Standing Up Against The Church

The church may appear to be this megalithic structure with structures on every street corner in some neighborhoods.  Many towns even have 'holy row', a particular street where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some hallowed hall.  Some have their brand names on the signs, "Catholic", "Presbyterian", "Baptist", "Methodist", "Lutheran", "Episcopal" and so on and so forth.  It's like Cath, Presby, Bapt, Meth, Luth, and Episco were disciples or something.  Okay, maybe not Meth... 

In my church, we follow the disciple "Presby", the patron saint of committees.

The 'church', as a single minded entity, is how I fear most people without direct experience about us see and feel the church's presence.  And the loudest voices from the 'church' seem to be crying out about who God is going to hate/punish/exterminate/hell-ify or they are claiming a Godly 'wealth-management' scheme, where the wealth you have is directly proportional to how much God likes you.

To be serious for a moment, the 'church' seems to use a disproportionate amount of its sound volume to tell us who to condemn.  Jews, Muslims, Women, American Indians, people of pretty much every color other than White, Homosexuals, Communists, Liberals, whomever.  Notice, I said sound volume.  Anyone who is on the edges of need will see that there is truly a 'silent majority', to borrow a VERY loaded term, doing real work in the name of Jesus to help others.

I am an employee of, vocationally devoted to, and irretrievably linked to the 'church' when it is seen as a monolith.  You have to get closer to see the cracks and splinters, the multitude of voices that speak in many different directions in the name of Jesus.  Some of them are all about loving, some are all about judging, some are all about helping, some are all about saving, some are all about wandering alone.  Most of them have a combination of all of the above and more.

Tomorrow night, from one obscure, urban corner of the 'church', one pastor, probably far more self-confident and overbearing than he ought to be, is going to speak, at least in part, against that 'church', the monolithic, judging entity.  It is Father's Day, but the followers of Presby do not have 'fathers' running the church the way the followers of Cath do. 

I am a father by virtue of having children, not being a priest in the service of one of the slices of the church seeking to serve Jesus.

The message is pretty straightforward-love.  The tone is probably going to be a little on the angrier side, given the lack of love this pastor has seen coming from too many of his colleagues in the 'church' monolithic.  My prayer is to avoid the double whammy of anger and insult that Jesus teaches is murder in the Sermon on the Mount.

Forty nine people are dead because they were declared unfit to live by a man who completely missed the mark of the power and focus of Islam.  Forty nine people are dead and my faith, the faith of Jesus, throws out hateful vitriol and condemnation of those innocents in the name of a perverse sense of God's judgment taken into their own hands.

There is a huge part of me that does not want to be part of the 'church' that feeds into so much of that hatred.  But there is not another game in town.  I do not have the energy to start a "Pete" that will run in contradistinction to the 'church'.  No, I have to be arrogant enough to believe that Jesus is going to speak to me as I cry out to my brothers and sisters across the 'church' and ask them to share love and not hate, that they re-evaluate what they think the Bible says, and they GET WITH THE PROGRAM.  (All-caps, that is yelling in texting and typing and the such, yes?)

Jesus has a great line about bringing a sword into the world because of what he taught.  I get that, maybe for the first time.