The gospel gives us different priorities from those of the popular culture, and offers us a different agenda from that of the political economy.
hen people ask me for ideas about how to renew the church in our time, I am almost embarrassed by how coarse and simple my answer sounds. âJust do something.â Find a need in your congregation or in your community and make a plan to meet it. Identify a way to love God and neighbor here and now, and then just show up. Donât spend too many hours planning it or talking it to death, because nothing takes the place of doing. Grace is a byproduct not of good intentions but of good deeds performed by imperfect people for the right reasons. Most of the moments of joy and clarity in my ministry have come in the midst of the performance of ministry, not in the contemplation of the performance of ministry.
It would be difficult to overstate how mired the mainline church is in hyperintellectualism. We are factories of good ideas; we form committees to study problems and then appoint task forces to propose possible solutions to the problems that we already knew existed. A report is issued, voted on, and filedâconfirming all the evils of the age and what should be done to address them. Often the energy expended to identify and articulate the mess that the world is in steals most of the energy needed to actually do something about it! We create mission categories like a quarterly emphasis on peace, but alas, after ninety days, war appears unfazed by our resolutions against it.
There is something very seductive and satisfying about naming sin and recommending repentanceâas if what we have encouraged we have accomplished. Preachers are the ones most at risk, because they are public speakers of the gospel.They are constantly condemning evil and recommending loveâare they also expected to actually resist evil and practice love? Surely it is clear that I am a loving person, thinks the pastor; I just preached a six-part sermon series on love, and lots of people asked me for a copy. This confusion, between thinking about doing something and actually doing it, causes little pieces of the soul to break off and fall on the shower floor. It is why more members of the clergy end up in psychotherapy than do those of any other profession.
It also lulls the church into the complacency that results from assuming that a discussion of what is Christian is more important than a demonstration of how one is Christian. Again the words of Fred Craddock post a warning here:
It is one thing to talk about a concept such as love, and quite another to have the capacity to love. And the one does not lead directly to the other. Knowledge about ethical concepts does not make one ethical. Burghardt [W.E.B.] DuBois, the great black educator, sociologist, and historian, upon completion of studies at Fisk, Harvard, and University of Berlin, was convinced that change in the condition of the American black could be effected by careful scientific investigations into the truth about the black in America. So he proceeded. His research was flawless and his graphs and charts impeccable. After waiting several years and hearing not the slightest stir of reform, Dr. DuBois had to accept the truth about the Truth: its being available does not mean it will be appropriated.
This is why the renewal of the church will come only when right practice replaces right belief, when our desire to do the work of real compassion in the world is stronger than our impulse to convert others to our way of thinking; when we become doers of the Word and not just hearers only, to use the language of James.
Donât get me wrong. I am not opposed to thinking in the church. I like thinking. I think we should do more of it! I am also not suggesting that theology is unimportant or that our traditions do not matter. Indeed, the essential task of biblical interpretation is not just to tell people what a text said, but what it says. Yet even when this is done well, itâs not enough. Take the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example. If I should happen to be beaten and left half dead by the side of the road, I would prefer to be bandaged and delivered into the care of an innkeeper, rather than to grant an interview to a Christian reporter doing research to publish an article about how dangerous that particular road has become.
For twenty years, my congregation has participated in an annual spring ritual called âChristmas in Aprilâ (now called âRebuilding Togetherâ lest we offend non-Christian sensibilities). We select a house that is in need of substantial repair. Over one weekend, a mob of pilgrims descends on that house in what might best be described as the ecclesiastical version of Extreme Makeover. All the furniture gets moved out, plumbing is repaired, walls are painted, and new carpet is installed. The youth group landscapes the yard and plants flowers; skilled laborers install new windows and doors; the older women of the Guild who canât work prepare lunch, deliver it, and urge us to use sunscreen. To say there is a good vibe that permeates the morning would be an understatement. All are volunteers, and some work long into the night. It is blissfully exhausting.
The person who lives in that house, usually an elderly Oklahoman, spends the workday day elsewhere (lest he or she find the gutting of the home unbearable) and then returns to find it gloriously restored. It would difficult to describe how this feels if you have never experienced it. Nobody worries about whether the home belongs to a Baptist or a Catholic or an agnostic. We do not use the project as a recruiting tool, and the last thing on anyoneâs mind is the virgin birth. What happens is that we are reconnected to one another, reminded that the world is full of people whose lives we will never know, and sobered by the deep divisions of race, class, and culture. Yet we know that everyone needs to live in dignity and that everyone has a name. Rebuilding Together is one of Mayflowerâs High Holy Days.
It should go without saying, however, that seldom are our motives âpure.â Many of us wake on that morning thinking, âHavenât I got something better to do? Tend my own garden perhaps? Play with my own kids? Paint my own house? Watch the game?â Of course. But it is in the doing of a good deed for the stranger (who then becomes the neighbor) that we experience something transcendent. The experience of collective compassion trumps the satisfactions of private ambition every time. Yet the world and all its cleverness is mostly devoted to private ambition.
In the Underground Church, we should talk less and do more. We should appreciate how powerful it is when people go about quietly doing good works. If you want to attract a gaggle of the neighborhood kids, just start digging a hole in your front yard. They will gather, stare into the hole, and wonder why you are not engaged in a running commentary about the project. Just dig in silence and the questions will begin: âWhat are you looking for? Is that a grave? Are you going all the way to China?â
Likewise with the Underground Church, we resist explaining everything we are doing lest we push people away. Itâs not the reasons that people are interested in anyway; it is our strange behavior. Take the announcements in the worship service, for example. When visitors come to the service and we report the marriage of Joe and Sarah, we will not pause to explain who they are, how they met, where they work, or why this is such a joyful moment. If you are a visitor and want to know more about Joe and Sarah, join the church!
What moves people is that we are trying to create a community that can exist outside the frantic and impersonal world of buying and selling, of scheming and lying, of manufactured sentiment and shallow conversation. What people are looking for, and desperately, is something real. When a beloved member of the church is dying, then thatâs what we say: âMr. Morgan is dying.â In the Underground Church, we shun euphemisms when the subject matter matters. No âpassing away,â no âgoing to be with Jesus,â and please, no âtransitions.â It makes a dying person sound like someone at a graduation ceremony.
In the Underground Church, we do not avoid what is unpleasant lest we miss the hidden blessings inherent in the authentic life. That means we donât always do what we feel like doing. I donât know how many times Iâve forced myself to make a hospital call (who likes to go to hospitals?) and then come out feeling as if nothing I have done recently, or will do in the near future, is as important as the time I spent sitting in silence beside the bed of a dying person. The Beloved Community needs to preach and teach constantly this lesson: to hell with how you feel about it! Is it right?
Likewise the purpose of a church that functions subversively is not simply to confirm or to inspire but to undo people. The ultimate objective of preaching is not to score performance points or create a fan club but to create in everyone present the feeling that the more one trusts in the basic equation of the gospel (we lose our lives in order to find them), the more obligated we feel to let go of the sickness that is self-sufficiency. Me, Myself, and I is the unholy trinity.
Looking out for number one is the anti-gospel. Enough is never enough will ultimately be enough to do us all in.
What then shall we do to awaken the slumbering giant that is the church in the Western world? Many churches are just barely hanging on, and none of us are getting any younger. Those of the next generation, dubbed the Millennials, are not wild about our solemn assemblies. But they seem endlessly fascinated by Jesus and the ways of nonviolence, hospitality, generosity, and encouragement. Not all of them buy into the myth of a partisan God who votes a straight party ticket and teaches us to hate. Whatâs more, too many of them have seen what religion does to church people, and they donât like it. Not only do many Christians strike them as frightened and judgmental, but they also continue to act as if there were something endearing about ignorance.
So what can the Underground Church offer them? How about the path of most resistance? How about an alternative to the madness of the age? How about the chance to be leaven, corrupting the corruption of the Empire? Letâs be bold, shall we?
On War
War is a cowardâs escape from the problems of peace.
âTHOMAS MANN
Let the Underground Church clear its throat and shout this from the mountaintop. We hate war. We despise it. We are committed to doing everything possible to avoid it. This is not a conservative or liberal position. This is the deepest of all human laments. War is hell. It is monstrous and demonic. To use a biblical metaphor, it stinks to high heaven in the nostrils of God.
When it is chosen as an instrument of foreign policy or economic advantage, it is the gravest of sins. When it is called âholyâ (as if God rides into battle wearing a particular uniform), it is blasphemy. When it is an act of vengeance, it spits in the eye of the gospel. âWar,â said Plato, âis humanityâs most chronic and incurable disease Only the dead have seen an end to war.â But to give up on peace is to give up on God.
My generation learned this lesson the hard way, in that monstrous futility known as the Vietnam War. More than fifty-eight thousand men died for a cruel deception, sent to the rice paddies of southeast Asia to fight communism on a borrowed battlefield. Our generals and our politicians lied about it (truth, as the saying goes, is the first casualty of war), then failed to end it for fear of the political cost, only to abandon the country to a political system soon to collapse under the weight of its own ineptness. But first we killed more than two million Vietnamese and divided our own nation. There are sons my age who have never again spoken to their fathers.
When I say the word âVietnamâ in my classroom, I see nothing on the faces of my students. Itâs all ancient history to them, and besides, they have their own wars to worry about.The big difference is that they donât receive a draft notice on their eighteenth birthday. War is now outsourced like everything else; people volunteer to do the job, and we train, equip, and cheer them as they do it. Many of these young people sign up in need of money for college or because there are no other options. Others continue a military tradition in their families.
So to help my students understand war in a less abstract way, I tell them a story, a true story about one night in 1970 when I w...
