Critic by association

Feb 7, 2009 by Daniel Ross-Jones

“If you believe love should be uncritical, you may soon be thinking that I do not love this church. But my experience has been that to be a member of the United Church of Christ is, almost by definition, to be a critic of it. To be uncritical is to be the real oddball in this church. Perhaps to be uncritical is to be un-Christian”. -From “The United Church of Christ Tomorrow”, THEOLOGY AND IDENTITY: TRADITIONS, MOVEMENTS, AND POLITY IN THE UCC (Pilgrim Press: 1990), ed. Dan Johnson and Charles Hambrick-Stowe

I have a love-hate relationship with institutional church.  For any of those people who know me even slightly well, they will attest to the convoluted paradigm that is my absolute devotion to structured religious practice within the covenantal church standing next to the uncompromising commitment to the institutional ideal — what should be, what could be, what ought to be instead of what presently is.

To be certain, I have faced my own personal series of dark nights where the church was little more than a cannon aimed in my direction.  But the enduring power of the faithful assembled wouldn’t let me go.  Time and again I come back to this place with all of its faults and failures, roll up my sleeves, and say to those around me, “Let’s get to God’s work among God’s people.”

Because of my commitment to that ideal, I couldn’t in good conscience remain in the faith tradition of my upbringing.  As a confessional tradition, it takes its cues and inspiration from ancient statements of faith, 15th and 16th Century methods of interpretation and practice, and holds a certain suspicion to those models which emphasize freedom in the Gospel.  I don’t say this to reject that community’s faith; far from it, there are myriad good and faithful people who work to build the Beloved Community on earth there, and I am shaped and molded by their tradition more than I can ever unravel.  But in the end, my instinctive understanding of religious freedom for the sake of Jesus Christ led me down a different path of searching and discerning before I arrived in my home in the United Church of Christ.

I love the UCC.  I love that I can walk into two local churches sitting next door to each other and receive a completely different message.  I love that I can talk with two UCC members and receive eight different opinions.  I love that I can be about faithful risk, challenging the structures which define us, while maintaining solidarity with those around the edges.  I love that I can (even ought to) challenge church leadership yet stand side-by-side at the wonderful Table of Grace and receive heavenly food to sustain each of us.

I love the ideal of the UCC: a church rooted in no fewer than four Christian traditions in North America but affected by so many more, that celebrates its diversity in all of its forms while requiring uniformity of none.

There is much to celebrate in the UCC, but yet I am constantly reminded of where we fail.  In our attempts of inclusion, we fail to name — and even sometimes reject outright — those who we are purposely or indirectly excluding.  In our attempts of promoting religious freedom, we reject those who, in their freedom, subscribe to or promote a more conservative Christian faith.  In our attempts of promoting diversity, we provide a narrow definition rather than subscribing to the comprehensive whole.

One of my requirements as I work toward ordination is to take a course on UCC History & Polity.  I’m enrolled in that this semester and after one class period, I can speak with certainty that its going to be one of two classes that will pull me and stretch me in ways I can’t name now.  Over the course of the next few postings here, I’m going to address first three things that are cause for celebration in our beloved church, followed by three things that hinder us in our work.

For those who are “church people,” especially who might be involved in the life of the UCC, I hope that you will join the conversation.  For those who are “people of the world,” I hope you will also join the conversation and keep us grounded in the here-and-now of our work together.  Finally, for those of you who can’t stand church talk, I hope you, too, will join the conversation and let us know what it is we have done to push you away.

We’ll see where this goes.  I’m excited.

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