Inclusion in Church Community
Another of my contributions to Spectrum's summer reading group.
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My idea of a spiritual leader is someone whose questions are harder than mine and who will admit it in group discussion. This disqualifies most pastors I've had. Maybe all pastors I've had.
I've grown up entirely within the Adventist church. When we do church, we always assume a universal piety. You hear people say things like, "Of course, we all believe that God is all loving," or, "As Adventists, obviously, we all have faith that we will never be forsaken," or some other slogan of belief. The Sabbath School Quarterly does this kind of thing all the time, which is the main reason I can't stand it. I always want to say, why? Why should we universally be immune to the disharmonies of belief of any other God-seeking human being? Why should our intimate relationship with God lack the texture of every last one of our other intimate relationships? The tragedy is that we're not immune to these things, yet choose to pretend we are. We tithe our mint and dill and cumin...
I once had a conversation with a very successful Adventist minister to young adults who shall remain nameless. I was talking about being inclusive, about using language that is charitable to those who would disagree with us, about how I wish we could stop making demands of people who neither ask for or understand them. I was trying to explain that the unbelievers I wanted to bring to church with me aren't just random strangers from campus, they are my friends who I care about, and I want to show them my faith as something that is beautiful rather than something that will cost them. This person quite quickly shut me down on the grounds that we need to stand up for and preach the truth. As if that were incompatible.
I really liked the Deep Evangelism chapter of Belcher's book, perhaps because it legitimized some of my own frustrations with my church experience. I acknowledge that serious problems remain. How do you build a faith community around shared belief and yet still retain enough freedom to allow for the correction of theological mistakes and differences in individual spiritual journeys? How do you reconcile inclusion in a community with exclusion from participating in certain roles in that community? Even so, I think we make a mistake when we use phrases like "pushing for a specific verbal commitment", because I'm not sure we should be pushing for anything at all, even in the Adventist model I grew up in. (Although prohibiting people from participating in certain ways could be understood as coercive.) We have a standing invitation that one is free to ignore indefinitely. I am comfortable with an ignorable standing invitation. I know that not everyone is. I can recall some embarrassing presentations in my church were the presenter demanded that if people never get over their sin they should be expunged. But I don't think those people speak for my faith community.
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