Connected and Disconnected: Eighty-five Years in the Church
The church needs to change. That didn’t become apparent to me until midlife. Since then, however, it has steadily kept becoming more and more apparent.
If God is trying to get the church to change, it shouldn’t surprise us. Often in the Bible and Christian history we find God urgently trying to get God's followers to make needed changes. Still, it's hard to imagine that God might actually want us to change. When we're active in the church we tend to assume that we're doing God's will. But surprisingly, throughout history the people who have most adamantly refused to make the changes God wanted have been the most religious people. They've been people like us.
In the days of the Old Testament prophets, the priests and worshippers at the temple and its local shrines refused to heed God's messages. Through prophets God kept saying that acts of love and justice like caring for the poor were what God wanted, instead of merely following traditional religious rituals and rules. But even though God begged people to change, most of them refused.
The New Testament portrays the Pharisees as the culprits. Their status and comfort depended on their seeing themselves as righteous. Instead of listening to what God was currently saying to them through Jesus, they kept following instructions that God had given to other people many centuries earlier. They also distorted those instructions and added a lot of rules of their own.
I’m afraid we’re doing something similar in our churches now.[1]
I kept quiet for years
For several years after I started seeing the need for change, however, I kept quiet about it. I never heard anyone else mention it, so I thought I must be wrong. I assumed I just hadn’t yet caught on to what everyone else understood: that everything about the church was fine, and that members should simply conform to it. Doubting it or even questioning it seemed unacceptable, and dropping out would definitely not be okay. Almost everyone I knew was a churchgoer, and I assumed that everyone was supposed to be one.
Until about fifteen years ago, I’d been one for essentially my entire life. My parents and grandparents were all lifelong, active Methodists, so I automatically became one too. I was baptized as a baby, and when I was in the fourth grade I “joined the church” (it wasn’t called “confirmation” then) along with everyone else in my Sunday School class because it seemed like the expected thing to do. My parents and I went to Sunday School and “church” (worship) every Sunday, did the expected church-volunteer jobs, and made the expected financial contributions. I married someone who had the same kind of churchgoing habits, and for most of my life I couldn’t imagine ever stopping that pattern. But then in 2006, I stopped.
No longer a quiet conformist
I’ve also stopped keeping quiet. I’ve changed from being a quiet conformist to being an outspoken nonconformist. Here on this website, I explain why I’ve made these changes.
I’m encouraging other churchgoers and church dropouts to do the same—to continually ask why the church does what it is doing, and to actively press for change when they see the need for it. For the past thirty or so years, I’ve done that mostly by writing, mainly in a personal letter named Connections that I wrote and published almost every month from 1992 until 2019. It went by U.S. Mail, e-mail, and here on the Internet to several thousand lay people and clergy in more than a dozen different church denominations plus some church dropouts, in every U.S. state and several other countries.
This website contains back issues of Connections as PDFs. Additionally, I’ve merged contents from several issues into blog posts on the site. In footnotes, I’ve indicated which issues the material came from. If you want to read more about any of the topics in the blog posts, you can find it in the issue of Connections in which I addressed that topic. All issues are available complete and free in the archive.
My choice of topics to include on the blog doesn’t completely reflect the relative importance I give to them. It’s based more on what topics happen to have been on my mind most often. And although I recognize the importance of the worldwide church, I’m mostly familiar with U.S. congregations so what I’ve written applies mainly to them.
Readers say I’m far from alone
Replies I’ve steadily gotten from Connections readers over my twenty-five years of writing it have let me know that I’m far from alone in feeling the need for change in the church. They say, “Until I read Connections, I thought I was the only person who felt this way. I’m so glad to know I’m not alone!” “You’re saying exactly what I’ve been wanting to say!”
I’m writing this because I want to let thinking, forward-looking Christians know that although they may feel alone in their views, they’re not alone, their observations about the church are likely to be accurate, and the church and the world therefore need to hear from them. I want to increase awareness and discussion of topics that I believe urgently need more of the church’s attention. Here are some that most concern me.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that came from God and contains truth.
Jesus advocated and modeled radical change. He associated with his culture’s social outcasts and chose some of them as his disciples. To follow him, Christians must also advocate and promote social justice, not only by helping suffering and mistreated individuals but also by working to change customs, laws, and mistaken beliefs that cause the suffering.
Jesus directed his fiercest criticism at religious traditionalists. He didn’t advocate enforcing religious rules or keeping a religious hierarchy in power. When we refuse to question our church traditions and rules, we’re not following Jesus.
Many words we use for people and for God misrepresent God and put women down, contradicting what we claim to believe.
God calls every Christian, lay or ordained, to some kind of ministry and gives him or her the abilities and other resources necessary for doing it.
People experience and understand God in different ways. Christians thus need to avoid claiming that their experience or preference is the only right way.
Ministering to church members and keeping them comfortable isn’t the church’s main purpose. Instead, it is showing people what God is like and how God wants them to live. It is ministering to the world and changing it to function more like what Jesus taught.[2]
I feel that if the church could persuade more people to practice the compassion, justice, and peace that Jesus taught, life would be noticeably better for more people, so I want to help the church accomplish that. I see the church often being ignored or opposed because of its continuing to make claims about God, Jesus, human beings, the Bible, and Christianity that seem unlikely to be true in light of what has now been learned through science, medicine, historical research, and other fields of scholarship, and through today’s exposure to non-Christian religions. I want to help disseminate information that I believe shows the need to deny or at least question some of those claims. I see many congregations, including my own, trying to stifle members’ efforts to learn and to mature spiritually, when the church needs to appreciate and promote such efforts instead. I want to do whatever I can to change this.[3]
Love for the church can require pushing for change
My feelings about the church—the United Methodist Church that I’ve belonged to all my life, and also the larger church-- are similar to what author James Baldwin once said about the U.S.: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” [4] I love the church, especially the UMC, and that’s why after eighty-five years in it I still feel the need to keep pushing it to change.
“Every column or blog” says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.” Its purpose, Friedman explains, “is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue.”[5]
That’s what I’ve aimed at doing with Connections and what I now hope to do with this site.
[1] November 1992 Connections
[2] October 2002
[3] October 2012
[4] December 2018
[5][5] December 2016
