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First off, let me apologize for the scarcity of posts lately. I just finished up my first full week at Yale University as a freshman, and thus I’ve been incredibly busy. I’ll be trying to post at least a minimum of once a week though, so don’t tune out completely.
However, the delay in posting has not been mentally barren; rather it has provided me with much to ponder and write about. Thus, I present some scattered thoughts on my first week at Yale.
1. My first Sunday (August 30), I attended a morning service at the University Church at Battell Chapel, which is only a few hundred feet away from my dorm room. I loved it. The service was ecumenically Christian, drawing on multiple Christian traditions from around the world, with a rich liturgy and diversity of music and prayer. I felt connected to the worldwide Body of Christ, while still being keenly aware of the particularity of being part of a Christian community in the context of the university. The University Church exists and thrives in the middle of this tension: it is both expansively global and self-consciously contextual, uniting the immediate and the distant, the past and present, with an eye towards the future and a vision for the whole world.
2. Yale is a wonderful place to discuss ideas. I am already profiting from being around people who are eager to examine and debate, people who value my (sometimes unorthodox) perspectives even when their own opinions differ. I feel accepted here in a remarkable way: no one is going to reject me because I don’t tow the line, no one is going to say that I don’t belong just because I don’t agree. (This has been my experience in the community as a whole, but I sense it to be true also in the University Church — a wonderful change from my last year in Augusta.) I feel free to be open about the way that my politics are drawn from my faith, and this gives me a unique voice in the ongoing political discourse that thrives here.
3. Returning to the subject of church: I finally received communion again, at the University Church both today and last week. This was the first time I’d received the sacrament since last summer, at the Youth Theological Initiative at Candler. This was somehow appropriate: for the past year, between YTI and Yale, I was adrift, lacking any real faith community to serve as a spiritual base. That was not fun. But partaking of the Eucharist at Yale seemed to me to signify a new beginning: that I am finally at least in the process of finding a community in which to live for Christ.
4. Today, I finally filled out the necessary form in order to register to vote. I decided to register in Connecticut, rather than Georgia, because for the next four years I’ll be much more interested in the local politics of New Haven than in those of Augusta. In addition, I rather hesitantly made the decision to register as a Democrat. I despise the two-party system (which has destroyed much of American democracy); but because Connecticut is dependably blue, the only way to have a meaningful say in who goes to Washington is to vote in the Democratic primaries. Because primary elections in this state are closed, it is necessary to register with a party in order to vote in them. (It’s quite possible that in the general elections I’ll be voting for third-party candidates — but I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.)
5. A final note on the University Church: Last month I described various criteria I would be using in searching for a new church. Remarkably, to at least some degree, the University Church fulfills all of them. This is more than I could have hoped for; clearly God is at work in my life at Yale.
6. Sometime this coming week, I plan to obtain my official New Haven resident’s card. These cards, suitable as a form of identification in almost all official capacities, are provided by the city to any resident, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. In common with several of my new friends here, my primary purpose in getting the card is to express solidarity with residents who are at risk because of the way the American immigration system operates. I believe that these cards have theological and ethical import for Christians, because of our call to solidarity with the oppressed and our own position as a “resident alien” in all the kingdoms of the world.
For various reasons, I’ve recently decided to permanently leave the church I’ve been attending for some time. Soon (August 28!), I’ll be starting college at Yale, and I’ll be searching for a new community of faith in the New Haven area. Here’s what I’m looking for.
- I’m not limiting myself to a specific denomination, but I’m attracted to Methodist and Episcopal churches. My theology is very anabaptist in flavor on many points, and so I’d love the opportunity to explore one of those traditions. Any of the historic peace churches attract me, for obvious reasons (this overlaps with the anabaptist category).
- I desperately need a congregation that will affirm me as a member of the community even where I openly differ with the majority opinion on an issue: a community that doesn’t make me afraid to disagree, that respects me as the role of “faithful dissenter” where necessary. This isn’t something I’ve encountered yet.
- An emphasis on social justice and poverty work would be great to be around. I’d love the opportunity to grow in my faith in an environment that recognizes the importance of poverty within Jesus’ message and that struggles in solidarity with the oppressed.
- Theological depth in the life of the community would be really encouraging, rather than the all-too-common self-help-style sermon with a Scripture thrown in for good measure.
- I’d like to finally go to a church that spends more time speaking against materialism than against homosexuality.
- A church composed of more than just upper/middle-class white people would be nice; the Body of Christ is so diverse, but our American churches often do not reflect that.
On March 5, three days ago, I wrote a post on why I don’t fit in at my SBC church.
On March 7, just yesterday, I wrote a post about the “Theology of Watchmen“, discussing the way it reflects the American religion of Christian Nationalism. In that post, I referenced “churches that obscure the cross with the flag”.
Today, these two subjects combined, as I realized yet again that my own Baptist megachurch is one of those institutions. In fact, my Sunday school classroom is adorned with three miniature American flags, and on the wall hangs a WWI Pearl Harbor calendar. The March image is a 1940’s poster depicting artillery gunners, with the caption “Your job is to keep ‘em shooting!”
Blessed are the peacemakers?
Don’t get me wrong. I do not take issue with people who fly the flag or are “patriotic”, and I myself am “patriotic” in a cultural (not nationalistic) sense. But the Church is not the place for flag-waving, and it is not the place for vintage military propaganda. I find it hard to imagine Jesus encouraging the early Christians to decorate their houses of worship with symbols of the Roman Empire. But today, that is exactly what many congregations, including my own, are doing.
I attend a large Southern Baptist church here in Augusta. I have some very good friends there; I enjoy the youth group, and the head pastor is clearly a brilliant guy. More significantly, when I started going to this church a couple years ago, it helped me get out of a long-running spiritual rut that had developed at the tiny, Plymouth Brethren assembly I’d been a member of before.
But as my theology (and thus my “applied theology” — my politics) has developed and matured over the last year, I’ve felt increasingly out of place. I’ve never really had a particular affinity for the Southern Baptist Convention, though I’ve attended several strong SBC churches over the years and SBC theology was formative for me at an early stage (for better or for worse). My loyalty to my local church was, and is, to just that: to my own congregation, not the denomination it was a part of. But recently, I’ve found that the distance between my church’s theology and my own — and, more significantly, the difference between the internal culture of my church and my own vision for what the culture of the Church should be — is so great as to make me feel distinctly out of place. This hit a high point during the election last year, when not only was I one of about three non-McCain/Palin-supporters in my youth group of over a hundred teens, but I also encountered multiple instances of racist rhetoric and sentiment triggered by the campaign.
Yesterday, another incident occurred, a relatively minor one that I thought nothing of at the time, but that I now recognize to be symptomatic of my general status as a theological and political outsider in my own church.
This week I bought a t-shirt adorned by a green peace symbol made of trees and plants. I bought the shirt simply because I liked the design, seeing it as an accurate representation of a significant portion of my beliefs. I wore this shirt yesterday, and had it on when I went to the Wednesday youth service.
After the service, another member of my youth group asked me if I choose my clothing just to be confrontational or stir up debate.
Huh?
It’s unfortunate tragic that in any modern church an eco-peace symbol can be considered “controversial” or “provocative” in some sense, or be seen to convey a “dumb” or “unchristian” message. Given that Jesus Christ was one of the most radical advocates of nonviolence ever to have lived, I’m often at a loss for just how opposed to his ideals much of the modern church seems.
Oh well. In six months I’ll be in college. Maybe I’ll be Quaker or something.
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
-Ghandi
That, my friends, is the problem with the modern American church.
According to a report from the Barna Research Group, 85% percent of young non-christians view the church as hypocritical. The report also says:
When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was “Christianity is changed from what it used to be” and “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.” These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).
That’s a problem. And it’s our own fault.
The church has the potential to completely transform society, to influence it in powerful ways. We haven’t. We’ve become so caught up in moral rules that we’ve lost sight of moral transformation; too fixated on societal problems to catalyze societal change.
Jesus was a radical. So many Christians today (myself included, much of the time) have lost sight of that fact. We’re comfortable. Our freedoms have softened our faith; our rights have weakened our relationship with the living God.
So.
What are we going to do about it?
What does Jesus want us to do about it?
I think the answer is clear.
“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take us his cross and follow me.” {Matthew 16.24}
Somewhere along the road, American Christianity set down its cross. We all do it sometimes. But there’s no reason we can’t go back.
There’s no reason we can’t take up our cross again.
