I hesitate to write about the church for many reasons, not least because many of you do not attend one, have no interest in the church, are not religious, or, if religious, are not Christian.
Yet, I think it is important to write about it, not least because, for good or bad, Christianity has always been and still is the dominant religion in the United States and, thus, has affected and still affects all our lives whether we want it to or not.
The Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade, for example, was in no small way the result of the anti-choice movement among Christians.
The same can be said of the Christian Nationalism movement that includes people like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. They want the government to declare the U.S. a Christian nation, to allow the Christian Bible to be taught in public schools, and to rewrite the nation’s laws to conform to Christian beliefs and practices.
Such beliefs are prominent in American life because many churches teach them. They do so because they believe they have a God given mission to convert the world to Christianity. That is what I want to discuss.
Let me say as I begin that I write from the perspective of someone who has spent a life-time as a congregational pastor and a seminary teacher. I have seen the church from all sides, at its best and its worst, and while I have not given up on the church, I do feel worn down by it, and wonder if the church can refocus its mission on itself rather than the world. Let me explain.
I think the basic problem with the church seeing its mission as making disciples stems from misunderstanding the words of Jesus at the end of the Gospel of Matthew that are translated, “go and make disciples of all the nations” (28:16).
Jesus may or may not have actually said those words, but if we accept that he did the traditional translation of the text is actually misleading. It doesn’t say “make disciples,” it actually says , “disciple the nations,” and that conveys an entirely different message.
To “disciple” someone is the teach them, mentor them. Thus, to “teach the nations” is not about “making” anyone anything. It is, rather, about teaching them rather than seeing them as objects of clay to be formed into the image we want them to have.
What is more, we know that the best kind of teacher is one who models the message, embodies it, makes it real in the way he or she speaks and acts. The best teacher shows students the message, the lesson, the content of what is being taught.
Therein, I suggest, lies the heart of the problem. The church has failed rather dramatically at modeling the message Jesus taught. From the beginning it began to add its own teachings to what Jesus said, and soon those teachings – beliefs, doctrines, dogmas – became more important than anything Jesus said.
Once it became an organization, an institution, the church took on a life of its own that in many respects hardly resembled anything about who Jesus was, how he lived, or what he said, and, worse, began to judge who received God’s grace and who did not.
Now that centuries have passed we find ourselves in the ironic situation where the group that needs to be converted to the message of Jesus is the church itself. Its words and actions not only don’t reflect his, but contradict them.
The obvious truth the church must confront is that it cannot teach someone something it doesn’t know about itself. This is why the church trying to make non-Christians into Christians exacerbates the problem. It is teaching people to be what it is, and that can be far from living the way Jesus lived and taught.
It is almost a rule of thumb that the larger a church becomes, the more it struggles with overcoming the demands of institutionalism that make it reluctant to upset or disturb its members.
There’s a reason the church played a major role in Europe being embroiled in war after war until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 after people said enough of Catholic/Protestant conflict…
…a reason why churches in colonial America supported slavery
…a reason why churches supported the government ceasing native American lands …a reason priests and nuns forced native American children into Catholic schools
…a reason southern churches supported segregation after the Civil War
…a reason churches have demonized GLBTQ individuals
The reason was and still is that many church members have not learned, and perhaps were or have not been taught, what it means to live Christian. Attending church on Sunday, they think, is the core of discipleship rather than how they live the rest of the days of the week.
Of course, some church members do understand the call to become Christian and work at it faithfully. They serve as examples for the rest of us, but the hard truth is the church itself lost its way almost from the 1st century onward and has yet to find it on a large scale.
For this reason churches are filled with church members who have never truly committed themselves to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the cost of discipleship.” They’ve settled for “cheap grace,” by which he meant enjoying the comfort, joy, hope, and blessings of discipleship without embracing any of the sacrifices involved.
In America where there is no state support for churches, putting the need to have people above commitment to the gospel is a temptation all churches face. The big problem, of course, is that the cat is already out of the bag. Churches are full of people who joined without making any genuine commitment to the way of Jesus.
There are Catholics, for example, who don’t like Pope Leo saying the message of Jesus is one of diversity, equity, and inclusion, there are Protestants who believe Donald Trump is an instrument of God, and there are Catholics and Protestants whose political views override anything Jesus taught that contradicts their politics.
It’s not as if church leaders don’t know this is the state of the church. I don’t know any minister who doesn’t, but too many of us have made our peace with having to dance around the hard demands of the gospel when teaching and preaching to people who often don’t want to hear anything that makes them uncomfortable or challenges their life-style or view of the world.
All of this means that the primary mission of churches today is to teach their members the difference between being a church member and being Christian, and then expect them to embrace the latter even if they cannot do it perfectly.
No one in fact expects perfection, but the least we can expect is to be able to preach the message of Jesus as best we know how to do without the message itself being the source of controversy, conflict, and division.
That sounds idealistic, and in some ways it is because diversity includes people seeing things in different ways. But interpreting how to do what Jesus said we are to do should not divide churches.
I suggest one key to honest teaching and preaching in churches is the fundamental principle that no one has a corner on truth.
The trouble with zealots is that they believe they are right and everyone else is wrong. That’s how the church lost its way in the first place. When human beings think and act as if they possess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, they start acting like they are God.
To recognize no one has a corner on truth requires a measure of humility, a quality Jesus possessed the church that bears his name ought to as well.
History makes it sufficiently clear that the church has always been led by flawed human beings, and, therefore, its membership is also made up of flawed human beings, and still is. But our flawed-ness is not the problem. It is acting as if we’re not flawed that is.
Telling the truth in churches doesn’t require perfection. It requires courage, and that courage comes from the commitment to hearing and doing the gospel as best we can. Without the courage to tell the truth, hear the truth, take the truth seriously, nothing else in the church matters.
It is precisely because we are flawed and imperfect that telling itself the truth is the church’s first order of business, realizing that its mission is not to make the world Christian, but to become Christian itself.
That needs to be the focus. It is even possible that if churches would embrace that mission, they might end-up teaching the nations the message of Jesus after all.
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