Why should anyone read a book on old-style church union?

I’ve spent four years writing a book on the last and most important church union movement of the 20th century, but knowledgeable people report that readers won’t be much interested.

A friend, who is an expert in the unity movement, recommended the manuscript to his publisher but was told that their readers aren’t buying books on “old-style Christian unity.”

Even the Christian Century, which for generations was the nation’s primary advocate of ecumenism, rarely uses the word “ecumenical” in its columns. One occasion when the word was allowed was the interview with historian David Hollinger (published on July 2, 2012) who reported that “ecumenical Protestant churches“ is the title he prefers for the classic Protestant denominations.

This declining interest in church unity movements was confirmed a few months ago when I announced a workshop on my book for the program of a theological conference I would be attending. Five of my friends showed up.

The next step in finishing the book is to draft a description of the story it tells and in the process to indicate why this book should be read by people who care about the Christian witness in an inter-faith world broken open by the principalities and powers.

The next few paragraphs are my first effort to write the statement. Comments, question, and suggestions will be much appreciated.

The American Church That Might Have Been: A History of the Consultation on Church Union

For most of the twentieth century, a small group of Protestant churches stood at the center of American life. Four of these denominations—Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Methodist— were especially important as pillars of the national culture and guardians of all that was considered true and right. Members of these churches held positions of power in the institutions of government, business corporations, and academic institutions.

Although the American constitution maintained a de jure separation between church and state, these classic churches constituted a de facto establishment of religion.

In December 1960, Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake, one of the nation’s best-known religious leaders, proposed that these four American churches form a plan of church union that would be both catholic and reformed. The idea was widely and enthusiastically reported by major news media. During the next few months the churches that Blake had named formed an organization, the Consultation on Church Union, to develop this plan. They added a third descriptive adjective, evangelical, and received two additional churches to their number.

The primary motive for reshaping church life in America was the conviction of its leaders that only a united church could minister effectively to a nation that was divided by race and class. They were convinced that this new church would enable the churches to minister more effectively to a divided world.

At its high point, the Consultation consisted of nine denominations, including three historic African American churches. With 25,000,000 members, the Church of Christ Uniting would have been spread throughout the nation more completely than any other Protestant church. It would have overcome 400 years of separation between major branches of the Protestant Reformation and provided experiences of local communion and common witness that previously had not existed.

It would have overcome the increasingly dysfunctional aspects of the denominational system that even yet hampers the effectiveness of these churches. It would have transformed long-standing patterns of prejudice, privilege, and power that still distort American life.

Although the Consultation on Church Union ended in January 2002, without accomplishing its major goals, its history needs to be preserved. The contributions to American life of this last (by which I mean the most recent) comprehensive plan of union in the United States need to be remembered and honored. Despite its failure, the reverberations of the work done by the churches over this extended period of time continue to be felt. Many of the issues on which the Consultation worked so diligently remain with the churches, and their future activity can benefit from an understanding of what went on before.

Last has a second and more important meaning. If one conclusion can be drawn from COCU’s history it is that the century-long pursuit of multilateral church mergers can no longer be regarded as an important way to manifest Christian unity in the United State. It is hard to imagine any combination of theological and social factors, save the virtual collapse of existing ecclesial systems, that could inspire a new effort to achieve a comprehensive American plan of church union in the decades immediately before us.

For this reason, it is especially important for church people–laity, clergy, workers for justice and mercy, professors–to reflect upon the history of the Consultation on Church Union, America’s last and greatest example of old-style Christian unity.  

 

What does the church pray when storms are raging?

On a Sunday when the Oklahoma tornadoes had been dominating the daily news, I was asked to offer the morning prayer at my church. Traditionally, this prayer includes the church’s intercessions for the well being of the world and requests for God’s abiding presence in all that takes place in life.

Since my church stands in the tradition of extemporaneous prayer, it was my responsibility to decide what we as a body of faithful but uncertain people would want to say to God. At such a time, I remember the comment of one of my neighbors, a retired Episcopal priest, who told me that his church “worships its theology—it converts what it believes into the language of prayer, which it then offers to God.”

This was where I would have to start my preparation: by asking what is God’s role in the storms, droughts, and wild fires spread across so much of our country. Two themes in Scripture came to mind: the world as a beautiful garden in which God and people talk as friends in the cool of the day, and the world in which God is most fully present in violent storms that tear the world apart.

I live my life as a person of faith and as a person who honors scientific explanations of natural processes. Neither my religious nor my scientific persuasion allows me to assert that God has chosen to destroy Oklahoma and burn down California.

So what should I pray? Here’s what I said.

Eternal God, our faith is built on the confession that you are creator of heaven and earth. We live in the confidence that you intend to give us everything we need to enjoy life. On beautiful spring days when the weather is tranquil and markets are filled with newly harvested fruit and vegetables, it is easy to see your intentions for the world coming to their fulfillment.

Yet, the news is filled with reports of natural powers gone awry: in some places, violent storms of wind and rain, and in others drought and wild fires raging out of control. Fascinated by their power, we are terrified by what these natural forces can do.

God, because we know that your will for us is good, we cannot believe that you cause these things to happen. Today we stand with the prophet Elijah long ago, who endured earthquake, wind, and fire and then heard you speak in a still small voice.

Speak to us, we pray. Speak words that we can hear with the inner ear, words that help us live beyond our fears and into lives of solidarity with one another, courage, and confidence that you are with us no matter what happens.

Today we pray for people who are experiencing the momentous times of life:

• Entering into marriage,
• Giving birth to babies,
• Completing school terms and doing the work that sustains life,
• Responding to the crises of natural disaster, economic distress, and war,
• Facing illness,
• Passing from this life to the next.

By your Holy Spirit, be present with us in all of these moments. Fill us with joy; calm our fears; forgive us our sins; and renew our faith that through Jesus Christ nothing can separate us from your love. For it is through the same Jesus Christ that we pray. Amen.

Post-modernist rituals and celebrations of life’s passing

Parting Ways: New Rituals and Celebrations of Life’s Passing, by Denise Carson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)

Parting Ways

Denise Carson watched both of her parents die of cancer, her father when he was 37 and her mother 17 years later when she was 54 and Denise was 26.

Her dad had done everything that his doctors could devise to master the disease that gradually destroyed his body. In his final hours, with tubes connecting to his body in many places, he was rushed by ambulance to the hospital where he died in a sterile institution isolated from the people he loved.

Denise’s mother, Linda Carson, declared that for her the quality of life would be more important than the quantity. She didn’t want her life to end that way. Despite unexpected developments in her medical care, Linda’s desire was accomplished. She died in the home she loved, surrounded by people who loved her, her family, friends, and colleagues with whom she had worked.

Before her mother’s death, Denise had begun reading in the large body of literature about death and dying, the history of funeral and burial practices, and ritual theory. She became acquainted with a growing movement throughout the United States to set aside prevailing patterns and develop new ways to celebrate life and memorialize its ending.

Three years after her mother died, Linda took advantage of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism book class to help her shape her research into a book, Parting Ways: New Rituals and Celebrations of Life’s Passing. Although published by a university press, this is not a heavy, hard-to-read tome.

The book contains extensive narratives describing the passing from this life to the next of her parents and of a considerable number of others who have helped remake American practices related to this time in the life cycle. It recounts the stories of several people who are pioneering new approaches to medical care, celebrations of life before death, and new ways to memorialize the deceased after death has come.

Although the author clearly sympathizes with the changes that are taking place, she writes in a descriptive, declarative mode rather than in a manner that denounces conventional practice and advocates new ways. By the life experiences she recounts, she reveals the deficiencies of customary practices and opens the door to new possibilities. Among the themes that unfold in Parting Ways, several stand out for me.

For most of human history, including the United States until a century ago, dying and the care of the dead were part of the natural rhythm of family and community life. We had not yet learned how to prolong the process of dying with ever more painful and alienating medical and institutional processes. People died in the arms of their loved ones, were cared for by people of their community, and their remains returned to the elements in natural ways.

Gradually, we developed new ways of using medical processes that took the dying away from home. The care of the dead was entrusted to new institutions (funeral homes), and the embalm-and-bury method of caring for the remains came into common practice. Funeral rites, even in the churches, tended to be impersonal. (I remember being taught in seminary that the name of the deceased ought not even be mentioned during the funeral.)

Carson refers to this pattern as the modernist way of ritualizing life’s passing. It was, to some extent, brought about in response to the Civil War when new processes of embalming made it possible to return the war dead to their home communities for burial.

The post-modernist approaches have not yet settled into a common pattern. The very nature of contemporary life makes it unlikely that one set of ritual actions will become dominant. One reason is that families often are divided and their members alienated from one another. People move from one place to another and develop differing patterns of friendship and support. Uniform patterns of religious faith and practice are being replaced by a wide range of religious and non-religious ways of living.

The old authorities—doctors, funeral directors, and clergy—have been so tied to the old order that they have often been unable to guide the people of our generation as they seek for ways to be with the people who are dying and to remember them on into the years after their passing.

If there is any single phenomenon of our time that has demonstrated the need for new patterns, as the Civil War did long ago, it is the AIDS epidemic. “From July 1981 to March 1998,” Carson reports, 17,198 had died of AIDS in San Fransicso, nearly 70% of them at home. “This provided space around the deathbed uninhibited by medical professionals or any authority figures. The very nature of this disease dwelled in the dark underbelly of society. In many cases, family banishment had entrenched their alternative lifestyles, and many AIDS sufferers were divorced from religion” (p. 164).

The larger part of Parting Ways is devoted to “end-of-life celebrations and pre-death rituals,” practices that are largely missing from the modernist approach to death and dying that has dominated American life. The second part of the book discusses “post-death and memorializing rituals.”

Hurry out and get your copy. Maybe because it’s such a good book, Parting Ways is getting hard to find.

Giving the Hebrew bible another read

Yorum Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

About twenty years ago, when I was in my early 60s and dealing with mild depression, I decided that it finally was time to read straight through the Bible, beginning with Genesis 1:1 and finishing at some later date with Revelation 22:21. I got as far as Judges. The bloody narratives, many of them describing actions incited by the warrior God of the conquering Hebrews, were more than my flagging spirit could manage.

Although I continue to read from the New Testament, especially the letters of Paul, the gospels, and Acts, it is as though the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures in my personal Bible are pasted together. Will The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge University Press, 2012) by a highly acclaimed young Israeli scholar, I am wondering, help me start over with the thirty-nine writings in the first part of my Bible?

Yorum Hazony, provost and senior scholar at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, believes that the texts of Hebrew Scripture are best read as “works of reason or philosophy.” The question of whether this can be done, he says, in the next to last paragraph of the Appendix, takes this form: “Do they engage in the effort to derive and make known to us the general causes or natures of the things encountered in human experience? Are these general natures used in attempts to establish principles or laws of general applicability concerning the world of our experience? And do these find application in particular instances, or to substantiate the truth of the principles and laws in question” (p. 273)?

In the final paragraph, Hazony states the one premise upon which he bases his constructive argument: “As soon as one recognizes, as I have suggested, that metaphor, analogy, and typology are in fact means by which the author of a work can establish positions with respect to general causes or natures, it becomes easier to see that the great majority of the biblical authors, and perhaps all of them, are indeed engaged in reason; and that it is the exercise of reason, which we find almost everywhere in the Hebrew Bible, that I’ve sought to depict in my inquiries into the ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and faith of the Hebrew Scriptures as presented in Part II of this work” (p. 264).

Hazony believes, however, that the Hebrew Scriptures do not receive the respect they deserve from readers today, especially those with recognized competence in philosophy. Much of the book, therefore, is devoted to describing and counteracting the reasons why the ancient writings of his people are dismissed as works of reason.

One of these reasons is cited above, the form of these writings. They abound with references to the words and actions of God, which for many readers make them into works of mythology or divine revelation, incapable of being read as serious works of reason. Hazony quickly dismisses this argument by showing how many of these same skeptical readers seem not to be troubled by the obviously mythological format of Greek and Roman treatises that they acclaim as among the most important works of reason in the history of human thought.

If Greek writings can be read as works of reason despite their mythological format, he insists, then writings in similar form in other traditions, including the Hebrew, can also be read philosophically.

Far more important in Hazony’s explanation for this lack of respect is what he alleges is the misreading of Hebrew Scripture by Christians and the baleful effect this prejudicial attitude has had on the Western intellectual tradition. According to Hazony, Christians divide religious writings into two categories: reason and revelation. Revelation comes directly from God and is to be accepted as given. In contrast, reason is a human construct, always subject to error, always inferior to revelation. Even if one were to agree with this distinction, Hazony counters, this dialectic is irrelevant to the proper understanding of Hebrew Scripture. These documents were written prior to the emergence of the reason-revelation dichotomy in the Western intellectual tradition. Continue reading. . .Hazony-Philosophy

“Symbolic healing” on a Sunday when we really need it

When a member of my church began the morning prayer on the Sunday following a terrible week, I knew I had come to the right place.

“This has been a horrific week,” he began, “with bombings at the Boston Marathon where three were killed and 170 were injured, a police officer later assassinated, a bombing suspect killed, and then the chemical explosion in the community of West, Texas, where fourteen were killed including firefighters and rescue workers, and 200 injured. Then an earthquake took the lives of more than 150 people and injured 5,550 others in China.”

He invited us to join together in a time of silence and remembrance for the victims and families, after which he offered a long prayer, with words carefully crafted. A few minutes later, our pastor (who last week told us that being nice is not good enough) preached a gentle, emotionally charged sermon about God the Good Shepherd.

So what’s the point of all these prayers and sermons in church when the world is torn apart by horrendous pain and suffering? At home after church, while pondering this question, I came across an answer in I. M. Luhrman’s op-ed column “The Benefits of Church,” which she posted April 20 in the New York Times. Luhrman is a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

 “We have increasingly better evidence,” she writes, “that what anthropologists would call ‘symbolic healing’ has real physical effects on the body. At the heart of some of these mysterious effects may be the capacity to trust that what can only be imagined may be real, and be good.”

While Luhrman refers to her research in evangelical churches, symbolic healing also takes places in liberal churches like the one where I worship. Here is the prayer that is helping me trust that a peaceful world, something I can only imagine, may be real and at sometime in a future we can only imagine come to pass.

“Creator God and Life-giving Spirit: We gather on this Lord’s Day with Easter only days behind us. While Easter was a time of new awakenings, this past week has been an occasion of both death and new life. Our eyes and minds have been bombarded with images of violence, destruction, injury, and death. We have been filled with both hurt and happiness.

“It is difficult to imagine the historic city of Boston being shut down, the people terrorized and living in fear. It is just as difficult to imagine an entire town on the plains of Texas being blown away by a chemical explosion.

“We come today remembering and praying for our sisters and brother. Our hearts go out to those who lost loved ones and whose lives will be forever changed. With your tender mercies bring healing and wholeness to their brokenness.

“O God, our great Shepherd, healer and helper, we also remember today those who are ill, hospitalized, convalescent, or homebound. We remember those who grieve—the loss of companions and loved ones, the loss of strength and youthfulness, the loss of quality of life.

“We remember the lonely who need friendship, those whose hearts and lives are broken , those who live with their addictions, those needing food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. With your tender mercies bring healing and wholeness to their lives.

“O God of hope and encouragement, enable us to see the world not only as it is but as it can be. Give us a vision of families living together in a global community where there is peace with justice for all, sufficient food and water, housing, education, and healthcare. Teach us the joy of giving and the dignity of caring.

“Use our humble gifts to build a better humanity. Let us never lose sign of the purposes you have for our lives, and grant us the strength to obey your voice. In the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, our elder brother and friend, we pray. Amen.”

Following public disasters like the Boston Bombings, public officials encourage us to continue our normal patterns of life, vigilant but unafraid. And we want to live that way. What the public officials cannot easily do, however, is provide the symbol healing that gives the spirit of trust in the reality of the world that can only be imagined.

By themselves, prayers are not enough. What must follow is the constant, hard work of seeking justice, overcoming all that causes pain and suffering, teaching, and building. All of this we have to do. But in order to engage in these labors, we need to believe that what we do can make a difference. The disease we face is cynicism, the inaction  that comes from believing that nothing good can be done.

The healing symbols of hopeful expectation enable us to move past our illness into new life.

Amy Piatt’s not very nice sermon

First Christian Church, Portland, Oregon

“Nice sermon, pastor.” That’s what folks sometimes say at the door as they leave church. It’s an easy thing to say, positive in tone, neutral with respect to what the preacher said. The only response it calls for is “Thank you. It’s nice to see you today.”

But what do you say at the door when this is what the preacher said during the sermon a few minutes earlier?

“Anybody can be nice. But there is a difference between being Nice and being a Christ follower.

“Nice” never stirs the waters. It never makes people uncomfortable. And it certainly never asks people to do anything that would compromise their security.

“Jesus was not a nice man. He was a good, compassionate and loving man.  And for that, his security was certainly compromised.

“We’re not here just to be liked – we’re here because we need to be LOVED and we need to love others…and that is risky business.

“But, God is in the business of taking risks.”

After church, comments went in different directions. “Sermons like that will make us a different kind of church,” one person told me.

“How would people who’ve never been in church before respond” someone else asked. “What they need is a sermon that invites them into the church because it is a community that accepts them as they are.”

“That’s one sermon we sure talked about after we got home,” was a comment later in the week by someone else who has been going to church for a long, long time.

And since Sunday morning I’ve been thinking about it more than I usually do. Here’s what I liked about the sermon.

• It was a logical development of the gospel reading for the day which was the stiff and challenging way that Jesus dealt with Peter on the beach: “If you love me, feed my sheep.”
• It was phrased in the indicative mood rather than the imperative. The preacher was making factual statements about one aspect of the church that has marked its life from the beginning. She was not telling us how it ought to be and how we as church members ought to be doing things.
• We were not being scolded. Instead, the preacher was calling attention to one aspect of life in the church that has always been there but is often not mentioned in conversations about what it means to be part of the life of a Christian community.

The preacher had this to say about Jesus:

“Jesus isn’t nice, and he couldn’t care less about his public image. Here, in the Gospel of John, Jesus has finished his life on earth…at least as the man who walked around teaching and healing and loving everybody – remember?

“That’s what got him killed.  He stirred things up and raised a few too many questions. The people in power couldn’t have him running around questioning their authority. That would be chaos. Where’s the order?  Where’s the line? We can’t have this! We’ve got to keep things under control here. And so, they crucified him.”

Then came the question: “Who are we without Jesus?”

And then the answer:

“We are a bunch of nice, orderly, folks.…And a people without hope. What is required of us? What’s our job? Why do we keep showing up here – week after week, year after year? For a common life of fellowship, prayers, meals, service and study. To put love into action.

“This is nourishment for the soul. And food for the body of Christ. That’s what the church is. Jesus has not left us.  His spirit is still with us. In order to keep Christ alive we are called to BE Christ to the world. Entering into the body of Christ is a process of discovering a new humanity. Ours is a story of a God who throughout history has brought change and upheaval to our neatly structured lives.

The sermon ends with an appeal. “Let’s be faithful enough to give all that we have so that the world may receive all that God has to give. No more mister nice guy, no more Miss Manners.

“Hear Christ’s call Brothers and Sisters:  He says it to us as he says it to Peter on the Beach: ‘Follow me.’ We don’t get to play Church, we’re going to be church.
We are going to embrace the spirit of Christ. By getting past the facades and pleasantries and by tending and feeding others in a way that makes love real.

“Nice just won’t get it done, but we – by the grace of God – WILL live into a new life – a resurrection life, A future of hope.”

To hear the sermon, preceded by the scripture reading and a musical interlude, click this link: A Nice Church.

 

A new American church for a world groaning in travail

The era in which the Consultation on Church Union began its work to remake the church and the nation

The decade of the 1950s was a moment in America when two cultural forces were coming together like tectonic plates. By the end of the decade, major systems in American life were experiencing tremors that presaged a more dramatic revolution than most people—especially those in leadership positions—could have imagined.

When the tremors came, a natural response was to hold things together until the shaking ceased and then to shore up the systems where vulnerabilities had been revealed. A more imaginative response by a few church leaders was to acknowledge that something much more substantial needed to be done. New systems able to withstand the shaking America’s institutions would have to be devised.

One of these efforts was the movement to unite nine ecumenical protestant churches at the center of American life and culture. Although the intended merger of existing denominations did not take place, the unity movement impacted American churches and culture.

As part of my research on the history of this movement—the Consultation on Church Union—I have written a description of that period when the United States was undergoing radical change. To read the essay, click New Church – World Groaning

The Disappearance of Church Religion

Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

Even on Easter Sunday people don’t go to church the way they used to. Some give as their reason that they aren’t religious. Others that they are spiritual but with a spirituality that does not need institutional expression. Others may be willing to engage in religious practices and patterns of devotion but believe that churches no longer provide an effective form of public ceremony.

Whatever the reason, it is accurate to declare that church religion is disappearing. The challenge for all of us, whether or not we participate in church religion, is to understand the phenomenon we experience around us.

For me, the place to begin is a book that was published nearly half a century ago by Thomas Luckmann, professor of sociology at the University of Frankfurt and for a time a faculty member of the New School for Social Research.

He entitled his book The Invisible Religion:The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. Luckmann wrote that the focus of studies in his discipline tended to be “church religion,” the forms of religious observance that take place within the framework of specialized religious institutions. Because church religion was declining in Europe and the United States, many of his colleagues were concluding that religion itself was disappearing.

Not so, Luckmann asserted. Instead, people were expressing their religion—which he defined as “the transcendence of biological nature by the human organism”—in a new, non-institutional way.

As I understand this idea, it is that a human being is more than an ongoing complex of biological and psychological experiences. Each person interacts with others and in the process becomes aware of oneself and of everything else. One’s past, present, and future are integrated into “a socially defined, morally relevant biography.” Each of us embarks with others to construct an “’objective’ and moral universe of meaning. Therefore the organism transcends its biological nature” (49).

One of the most important aspects of this religious process is taking into oneself a world view, which Luckmann defined as “an encompassing system of meaning in which socially relevant categories of time, space, causality and purpose are superordinated to more specific schemes in which reality is segmented and the segments are related to one another” (53).  Although world views could be developed individually, this rarely happens because the “universe-constructing activities of successive generations. . .is immeasurably greater than  that of individual streams of consciousness” (52).

Central to Luckmann’s thesis is the fact that in the modern world all institutions become sharply specialized, each dealing with its specific area of responsibility. No institution, including the religious, can unite all of the other perspectives and connect them authoritatively to the sacred cosmos. Because life experiences change more rapidly than institutions, however, churches and other religious institutions lose their potency. Their message is experienced as rhetoric rather than as essential and authoritative explanations of the objective world.

Furthermore, this rhetoric is understood as important only in private matters and has no bearing upon the values and norms of the other domains of life such as economics and politics. In their religious development, individuals act as consumers, accepting only those elements they find meaningful.

Although a once dominant religious worldview can lose its dominance, its central themes and values linger in the society and are incorporated into the religious identities that people develop for themselves. Even in a society where two thirds of the people are non-observant in religious institutions, the themes from those institutions continue to be part of the commonly affirmed religious values and life practices.

Luckmann offered four questions for students of religion to consider: 1) What norms do determine the priorities of people? 2) What systems provide the “overarching, sense-integrating function in contemporary life?” 3) How clearly are they linked to individual systems of ultimate significance and to social roles and positions? 4) To what extent is official religion being internalized and what is its relevance to systems of ultimate significance in contemporary life? (91).

While the church religion that once was central to European and American life is disappearing, and the religious function is more personalized than once was the case, it is unlikely that human societies can exist as fully individualized conglomerations of people who do not share norms and patterns of life.

Institutions will continue to emerge and participate in shaping human values, patterns, and practices. If the Christian faith continues to lead people to “life abundant,” it will be because revised forms of church religion will emerge.

What will they be? And how can those who lead churches now participate in shaping these new forms? These are the questions for leaders of churches during these post-Easter days.

America’s last plan for church union

COCU’s Final Documents

On a blustery day in early spring, I decided to stay off of my bicycle and instead complete the second draft of my current research project, which is to write a history of the last effort to develop a comprehensive plan for church union in the United States.

I am using the word last in two senses. One is that the Consultation on Church Union, as this 40-year venture was called, was last in that it was the most recent effort. The more important meaning of last is that it is unlikely that any other project of this kind is likely to be attempted during the lifetime of anyone capable of reading this blog.

It’s hard to comprehend what American church life would be like today if COCU, to use the acronym by which the Consultation was most widely known, had succeeded. Imagine a 25 million member Protestant church comprising Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist (four denominations), United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and International Council of Community Churches branches Christianity!

There is much more work to do in order to complete this manuscript, which (at 400 words per page) would print out to about 175 pages). Not least of the tasks is to find a publisher (if you have ideas and influence, let me know). The detailed table of contents outlines the story line of this saga of American Protestant church life.

The American Church That Might Have Been: A History of the Consultation on Church Union, by Keith Watkins (Table of Contents of Second Draft)

Part One: Moving from Vision to Plan (1960—1970)

Chapter One: The Bold Proposal (“Jesus Christ, whom all of us confess as our divine Lord and Saviour, wills that his church be one”)             

• A Sermon to Transform the American Church
• Principles and Patterns for Christian Unity

Chapter Two: The Challenge to Reunion in Concrete Terms (If the churches are unwilling to give this proposal full seriousness, they are “abdicating their ecumenical responsibility”)

• Creating the Consultation on Church Union
• Developing the Theological Foundation for a New Church

Chapter Three: Second Thoughts on Church Union (Pressing on to become an instrument for peace and reconciliation across all boundaries of nation, race, and class)

• A Deeper Understanding of Ministry
• The Resurgence of Hope

Chapter Four: Principles of Church Union (“A more inclusive expression of the oneness of the Church of Christ than any of the participating churches can suppose itself alone to be” )   

• The Principles
• Enlarging the Enterprise

Chapter Five: Responding to Issues of Structure and Organization (“The law of man is secondary. We move today under command of the law of God”)

• Facing Organizational Challenges
• The Unification of Ministries
• Bringing Things Together in a Plan of Union

Chapter Six: At Last A Plan of Union (Whatever the decision may be, the lives of all of us will be changed  and the shape of the church will have been drastically altered)

• Following Christ to the Cross
• The Basic Elements of the Plan
• Deliberations and Actions

Part Two: Negotiating the Terms of Agreement (1971—1988 )

Chapter Seven: Reaching for Balance and Equilibrium (Still “the best hope for a reconciled, revitalized Christian community”)

• Empowering the Black Churches
• Reclaiming the Sacramental Center

Chapter Eight: Changing the Focus from Plan to Process (Consensus on theology but still searching for agreement on organization and structure)

• Paying Attention to What the Churches Had Said
• A Different Kind of Next Step

Chapter Nine: Moving Yet and Never Stopping (A consensus struggling to find expression)

• Dutifully Working at the Pragmatic Task
• Christian Unity and Racial Justice
• Consensus Struggling to Find Expression

Chapter Ten: The COCU Consensus (“A sufficient theological basis for  covenanting acts and the uniting process”)

• Something Like a Compass for the COCU Churches
• Second Revision, in Two Parts
• Adoption of the Theological Basis for Unity
• COCU at the Turning Point

Chapter Eleven: Churches in Covenant Communion (Pledging to walk together until we are visibly united in Christ)

• The Idea of Covenant Takes Shape
• Liturgies for Covenanting
• One More Time Around

Part Three: Watching the Vision Vanish Away (1989—2002)

Chapter Twelve: Churches Uniting in Christ (Like a grain of wheat, COCU falls into the ground and dies)

• The Responses by the Churches
• Searching for a Way Forward
• COCU Becomes CUIC

Chapter Thirteen: Continuing the Search for Christian Unity in America (The post-COCU agenda for the nation’s ecumenical protestant churches)

• What COCU Tried to Do
• Why This Venture Seemed So Promising
• Why COCU Lost Momentum
• COCU’s Achievements
• The Post-COCU Agenda for Ecumenical Protestant Churches in America
• Conclusion

 

Finding Faith in the New Millennium

Liberating Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, by Thomas C. Sorenson (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2008)

After earning a Ph.D. in Russian Imperial History, Thomas C. Sorenson decided that he would rather be a lawyer than a history professor. He earned a law degree and became an attorney. Then three things happened.

He began reading theology, starting with Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith. With his wife, he became an active participant in the process by which the United Church of Christ congregation to which they belonged became an open and affirming congregation in regard to “equal rights and dignity of gay and lesbian people.” He experienced a period of serious depression during which his pastor introduced him to Jungian psychology.

The result was that at the age of 48, Sorenson turned away from the law, earned an M.Div. degree, and became pastor of the United Church of Christ congregation in a community of 17,000 outside of Seattle. Early in his pastorate, it became clear to him that his congregation’s role “was precisely to be a progressive, Open and Affirming alternative to the religious conservatism that so pervaded the community” and its 26 churches (p. xxiii).

Sorenson is aware of the popular understandings of Christianity that dominate the news and have led many people to abandon Christian belief and practice. To counteract this tendency, Sorenson wrote a book, Liberating Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium. These obstacles are: 1) philosophical materialism, 2) biblicism, and 3) the denial of grace.

In a very short Part One, Sorenson presents his answer to the first problem, the belief held by many people “that only the material, only the physical, is real.” His intention in this chapter and “A Philosophical Appendix” at book’s end is to show that “belief in a spiritual dimension to reality…is both reasonable and intellectually defensible.” While I affirm Sorenson’s line of thought, the subject needs fuller treatment than it receives in this book.

Part Two, three times longer than Part One, discusses the problem of biblicism, which to Sorenson is the foundation for much of the popular misunderstanding of Christianity. In contrast to much naysaying literature of our time, however, Sorenson does not begin this part of the book by denouncing views that he believes to be wrong. Instead, he develops a constructive line of thought, based on Tillich, concerning the nature of religious truth.

Its significant components are myth and symbol, which Sorenson describes as “images and stories taken from the world of ordinary sense perception and experience and applied to the spiritual, to which they point and in which they participate but cannot fully capture and cannot ultimately define” (p. 31).

Sorenson then discusses how biblicism, which insists that the Bible is literally and factually true, misunderstands what the Bible actually is and leads to conclusions and convictions that cannot be sustained by thoughtful people in our time. As might be expected, issues related to homosexuality are important illustrations in this section of the book.

A full half of Liberating Christianity is devoted to the third obstacle, which in my experience in liberal congregations today is the most serious. Sorenson identifies it as “the denial of grace,” but the range of his discussion is indicated by the four chapter heads which state his topics: beyond the classical theory of atonement, the meaning of the cross as a demonstration of God’s solidarity, the dynamics of salvation, and the teaching of Jesus for our time.

An example of his exposition is this except from his chapter on the meaning of the cross: “God’s solidarity with us demonstrated in the life and death of Jesus is, when we truly understand it, the best news there ever was or ever could be. It means that even in our times of greatest pain and greatest grief God is there with us, holding us in God’s everlasting arms of grace, keeping us existentially safe from harm. Though we die, God is there with us, dying with us, and keeping close in death and beyond death” (p. 124).

Throughout the book I noted places where I would develop Sorenson’s themes somewhat differently, but the book as a whole is an articulate and persuasive presentation of a version of Christianity that I readily affirm.

Sorenson believes that many pastors already understand Christianity in ways that are consistent with the ideas in this book. He urges them to be more forthright in preaching and teaching these ideas that can liberate the church.

He is convinced that a liberated church is liberating to people and that as a result they can affirm the Christian faith and live effectively as Christians. The book includes two or three pages of questions for discussion at the end of each chapter.

Liberating Christianity is a good book that deserves a wide readership.