It’s fair to say that the Christian church has survived many challenges during its 2000 year life on earth. It has survived the challenge of persecution, when Christians were killed in the Roman arena rather than deny Jesus as their Lord. It has survived heresies – distortions of the Gospel that sound good at first glance, but that ultimately lead to a denial of the gospel. And it certainly has survived hate of all kinds – people who hate the Church; and people in the Church who hate others in the name of God. But no challenge has been more pervasive than the challenge that doesn’t seem like a challenge at all. I’m talking about the challenge of privilege.
The church’s privilege started about 1700 years ago when the
Roman emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the
empire. Constantine had accepted Christianity as his own faith early in his
reign; and almost immediately, he made it a legal religion so that the
persecutions ended. But he didn’t stop there. He wanted to bind his empire together
– and it was a vast empire that stretched from the British Isles almost all the
way to India and including a vast number of cultures, languages, and traditions.
A common faith seemed to Constantine the way to hold it together. And so, in the
year 333, he declared that every person in the Roman Empire would from that day
forward be a Christian. The persecuted church had become the privileged church.
And in much of the world, it has been that way ever since.
Now, that may not seem to be much of a challenge. In fact,
it seems like a pretty good thing. But privilege always brings problems;
because with privilege comes power. You know what they say about power: “Power
corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That even applies to the
Church. Although it was begun by Jesus Christ, the Church is still a human institution. And because
that is the case, its power has led to some actions that were definitely not Godly! The Crusades… the
Inquisition… the amassing of huge amounts of wealth in the name of God… These
were just some of the consequences of the fact that during the years, the
Church has enjoyed more power than was good for it.
Now, the Church in the United States hasn’t had quite that
much power. Our Founding Fathers saw the consequences of marrying political
power to religion; and they divorced the two in our Constitution. But since
World War II, Protestant churches have enjoyed quite a lot of social privilege.
Many of you will remember the “golden age” of the 1950s and 60s. Church
membership skyrocketed as veterans of World War II came home and started
families. Sunday schools were overflowing with well-dressed, well-scrubbed
children who memorized the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. On Easter
Sunday, many churches had to set up folding chairs to hold all the worshippers!
Anybody who was anybody belonged to a church – the right church, of course. That’s where the businessmen and the
society ladies got to know one another. Some churches looked a lot like the
Country Club on Sunday morning!
All that, of course, has changed. Church membership is
dropping like a rock. Some churches have no children at all in their
membership. And on Easter Sunday… well, attendance at an Easter service is
about what attendance at a typical Sunday service was 50 years ago! What happened? Doesn’t anybody know how to fix things? Can’t
somebody tell us what in the world is going on? The truth is that no one knows exactly what happened. Oh, there are
plenty of suggestions. Lots of people are crunching numbers and writing books.
Even more are sponsoring pricey workshops on how to lure people back to church.
But despite enough new books to fill a small library, and a workshop somewhere
on every single weekend of the year, nothing is changing. The Church has lost
the privilege that it once had.
And maybe that’s a good thing. An essay in the Christian Century magazine (Vol. 129,
No. 26, December 26, 2012, pp. 28-30) recently suggested that maybe – just maybe – this decline in church privilege
is actually a sign that God is at work among us. Authors L. Roger Owens and
Anthony B. Robinson turned to an ancient Christian mystic, St. John of the
Cross, for insight into what God might be doing. John of the Cross is famous
for an experience called the Dark Night of the Soul. During the Dark Night, God
seems to have gone on an extended vacation. We can’t feel God in our lives in
any way at all. But what is really happening is that God is working through the
Dark Night to free us from all worldly attachments so that we might draw
spiritually closer to him. “This night,” said John, “frees the soul from all
its vices by quenching all its earthly and heavenly satisfactions.”
Is that what is happening to the church now? Is God taking
away the social privilege that we once enjoyed so that we can embrace something
much better? Is God prying us away from the security that comes from power and inviting
us to a renewed relationship with him – which, in the end, is the only security
that really counts? Is God reminding us that our real identity is not “Grand
Offerer of Programs” but the Body of Christ? If that’s the case, then it’s a
blessing! Privilege and power, after all, distract us from what we ought to be
about. When we enjoy privilege, we’re like a little boy whose mother motivates
him to practice the piano by offering him a Snickers candy bar after he has
finished. But as long as he practices only for the Snickers, he’ll never learn
to play that piano really well. Only when he cares more about making beautiful
music than about getting the candy will he begin to play with the love that
marks a real musician. American mainline churches have had too much candy for
way too long. Our candy hasn’t been Snickers bars, but church members on city
councils, and civic leaders on church boards. Our treat bags were filled with
big cradle rolls and overflowing Vacation Bible Schools. We got fat on years of
successful youth programs.
And now we’re on a diet. But if, indeed, God has put us here,
it is a diet that might well lead to some real blessings. It might refocus us
on the real purpose of the Church – to worship the God of Jesus Christ in a
culture that worships all kinds of other gods. It might lead us to proclaim
God’s grace through the way we live our lives. It might force us to the
realization that if anybody is going to change the world for Jesus Christ, it’s
going to have to be us – not government programs or economic policies. But
that’s OK. Jesus only had 12 followers, and look what they accomplished! If
this Dark Night of the Church can help us to focus on what’s really important, to
reaffirm our commitment to live our faith, and to renew our desire to live for
Christ and for Christ alone, then the Church will experience a revival that
will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before – a revival not of numbers, but of
spiritual power.
Maybe if we let go of who we used to be, we’ll discover who
we really are. What a revival that would be!
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