We've all heard the stories, we've tut-tutted and shaken our heads. We deplore it, and we wish it would not happen. But it does.
A friend and I were discussing the history of a particular church; I remembered how it formed back in the early 1980s, and I told the story, warts and all. Without going into a lot of details, someone decided what constituted holiness, and said that not only must the people who held an office in the church (from secretary to deacon) be holy according to this definition, but all the members of their families had to be as well. The organist's husband smoked. This was not deemed as holy. Need I say more?
Churches have split over such deep doctrinal issues as the color of the hymnbooks, whether Sunday or Saturday is the day on which we should worship, even whether Adam had a belly button or not. How ridiculous!!
The problem with a church split (and let's face it, they are bound to happen because they contain the one thing that causes them - people!) is that it doesn't actually split. A split implies that half the people stay in the original church and half go to form a new one. What really happens is that about 30 percent of the people stay in the old church, 15 to 20 percent form the new one - and half or more don't go to church anymore at all. This last group is composed of people who are so disillusioned by the pettiness of people who are supposed to be loving and self-sacrificing.
Moreover, at least three times the population of the church - who hear about the split (usually from the disillusioned ones) and have never gone to church (any church) - are people we will never see inside the doors, for they are all the more convinced than ever that Christianity is for weaklings, bigots, and losers. The problem is that people who are more prone to be involved in a church split still call themselves Christians - except that they have a different interpretation of what that is.
If the folks in a church have gotten to the place where there is an imminent split, their faith bears about as much resemblance to Christianity as a dodo does to an eagle. Both birds - but the former is pretty much useless ... and extinct. And so what was once an organism has been subject to the normal vivisection that happens when it gets "organized." It loses all traces of life.
Fear takes over - fear of losing the purity, the passion, or the fire (which is an interesting concept - for if you fear losing the fire, it's probably already gone out. Otherwise you're too busy being on fire!) I know people who are absolutely convinced that they have the RIGHT to sit in judgment on others with whose lifestyles or practices they do not agree, simply because they are 'seated with Christ in heavenly places.' This is a gross distortion of all that Christ came to accomplish. It was never His intention to have His message of love twisted into a message of paranoia and bigotry.
Fear of people slipping and straying from the tenets of ancient Judaism led to the formation of the group known as the Pharisees. Their one mission in life was to uphold the laws and traditions they were taught and make people follow them. And when someone (one of their own countrymen) came along who threatened that by talking about love and a personal relationship with God, they went against their own laws: paying someone to betray him, holding his trial after sunset and on the holiest day of the year when nobody was to be conducting any business at all, consorting with people they considered heathen, and bribing witnesses, to have this threat put to death.
Religious people within the church have done the same thing ... to the same person. I say religious people because religion is all about maintaining the status quo, dressing it up, making it pretty, doing it right to the point of shunning those who don't, keeping people in line, making the right impression, trying to twist God's arm to make Him do what you want Him to do, and doing what you've always done just because you've always done it that way.
Christianity, on the other hand, is iconoclastic - always has been ever since oh, let's see, its founder was here! "Iconoclastic" means it tears down the idols - idols of complacency, of hypocrisy, of spiritual correctness (if Christians were all one race, then this term "spiritual correctness" might even be called racial purity!) It focuses on an individual relationship with God, and it celebrates the uniqueness of every individual rather than building an empire of people who all agree with each other, look the same, and act the same through what can only be described as bullying. Strange that so many religious leaders can get away with that, and so much more: shoving their fingers in someone's face and calling him or her to the lowest (in front of fellow church-members, no less) because of a perceived "difference" in either focus, approach, interpretation, or belief. They have no qualms about using guilt, shame, and intimidation to keep people all believing a certain way and they try to eliminate all who don't. One of the last times a political leader tried to do that, the world plunged into war; it was 1939.
But unfortunately, nobody in the church stands up to stop it; those few voices who do object are ostracized or drowned out in the zeal of the polarized groups that emerge. So those who get in a huff about the far-reaching implications of choosing blue hymn books over red (yes, this actually happened, several years ago in a different country) will "up and leave" over such things, start another church, and leave hundreds of casualties, Christian and non-Christian alike, in its wake.
It's enough to give the Head of the church (that is, the one preparing a place for us in Heaven) a splitting headache.
A friend and I were discussing the history of a particular church; I remembered how it formed back in the early 1980s, and I told the story, warts and all. Without going into a lot of details, someone decided what constituted holiness, and said that not only must the people who held an office in the church (from secretary to deacon) be holy according to this definition, but all the members of their families had to be as well. The organist's husband smoked. This was not deemed as holy. Need I say more?
Churches have split over such deep doctrinal issues as the color of the hymnbooks, whether Sunday or Saturday is the day on which we should worship, even whether Adam had a belly button or not. How ridiculous!!
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| This cartoon found through Google Images at http://ponderingpastor.blogspot.com/ 2010_05_01_archive.html |
Moreover, at least three times the population of the church - who hear about the split (usually from the disillusioned ones) and have never gone to church (any church) - are people we will never see inside the doors, for they are all the more convinced than ever that Christianity is for weaklings, bigots, and losers. The problem is that people who are more prone to be involved in a church split still call themselves Christians - except that they have a different interpretation of what that is.
If the folks in a church have gotten to the place where there is an imminent split, their faith bears about as much resemblance to Christianity as a dodo does to an eagle. Both birds - but the former is pretty much useless ... and extinct. And so what was once an organism has been subject to the normal vivisection that happens when it gets "organized." It loses all traces of life.
Fear takes over - fear of losing the purity, the passion, or the fire (which is an interesting concept - for if you fear losing the fire, it's probably already gone out. Otherwise you're too busy being on fire!) I know people who are absolutely convinced that they have the RIGHT to sit in judgment on others with whose lifestyles or practices they do not agree, simply because they are 'seated with Christ in heavenly places.' This is a gross distortion of all that Christ came to accomplish. It was never His intention to have His message of love twisted into a message of paranoia and bigotry.
Fear of people slipping and straying from the tenets of ancient Judaism led to the formation of the group known as the Pharisees. Their one mission in life was to uphold the laws and traditions they were taught and make people follow them. And when someone (one of their own countrymen) came along who threatened that by talking about love and a personal relationship with God, they went against their own laws: paying someone to betray him, holding his trial after sunset and on the holiest day of the year when nobody was to be conducting any business at all, consorting with people they considered heathen, and bribing witnesses, to have this threat put to death.
Religious people within the church have done the same thing ... to the same person. I say religious people because religion is all about maintaining the status quo, dressing it up, making it pretty, doing it right to the point of shunning those who don't, keeping people in line, making the right impression, trying to twist God's arm to make Him do what you want Him to do, and doing what you've always done just because you've always done it that way.
Christianity, on the other hand, is iconoclastic - always has been ever since oh, let's see, its founder was here! "Iconoclastic" means it tears down the idols - idols of complacency, of hypocrisy, of spiritual correctness (if Christians were all one race, then this term "spiritual correctness" might even be called racial purity!) It focuses on an individual relationship with God, and it celebrates the uniqueness of every individual rather than building an empire of people who all agree with each other, look the same, and act the same through what can only be described as bullying. Strange that so many religious leaders can get away with that, and so much more: shoving their fingers in someone's face and calling him or her to the lowest (in front of fellow church-members, no less) because of a perceived "difference" in either focus, approach, interpretation, or belief. They have no qualms about using guilt, shame, and intimidation to keep people all believing a certain way and they try to eliminate all who don't. One of the last times a political leader tried to do that, the world plunged into war; it was 1939.
But unfortunately, nobody in the church stands up to stop it; those few voices who do object are ostracized or drowned out in the zeal of the polarized groups that emerge. So those who get in a huff about the far-reaching implications of choosing blue hymn books over red (yes, this actually happened, several years ago in a different country) will "up and leave" over such things, start another church, and leave hundreds of casualties, Christian and non-Christian alike, in its wake.
It's enough to give the Head of the church (that is, the one preparing a place for us in Heaven) a splitting headache.
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