Spiritual Hiccups - Who Am I, and Why Am I Here?

I have a lot of thoughts bouncing around in my head this morning, and when that happens, I always wonder if God is connected to any of them.  An elder in my church, in the context of a discussion on declining church attendance, wondered if congregations weren't asking the wrong question.  Rather than, "Why aren't people coming here on Sunday?" perhaps we should ask, "Why would anyone want to be a Christian these days?"

At the same time, I heard someone from another church complaining that the reason for decline in our Presbyterian denomination is that we have no real message, that we are afraid to call our members to the hard work of discipleship.

I wonder if there isn't a common thread to the comments from these two folks.  Do we Christians have a distinct enough identity that it has any real meaning in our world?  And if we don't have an identity, can we have a message?

In today's epistle, Paul writes to the church in Corinth, "'All things are lawful,' but not all things are beneficial. 'All things are lawful,' but not all things build up. Do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other."  The Corinthian congregation was apparently one with great energy but also great excesses, and some of them embraced their freedom in Christ to the extreme.  The particular issue here is eating meat sacrificed to idols.  (Much meat sold in Paul's day had been.)  Some Corinthians argued that since there was only one true God, what difference did it make where the meat came from.  Paul would grant them the logic of their argument, but he was more concerned about how these actions might impact others.  If their freedom had a negative impact on other believers or on the image of the community of faith, one should not exercise that freedom, says Paul.

Our culture is enamored with freedom and "my rights."  And even though the public is disgusted with the partisan gridlock in Washington, we keep it going by electing those we think will "protect my interests."  We rarely follow Paul's advice to seek the advantage of the other over our own.  Our individualism has grown so dominant, that we seemingly cannot.

Christianity in America has very often adopted the same individualistic mindset and in the process become a primarily private thing.  And the more private it becomes, the less possibility is has to give us a distinct identity.  We look no different from the world around us, and so our lives bear no witness to the possibility of a new life in Christ.

The Church did not set out to lose its identity.  But over the centuries, thinking of American as a "Christian nation" led to thinking that being a good citizen was perfectly compatible with faith and, further, that living as a good citizen in America would shape a person as a Christian.  All the Church need do was have worship and fill in a few of the finer doctrinal points.  Of course the problem with such a setup is that it depends on the culture keeping up its side of the bargain.  But our culture decided decades ago that it was just fine without us.  It stopped doing things to prop up the Church, and in the old, mainline denominations (those most tied to the culture), the decline has been steady ever since.

To be sure, the culture has lost out as well.  Faith once served as a restraint on the worst tendencies of individualism, tempering it with a commitment to community, to the neighbor.  Most certainly the decline of faith communities has contributed to a weakening of the social bonds that had helped balance my freedoms with the other's needs and well being.

But there is no going back to the 1950s, however appealing that might be to some.  Rather, people of faith must do the work of defining who we are in this time and place.  We have actually been given huge opportunity to consider afresh what it means to be a follower of Jesus, to think about what it means to be faithful in this age.  And then we will need to be able to transmit this identity to others.

I am more and more convinced that this will have two parts. The first is a deepening spirituality taught and practiced in our congregations.  We need to learn or relearn how to draw close to God, to listen for the Spirit, and discover our true humanity made in God's image.  And this will necessarily be paired with becoming communities of love who work for the good of the other.  People will not simply go to this church on Sunday.  Instead they will be the body of Christ together.

This work will be harder for older, established congregations than it might be for those less bound to old patterns forged during our old alliance with the culture.  But easy or hard, this is the work that is before us.  And in Christ, we are more than capable of the task.

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