When Church and Culture Merge, Goodbye Church

I had a chance to preach at the United Church of Christ in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, two Sundays back. I love preaching. It really fires me up to see people moved, to see their faith grow. If that’s an ego indulgence, I apologize.

In my sermon on claiming the fruits of grace, I quoted several luminaries of recent times going back into the 20th century: Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Marcus Borg. I even had a Martin Luther reference. The subject was grace, you have to mention Luther!

The thing all four of these gents have in common is they were all, to one degree or another, counter-cultural. In Luther’s day the church was everything. Emperors bowed down to it. When the Pope said jump, people said “how high?” Talk about extraordinary rendition. Talk about torture. The Pope’s guys could make a secret CIA prison in Bulgaria look like a week at a Girl Scout camp. And yet Luther stood up to them in the name of the truth.

Bonhoeffer’s enemies were just as lethal. When Hitler’s Waffen SS got hold of you, it was time to put your last will and testament in order. And yet Bonhoeffer and what was known as “the Confessing Church,” that is the church that wouldn’t bow down to Hitler, were prepared at any moment to feel the iron boot on their throats. Their numbers were small but their hearts were large.

Marcus Borg plays an important role in championing the true confessing church of our time. He hasn’t faced torture and execution but, like Tillich, has been targeted as a heretic by entrenched forces within the traditional ranks of Christianity—the very people who have let the realm of faith shrink ever smaller. A leading voice among the often silenced ranks of progressive Christian thinkers, Borg teaches at Oregon State University.

Tillich, who died in 1965, was also a victim of Hitler, but unlike the executed Bonhoeffer, Tillich escaped to the United States and taught at Union Theological, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He is considered one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and did his best to rescue Christian philosophy from shallow subservience to simple formulas of faith. But the continued dominance of the American Evangelical Church demonstrates that neither Tillich nor Borg have been as successful as we would have wished.

As much as I admire all these heroes of the faith, none of them ever became a household name like Billy Graham or, I hate to say it, Jerry Falwell. But I can live with that. Earlier this week I joined a meeting of an interfaith group known simply as The Theology Club. I’d been meaning to sit in on one of their sessions and this was my first. They are an intelligent, progressive group and I enjoyed the discussion immensely. As the 90-minute session was winding down, someone observed how sad it was that so many seats in the lecture hall were empty. Why weren’t people coming?

I told the leader, a wonderful gentleman known as JJ, that maybe that’s the way it’s meant to be. I recounted Jesus’ parable of the sower in Matthew 13. The sower tosses seeds in four locations, but only one leads to a harvest. Maybe that’s just how it is, I suggested, maybe those who embrace the truth will always be a small minority. That was not a welcome thought for JJ. “That could be true,” he said, “But if it is, I fear for the future of our planet.”

We have good reason to fear for the future of our culture and our planet. I’ve asked previously why the church after 2,000 years has been so unsuccessful in changing the world. One reason could be a devotion to amassing numbers, leading to such complete compromise that the church and the larger culture became indistinguishable. And being the same, who needs the church? The heroes I admire refused to do that. They were counter-cultural at every turn.

Many claim the truth, but not all truth is created equal. If truth is like a tree, you know authentic truth by the fruit it bears. We’re called to carry that fruit to all people and to feed our hungry world. The future may well depend on our success. But if the world won’t eat, we should feed those who will, small though their numbers may be. And we shouldn’t apologize for it. As the scripture says, “many are called but few chosen.”