Category: DOC Thoughts
Searching for a Liberal Church
A few Facebook friends and my RSS feed pointed me to this article, “The Liberal Church Finding Its Mission: It’s Not About You.” These thoughts from a Unitarian Universalists minister are applicable to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and our lack of denominational clarity about who we are and what our expression of Christianity stands for or for whom. It begs to question what a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world means?
A couple of paragraphs and a link.
The Liberal Church Finding Its Mission: It’s Not About You
by THE REV. PETER C. BOULLATA | Held in the Light BlogAt one point he said to me, “You know, I should tell you this story. I have a thirteen-year-old son who has been asking a lot of religious questions lately. I was raised Catholic, but we’re not involved at all, and haven’t really given him a religious education. One day, my son was with me in the car when we drove by another Unitarian Universalist church. He asked me, because he knew that I had done some work for them, what kind of a church it was. When I told him, he asked what Unitarian Universalists believe. So I told him, ‘Well they don’t really believe anything specific. It’s a religion where whatever you think or believe or feel is what the religion is all about.’ And my son said, ‘That’s the kind of church I want to go to!’”
But my pleasant façade betrayed the bomb that had just gone off in my head. Oh dear God, it’s true. We have institutionalized narcissism. Here was a person that was not involved in a Unitarian Universalist church, and yet knew something about us. As an outsider, the message he received about what we stand for is: It’s about whatever you want it to be about. It’s all about you.
There is a contradiction inherent in liberal religion. We are free, autonomous individuals in community with one another. Tension exists between freedom and connection, autonomy and community. There is no getting around it. Our calling is to live gracefully in that tension, holding them with equanimity, without being weighted as we are now toward individual freedom and autonomy. Our capacity for being a transformative presence in the world is diminished when we neglect the communal, connected, covenanted aspect of our life together and when we focus primarily on the individual and their freedom. Our institutions suffer.
Prayer . . .
My companion and I write a journal each week with commentary, exegesis and ideas to assist persons that prepare the children’s sermon. This is a Lectionary based resource. This morning, while writing for the texts for New Year’s Day, I ran across a sermon by a friend, Rev. Dr. Claudia Highbaugh, from December 2003. Her sermon ends with a prayer written by The Reverend William Sloane Coffin that seems good for the closing of this year, 2011, and the anticipation of 2012.
O God, who has created a world beautiful beyond any singing of it, gratefully we acknowledge that of thy fullness have we received, grace upon grace. Grant now that we may be responsible in the measure that we have received.
Keep us eager to pursue truth beyond the outermost limits of human thought, scornful of the cowardice that dares not face new truth, the laziness content with half-truth, and
the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth.Strengthen our resolve to see fulfilled , the world around and in our time, all hopes for justice so long deferred, and keep us on the stony, long and lonely road that leads to peace. May we think for peace, struggle for peace, suffer for peace. Fill our hearts with courage that we not give in to bitterness and self pity, but learn rather to count pain and disappointment, humiliation and setback, as but straws on the tide of life.
So may we run and not grow weary, walk and not faint, until that day when by thy grace faith and hope will be outdistanced by sight and possession, and love will be all in all in this wonderful, terrible, beautiful world. Amen.