Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Churches Need To Ask Why They Exist
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
January 2002Over the past few decades, a small industry has devoted itself to diagnosing mainline religion's "crisis." A focus on survival has ignored the original sense of crisis as a point of judgment, a point of evaluating performance and deciding identity and direction.
When the institution appears to be in danger of disappearing, all but the most unthinking or insecure ask what the institution is for, and whether it has been effective in meeting its purpose.
One response to the crisis as the Episcopal Church has experienced it troubles me. It is the idea that all will be well if we simply keep on doing what we do well, by which is generally meant emphasizing our talents for liturgy and the fostering of personal spirituality in the Benedictine tradition.
Readers from other denominations and faiths, I suspect, have heard the "keeping on" response in ways that apply to their own traditions.
The suggestion that we simply keep on keeping on epitomizes the great American failure trap: if something does not work, do it more. More intensely. With greater fervor.
At its worst, the "do it more" syndrome assumes that the answers and the questions never change. The baby is kept in bath water that may kill it, in a tub that stunts its growth.
There are ways to question this approach that do not detract from the importance of our traditions and gifts.
In opposition to the "do it more" fallacy lies the truth of the law of requisite variety: those who have the most options succeed. Those who face a crisis as a time to assess, learn and attempt to change for the better are likely to make the helpful contribution. To use the law of requisite variety means being honest: learning from mistakes and wrong turns, learning to part with what has become obsolete.
Christianity's mission can be described generally as offering to people that fullness of life in God available to disciples of Jesus Christ and witnessing to Jesus' call for everyone to enact God's compassion and justice in the world. Our mission is to serve the world in the name of Christ, to extend compassionate arms even while new spears pierce Christ's body as they did on September 11.
The mission cannot be performed without intense self-awareness. Are we prepared to choose the right strategies for our time? If we are to perform the mission we have been given, we have got to be better at making explicit connections between people's lives as they are and the kind of life God offers in Christ.
Christian bodies have taken chances. That is a valuable trait. The value of the fact that American Christians have been forced by history to create an atmosphere where passionate disagreement is possible ought not be underestimated.
Experience suggests that those of us who preach will do better at helping the faithful to be faithful if we make more explicit and inviting the connection of the church's activities to its identity in Jesus Christ, and if we do that in words and in ways that contemporary Christians can hear.
We live in an age when one risks being locked up as psychotic for claiming that God communicates; yet, in one way or another, that is what happens - at least when we learn to listen. Deep within us the Spirit breathes. We are invited to enter those depths. God heals us, gives us more than we can ask or imagine, and enables us to become agents of change in an unjust, painful and starving world. Such transformation can be frightening.
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