy conversation, and reference to our doctrinal standards as expressed in the Book of Discipline.

If the church was to take standards of membership seriously, we'd probably all be in trouble. But maybe feeling guilty about our lukewarm commitment to Jesus and his church is something we need to experience. And maybe we need to repent together, and start to learn what it means to live as real disciples.