An important book, well written, well researched, graceful, challenging and comforting. A study of the revitalization of mainline churches through intentionally applying classic Christian practices.
Quotes:
Nomadic spirituality, that sense of being alien, strangers in a strange land, is almost a given of contemporary life.
In the New Testament, Jesus asks everyone to change. With the exception of children, Jesus insists that every person he meets do something and change.
At first, it seemed odd that students regularly challenged me with the same statistic. Then, I discovered that the vast majority of them had seen the same video, America’s Godly Heritage, by an amateur historian named David Barton.
is the church “the gathering of the saints” or “a hospital for sinners”
Many mainstream congregations became a kind of Christian version of the Rotary Club, understanding the church as a religious place for social acceptability and business connections. [...] By the time I was born in 1959, church was an extension of postwar middle-class aspirations, run by bureaucracies in the faith business. [...] mainline churches of my childhood had essentially capitulated to American culture—their political practices of charity and social concern were basically secular.
Many people today, religious nomads isolated in time by modern amnesia, are trying to relocate themselves in the past. To get connected with the ancestors. To find their way back to an enchanted world.
Some Christians think that faith is like a set of MapQuest directions—that there is only a single highway to God. [...] Christianity is not a map religion. Christianity is a religion of the streets, of signposts on the ground, of people walking along the way.
Next to hospitality, discernment was one of the most widely spread spiritual practices among the research churches. [...] You have to pay attention when you are not entirely sure where you are going.
For my soul’s gonna be a place for God to live and laugh, to heal and love.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ’s compassion to the world;
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; yours are the hands with which He is to bless men now.
(Teresa of Avila)
[S]alvation is a process whereby we enter into God’s saving work—not a single moment of miraculous transformation through which we are rescued from sin. [...] a lifetime of practice, receiving God’s healing grace and power, being changed by it, and offering healing back to the world. The healed heal.
Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence. (Meister Eckhart)
Prayer is then not just a formula of words, or a series of desires springing up in the heart—it is the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration. All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God. (Thomas Merton)
testimony is the most democratic—and empowering—of all Christian practices
How can a religion that speaks so eloquently of love so brutally destroy its questioners, its dissenters, its innovators, and its competitors?
Tutu explains that Africans believe “a person is a person through other persons.” Fundamental to our humanity is that “we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation.” Tutu says, “The truth is we need each other. We cannot survive and thrive without one another.”
The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community. (Martin Luther King)
While fairness, equality, and human rights are very good things, they are also primarily secular ideals. As shocking as the discovery may be to many American Christians, that secular language is not found in the Bible or in the vast consensus of Christian tradition. Instead, those ideals emerged during the Enlightenment [...]
This is the foundation of worship. If you can take an hour on Sunday morning and open people to experiencing just a quarter-second of awe, wonder, and surrender you just experienced, it is accomplished.
the object of worship “is not to create anything.” Rather, he says, “the goal is simply to invite people into a sense of openness and attentiveness [...] Worship, Robinson concludes, needs to be an “experience of God,” rather than a “reflection about God.”
Every act of worship, no matter how private or public, how discreet or elaborate, enacts God’s dream for the world.
Worship is much more than something Christians attend on Sunday morning—it is something pilgrims make together.
For more than thirty years, mainline Protestants have fought bitterly about worship. Typically, the argument is about the use of “contemporary” versus “traditional” music, art, and liturgy in church. Yet, as I journeyed through the mainline, I observed that the particular style of music did not necessarily matter to congregational vitality.
Perhaps unexpectedly in this highly technological age, young adults may well have found their way back to an untapped stream of American theological mysticism. Postmodern and ancient at the same time, new and old, innovative and traditional.
As a California Presbyterian said bluntly about art, “It helps move people away from blind literalism” to what is “truly there.”
Through the arts, human beings embody God by imitating God’s creative life—shaping the clay of their experience with voices and hands. In that place, everything becomes new as we participate in God’s continual creation of the universe.
In the churches along my way, change was not gimmicky innovation in search of cultural relevance. Too often, churches think that if they add guitars to worship, put DVDs in Sunday school rooms, or open a food court in the foyer, new people will join. This kind of change smacks of market tinkering—adjusting the product to improve sales. In my journey, churches changed at a much deeper level and for different reasons.
“We don’t do things arbitrarily,” says one woman. “We adopt them as part of our community when it feeds the spirit. When things don’t work, we shed them.”
Because of their unique sense of identity, almost all the congregations expressed reservations about their larger denominational identity.
I had seen an almost entirely different political vision in the study congregations—a nearly wholesale rejection of the definition of politics as systemic change and policy platforms. In the congregations I visited, politics was being redefined as communal practices of service, grassroots social transformation that works “up” toward larger change.
“We come with our own national identity. And that’s okay. But as we gather as God’s people, we need to say that we are something else at least an hour out of the week. We are a liturgical people worshiping God more than a bunch of Americans.”
Some congregations along my way leaned toward being blue-purples (especially in urban areas and in the west); others, red-purples (especially in suburbs and in the south). None matched the media stereotype of Christian politics; none was a pure form of any political party. Like their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, they are somewhat politically unpredictable and do not form a reliably unified voting block.
Lent is not about being sad, not some sort of spiritual penance. Rather, she insists, Lent is about change—the change that God can make in our selves, our faith communities, and the larger world. Lent is a time that opens our hearts to transformation, to becoming God’s people and doing that which God calls us to do.
Transformation is the promise at the heart of the Christian life.
Christianity for the rest of us is not about personal salvation, not about getting everybody else saved, or about the politics of exclusion and moral purity. Christianity for the rest of us is the promise of transformation—that, by God’s mercy, we can be different, our congregations can be different, and our world can be different.
Mainline renewal is, as one Lutheran pastor told me, “not rocket science.” As he said, “You preach the gospel, offer hospitality, and pay attention to worship and people’s spiritual lives. Frankly, you take Christianity seriously as a way of life.”
