Over the years I have become increasingly allergic to “religious” language. This creates a certain level of cognitive dissonance because I am a pastor, after all, tasked with using words (literally, I’m a minister of Word & Sacrament) in religious contexts.
However, my allergy arises because of the vacuity or performativity I perceive in much religious language. It’s as if religious sense-making takes place entirely apart from the world as we know it, or is considered a required veneer, something that must be inserted in order to hold space for faith.
As one example, some Christians may feel a sense of responsibility to “proclaim the gospel.” Dig down into what they mean by “gospel” and you find out its about communicating a set of religious claims, such as “Jesus died for your sins” or “developing a personal relationship with Jesus.”
This kind of gospel (on some levels) kind of innocuous, and I don’t necessarily disagree with the general direction of the speech act. I also believe Jesus died for my sins and I do have (albeit comported differently from some other Christians) a “personal” relationship with Jesus.
However, all of this communication of the gospel remains at the level of a kind of discursive positivity, as if the gospel were just about “the gospel.” It’s a communication loop that never lands anywhere. “The gospel is the gospel. We have to share the gospel!”
This positivist performativity makes me think of the teaching at the end of Jesus’ sermon on the mount, when he says, “It isn’t those who cry out, ‘My Savior! My Savior!’ who will enter the kingdom of heaven; rather, it is those who do the will of Abba God in heaven.” Jesus then goes on to say, “Anyone who hears my words and puts them into practice is like the sage who built a house on a rock… anyone who hears my words but does not put them into practice is like the fool who built a house on sandy ground.”
Jesus’ brother James picked up on this teaching and included it in his letter, “But act on this word—because if all you do is listen to it, you’re deceiving yourselves. Those who listen to God’s word but don’t put it into practice are like those who look into mirrors at their own faces; they look at themselves, then go off and promptly forget what they looked like.”
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Here’s another example. Recently I shared on social media a mission statement for our congregation I’d drafted for a grant I was writing at the time. It reads:
"We are a progressive church that walks in solidarity with the community providing mutual aid and creatively adapting to the needs of our neighbors as they arise."
I wrote the mission statement this way in an attempt to adequately state what we actually do, right now, boots on the ground. It’s only aspirational in the sense that I hope we keep doing it and doing it better and better. But it inserts nothing that isn’t literally true of us.
Intriguingly, I got no pushback on the statement from members of our congregation or community members. But I did receive a lot of unsolicited responses from some clergy colleagues.
For example, one pastor wrote, “There is a lot of emphasis and fleshing out of service in your statement, not much of the spiritual or what “church” is. Perhaps consider reworking it.”
I sat with this comment for a bit and tried to imagine how to respond. I wondered: Why do we think what I wrote isn’t spiritual or doesn’t define what church “is” simply through what we “do”? And how do we not think that ‘mutual aid’ ‘walking in solidiarity’ aren’t definitions of church? And perhaps most important, if we think church statements de facto need to sound “spiritual,” are we tacitly indicating the rest of the world besides the church isn’t spiritual and church has a special claim on spirituality?
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Perhaps if I had only received one reply challenging the supposedly “secular” nature of the mission statement I wouldn’t have ended up blogging about it, but the edits kept pouring in. Here’s another example: "progressive church" without something that unfolds that in relation to God, worship, scripture, etc, would leave me wondering what the point would be to check it out (or give it a grant) as opposed to some "secular" group. Embarrassment among progressives to articulate faith connections is, IMHO, a reason our churches are dwindling.
I’ll admit, I'm at the point in my life where I am 1000% ok with being accused of the church risking "simply becoming a service organization." I take Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" and Dorothee Soelle's "God is justice" as point of departure.
But an even more thorough response: Who is embarrassed? If we look at Scripture, don’t we see precisely encouragement to live and practice along the lines of this very mission statement (see, for example, James on pure religion) and avoid overt displays of religiosity? In other words, the articulation of faith connections or the intentional dampening of it has far less to do with supposed embarrassment and much more to do with an actual biblically-grounded encouragement to temper or moderate such overt religiosity.
I’m also just thinking along the lines of the gospels themselves and how they describe Christ’s religious practices. It isn’t that the gospels never mention that Jesus goes to the synagogue. He definitely does, and then teaches there. But, and I think this is the crucial point: the “mission” of Jesus is never described as “conducting religious observances through synagogue attendance.” Rather, if you read the gospel you pick up very clearly the mission of Jesus.
It’s this: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”
And before we think that “the good news” means “Jesus saves you from your sins,” I invite everyone to just take the time to look at the entirety of the Scriptures, where you’ll quite quickly discover (as again James the brother of Jesus summarizes) the good news related to the poor: “Listen, dear sisters and brothers: didn’t God choose those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom promised to those who love God? Yet you’ve treated poor people shamefully! Aren’t rich people exploiting you? Aren’t they the ones who haul you into the courts, and who blaspheme that noble Name by which you’ve been called?”
Or in the even briefer and more poetic terms of Jesus’ mother: “he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”
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The most crisp editorial comment that came in: “Needs the gospel with clarity.”
My response: Please tell me how this isn’t the gospel with clarity. I mean, there seems to be an entire thread running all the way through Scripture modeling “show me the gospel without telling me the gospel.” From the parables of Jesus, the the story of Esther, to much of the letter of James itself, and on and on, there is a kind of theological reticence at work as a thread within Christianity that I appreciate and strive to claim.
Perhaps in an entirely other context where religious language is rare, illegal, oppressed, etc., I could understand a stubborn commitment to over expressions of religiosity. But contextually, in this moment when religion (and Christianity in particular) is being discursively tethered to so many moral frameworks and fascist strategies genuinely at odds with authentic Christianity, I think churches expressing their mission in ways that fully dissolve them into appearing like regular old “social service organizations” may actually be one of the most authentic ways to move.
I’ve been pondering a line from a Paul Tillich essay for a while now. I’m carrying it around like a mantra. Tillich argued, in an essay on religious socialism, “Religion is truer the more it cancels itself out as religion over against culture without thereby losing its specifically religious power.”
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Here’s a final practical point. I was raised in a church that, by and large, believed its primary responsibility was to host a range of special “religious” programming. Central was worship, of course, but then there was also church camp and Bible study and choirs and youth group and committee meetings and special church events.
I tend to think now, looking back on those halcyon days of church life in the 1980s, that those events and programs were the practical corollary of the positivist assertion that the church has to use language that sounds “religious” in order for it to truly be the language of faith. That is to say, by demanding that the church sound particularly religious, you end up with an entity that invests a lot of time and money in then also doing things together that look religious.
We might ask ourselves: how has that been working? Like, do we have any data that Sunday school, or confirmation, or other church programs, is tied to specific outcomes?
But more crucially, we might ask ourselves: which of those things that churches busied themselves doing actually align with the mission statement of Jesus expressed in the gospel of Matthew: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”
If you honestly asked yourself which kind of church is walking in the way of Jesus, would it be a church that has Sunday school classes, worship, confirmation, bible studies, and midweek church fellowship opportunities? Or is it a church that cancels all its classes and programs to provide housing, feed people, open their doors for a medical clinic, and risk losing the generosity of rich donors because it was out advocating for the rights of the poor, which are in our present day as always currently completely at odds with the privileges and power of the rich?
And if it is the latter, do you need a lot of religious language in there at all? Or can we mostly rely on the shared imagination of a culture that has some broad familiarity with the Jesus of history and can recognize those who follow him by the way they live their lives?
And even if they don’t connect the dots, does that even matter? Why does someone needing shelter need to know you’re providing it for religious reasons? What’s not gospel about pouring ourselves out entirely in social service? The church in America is a multi-billion dollar enterprise after all. Imagine what good news it would be if that whole enterprise actually and truly moved in solidarity with the poor.
“There is a lot of emphasis and fleshing out of service in your statement, not much of the spiritual or what “church” is. Perhaps consider reworking it.”
I offered that out as something to think about because you also creatively engage with God's story to help people connect and think more deeply about issues of faith and life in ways that are markedly unique and different from typical churches. I thought that was worth lifting up in your mission statement as a true reflection of who you are.
Incredible!