New language, not a new message.

I was reading an August issue of Christian Century this morning, and was drawn back twice to read the comments of Rev. Geoffrey Black, the new national president of the United Church of Christ. You may remember the UCC as that denomination that has run interesting TV and print ads with the “God is still speaking” slogan. It’s probably the most compelling answer to the fundamentalist”God said it, I believe it, that settles it” drivel.

If God is still speaking in our world—still creating, still controlling our world, then nothing is “settled.” The Word of God is not fixed like an oversize rock we can’t get around, but a living word which God’s people must constantly understand and interpret for themselves. And the ongoing religion wars that drive the so-called Culture War are an attempt to frame the discussion of a changing world through a fixed lens. In my own ministry, I remind people that we must often re-question, and re-answer many of faith’s big issues not because the holy Word has changed but because we human beings have changed. Our language has changed, so we cannot use the old language to speak to the world today.

Geoffrey Black articulates this very well. When asked how he interprets the declining membership of the UCC and other mainline Protestant denominations, his answer is thoughtful and very much on point:

“The Protestant mainline and the UCC are going through a period of rediscovering what makes us committed to and enthusiastic about the Gospel. We have to dig deeper. We cannot rely on the props of the past. America is changing, and we have lost the language that conveys the centrality and the compelling message of Christian faith. We have to find a new language that speaks to the realities that human beings are facing.”

The contrast with right wingnut Christian couldn’t be sharper. They clung tightly to the King James Version of the Bible (published in 1611) until nobody could understand it anymore, and only switched to new versions when the realized that they could manipulate the Bible to say what they want said, a la The Living Bible, and the New American Standard Bible, etc., which put the word “homosexual” on the lips of St. Paul even though the original Greek doesn’t say that.

President Geoffrey Black, I think, speaks to the real point for progressive Christians in 2010. We can’t go back to the past. We have to speak to the realities which humanity lives with today, in a language that can be understood. If mainstream churches are in decline it is, in part, because those who are disaffected and leaving may have been in church for the wrong reasons (the comfort of civil sanctity rather than the discomfort of following Jesus to all the difficult places he leads us), and the younger generation is not interested in picking up their tired old pious rhetoric. Religious forms with deeply-held conviction and passion for truth and purpose are simply dead. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that conventional churches are emptying out.

But there is reason to be passionate about the gospel, because it is the news of God’s reconciling with humanity as we are—often lost, broken or hurting–especially from self-inflicted wounds—sometimes depraved but sometimes noble, not disembodied angelic spirits but embodied human beings with dreams and energy, capable almost at the same time of compassion and creativity and stupidity and cruelty. But in the story of Jesus, we are accepted by God as fully human, and we are given an example of the highest purpose of human life. As Christians, our “righteousness” is neither pretense nor fake, nor is it piety and religion. Our “rightness” with God is grace, an undeserved gift which comes alive in our faithfulness.

In place of searching and striving for the divine in our lives, we often make the mistake of settling for piety and religion. The Gospel, however, includes the news that God seeks us, even when we are off-track, lost and oblivious.

Black goes on to say, “More than ever we need voices of reason and deep spirituality. The voices of intolerance and hatred are loud. We need to articulate an alternative.”

But talk is cheap, and the din of media, internet, twitter has made it even cheaper. Over and over I realize that more Christian energy needs to go into our faithful actions and much less into religious talk. The people who are being drawn to our church, I think, are more interested in what we do that tells the Gospel in our neighborhood than what we say. Actions speak louder than words, it is said. Actions also speak more truthfully than words.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

This entry was posted on September 2, 2010 at 10:00 and is filed under Bible & Interpretation, wingnuts, Ecumenical Issues, Fundamentalism, Faith, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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