The prophets did this, too, so who am I to complain? The Hebrew prophets always had a litany of failures as part of their word to the people of God. They had turned away. They had set up shrines to Baal and poles to Asherah. They had oppressed the poor and covered it over with fancy church liturgy. But now, a new thing was happening.
As I say, if it was good enough for Isaiah, who am I to carp? But so often, I read words to the church or the denomination these days and they sound like beating up on our parents and grandparents for no reason. They sound like evil-speaking to me. Here’s a recent example from a post meant – I gather – to encourage us not to lose faith in God’s faithfulness:
We are recovering from decades of passivity in the church. We forgot somehow that being a good Christian was more than showing up at church on Sunday and belonging to the right civic organizations. We forgot that we need to develop Christians — to make disciples out of the people who were already in the building! Given this forgetfulness, how is it realistic to expect these same pew-sitters (and their progeny) to go into the world to make disciples? Jesus tells us the disciples to witness to what they have seen. In general, what these folks have seen is what people wore to church on Sunday, not the power of the resurrected Christ. No wonder we’re dying.
Is this true? Well, I’m sure in some cases. But is this necessary?
Other than saying people who have been part of the church for 25 or 50 years aren’t really Christians, what is the value of these exercises? When offered by the middle-aged and seniors, they sound like score settling. When offered by the young, they sound like people who seek their own identity in trashing those who came before. The use of the pronoun “we” does not really cover this up. The tone is rarely one of shared shame and guilt, but rather pointing out other people their errors and failures.
It is not that these little rhetorical swipes at the gray-heads in the pews don’t have some truth in them. I just don’t see what purpose they serve. If you want to encourage me to believe God will remain faithful even if the UMC dies, please do so. Why make sweeping generalizations about decades of church life and millions of Christians in the process? Does the point you are trying to make depend on throwing sister Eunice under the church bus? Often when I read such posts or articles or books it does not. But chasing the old broad out of the sanctuary with her floral print dress and her covered dish just feels so good, we do it anyway.
See how I used “we” there? I’m a sinner, too.
How about a little more Exodus and a little less Isaiah in our rhetoric? How about a little less – you people are horrible but God loves you anyway – and a little more – God has heard your cries. There is a land of milk and honey over there. I’ll show you the way.
Yes, yes. The people in the pews are going to start hankering after the flesh-pots of Pharaoh pretty much right away, and the leaders are going to be praying to God, ”Why did you give me these ungrateful people?” But I don’t recall Moses ever saying, “You know, if you wouldn’t have been so lazy and contented in the 1950s, you could have gotten yourself out of Egypt pretty much on your own.”
Maybe I’m just – as my daughter reminded me this morning – getting old. But I find myself less and less persuaded by people who feel the need to beat up on senior citizens in the service of a theological argument.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
I couldn’t agree more. These sentiments are usually also coupled (as in the post you referenced) with an appeal to the vigorous faith of younger people, which seems to me just as much a mirage as this supposed unfaithfulness among the elderly. Speaking as a young person, I rarely find the same strength of faith among those of my age group as I do among older Christians. Often, I suppose, we are more energetic or idealistic, but isn’t that the nature of young people in all things? And I think young people are as much driven away from the institutional church by their own stubborn pride and independent spirit as anything else. Patience and a sense of duty are sorely lacking in my generation, and to my mind these deficiencies at least balance out, if they do not outweigh, any particular strengths we may have as a group. It is much easier, however, to blame people who are set in their ways and to exonerate those who still have time to make the difficult change.
John,
I’ve been reading for some time but this is the first time I’ve posted on your blog.
THANK YOU!
I can’t tell you how sick I am of articles and posts that wish to ring in “a new day” in the UMC after “decades of passivity.” It has more than once occurred to me that individuals write such things because even they don’t know how to proceed. So, they lob bombs at the people who have come before them. My take is this…if a person knows how to do it better than previous generations, s/he should do it and share specifics. That said, as Charles very eloquently points out, there’s a lot that previous generations had right. I think people might be surprised to find that the ship’s course just needs to be tweaked by a couple degrees. It doesn’t need to be scrapped and re-built.
Adam
I think your thoughts are a good corrective to the thinking that denigrates the faith of the people of the past. Yet, I speak from a church that is about 50 years on from where the United Methodist Church is. Many (not ALL) do have a discipleship of passivity that is little more than ‘the faith part of my life is coming to church’. There is a sense in which we do need to be honest.
However, statements like the one you quote (at least in a British Methodist context) have generally been directed at the church leadership. Our General Secretary (sort of the ‘chief executive’ of the Church) has said that we have arrived at this situation because the clergy have taught them that this is what it means to be a disciple. The clergy do the work, and the people sit there and do what they’re told (or just show up). Perhaps he is overgeneralising to make a point. Yet the problem remains: we have a lot who believe that faith is a small category of their lives fulfilled by their weekly (or even monthly/six-weekly) attendance at church on Sunday. This isn’t to say they are not nice people, but does the church need to redefine disciple to include them?
Will,
My point is not that the church is fine just as it is. My point is that generalizations like these are not constructive – even when they contain truth. Your point about leadership is a good distinction, but if I were a lay person reading many of the comments I read, I would not notice the distinction.
Does saying that the church has been passive and – essentially – unfaithful for 20 years do anything to inspire or move it forward now? Doesn’t it, rather, tell the people who have been there for those 20 years that they are bad Christians? What is the purpose of that? And, since most of us were not there for those 20 years, how can we know it is true?
Generalizations are dangerous (there’s a generalization for you), and post-moderns should know that. But they are rhetorically useful.
I’d much prefer to see us take a “here we are, let’s see where following Christ takes us” approach than start by saying “you lot failed and really had it all wrong, now listen to me tell you how it should be done.”
Sure, there are nominal Christians in the pews – and the pulpits – who would like present arrangements to stay as they are. But there are many who have invested heavily in the church and their faith and have been the best disciples they could figure out how to be. What is the point in trashing them? I’m not saying we should not challenge them, but can we do it without saying they turned their back on Christ?
It is really a matter of tone and respect. We can refuse to stand still without saying the people who brought us here were wrong and lifeless.
I think where we disagree is that I don’t consider it ‘trashing’ anyone. The church has got to its current state somehow, and I imagine it goes back further than 20 years (certainly in the case of British Methodism). Then again, it also depends on the definition of discipleship one is using. If Dan (in the blog post you linked to some time ago) is correct about how the church is divided up into those categories (with only 10-15 % being interested in discipleship), then are all those spheres legitimate forms of being the church? If yes, then you’re right – we’re trashing them. Otherwise, the majority has been committed to passivity.
I am not sure how we could be particular – yes, they are generalisations, but how would we go about it? How do we say that what the church has been doing is right even whilst we have been in decline? Any statement of saying ‘here we are’ implies some sort of judgment on where we have come from. Or at least on our planning of where we are to go. Once in a stewards meeting, I got asked by an older member of my team who asked, ‘Do you mean to say that what we have been doing for the past 100 years is wrong?’ And I answered, ‘Not necessarily. There may be some things we have done wrong, but we also have to account for how the situations have changed. We live in a different time and we need to respond accordingly.’
Of course, as I have found in preaching challenging sermons, you often don’t reach the people you intend to. I remember once when I preached at a former church about how we needed more to help with the fundraising efforts, the once who felt guilty were those who I wasn’t preaching to – the ones who already had a list of things going on in their church life and in their home life! I had to tell them, I wasn’t preaching to you.