Post-Denominationalism

Between orientation meetings and worship services my first week of seminary, I managed to squeeze in a reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's classic study, The Social Sources of Denominationalism. Two among its many important points still stand out prominently. The first is that social and economic struggles had as much to do with the development of Protestant denominations as theology did, and even more with Protestant Christians' choices of denominational affiliation. I was especially struck by Niebuhr's laconic application of this point to Methodism.

Early Methodists, Niebuhr began, exhibited an especially strong passion both for improving the condition of the poor and for teaching methodical living in both the spiritual and the mundane spheres of life. He then observed that by accomplishing the former so effectively through the latter, the Methodist movement raised up successful, even wealthy people who then found members of lower economic and social classes increasingly distasteful and turned to high steeple hob-nobbing and ministering to the poor with checks more than personal presence. This description pertains to most of mainline Protestantism today as much as it does to the Wesleyan tradition.

Niebuhr's first point left me mildly embarrassed to be an upwardly-aspiring Methodist surrounded by seminarians who quite clearly had a better grasp of God's good news to the poor than I did. His second point left me in outright shock: denominationalism, he wrote, is sinful in its very essence. Why? Primarily because the loyalty that denominations demand of their members typically wafts toward their own leaders and programs and away from Jesus's mission to the world on God's behalf.

Not too long after finishing this deeply troubling book, I dropped by Mr. Niebuhr's office (I chose the seminary I did partly because he was on its faculty) to confess some of my own denominationalist obsessions, and to see if he thought there was any hope for me. Gently and with good humor, he told me that the sin of denominationalism was serious, but not unforgiveable. Then, and somewhat gravely, he said that I would not overcome it easily.

How prescient my much revered professor was. I still let myself get sucked into the quadrennial swirls of episcopal elections as if the future of Christendom were at stake. And I still get caught up in fending off ever more strident efforts of General Conference's ill-informed to tell people out of plumb with their own favorite social principle to get lost, as if intelligent Christians do not follow the dictates of their own consciences anyway. And then there is all the hot button pushing to get as many United Methodist churches --- they have to be Methodist --- started or re-built on grander scales as quickly as possible, the immediate needs of society's sick, poor, helpless, and hopeless be damned.

A lot of people have been struggling to break out of denominationalism's thrall for some time now, and in dramatic numbers have set about the creation of nondenominational churches they believe to be the only proper habitat for communities of believers that profess true apostolicity. Even people who have chosen to remain in their denominationally-affiliated churches are quietly eliminating as many public references to their wider connections as they can from their signs, their stationery, and even their spiritual practices. Their hope seems to be that the taint of their corporate past can still be eradicated before it is too late.

For hard-wired denominationalists, the really big tragedy in the church nowadays is that mainline membership continues to decline. Their non-denominationalist counterparts are sometimes equally tunnel-visioned, only for them the light at the end of the tunnel is merely that their own growth makes up for losses among the established denominational churches. For neither group it appears to matter much that the world God loves continues to be ruthlessly exploited, that the human race God loves continues to be recklessly partitioned into haves and have-nots, saved and damned, or that the future God presents on the far side of grace, mercy, and forgiveness continues to be deformed into utopian visions concocted and imposed only by the most powerful and self-serving among us. What matters more seems to be how packed the pews are on Sundays, even if much of the crowding is accomplished by stealing away the membership of other churches.

As both H. Richard Niebuhr and his more famous brother Reinhold knew well, human sinfulness eventually affects --- actually, infects --- every kind of human organization, and that looking to some new way of doing business as a way of absolving ourselves from messing up an old one only ensures that the new will be swallowed up all over again by the old. New things under the sun there are, but nondenominationalism is not one of them. It is just as sinful as denominationalism is, in the same ways as denominationalism is. And it is so because its constituency is just as sinful as we are.