life on the edges

It's been a few days and I would be more consistent, but I'm not. I'm just being true to myself. Post production will improve. Eventually. Right?

Where do you go?

I currently sit on the edge of a wide ranging sub-culture I used to identify with, the White Christian American anthropological group. I am still white, Christian and American, but I no longer feel a part of the structure that I lived under for the first 30 years of my life. And this isn't the first time.

You can never go home again, as they say.

I desperately want to be a part of the culture again, to feel a part of something bigger than myself (truly bigger than the whole of known existence) and more important than any one person's problems. That's the amazing pull of the Christian faith, to know you are more than the sum of your parts and more loved than you will ever understand. That's the motto, God loves you as you are. Jesus loves you as you are. The Church loves you as... well, we'll get to that part.

As you can imagine, being alienated from the Church for the -third- time in my life, I have less of an inclination to return. There are scads of articles about how to get men back into church, to draw them back into a life of church-going. Some assume these men are in dire straits, just begging to be brought in from the cold, unfeeling world. Some offer men forgiveness so they can feel good about themselves again. Others offer various levels of brotherhood: "We have coffee! We have game nights! We have guns!" This assumes an average man is bored by church services, or church doesn't feel manly enough.

My case is a stubborn attachment to the ideal of Compassion above all else. I say 'compassion', because everywhere I turn, someone has another definition of Love (or in some nerdier churches, Agape). Nine times out of ten, when someone is seen to be committing a Sin-of-the-Week (such as lusting, a major favorite), they will say that confronting people is the most "loving" thing a good Christian can do. They are told "be gentle, but firm in your conviction. If they refuse to correct their behavior, you should bring it up to a pastor. If they resist the pastoral correction, they are subject to church discipline."

"Love" is just another word for peer pressure in many churches. Conformity to a set of rules is more important than the often referenced but seldom seen "Christian freedom". 'Freedom from sin is found in obedience to God', as the logic goes, but the definition of obedience changes from house to house and church to church. Freedom to be who you are, but only within narrow parameters, creates a predictable church of like-minded people, but everyone else is pushed out. Instead of trying to see the world from the perspective of the outsiders (to try to understand them better), we hustle them inside and tell them they are seeing things wrong. Evangelism is the idea that you have everything already figured out, and it's just a matter of convincing people that you are right. False empathy leads thousands of Christians to believe they understand everyone's problems and it's simply a matter of faith.

Empathy is a building block of civilized society. Empathy leads to sympathy and sympathy to compassion, the feeling that drives a person to act on someone else's behalf. Charity is the ultimate expression of compassion, offering free food, shelter, clothes, medical services and/or money to people who have too little to survive without help. Compassionate charity used to be the backbone of true Christian living, and today it can be seen mostly in foreign missionary work. I'm seeing it being squeezed out here at home by the new kind of "love": Capitalist Moralism.

Let me tell you a story

Capitalism dictates that you cannot receive what you did not earn, other than God's love, of course. Moralism is the belief that a person is of little to no value if they have vices, a person with "loose morals" can't be trusted with anything. So we find a charismatic speaker and pay him a salary to be super moral and preach moral lessons from the Bible. Every week, a portion of everyone's income goes into the hat, the lights stay on, the preacher keeps preaching, and a social bubble is created. Outsiders are now "sinners", "the lost" or "future members". Insiders are now required to continually prove their commitment to the common cause by volunteering their time and money for special projects or ongoing programs. Bylaws are written and followed, a code of conduct is developed. Obedience to the leadership becomes more than a suggestion, it's required to remain a member in good standing, and being in good standing is the best part of living in this bubble. It might even be the only good part.
Meanwhile, there is little to nothing left over for the people in need just outside the chapel doors. A single mother is handed a tract and pointed to the nearest shelter. A pot head sits in the back every week, but is rarely greeted. This goes on for a few decades, all the original members get old, and the church slowly loses relevancy in the neighborhood. The church disbands and all remaining faithful join other congregations.

Or that's what happens most of the time.

Sometimes a "miracle" happens instead. Someone with good business sense becomes a leader in the church. His ideas are fresh and his budget planning is dynamic. He recruits more men like him, and slowly the church becomes profitable by attracting people with more money. That money is then spun into family programs, larger screens, better buildings, softer chairs, brighter lights, trendier music. More pastors are hired to shepherd the growing flock, and the pastors "earn" bigger salaries as attendance grows. It's a BIG bubble, but now it's full of faithfully generous middle-class people. The church is finally big enough with enough extra money left over to alleviate every possible need in the community... and then they don't. The church has been run like a business so long, the budget to help the poor is about 13% on average (note: there are no real dollar amounts on any of these charts.)

Compassionate work is the "love your neighbor as yourself" part of Church, AKA the second great commandment of Christ. All the bylaws and moral code adherence is based on the idea that you first love God most, and then also love all other people as if they were extensions of your self image. This bar is almost insanely high. That is part of reason that even though there are about 450,000 individual church congregations in the US of A, there are still under-served individuals in every community. The de-emphasis on neighborly empathy is at best negligent, and at worst punitive.

It starts with empathy

So where does this leave me? I pray for a Church that is outrageously inclusive. That's all I'm really talking about anyway, as I know many people will be highly defensive of their church or outreach program. I'm not here to knock your church, I'm expressing my own loss of faith in The Church to reverse this trend toward spending 87% of the operating budget on everything other than helping the poor. I don't want a comments section full of messages about how great your church is (to you, from your perspective). Being a liberal Christian in America today makes me incompatible with almost every congregational model because of only one small difference - I want to love everyone as they are. Gay, transgender, strung out, too poor to give, emotional or depressed, disaffected, single parent, divorced, abused, criminal or ex-con, barely believing in a vague God-like concept but wanting more... that is not a bubble. It's an unpredictable, nearly explosive mix of people coming into your chapel/auditorium/stadium every single Sunday and into your homes for Bible study every week. These are also the people that need your church the most. Can you lighten up on the anti-gay, pro-traditional family, anti-abortion, pro-capitalist message from the mass-media long enough to love people the way Jesus explicitly told you to? Can churches survive cutting entertainment and member program budgets to crank up the portion given away to poor, non-member populations? 

I would be very excited to join a church that has a single spotlight on piano player leading us all in old hymns if the money saved in the media budget could be used to house a dozen homeless people that month. But that might put off the benefactors that want a big band and professional music pastor. I would love to be part of a small group that let each member take a turn leading, even if that means letting a transgender woman talk about how they identify with the woman Jesus met at the well. But that might scare away the young WASP families that need to grow up in the church to maintain a "core membership". I'd love a Church that abandons politics and legislative process (i.e. voter registration programs and letter writing campaigns) to focus on restoring dignity to the human beings at their doorsteps instead. I want a church that rejects well-padded budgets and strives for frighteningly generous giving.

God help me, that's all I'm looking for.