Letters From a Broken Church | Episode 179

[0:00] Music.
[0:43] Life. My name is Dennis Sanders, and I am your host. So, Church in Maine, as I said, is a podcast that is trying to look for God in the midst of all the issues that are affecting church in the larger society.
[0:58] You can learn more about the podcast by listening and listening to past episodes and donate by checking us out at churchinmaine.org or at churchinmaine.substack.com. The second one, My sub stack is also includes articles where, um, that I've written and either place you can, I would hope that you will consider subscribing to the podcast. Um, you can do that on your favorite podcast app, or you can do it as sub stack and leave a review and that helps others, uh, find this podcast. So, for this episode, it is actually a solo episode, and it is based on an article that I wrote a few days ago. Well, every so often, I'm probably not like a lot of people that, you know, usually have tried to make sure that they're writing down what this, what your podcast is for, what you're doing, and make sure that you have it, have all the plans and everything. Thing, it's kind of a drawback of, well, some people wouldn't call it a drawback, but being on the spectrum, that you just kind of do things. And when I launched this podcast back in 2021, I just kind of did it.
[2:23] I like to talk about politics and I like to talk about religion and how those two intersect. And that kind of became what this podcast was about. And so the podcast itself has been kind of defining itself in a process. And so every so often I need to kind of write something to tell people what this is all about, but also really to remind myself what it's about. And so that's what this episode is all about. And it's writing. This is kind of sharing my thoughts, and it's based on something that I wrote earlier a few days ago called Letters from a Broken Church. And I wanted to kind of read that to you, read it back to you, and kind of hopefully get your thoughts on it, but also to help you to know to define what this podcast is for. Um, and so, uh, you know, I'm not going to be reading this word for word. I'm kind of riffing off on it. Um, but this is what I wrote and I will put the link to the article because it also has a lot of other links to it, uh, in the show notes.
[3:38] So, about 15 years ago, I was coming to terms with being on the autism spectrum after a lot of failures and actually a specific success. I kind of wondered what was going on with me. What made me, me?
[3:55] I had asked a former boyfriend if he had seen any kind of quote-unquote odd behavior. And he smiled and said something to the fact that I tended to not really plan for anything. I just kind of tend to do things. Well, he had me pegged. You know, if you read anything about starting a podcast, and probably even if you start a newsletter, the advice is that you make sure you know your target audience before you create your first episode. Now, did I do that back in 2021? No. I just started a podcast. I had a big idea of what I wanted to do, But I just kind of did it. And it really does take time for me to figure out what is the point of anything. I kind of have to live into what I want something to be. And I think that I'm really living into what this podcast and newsletter on Substack is for. And all it was, all it did, the only thing was that it just took three years and over 170 episodes. So the question is, what is all this about?
[5:11] And looking back, as I have on past episodes and past blog posts, I've come to realize something. I've come to realize that the church, which is my focus, which is my calling, is broken. It's broken. It's damaged. It collapsed. Collapsed. It's injured. It's defective. It's busted.
[5:35] Now, I'm not saying that the church is imperfect, that this is news. The church has always been imperfect because, you know, it's made up of humans. For some strange reason, God chose to build a church and use humans to do that. And God must have known something that we didn't because we tend to mess up a lot.
[6:02] But when I'm saying that it's broken I'm not saying that it's imperfect what I'm saying is that it's not working the way it should it's not working the way it once did, and my focus mainly has been on mainline Protestantism though there are also problems in other parts of the church but mainline Protestantism which has been my home for the last 30 years is broken in so many ways that tradition has bled members and closed tons of churches my own denomination the christian church disciples of christ back in 1970 maybe about a year after i was born had about 1.4 million members i believe about two or three years ago it had under two under 300 000 that's a steep steep, steep decline. And it seems like in many quarters, that decline is greeted kind of with a shrug of the shoulders. Or maybe even worse, it's just outright denial.
[7:06] The idea, I thought, that mainline Protestantism is broken really stems from a 2021 essay that I read maybe about a year, year and a half ago from Alana Newhouse. She is the founder of of an editor of Tablet Magazine, a magazine that mostly focuses on Jewish culture in the United States, but, you know, like a lot of places, that's not their only focus.
[7:32] They focus on society as well. And she summarizes that various changes in our culture and also in our economy have actually just produced a society where all of the major institutions no longer work. In the before times, and before times means the 1970s, America was a society that was made up of strong institutions, and that produced a wide range of culture. There was just a lot of variation. And she says, quote.
[8:32] Country. This wasn't a set of factories pumping out individual widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part. Unquote. Now, as I said, changes in the economy brought about liberalization. And some of that I think was good. I don't want to say that that all of it was bad. I'm not someone that's saying we should all go back to the economy of the 1950s. But with anything, that comes at a cost. It really weakened, if not destroyed, a lot of major institutions. And it left individuals with few places for support. Of course, one of those institutions was the church. And at the same time, there was another thing that was going on that I think wasn't totally evil. I think it had a lot of good in it. But the tech revolution really brought down barriers, and it also brought down gatekeepers. It made the world flat. This flatness also had a cultural component. Organizations, in a lot of ways, became more ideologically driven.
[9:49] And more homogenous in thought. Now, this flatness might make it easy for people, but it hasn't always been good. And this is what Alana Newhouse has to say about flatness. She says, quote, Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27 a year. And it's also the reason that all of the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds and millions of American lives. Jobs and unions, but also local newspapers, churches, rotary clubs, and Main Streets have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which over the last decade, and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the long march went from a punchline to a reality, as one institution after another fell, and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who aggregated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.
[11:04] Flatness broke everything." I think that a certain flatness, or maybe to put it another way, another way that people have described it is frictionlessness, has invaded mainline Protestantism.
[11:20] I've seen it more and more, especially in the years that a lot of the denominations that make up the mainline have voted to affirm LGBTQ persons into the full life of the church. When these denominations were big tents, there was friction on various issues, especially in sexuality and gender.
[11:41] And that didn't really make everyone happy. And I think that the, now I do want to stress the breakthrough on LGBTQ issues was good for people. It was good for people like me, personally, who is openly gay and ordained. When I was ordained in 2002, I had to keep my sexual orientation secret. And today, I can be open. I can share that with the church. I can talk about my husband and not worry about that, and not worry that I'm going to lose my job. But again, there seemed to have been a trade-off. As denominations became more accepting, they also became more homogenous. The losers in the debate were the conservatives left. They set up denominations more to their liking. And so what you had were places that were less diverse.
[12:37] Music.
[12:45] A case in point is when I went to my denomination's general assembly last summer, the gathering that I saw was flat and frictionless. Frictionless. People, I remember one of the resolutions that came up was to vote on calling Israel an apartheid state. Now, I was one of the few, probably very few, that opposed that. That. I strongly believe that Israel is not an apartheid state. I think that there are problems, especially when it comes to the Palestinians, but I don't think that they're an apartheid state. But it was fascinating how many people lined up to say that they agree and how easily it passed and how many things just kind of easily passed. There was no debate anymore. And so many people that I heard were talking about how much they loved to be part of this progressive denomination. And that was great, but it seems like they were glad to be part of a denomination that agreed with them. And like I said, there was a whole lot of pride about that, but I didn't feel a whole lot of grace or gratitude. In the words of a fellow disciples a post-pastor, there was little theological humility.
[14:14] The Disciples of Christ, but a lot of other denominations especially, have become more like affinity groups, where everyone agrees, everyone has kind of the same beliefs or ideologies. And this is probably the same in more politically and more conservative denominations too, so I don't want to make it sound like I'm just harping on the progressives. But things that i think that used to be important in the denomination like evangelism and church planning have gone by the wayside the mission more and more seems to be following some kind of a political agenda than it is to figure out what god is calling the church to be and to do at this time now i need to say this i'll say this again to be clear i don't wish for the return of of the days when I had to be in the closet. The past is not where I want to go. The problem is that the present isn't really great either. And like I said, this flatness is also a problem in evangelical circles. It's not just a problem among progressives. But I think the problem here is that in a flat church where there is no friction, where everyone agrees, I think that church is in trouble. In the main line, that shows itself in the crashing rates of membership and other tallies.
[15:39] Will denominations like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or the Episcopal Church be around by 2050? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. What I do know is, if you look at statistics, and I won't bore you by going into a long talk about statistics, but what I do know and what I see is that they're broken. And I'm not really even sure if they can be repaired. But the thing is, we still need mainline Protestant churches. Maybe not these denominations, but we need something. They are needed. As I said, I stay in mainline churches, even as I get frustrated, because this is really the only place I can go where I can be and can serve God as an openly gay man.
[16:28] The political scientist and American Baptist pastor, Ryan Burge, and many of you may know him because he writes a lot and shows up everywhere about his takes on religion. He loves to look at statistics and where things are going. He's kind of a statistician in that way.
[16:55] But this one, he kind of wrote less about statistics and numbers and more about his own story. And he wrote something in 2021 about how mainline churches are places for those who may not be a good fit in evangelical churches. He writes, quote, Some people desperately want to be part of a Christian community. They love the gospel story of a simple man from Galilee who lived a sinless life and died an innocent death on the cross that somehow saves us all from our sins. They believe in the redemption of that simple act. But they also believe that women can and should preach, and that if two men or women want to marry each other, that's none of their concern. Shouldn't those type of people have a few options for a church home as well?
[17:46] The data is exceedingly clear on this point. Most of those people would like to still be a Christian. But they can't be in an evangelical. evangelical, but they can't be an evangelical. They aren't gritting their teeth and going to the local Southern Baptist or non-dominational congregation. They are leaving religion behind entirely and not looking back. As a pastor, I cannot fathom how anyone thinks that this is the best outcome. Unfortunately, for many evangelicals, they have a view of the church that is simply, if you don't agree with our theology completely, then you might as well have no religion at all. Unquote.
[18:31] Sometimes, maybe some of the mainline denominations are beyond saving. But I don't think that that means we shouldn't try, because I think the stakes matter. There are people who are looking for a church, and the evangelical church down the street is not going to be cut out for them. And I also just think we need churches in our society. We're kind of seeing what's happening. I think that the rise of people like Donald Trump and some of the problems that we are facing as a society is because we have become less and less churched.
[19:07] The hidden purpose of this blog and this podcast has always been to find the dreamers who are out there trying to live out something different. Trying to live out what the church can and mainline church can look like in today's world. It's about people like David Emery, the pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Paul Moore, pastor of a Presbyterian church in the Twin Cities suburbs, or Ben Crosby, an Episcopalian and Anglican who lives in Canada, and Lauren Richmond Jr., another disciple who has a fellow podcast, and Laura Coddington, a lay Methodist who is planting a church in the Twin Seas suburbs. And there are countless others out there who still have a passion for the gospel and also a heart that truly welcomes everyone, regardless of their race, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, to God's table.
[20:18] This law this sub stack and podcast especially the podcast is a letter to a broken church it's finding ways that it can work again, Towards the end of her essay, Alana Newhouse urges people to start building and trying new things, leaving the old institutions behind. She writes.
[21:12] Politics with them. Do things that generate love and attention from three people you actually know instead of the hundreds you don't. Abandon the blighted Ivy League, please, I beg of you. Start a publishing house that puts books out that anger, surprise, and delight people and which make them want to read. Be brave enough to make film and TV that appeals to actual audiences and not to 14 people on Twitter, establish a newspaper, one that people can see themselves in and hold in their hands. Go back to a house of worship every week. Give up on our current institutions. They have already given up on us, unquote. Now, I don't know if we should give up on our mainline denominations just yet. I'd rather see what new things are coming up among the old, but I am open and to seeing what can be made new and make something that isn't so fat but that can make some room for friction and grace. So that, dear friends, after three years and over 179 episodes is what Church in Maine is all about.
[22:27] I hope that you will join me on this journey as we try to, with God's help, put back together a broken church.
[22:38] So, dear friends, that is it. That is what I came up with. I'd love to know what y'all think. All three of you that are probably listening. But that's kind of the way that we are doing things here. This isn't a podcast just for, you know, the kind of... It's not going to be always a cheerleading squad. This is my home in the mainline church. It's a place that I truly love and I don't see myself going any other place. As much as I grew up in evangelical circles, I'm not going back. It's not where I belong anymore. But I do want to try to make a difference, do so help to build reform and, um, maybe to be the loyal opposition. Um, that can be rather cranky. It's not the place that not the, the voice that people always want to hear, but I think it is the voice that people need to hear right now.
[23:54] Music.
[23:55] So thank you for listening. Um, that is, um, it for this episode. Um, I hope that you can rate and review this episode on whatever podcast app you listen to. Pass it along to family and friends that might be interested. You can donate. You can donate at two places on the sub stack. Also, there's a link in the show notes to the donor box. And I would hope that you will consider donating whatever you can. That really does help me to produce this here podcast. So, that's it for this solo episode. I do have more episodes coming up with more interviews, so please stay tuned. Again, I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Thank you so much for listening. Take care, Godspeed, and I will see you next time.
[24:52] Music.