Encouraging One Another In The Faith

People who are struggling with questions about faith deserve answers that reflect both the best in the Christian tradition and the best that their own reasoned judgment can bring to life's challenges in the here and now. In general, the most helpful answers are discovered for oneself, with the encouragement of others. Nevertheless, earnest questions about the Christian faith are frequently met with exhortations and pronouncements which allow little room for exploring why a particular question is of concern to the particular person asking it, and almost no encouragement to discover more than just one way of answering it.

A life-long Episcopalian, distraught over the possibility that her diocese may break from the denomination over the issue of homosexuality, is told: You just have to trust that our leaders are telling us what God is telling them, that we have to disaffiliate. A father of two severely troubled teen-agers, painfully second-guessing his decision to divorce their mother, is comforted with the proclamation: You don't have to worry about your sin if you trust in the Lord; he already paid the price for it in full on the cross. A staunchly pro-life advocate, still in shock over an unexpected pregnancy at age 44, is advised by her Catholicism-bashing good friend: Abortion is your decision and yours alone to make.

All three of these sincerely-intended affirmations are more than passably Christian. And any of them might be true and right for any struggling believer at one time or another. But whether they and other affirmations like them are helpful in the particular circumstances that give rise to them in the first place can only be known by patient and respectful listening, waiting, asking questions, and then listening and waiting some more. This is a process which resists giving answers and instead encourages people to begin composing the answers that will make the most Christian sense to them on their own terms.

Listening and asking questions along the way is both extremely difficult and immensely rewarding, especially when people are struggling to express hard questions about their personal faith. Essentially, though, it is no different from listening to people as they struggle to cope with any other life-issue. It is just as hard, but no harder, and it threatens just as readily but not more so to dissolve into doing too much of other peoples' work for them rather than supporting them in their doing the work themselves. The idea of racing in with quick fixes, whether of unresolved grief or unresolved doubt and everything in between, is a very seductive idea, particularly in its hinting that there is wisdom to impart and accolades to garner by the Imparters. By contrast, the idea of keeping in the background and congratulating people for solving their problems on their own seems, well, un-rewarding.

About this approach, though, one pastor I know raised an important question: But isn't it the responsibility of a Christian to answer someone’s faith-question the way the gospel answers it? To me, this listening approach says that whatever a care receiver says, no matter how theologically off base it is, is okay. "Kill the infidels," for instance. That's ok?

No, killing infidels is not ok, anymore than denying medical treatment to poor people, or worshipping nature goddesses, or accepting only men as church leaders, or deeming the universe to be the creation of an evil deity are ok. None of these is ok, because the gospel, properly understood, makes it impossible to say otherwise. This pastor is very wise and very right --- up to a point. Where he is not right is in his assumption that this very same gospel must be understood at all times and everywhere the same way, and that there is only one thing that the gospel has to say to people in every kind of situation and to every kind of question about its meaning and its truth.

Even so, however, the pastor is still right in his assumption that though we can question and disagree about what the gospel means for different times, places, and circumstances, we are still raising questions and disagreeing about how to interpret the gospel. That is, our questions and disagreements are about what is and is not God's own "good news" for us, and not about mere opinions floating in the air, alighting on people willy-nilly, no one of which demonstrably better than any other. Our listening to people who are feeling "whirled around by every fresh gust of teaching" (Ephesians 4:14) is a listening for what the God of the Christian gospel is in fact doing in their lives while storms of questioning and doubting rage. We bear the storms with them encouragingly, in the sense of lending a little of our own courage for the struggle to live a life worthy of just that God's incomprehensible mercy toward and faith in us.

A Mainstream Denomination's Struggle For Inclusiveness

In many respects, the United Methodist Church’s internal debates about gays and lesbians reflects uncannily the shape and scope of American society’s own ambivalence about homosexuality and about homosexuals in general. For Methodism’s mission, this is not a good thing. It is difficult to be an effective witness to God in God’s world when one is too much a part of, rather than a solution to, the world’s problems. Even so, it is precisely because the United Methodist Church mirrors so clearly our society’s current struggles with so many important issues affecting the human future that its in-house rhetoric and actions are worth a second look outside as well as inside Methodism.

This summer, the Annual Conferences of the denomination will be voting on a constitutional amendment approved by its General Conference a year ago whose subject is, among other things, inclusiveness. One behind the scenes issue the amendment addresses is whether pastors can refuse to accept a person for membership in a congregation on the basis of that person’s being gay. It is a worthy attempt to fix a problem created earlier by the denomination’s Judicial Council, some of whose members had to have been somnambulant when they interpreted the church’s constitution as giving pastors this right.

Basically, the amendment takes away this so-called right. But its language goes far beyond merely prohibiting the exclusion of people on the basis of their sexual orientation. It purports more fundamentally, and eloquently, to acknowledge that “all persons are of sacred worth and that we are in ministry to all.” Then it goes on to say that all persons shall be eligible to attend worship services, participate in programs, receive the sacraments, and be admitted to membership. The amendment clearly envisions an open and welcoming church, in the light of a theology that emphasizes the wideness and grandeur of God’s mercy. And this is a good thing. There are too many forces at work in more than just Christianity today trying desperately to shrink God and God’s grace down to their own pitiful measure.

Unhappily, it is the behind the scenes issues that are making controversial a declaration that on its own merits should be evoking unanimous shouts of “Sophia” from everyone who will be voting on it. Besides those previously mentioned, another has to do with the exercise of “spiritual discretion” in determining peoples’ “readiness” for church membership. Taking this out of the hands of pastors, the argument goes, will lead to an anything-walks-through-this-joint pattern of congregational life at precisely the time when high expectation churches are supposedly growing and low expectation ones are not. But this amendment in no way implies an abrogation of pastors’ responsibility to help people discern their calling to Christian discipleship. It only insists that the judgment of a person’s “readiness” for church membership cannot be on the basis of race, economic status, gender, or sexual orientation. Unrepentant eco-terrorists, pedophiles, serial adulterers, drug-pushers, atheists, and blasphemers against the Holy Spirit can still be held for questioning, hopefully before and not after being received into membership.

A more serious issue, and one that I hope will be given even more attention on the far side of this amendment’s final ratification, has to do with the force that it will carry in relation to other parts of the United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline. For instance, will it annul the current and near sacrosanct distinction between affirming homosexual persons as bearing the divine image and condemning their practices? I certainly hope so. There is no credible moral theology or philosophical theory of ethics that provides any warrant whatsoever for distinguishing personhood from acts in the way that this obfuscating distinction does. Condemning the latter amounts to condemning the former, and the proposed new statement on inclusiveness should bring about a timely end to both.

There are a lot of things that both homosexuals and heterosexuals do and can do that by any account renders them dubious representatives of the people of God about God’s mission in the world. But if I read the Decalogue and Jesus’ pithy summary of it correctly, having the former rather than the latter orientation is not one of them. If it is just the Decalogue that is taken into account, it would seem that we should be going after divorced persons long before we start messing with homosexual ones. But if we let Jesus into the picture, it would seem that we should be pulling in extra chairs around the Supper table so that members of both groups will be ensured a place. Come unto him, all ye that are heavy laden, and he will give all, and not just some, rest.