March 6, 2011

Clay Nelson

Last Sunday after the Epiphany 
    Matthew 7:21-29

Reports coming out of Christchurch say that the earthquake literally lifted whole buildings like the iconic Anglican cathedral fully into the air and then dropped them back down. The very thought boggles the mind. No wonder over 20 houses of worship were destroyed. Most were built of brick or stone that never do well in earthquakes anyway. And most were built over a hundred years ago, long before we knew how to construct buildings to withstand the colliding of tectonic plates deep within the earth’s crust. In fact, at the time they were built no one knew what a tectonic plate was. While Jesus wisely suggests that it is better to build a home on bedrock than sand, sometimes even that is not enough.

What happened to the cathedral is perhaps a metaphor for what is happening to the church today. When Christchurch Cathedral was built it was placed at the centre of a new town modelled on Christ Church, Oxford. I doubt anyone objected that a house of worship was to be the city’s anchor. The Church at that time was a respected and powerful institution. Today I suspect it would be a controversial decision. Nor did anyone object that it was a Christian house of worship, as there were no other faiths represented in the citizenry. I also doubt that anyone complained that it was an Anglican house of worship. While Roman Catholics, Presbyterians and Methodists were around, Anglicans were by far the largest denomination throughout the country and certainly that was true in a town that was trying to recreate a little piece of Mother England.

When the cornerstone was laid in 1864 the world bore little resemblance to today. In New Zealand the war with Maori in the Waikato was ending and their land throughout the North Island was being confiscated. Auckland was still the capitol of New Zealand and St Matthew-in-the-City had been a parish for nine years and already dreaming of building a stone church. In America the Civil War was being fought and Abraham Lincoln was still alive. In England Victoria ruled over an empire that was increasingly urban as the Industrial Revolution continued to transform society. In the world of science the theory of evolution was only five years old. Mendel would not report his discoveries about genetics for another year.

The Cathedral they would build on that cornerstone reflected the times in which it was built and its role and position in it. The Enlightenment with its values of critically questioning traditional institutions, customs, and morals, and a strong belief in rationality and science had not yet fully taken hold of the modern world. Democracy was barely out of the cradle. Women still knew their place in a paternalistic world. People of colour were still the white man’s burden. The authority of the Church and Scripture was still sacrosanct. It would not be long before the first tremors of change would be felt but the big one was still unimaginable.

I would argue that the church built for the 18th and 19th centuries was not designed to withstand the powerful forces shifting the ground beneath us in the 21st century. Before its downfall many more tourists visited the Cathedral to see the past than worshippers came to it to pray in the here and now.

But in spite of the evidence, we keep metaphorically building churches with the same old bricks and stones of the past and then wonder why the number of people affiliated with churches keep falling. We might as well build them on sand. 

Society now values science over magical thinking. People have unprecedented access to information that allows them to form their own positions. For good reasons many of us are sceptical of authority and resist hierarchy. Those under 30 (the largest part of the population) have grown up in a cosmopolitan world that has been shrunk by the Internet and cheap and faster forms of travel. Many of them reject much of the parochial, racial and homophobic attitudes of their parents and grandparents. They see the discrimination, violence and hatred perpetuated in the name of religion and reject all them on the grounds of hypocrisy.

As a result society as a whole is giving less value to what the church has to say than ever before. At best we become window dressing at public events giving invocations or benedictions. One measure of our lessening influence is that a majority of Kiwis indicate no religious preference. Another is that most weddings are not held in churches any more. I think the church still dominates as the preferred venue for funerals, but somehow that seems appropriate.

My hunch is that this decline will continue as long as the Church worries more about the institution than the message it exists to proclaim. Unfortunately there is a catch-22. As the Church shrinks, it becomes more conservative and insular as it seeks to differentiate itself from secular society that it sees as a threat to its survival. The result is that it becomes stuck in past dogmas and doctrines that no longer speak to this age. It tends to focus more on individual salvation than societal transformation: moral reform rather than social justice. Judgment and condemnation undergird their message rather than Jesus’ message of love and compassion. This results not only in the Church shrinking further but also in a loss of influence in the marketplace of ideas. We are dismissed as irrelevant, and I would suggest it is our own fault.

Progressive religion seeks to lay down a new foundation for being the church. St Matthew’s does not seek to differentiate itself from secular society. We find the divine present everywhere. We open our doors to everyone and a broad cross-section of Aucklanders uses our facilities for a wide variety of “secular” activities. If we try to differentiate ourselves from anything it is from traditional Christianity. We do so for several reasons. The first is that there are times when the Church is the perpetrator of social injustice as in its refusal to consider openly gay people for ordination or its opposition to gay marriage. We oppose injustice no matter who perpetrates it. Secondly, we can’t accept many aspects of traditional Christian theology in any literal sense from virgin births to bodily resurrections. We diverge from the traditional view that right belief is all that matters. We are concerned instead about right action. Thirdly, we seek to be taken seriously by the whole of society in our efforts to make it more just; more compassionate. We resist being lumped in with traditional Christians not only because of our different understandings of faith, but because a growing segment of society stopped listening, assuming they already know what the church will say and have rejected it as out of step with the world as they know it.

How do we go about differentiating ourselves? We do it in part by how we worship. It is in worship we are formed and find identity.  While on the surface our service looks pretty traditional, it doesn’t sound traditional as the prayers and hymns reflect our progressive theology. Another difference is the significant involvement of lay people to lead the service where in more traditional settings the clergy are the centres of attention. Lastly our invitation to people of all backgrounds and faiths to receive communion challenges an exclusive and closed view of who are God’s people. 

Ultimately the church is not bricks and mortar — it is flesh and blood — ours. We can be shaken, but not demolished. Our task is to be that progressive vision of the Gospel working for justice; living out compassion. That is our bedrock. The more we reflect our worship outside these walls, the more we will influence the world of which we are a part. The world may not listen to the institution but it will listen to us when we speak up because we have not cut ourselves off from it. We do not judge or condemn it. We love and care for it, for we and the world are one and the same.