Kneading Bread

Like some sick and twisted death-match on late night Spike TV, both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and The Episcopal Church are struggling to define the role of homosexuals within both the congregational life and in pastoral life - with liberals and conservatives occupying trenches equally deep and well planned. I’m not here to comment on that sad affair that is literally killing the churches mission (can you imagine how much these denominations could accomplish if they would talk
about something else at their annual meetings?), but rather I want to point out something obvious that vexes me about these institutions. These are both national churches, attempting to define the agendas for a whole country’s worth of believers – something I believe is antithetical to the entire purpose of the church from creation.

The church, at the most basic level is the group of people within which God has chosen to send his Spirit. This church is a highly personal group of interrelated individuals who seek to become more as God would have them be, and less like the world (and their own sinful ways) would have them be. They are a community at odds with the structure of power and authority, a quiet, but revolutionary counter-culture (in the purest sense.) These national churches, distracted (like the character Hyacinth
Bucket in the BBC’s Keeping Up Appearances) with presenting a facade to the press and the hypothetical alienated non-attender (insert likely, white, upper-middle class, college-educated) have missed the whole point in being the church and in the process done nothing to staunch the loss of their present members.

While this mess certainly sells newspapers it certainly is also illuminating the fundamental problem with large bureaucratic denominations: Christ-imitation doesn’t work when the faces you deal with are no longer people and God’s word is no longer the defining measure of this world. Power, consolidated in these national bodies, has done a similar corollary to the Church under Constantine… corrupted the mission of Christ. Luther tried to break the choke-hold of an authoritarian central church nearly
five hundred years ago because he saw the mission of Christ go undone, today I see petty centralized power missing the mission of Christ. I believe the collapse of these national churches will occur in my lifetime, and that gives me great hope. These denominations have a rich theological tradition that doesn’t need a national body to acknowledge or continue them, but rather need a people engaged in creating a community of God-lovers and Christ-seekers to continue what Christ and the martyrs have already
done.

Bucket and Jefferts-Schori – Same wardrobe department?

More reading: On Anglican Struggles, On ELCA Struggles 

Full disclosure: Baptized Episcopalian, and a member of an ELCA congregation