Post-Denomination Blues

Church ‘Homelessness’ Must Not Be Grieved Too Quickly

In his New York Times column this week, my friend David French wrote about what it was like to be “canceled” by his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. He later told me how stunned he was by how many people responded immediately—grieving their own “cancellations” from churches or ministries they’d loved and served.

I was not surprised at all.

Most people, of course, aren’t canceled in the way we typically use that word, but in a way more like the situation described by the late Will Campbell. He wasn’t “fired” by the National Council of Churches, he would joke. They just unleashed a swarm of bees in his office every day until he voluntarily left.

Similarly, many people who feel “homeless” these days aren’t told by their home churches or traditions, “Get out!” Instead, they face a quieter form of exile.

They face those they love, who expect them to conform to new rules of belonging. Sometimes, that’s to some totalizing political loyalty. Sometimes, it’s to a willingness to “get over” their opposition to whatever their church or ministry leaders now deem to be acceptable sins. Sometimes, this doesn’t even happen to these people in their own churches but in their larger theological or denominational homes, or vice versa. It’s confusing. It’s disorienting. It’s sometimes angering.

What it really is, though, is grief.

People who’ve faced this in their own contexts often ask me, “How long does it take to get over this?” I usually quote the landslide-losing presidential candidate George McGovern when he was asked a similar question by later landslide-losing candidate Walter Mondale: “I’ll let you know when I get there.” But an earlier version of myself would have had a completely different view.

When I was a young doctoral student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I hosted a panel discussion on the topic of war and peace on our campus during the weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. I wanted a genuine debate—not just a caricature of one—so I sought to include a pacifist in the group, ending up with the pastor of a very progressive Baptist congregation in our community, one that had long parted ways with our denomination after years of controversy.

Afterward, the pastor said that he didn’t think those of us on the conservative side of the split really understood what it was like to lose a sense of belonging, a sense of home. “It’s like going through a divorce,” he said.

In all of my punkish arrogance, I responded, “Actually, it’s more like after the divorce when the ex keeps showing up on the lawn with a bullhorn, despite the restraining order.” My implicit message was, The controversy is over. We won. You lost. Move on.

All the ways I was wrong would require an entire book, but here’s one of them: I had no idea that trauma here was not a metaphor. What this pastor described was not about Robert’s Rules of Order or even about which systematic theology textbooks would be taught at the alma mater. He was expressing grief, and I did not know what that was like until decades later.

We would not tell someone who’s experienced the loss of a parent, sibling, spouse, or lifelong friend to “get over it” or “move on.” Most of us would do what Jesus did with Mary and Martha, grieving the death of Lazarus: weep right alongside those who experienced the loss (John 11:35). Many of us, though, are less sure what to do when we ourselves experience this kind of grief, this kind of loss. In fact, many people want to hear, in a moment of unexpected church homelessness, a word of hope.

I say: Not so fast.

The hope is real, of course—and that’s not just in the Book of Revelation kind of long-term view, but right now. God is doing something new. Old alliances are shaken, but new ones are being formed.

In the civic political space, many of us are finding that the fundamental division isn’t where we’re used to it being, between the left and the right, but straight through them. People with fundamental differences on important issues are finding that what unites or divides them is whether democratic principles and constitutional norms are needed to have those critically important debates.

The same is happening in the religious space. We are accustomed to the dividing lines we knew whenever we came of age: Calvinist versus Arminian, cessationist versus charismatic, complementarian versus egalitarian. The dividing lines are in different places now, and unusual alliances are forming. From the very beginning of the church, God has worked with what one scholar describes as “patient ferment.” Change is always disorienting, and often painful.

And much of what God has to do can only come out of this kind of shaking. “I think that to overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge,” Flannery O’Connor once said. “I think that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world. So that you have a great deal of detachment.”

O’Connor needed a rootedness—a sense of being a Southerner and of knowing other Southerners, specifically Bible Belt Protestants. She also needed, though, a kind of exile—the experience of being a Roman Catholic minority in Milledgeville, Georgia. Whatever is next—perhaps the conforming of the American church more closely to the global body of Christ—requires the kind of change that can feel scary. And many of us will grieve what is lost.

For some of us, we need to give heed to what Jesus said to his followers: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32, ESV throughout). Grief shouldn’t cause us to look perpetually backward. But many also need to remember too that Jesus, even as he said for us to expect it, recognized that losing one’s home base would be painful (Matt. 10:17–21).

The apostle Paul told us that we were to “rejoice” in our sufferings, but he did not tell us to see them as anything less than suffering. Instead, we are to see that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame” (Rom. 5:3–5). To short-circuit endurance and character to get straight to hope is to do something different than what the Holy Spirit does.

People who do not allow themselves the time to grieve what is lost, in my experience, often end up in bad places. Some of them wind up with a cynicism that sees all connection as suspect—and we know what happens to human beings when we give ourselves to isolation. Some of them, in the fullness of time, end up pursuing the mirror image of what they once had, as though the antidote to every problem were the opposite of it. Fundamentalisms of those on the right become fundamentalisms of those on the left, or vice versa. The end of that path is disillusionment and exhaustion.

That’s why T. S. Eliot, in my favorite poem, “East Coker,” writes:

I said to my soul, be still, and without hope

For hope would hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

For those who feel homeless, grieve with hope—but remember, there actually is a place called Home. And don’t forget that even in hope, it’s okay to grieve.

Whatever Happened with My Pacifist Friend?

I mentioned above the pacifist pastor I invited to participate in the forum. He was there, of course, precisely because his views were opposite of mine. I believe in the classic just war tradition of Augustinian Christianity, especially in such situations as the response to the September 11 attacks. More than that, he and I disagree probably on every theological matter I can think of; he once called himself a “Zen Baptist.” We found, though, that we liked some of the same writers (Wendell Berry, for example), and he invited me for coffee.

We would meet at a hipster coffee shop near his church and he would often joke that we should alternate between there and Chick-fil-A so that he wouldn’t be the only one pestered by congregants. We never convinced each other of our theological views, but I grew to genuinely like him and to trust him. On one of the darkest days of my life, I ended up on his front porch, where he knew the best way to care for me was to talk about Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter.

I often work on questions of “depolarization.” Sometimes, people assume that that’s about people across the spectrum sitting down and discussing their differences. Sometimes, it is. More often, though, it is more akin to my left-wing pacifist friend willing to open up his porch to a theologically conservative Baptist guy who was hurting.

I’m still no pacifist—and definitely am no “Zen Baptist”—but, at a moment when I was treated by some of my own mentors as an expendable scapegoat, he treated me like a human being. I don’t want my friend’s theology or philosophy, but I want to be like that.

A Conversation with Lecrae

I believe the first cover story I ever wrote for Christianity Today, long ago in the before-times, was about the rise of Christian hip-hop, with one of the masters of the genre, Lecrae, on the cover.

This week on the podcast, Lecrae and I talk about, well, a lot of different things. We talk about music, of course, and creativity, but also about what it’s like to be expected to be a “Christian” rapper (or a “Christian” anything else), and what he learned when he burned out on fame and ambition. He was, as usual, insightful, deep, and fun.

You can listen to the episode here.

Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Jordan J. Andlovec in Portland, Oregon.

Jordan writes, “Thank you, Dr. Moore, for your continual pastoral and theological reflections, and for your leadership during this time of upheaval in the evangelical movement and in our country more broadly.”

Of his list, Jordan says, “I’ve chosen these not because they are my favorite books (although some are), but because of what I imagine I would need in a book in the event I were stranded somewhere in the South Pacific. The impossibility of planning what to take in this scenario aside, here are twelve books designed to make me the best darn castaway Christian out there.”

The Brothers K by David James Duncan (represented by the Kindle on top, in the photo): A heartbreakingly beautiful novel set in my own backyard, a mid-century American riff on Dostoevsky’s story with themes of family, faith, and broken dreams.

For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio by W. H. Auden: I read this every Advent season, and therefore associate it with anticipation and longing. Also, a desert island seems like the perfect situation to memorize long passages of poetry.
The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge: Having read several books on the subject, I think this one captures best the multifaceted nature of the strange event at the center of our faith. Also, at nearly 700 pages, it will keep me reflecting for a while.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: Apart from Steinbeck being amongst my favorite writers, my family also came west to California around the time this book is set, and so I feel a sort of familiarity (in both senses of the word) to it that’s hard to describe. Having time to reflect on that might do me some good.
Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition by John Calvin: I was pressed to read Calvin from Marilynne Robinson, who once remarked that his cultural despisers know nothing of his actual thought. Reading the Institutes makes me want to worship God, and this edition is more pastorally focused than the final edition.
The Life of Antony by Athanasius of Alexandria: As an incurable extrovert and recovering consumerist, I would not do well with the involuntary monasticism and asceticism of desert island life and would need someone to disciple me. Hopefully Athanasius’ portrait of the father of the ascetic movement would help.
The New International Version of the Bible by Holy Spirit et al.: This was the Bible given to me when, to the bewilderment of everyone, including myself, I became a Christian in the twilight days of the long 20th century. Although I have copies that would hold up much better to the wildness of a desert island, this one is the one I’d want.
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997 by Wendell Berry: I have been reading one of these poems every Sabbath for almost 10 years now, and I would very much like to continue to do so. Wendell Berry helps me see clearly.
The Sacrament of the Present Moment by Jean-Pierre de Caussade: Both chronic pain and my ADHD-addled brain make it very hard for me to be present, either with myself, others, or God. This book has been an immense help in learning to surrender instead of fighting to pay attention.
Pia Desideria by Philip Jacob Spener: A founding text of my own tradition, I find its wisdom perennial and straightforward. Though Pietism is a decidedly communal movement (which I don’t imagine will be the case in this instance), reforming my own desires is always necessary.
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis: Classics are called so for a reason, and as I wrestle with my own demons (both internal and external), Lewis has always helped me keep ahead of the wiles of Satan (as much as one can).
Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton: Merton’s words are consistently framing how I think about my own spiritual state, and, obviously, his reflections here are germane to anyone alone for long periods of time.

Thank you, Jordan!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.

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Onward,
Russell Moore