The Church Cracked Open

Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community

Stephanie Spellers

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781640654242
• eBook ISBN: 9781640654259
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

"This book will make a profound difference for the church in this moment in history."
— The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry

Sometimes it takes disruption and loss to break us open and call us home to God. It's not surprising that a global pandemic and once-in-a-generation reckoning with white supremacy—on top of decades of systemic decline—have spurred Christians everywhere to ask who we are, why God placed us here and what difference that makes to the world.

In this critical yet loving book, the author explores the American story and the Episcopal story in order to find out how communities steeped in racism, establishment, and privilege can at last fall in love with Jesus, walk humbly with the most vulnerable and embody beloved community in our own broken but beautiful way.

The Church Cracked Open invites us to surrender privilege and redefine church, not just for the sake of others, but for our own salvation and liberation.

1

The Reality of Disruption
and Decline

There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

—Martin Luther King Jr.¹

For some time now, church leaders have sat around tables and strategized, wringing our hands and sometimes engaging in wishful thinking about the ongoing systemic decline that has become a fact of life for dominant American Christianity. (Throughout the book, I will use this term to refer to the broad community of majority White, mainline Protestant and evangelical churches.) Global pandemic, the fear of economic collapse, and a massive racial come-uppance have added an extra degree of urgency and anxiety to those conversations. We sense and sometimes whisper the truth: dominant American Christianity has been displaced, pushed out of our buildings, away from our moorings, and out of the center . . . if there’s any center left at all.

Protestant mainline churches have experienced systemic decline and displacement since the 1960s², and that trend has expanded over the last twenty years to engulf the United States’ religious sector as a whole. It’s worth noting that Christianity has blossomed at the very same time in Africa, Asia, and South America, as well as in Eastern Europe, China, and the Middle East. The most dynamic churches in the United States and the West are often comprised of people from these countries of origin.³

Back at home, across dominant American culture, entire generations are rejecting faith. Some are angry and associate Christianity with words like “hypocrite,” “judgmental,” and “anti-homosexual,”⁴ but an alarming number of younger people simply do not know or care much about religious institutions at all.⁵ If they notice us, they may see self-obsessed institutions bent on self-propagation. They may hear us promoting our churches as God’s house. Since they’ve already met God outside, church isn’t worth the extra hassle.

So if your church welcomes fewer people on a Sunday, and those who come tend to be less engaged all around, it’s not going to change because the priest ups her preaching game, the musician brings in a drum, and you maintain a steady flow of online worship. The ground has shifted. The break is real.

I don’t rejoice at this reality. The fact is, something fundamental about the American Christian story has been waiting to crack, like land stretched across a fault line. God knows, there have been plenty of tremors. Now it’s a full-on break.

Religious commentator Phyllis Tickle pointed to this time as one of those periodic awakenings or “rummage sales” that Christianity holds every five hundred years or so, when it purges what’s no longer useful and reforms itself for the age to come. In her final years, she promised we were entering “the Age of the Spirit,” when our obsession with order and control would backfire, and we’d be forced to rely on the wily ways of the Holy Spirit. “Our jaws should drop open in amazement,” she remarked at an Emerging Church conference in Memphis back in 2013 (I was sitting in the pews scribbling furiously). “I think we’re seeing a shift in Christianity as dramatic as that first Pentecost wildfire.”

Our elder sister was more right than even she knew. Who could have predicted so much would crack, crack, and finally break open all at once? Now that it’s happening, what do we do? We will address that last question in the chapters that follow. For now, I’d like to survey the disrupted cultural and social landscape all around.

The Great Unraveling

Alan Roxburgh is an excellent guide for starting our exploration. In his book Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World, he explores the story of a group of church families he calls the “Euro-tribal churches.” These faith communities trace to the migration of peoples from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Northern Europe following the Reformations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the spread of colonial empires.⁶ On this family tree, Episcopalians and Congregationalists trace to England, along with Baptists and Methodists (themselves an offshoot of Anglicanism). Presbyterians hail from Scotland. Lutherans carry Germany and Scandinavia in their DNA. Mennonites point back to the Netherlands and Germany.

Although they cast a global net now, these mostly White denominational families still identify with the cultural tendencies of their forebears. In many of these churches, including my own Episcopal Church, it’s difficult to differentiate between what is holy and essential and what is actually racial, cultural, class preference. White identity and dominant American Christianity have been poured and blended into the same jar, and together they serve the purposes of empire.⁷

What does this familiar but loaded term mean? Empire is one country exercising power over another country, through colonial settlement but also through military domination, political sovereignty, or indirect means of control.⁸ For example, the Roman and British empires extended into distant lands and relied on local assemblies and governors who recognized the sovereignty (or the rule) of Rome or England. American empire, on the other hand, has wielded control through military might and indirect mechanisms like economy and culture. Sociologist George Ritzer calls it the McDonaldization of the globe.

Colonialism can be understood almost as a subset of empire. The Oxford English Dictionary defines colonialism as “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”⁹ So, for instance, the British colonized by sending settlers who removed the original occupants, permanently occupied their lands, harnessed resources in the colony for the sake of the settlers and the imperial ruler, and otherwise established the empire’s physical, political, and cultural power. The Euro-tribal churches were essential to that enterprise (we will visit this story in far greater detail in chapters 3 and 4).

Northern European cultural groups controlled much of American Christian life, even though they were not the only Christians here. In the 1700s and 1800s, Black people made up anywhere from one-sixth to one-third of the population of most colonies and states. Later, southern Europeans from Italy and Greece and their eastern European cousins brought an array of new smells, tastes, skin tones, and ways of being to America.

Faced with these non-dominant groups, the Euro-tribal churches had a choice: venture out, get to know the margins and newcomers, and create more culturally malleable Christian communities; or serve primarily as assimilating institutions that guide outsiders into subservient relationship to the White center.

At the risk of sweeping generalization, the Methodists and Baptists were more willing to invest energy and resources in the missionary venture, embracing outdoor revivals and bold ministry with Whites and Blacks, rich and poor. On the other end of the continuum, to varying degrees, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Presbyterians preferred to welcome new people into their existing cultural enclaves . . . if they welcomed outside groups at all.

The latter assimilation strategy was sure to break down over time; logic and numbers demanded it. Immigrants were arriving with their own faith traditions, many of them Roman Catholic or Orthodox Christians, in addition to non-Christian groups like Jews (already present but ballooning because of European persecution), Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and more. Immigration laws were once engineered to artificially stem the flow and favor European migration. That ended in 1965, when America stopped fighting reality and the Immigration and Naturalization Act formally opened the doors and for a time eliminated pro-Europe, pro-White quotas.

That same year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and protected Black people’s right to the ballot box. The 1960s also gave life to fulsome movements for liberation among women and Chicanos (Mexican Americans) that in turn fueled movements for gay liberation, disability rights, and so much more. A generation grew up with their voices raised to claim civil rights and self-determination, and to push back at social hierarchies and restrictions. In other words, they pushed against the White, heterosexual, able-bodied men who were the face and voice of dominant American Christianity. The battle lines for the culture wars were drawn.

Beneath all these cultural and identity developments ran an even more fundamental shift: people asserting their right to have no faith at all. Since 1990, people who claim no faith tradition (the “Nones”) have grown exponentially as a share of the American religious landscape.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, digital advances pushed the pace of cultural change into hyperdrive. In our book The Episcopal Way, Eric Law and I attempted to chart the seismic shifts rocking church and society,¹⁰ from the internet and social media to brain functioning, networking and emergent theory to flattened authority, globalization to secularism. We concluded our analysis by noting, “The America we now inhabit is every bit wilderness, moving faster, filled with emerging voices and cultures, playing out in the flesh and online, the local going global and the global suddenly at the front door.”¹¹

America’s dominant Christian groups tried to adapt for this wilderness sojourn, but they didn’t get far. Coming out of the 1970s, the ascendant evangelical and Pentecostal churches embraced music, language, and especially media that reflected the surrounding culture, but they doubled down on conservative gender and political identities. Now they are the loudest and most recognizable voice of Christianity in America, and they often speak in direct and even violent opposition to emerging generations and cultures.

Over the same period, the more moderate and liberal Protestant mainline has worked to align its social stands with public calls for liberation. I count this as a blessing, since scripture affirms that God is at work wherever people honor one another’s human dignity, contribute to common flourishing, and grow in love (1 John 4:7–12). Unfortunately, while members of these churches mastered the language of inclusivity and welcome—Episcopalians are known for our signs announcing “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You”—they were overall more hesitant to engage the public or to venture beyond their founders’ Euro-tribal identities, cultural preferences, aesthetics, and worship styles. I don’t think these churches always intended to exclude non-dominant groups and cultures. When you love something—especially something bound up with the sacred—it’s difficult to imagine why anybody else would not love it, too. In that model, segregation is nearly inevitable.

In the absence of significant efforts on any dominant church’s part to meet people where they were and to honor God’s life in marginalized cultures and spaces, it was only a matter of time until younger and increasingly diverse Americans stopped trying to find a way into these churches’ walled-off fortresses. As one millennial shared with my colleague Carrie Boren Headington, an evangelist and racial healing leader in the Diocese of Dallas: “Our workplaces, social hangouts, and even families are much more diverse than the church. Why would we go to church, where we and our friends would not feel comfortable because of its homogeneity? I feel like God is more outside the church than inside.”

What does all this mean? If we return to Roxburgh’s metaphor of unraveling, we can now see that the tapestry of dominant American Christianity—already full of loose threads—has hopelessly snagged, pulled, and unraveled. Could we simply tuck some threads back in? Roxburgh cautions against easy technical fixes. “Ours is not just any unraveling: it is a great unraveling, for something precious and enormously important to us has come apart and can no longer be woven back together.”¹²

Whatever majority American Christianity was it can no longer claim to be. Decline has caused us to spin and unravel. We have entered the wilderness. We’ve been humbled and unseated. We have cracked open.

Journey to the Cross

All of which brings us to 2020 and the advent of a lethal virus that spreads with particular vigor in crowds, close physical proximity, and wherever people speak, sing, or eat together. In other words: among faith communities.

Early in the spring, congregations began to shut their doors, at first with halting steps, then in great, apocalyptic sweeps. The Lenten readings were in eerie alignment with our lived experience. The third Sunday in Lent, we closed up and followed the Israelites into the wilderness (Exodus 17:1–7). They “quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’”—we echoed their plaintive cry. The Israelites complained to Moses and begged for provision; our exhausted leaders and volunteers scrambled to provide worship, pastoral care, and urgent community services without causing more harm than good. The loss of communion was perhaps most keen. Where was our manna? Where was the water of life?

On the fourth Sunday in Lent, March 22, my entire city of New York moved into lockdown. The streets were empty, save the ambulances zooming to overflowing hospitals. The psalm appointed for that day was Psalm 23:

The LORD is my shepherd;

I shall not be in want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures

and leads me beside still waters. . . .

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil;

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

It helped, knowing others had trod this path before and found God to be present and faithful. But it still hurt, not being able to touch or even breathe together, especially as so many entered the valley of the shadow of death.

On the fifth Sunday of Lent, we watched as Jesus made the solemn journey to visit his dear friend Lazarus, already dead and in the tomb for four days (John 11). The shortest line in scripture—“Jesus wept”—was now one of the most meaningful. This Jesus who suffered with his friends, wept with his friends, and loved his friends: this was the face of God we desperately needed to see.

Holy Week felt more early church than twenty-first century. We were like those in catacombs, banished from our buildings, gathering and praying in small circles, finding one another online to tell stories and remember the one we loved. Meals had shades of Jesus’s Last Supper on Maundy Thursday. His loneliness in the garden, just before the authorities came to take him away, resonated with the isolation of those who would die alone.

Good Friday requi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Reality of Disruption and Decline
• 2 New Hope for Beloved Community
• 3 The Origins of the Nightmare
• 4 The Church of Empire
• 5 Shards of Light
• 6 Lose Your Life—Kenosis
• 7 Gain Your Life—Solidarity
• 8 Walk in Love—Discipleship
• Conclusion: God Bless the Cracks
• Acknowledgments
• Notes