A Crisis Of Identity

Sometime in my ministry, the church I served changed from being a church desiring to be salt to a church desiring to be honey to help the world's solutions go down a bit easier. At first I thought it was a problem of liberal vs. conservative, or peacemaking vs. war-making. But lately I've decided it reflects the more fundamental problem of the church and the world.

What does the American world see when it looks at the American church today? Will Campbell, that great Southern prophet, was confronted by one of his friends who compared the church to an Easter chicken. Let me offer this passage from Campbell's Brother to a Dragonfly:

"You know, Preacher Will, that church of yours and Mr. Jesus is like an Easter chicken my little Karen got one time. Man, it was a pretty thing. Dyed a deep purple. Bought it at the grocery store."

I interrupted that white was the liturgical color for Easter but he ignored me. "And it served a real useful purpose. Karen loved it. It made her happy. And that made me and her mamma happy. Okay?"

I said, "Okay."

"But pretty soon that baby chicken started feathering out. You know, sprouting little pin feathers. Wings and tail and all that. And you know what? Them new feathers weren't purple. No sirree bob, that damn chicken wasn't really purple at all.

That damn chicken was a Rhode Island Red. And when all them little red feathers started growing out from under that purple it was one hell of a sight. All of a sudden Karen couldn't stand that chicken any more."

"I think I see what you're driving at, P.D."

"No, hell no, Preacher Will. You don't understand any such thing for I haven't got to my point yet."

"Okay. I'm sorry. Rave on."

"Well, we took that half-purple and half-red thing out to her Grandma's house and threw it out in the chicken yard with all the other chickens. It was still different, you understand. That little chicken. And the other chickens knew it was different. And they resisted it like hell. Pecked it, chased it all over the yard. Wouldn't have anything to do with it Wouldn't even let it get on the roost with 'them. And that little chicken knew it was different too. It didn't bother any of the others. Wouldn't fight back or anything. Just stayed by itself. Really suffered too. But little by little, day by day, that chicken came around. Pretty soon, even before all the purple grew off of it while it was still just a little bit different, that damn thing was behaving just like the rest of them chickens. Man, it would fight back, peck the hell out of the ones littler than it was, knock them down to catch a bug if it got to it in time. Yes sirree bob, the chicken world turned that Easter chicken round. And now you can I tell one chicken from another. They're all just alike. The Easter chicken is just one more chicken. There ain't a damn thing different about it."

I knew he wanted to argue and I didn't want to disappoint him.

"Well, P.D., the Easter chicken is still useful. It lays eggs, doesn't it?''

It was just what he wanted me to say. "Yea, Preacher Will. It lays eggs. But they all lay eggs. Who needs an Easter chicken for that? And the Rotary Club serves coffee. And the 4-H Club says prayers: The Red Cross takes up offerings for hurricane victims. Mental Health does counseling and the Boy Scouts have youth programs.

IN HIS BOOK The Public Church, Martin Marty says that we mainline--he calls us "old-line"--Protestants, in being open to involvement with the public world, have not been discriminatingly open. In our concern to use political activism put the national house in order, many of us old-line Protestants have failed to take care of business at home.

A while back, one of our church boards was busy doing what church boards do best--drafting a resolution. The resolution, addressed to 'the state legislature, .said that we wanted all buildings in South Carolina to be accessible "to the handicapped. A handicapped woman spoke up, "You hypocrites. I doubt there is a preacher here that comes from a church that is totally accessible to the handicapped. "How many of you have Sunday school classes for the retarded? Or a transportation committee for elderly shut-ins?"

Her words hit home, for it is always easier to dictate morality from the safe and relatively risk-free environment of public policy or to spend someone else's tax money to work for justice than to do justice in the church. The social activism of most liberal, mainline denominations sounds as if someone has asked us Christians to run the government rather than to be the church. And in so doing, we are both unrealistic about our effect upon the present political situation and unsuspecting victims of inadequate ecclesiology.

This is so because, if I remember church history correctly, the persistent problem is not how to keep the church from withdrawing from the world but how to keep the world from subverting the church. In each age the church succumbs to that Constantinian notion that we can get a handle on the way the world is run. Take charge, fit the world's standards of justice into a loosely Christian framework, substitute a little worldly wisdom for gospel foolishness, talk power rather than love, and call this Christian social concern.

Whenever the church has sought to prop itself up by the power of Caesar or the democratic mob, trusting the power of legalistic coercion rather than trusting the power of truth, the world has co-opted the church. Today, for instance, advocates of liberation theology, having decided in whose hands the political future lies, tell the church to exchange our familiar capitalist bedfellows for Marxist ones. Then when the revolution is over, the church will once again get to help run the world. Or the Moral Majority declares that the United States is basically a Christian country and legislatively tries to force everyone to accept the moral standards it cannot even achieve in its own churches.

Long before the rise of the Religious Right, we liberals decided that social concern meant politics rather than the witness of the cross. We began improving the world rather than reforming the church. As a result, we have become victims of what theologian Jurgen Moltmann has called chameleon theology, in which an acculturated church, baffled by its inability to have an impact on society or to get anyone significant to talk to it anymore, blends into society and becomes a victim of every passing fad, while politely waiting hat in hand for something useful to do to help keep society intact.

THOUGHTLESS INVOLVEMENT and indiscriminate openness have led us to a crisis of identity. As I see it, the mainline churches' problem is not that we are out of the world, but that we are not in the world on our own terms. Not long ago someone said of my own United Methodist Church that while we have talked so much about the need for the church to serve the community, he sees a need to reflect upon how to make a community in the church.

Now, you misread me if you hear this as a call for a retreat from social concern or a new narcissism in the church. I'm pleading for a more radical concern: an engagement with American society on our own terms. I'm pleading for a social activism that is appropriate for those under the cross who constantly wonder what it means not to be conformed to this world and who recognize Jesus Christ as Lord.

Historically it seems that a church that spends too much energy leaning over to speak to the world sometimes falls in. Rather than criticize, we mirror contemporary American preoccupations with competing rights and privileges and narcissistic self-affirmation. We show a curious ethical split between private and public morality; we couple a laissez faire attitude toward personal morality with a legalistic, coercive stance on public policy. We confidently assert what ought to be done on all sorts of global problems but are utterly confused about advice to give two people in a bedroom.

The world doesn't need us to say, "First, be sure you're right in your heart and to hell with everybody else." It's already doing that. The world must think that our social pronouncements are rather tame, because we have been through a long process of universalizing and generalizing our principles in hopes of making them applicable to every thinking, rational American rather than to the people of God in particular.

In approaching ethical problems, it seems we can't afford to refer to the biblical witness or even church tradition, because we are attempting to reduce our stance to something that every rational person might be able to affirm. We can't speak of sin to those who know no standard of justice other than their own opinion and particularly to those who do not know a God who forgives.

A church that no longer preaches grace can't afford to admit to the presence of sin in every human activity, even the most rational and most sensitive of activities. All we can do is moralize, tell people to do the best they can, and preach sincerity as the sole ethical criterion. We dare not aspire too high in our ethics, if we are speaking to people who really believe that they are the sole fabricators of what is good. And so we present Christian morality as something that makes good sense, something that will help keep American society running smoothly.

We thus imply that it is possible to live the Christian life without holding the Christian faith. Any thinking person should be able to affirm such principles as the Ten Commandments and Paul's ethical injunctions, we say. We thus fail to do justice to the radical quality of Christian ethics, which are based more on a relationship than on practicality. We jettison the very faith commitments that make Christian ethics intelligible. This leaves us with little to back up our social concern other than sentiment, open-mindedness, pragmatism, and expediency. All this is just to say that the church's peculiar way of relating to the world must arise out of the peculiar group of people that is the church.

THE CHURCH IS a countercultural phenomenon. The Bible thus calls us a colony of heaven. Whatever we say about the church's social concern must arise out of that view. My criticism of mainline liberal Protestantism is that our churches are unable to be very critical of the current social order, since we rely upon that order as a prop for a church more concerned with being attuned to the status quo than to being truthful. In so doing we have handed to the world evidence that truth alone is not strong enough to preserve the church.

Some have referred to Jesus' statement of turning the other cheek as hyperbole. Well, it should be noted that there are Christians and there have been Christians who have taken that very seriously.

A recent biography of Martin Luther King Jr. makes the comment, "Martin Luther King practiced nonviolence as a useful strategy within the civil rights movement in his time." No. Martin Luther King practiced nonviolence because it was all he had. It was the only social mechanism Jesus gave him. He would have been nonviolent, I would say, if it had worked or not. But of course King could practice nonviolence because, first of all, he was a good person. But he also could practice nonviolence because he had an institution strong enough to back him up and to make nonviolent behavior possible even for violent people. And if you don't have that institution, you'd best get a bigger gun than the other side has and go to it.

I can remember those days in the civil rights movement. You'd go down to march, to do something useful in Mississippi. And what they would do first is pack you in some little, crowded, hot, black Baptist church. Three hours later, after four sermons and 38 spirituals, you were still sitting there, praying. I said, "Let's get out there and get with it doing something important," "No, no," they said, "we've been at this a little longer than you have. And we know that when you go out there to face the principalities and powers, you'd better have more backing you up than your kind of open-minded humanism."

The crucial political question for the church is, therefore, what kind of community do we need in order to be faithful to our Christian convictions? The church exists as congregation, a congregating of those who have been called forth to live the truth which is not a new philosophy but the truth which is this Jew from Nazareth.

Our primary task is not to give advice to Congress or to help the president keep running things smoothly, as if America were the key to the truth of Jesus Christ. Our first political task is to be the church, to keep criticizing our message and mission and life together, so that we become a people who are formed and reformed by our dominant convictions.

The primary question is not whether what we advocate is effective or acceptable or practical, because it normally is not. The question is whether or not what we advocate is true to the gospel. We criticize the world best by being the church, by being an alien people who belong to another kingdom.

Recently I was in a discussion in an adult Sunday school class. The class had been discussing capital punishment. Some were in favor and some were against. Nothing new about that. Those who were against said, "I find the killing of another human being to be repugnant." And there were others who were for it, saying, "I find the killing of another human being to be repugnant, and therefore those who do these awful crimes should pay." Then someone--I think it was a shoe salesman--said, "Well, you know, sometimes I feel like it's a good idea, and other times I feel like it's a bad idea. But I wonder what Jesus would think?"

I thought to myself, "Bless you, my son, for asking this question," because it really doesn't make much difference whether you've got some sensitive people who are against it and some sensitive people who are for it. But here's that old question: What would Jesus do? And what might that imply for those followers called to walk this perilous way?

The gift of the gospel is in great part the gift of being able to see the world for what it is--a world ruled by powers and forces that derive their strength from our natural human fear of destruction and our natural human need for self-preservation at all costs.

Governments have gained such power over our lives because they offer us security in exchange for truth. Martin Luther called security the ultimate idol. And we have demonstrated over and over again that we'll exchange just about anything for a little taste of security. Membership in the colony of heaven gives us the possibility of freedom from these powers. We are given a vision--a vision that enables us to be honest about the impossibility of self-preservation and the insecurity of all worldly securities. We are given imagination--imagination that transcends the limits of this world.

What can the world do except build bigger bombs and pass tougher laws? Violence and coercion, whether they be military or legislative, are the only means the world has of transcending the human condition. And it's wrong for me to point fingers at the world for using the only means that it has at its disposal, unless I can give the world some other means of being free.

IN A WORLD where there is no God, what can we do? The church must never forget that the imperatives "Come unto me" and "Do this in remembrance of me" are theologically perceived to mean "Go ye into the world." In its very existence, the church serves the world not by running errands for the world but by providing a light for the world, that is, by providing an imaginative alternative for society. The chief political task of the church is not to provide suggestions on social policy but to be in our very existence a social policy.

The gospel call is an invitation to be part of a peculiar people, a colony, an institution that is struggling to create those structures that the world can never achieve through governmental power or balanced self-interests. The world cannot achieve its hope for justice, freedom, and community. The church by its very existence as a colony is a kind of paradigm for society that the world considers impossible. The real validation of the Jesus story is when the world looks at us and says, as it said of our forebears, "See how they love."

Unfortunately, Jesus did not bring us an interesting philosophy of life. He just wasn't that good at philosophy. He brought us a way, a people, a body. And in spite of the best mental gymnastics of our best theologians, if we can't point to a visible community, a body of Christ, we just have nothing to say--and there is no resurrection, and there is no truth.

One Monday morning I was attending a ministers' morning coffee hour. We got into a discussion about abortion. A bunch of older clergy were against it, a bunch of younger clergy for it. One of those who was against it was asked, "Now wait a minute. You're not going to tell me that you think some 15-, 16-year-old is capable of bearing a child, are you?"

"Well," the fellow replied, backing off a little bit, "there are some circumstances when an abortion might be OK."

Sitting there stirring his coffee was a pastor of one of the largest black United Methodist churches in Greenville. He said, "What's wrong with a 16-year-old giving birth? She can get pregnant, can't she?"

Then we said, "Joe, you can't believe a 16-year-old could care for a child."

He replied, "No, I don't believe that. I don't believe a 26-year-old can care for a child. Or a 36-year-old. Pick any age. One person can't raise a child."

So I said, "Look, Joe, the statistics show that by the year 1990, half of all American children will be raised in single-parent households."

"So?" he replied. "They can't do it."

We asked, "What do you do when you have a 16-year-old get pregnant in your church?"

He explained, "Well, it happened last week. We baptized the baby last Sunday, and I said how glad we were to have this new member in this church. Then I called down an elderly couple in the church, and I said, 'Now we're going to baptize this baby and bring it into the family. What I want you all to do is to raise this baby, and while you're doing that raise the momma with it because the momma right now needs it.' This couple is in their 60s, and they've raised about 20 kids. They know what they're doing. And I said, 'If you need any of us, let us know. We're here. It's our child, too.' That's what we do at my church."

Well, it occurred to me that one reason many Christian ethical stances appear so odd is we're trying to proclaim our ethics with no church. Listening to Joe, I knew I was in the presence of someone with a peculiar way of going at the world.

What is the real world? Joe was telling us to get out into the real world. But is the world to define what is real? Is that what we're supposed to accept? We've done such a good job at swallowing so much, I don't blame the world for saying just swallow a little bit more.

No, we will not accept it. We will define what the world looks like. And we will say to the rest of the world, "Come on out of the place where you really think Caesar's somebody, and who is in the White House makes a big difference, into the real world where the poor are royalty."

THE CHURCH HAS a peculiar way of looking at things, and my job, I suppose, as a preacher is to keep laying that kind of peculiarity on us until we see. And it is hard to see because many of our most cherished values keep us from seeing.

The rest of the world goes about disposing of the very young and the very old, the very weak, the very vulnerable, and the very poor, calling that reality. But the church is called to adopt and embrace the little ones in the name of the Lord, who was a little one.

The church is not just to mirror the real world or wring its hands of the world, but the church is to prophetically create a real world. Thus for the church to be politically concerned, we've got to be congregationally concerned. The political question for us is: How can we form a community whose life is faithful to our central conviction? I'd much rather be told that for me the activist question is how to get on the school board or the YMCA board or the planning zone committee than be told that God actually wants to create a visible people back at Northside Baptist Church.

By social concern we too often have meant the politics of power. "Just pass a few laws to give the less powerful just a little more power, and don't bother about those who can't be given any power at all." The social legislation of the world can never serve the poorest and the least powerful. The best it can do is give the less powerful just a little more power and call that justice.

The world cannot give dignity to the very young, and the very old, and the very retarded, and the very sick. There must be hope that they are not dependent upon policy but upon the promise that God's love is stronger than the forces of evil and death and that nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ. Only the church can be the source of that radical hope. As Monika Hellwig says, if it won't play in a cancer ward or a shoddy nursing home for the elderly, then whatever it is, it isn't the gospel.

IN HIS BOOK on the evangelization of the Roman Empire, the Southern Baptist historian Glenn Hinson concludes that Christianity defeated Rome because it out-organized the empire. The church gave the decaying Roman world a vibrant, tightly knit, exclusivistic organization that was an alternative to secular communities. In its institutional life, the church presented the Roman world with a crucial otherness. It struck hard against the edge of something that was not grace, not justice, not redemption. It was a church that well appreciated not only God's involvement in the world but God's apartness even from the empire's best cultural achievements.

Our oldest moral catechism prepared candidates for baptism by instructing them, "You will not kill. You will not have sex with other people's spouses. You will not abuse young children. You will not have sex outside of marriage. You will not abort fetuses." And with this expansion of the Ten Commandments, the church put itself in a head-on collision with some of the Roman world's most widely beloved practices. Not content to be relegated to the back-seat status of a general religious influence on Western culture, the primitive church saw itself as something other than the world that surrounded it.

On the eve of the fourth century, Christians in Rome were said to be feeding 20,000 of that city's poor. Not as a social strategy but as a visible outpouring of what had happened in the world now that Jesus Christ was Lord. The church's social concern is a means to cite, to signal, to celebrate the coming of this reign. The church is the most neglected aspect of contemporary, mainline, liberal social concern and also the most neglected aspect of contemporary evangelism.

People are urged by contemporary Christian apologists to look into their hearts, or to be more successful, or to make individual commitment. But rarely is the church seen as the necessary crucible of conversion, or "detoxification," maybe because evangelists are embarrassed by the state of the church--and with good reason. Or perhaps it is simply easier to preach a private faith that is never challenged to be a political, communal formation that turns all other communities and political attachments on their heads.

The actual existence of a committed, visible church is crucial for any prophetic effort, because we are still rightly judged by the kind of people we produce. And it just may be that if every hundred years we cannot point to a Teresa of Calcutta, or to a Desmond Tutu, or a Martin Luther King Jr., then we should have the good sense to know we really have nothing to say.

So we are still on the way, and my job as a pastor is to ponder the communal nature of this faith and its political consequences. Unfortunately, from what I have observed, much of our social concern has led us away from the state of the congregation.

I remember a pastor who after two terms on the school board and an unsuccessful bid for city council was finally asked by his congregation either to take care of business at home or seek other work. Of course, his explanation for this was that he was too prophetic to serve these backward people. Their explanation was that he was presuming to serve people whose first names he didn't know. What arrogance--to presume that I am the one to be out on the vanguard, to forsake my pastoral vocation.

Our pastoral authority primarily relates to the edification of God's people, not running about doing nice things for the whole town. Many of our national church boards and agencies have found that serving the world--which, when translated, means making pontifical pronouncements from the safe confines of the bureaucracy--can be easier than helping us pastors form a prophetic church that challenges the world.

A few years ago, Bishop Emilio J.M. deCravalho, a Methodist bishop from Angola, visited our seminary. We asked him, "How is the new government in Angola? It's a Marxist government, isn't it?" He said, "Well, it's a government. I don't know whether it's Marxist or not; it depends on who's giving out the aid mostly."

"How are you getting along with the government?"

"What do you mean getting along?"

"Have you found it supportive of your work?"

"Well no, in fact they outlawed women's groups in churches a few months ago."

"Oh, my word, what did the women do?"

"They kept meeting. It's not strong enough to stop them yet."

"What will you do when the government gets strong enough to stop them?"

"We'll go to jail, I guess. We had our most marvelous period of growth during the revolution when we had so many in jail. We lost 18 Methodist pastors, but the church grew. By the time we got out of jail, we were 30 percent stronger. Jail is a wonderful place for evangelism--you've got everybody there."

What a curious way of looking at the world! When I read the New Testament, what fascinates me is that at a time when the church was faced with a pluralism we'll never know anything about and struggled for its very survival, what did the church do? Did it put its slogan on a billboard outside of town: "Lonely? Come to our church. Confused? Come to our church"? No, the church built walls around itself. These early pastors sought to evangelize not by reducing the faith to the lowest common denominator but by carefully saying, "That is the world and this is the reign of God. Please don't confuse them."

How different from our strategies. Now the church must focus again on its peculiarities. Now the church must see itself again not as a baptizer of culture but as a political monkey wrench thrown into the culture.

Our Lord's prayer for the church from another time could be ours today:

I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but thou shouldst keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world even as I am not of the world. As thou did send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

William Willimon was a professor of the practice of Christian ministry and the minister to the university at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina when this article appeared. He delivered this speech at the February 1986 Iowa Pastors Conference titled "Called to Do Justice." This material, which was adapted for publication, is based on Willimon's book What's Right With the Church (Harper & Row, 1985).