Everything else will follow.

I want to send a thank you out to Bishop William W. Hutchinson, bishop of the Louisiana Annual Conference, for some very kind words he wrote about an entry on this blog. I am very honored. His column appears in the September 25 issue of Louisiana Now!, the biweekly newsletter of the Louisiana Conference (website here). The entry he references is here.

There I reflect on a baptism ceremony--actually a baptism remembrance ceremony--I saw while visiting another Methodist church to see my friend preach her first sermon there. The service came just as I was in the middle of delving into and reacting against the hellfire-first evangelism of my youth. I had been ready to rant, but the beauty of the service and of the pastor's meditation on Methodist baptism moved me to belay the tirade I had planned.

Baptismal themes resonate with my memory of the 2004 General Conference (the quadrennial meeting of United Methodists to hash out contentious issues and set policy). I attended the 10-day conference in Pittsburgh working for an alliance of pro-GLBT-inclusion (and pro-social justice more generally) Methodist subgroups such as the Reconciling Network and the Methodist Federation for Social Action. My work there ranged from note-taking in day-long committee meetings, consulting with delegates about MFSA's stances on particular issues, drafting talking points that delegates could use if they so desired, and participating in a number of visual and performance displays to garner attention for the GBLT-inclusive cause.

Each General Conference has a theme, and in 2004 it was "Water Washed, Spirit Born" (From a hymn by Ruth Duck: We, your people stand before You/ Water-washed and Spirit-born/ By your grace our lives we offer/Recreate us; God, transform!). The progressive alliance I was a part of operated on a variation of that theme--"Watermarked"--which highlighted the indelible element of God's inclusion present in Methodist baptism. As baptized Methodists, we argued, God had already marked us as God's own, regardless of our orientation or gender identity. Our more display-oriented demonstrations inside and outside of the Conference sought to underline this theme. We bought loads of bottled water, for example (not the most environmentally friendly action, in retrospect), covering them with a fairly neutral label that said something like, "Enjoy this water, remembering that you are watermarked by God" and displaying the progressive symbol.

Some of my most rewarding moments in the conference (in addition to the ones I shared yesterday) involved me and several other volunteers stationing ourselves near one of the conference entrances, doing nothing more than handing out water with a smile to anyone and everyone coming by. The water served as a neat riff on our theme, of course, and the free drink was real relief on the hot spring days.

But the real magic happened with the person-to-person contact that happened as we gave the water out. Getting into the conference hall itself involves braving a double line of earnest volunteers from dozens of different Methodist interest groups, each handing out a flier, newsletter, or appeal. Some delegates and guests eagerly and cheerfully collect all of them they can, gaining a full pile by the end of the line (only to be greeted by more such lines inside the hall). Others set their shoulders, fix their gaze straight ahead (or on the ground), and barrel through the gamut as fast as they can. Most delegates fall somewhere in between, automatically grabbing fliers handed to them while looking ahead and beyond.

We set up our water stations before the paper hand-out lines, and we made it a point to greet people cheerfully, making eye contact and smiling. We did not discuss issues or press for votes. We just grinned and said "Hi, would you like a bottle of water?" Not everyone took the bottles we offered--particularly those who knew and disagreed with our stances--but just about everyone smiled and returned the greeting. It was a minor humanizing moment in a massive process full of bureaucratic impersonality. I have no idea, really, about the stances or ultimate votes of the people who shared that spark of communion with me, but it reinforced for me the commonality that God's baptism imposes even on God's feuding children.

Speaking of which, I am sorry to say that sense of commonality got strained by the Conference's subsequent votes, which reinforced rather than lessened stances against GLBT identity as anything but "incompatible with Christian teaching." Particularly painful was the narrow failure of a resolution that would have done little more than acknowledge that the Methodist Church was not of one mind regarding the issue. After those votes, the Conference broke for a recess, and all of the pro-GLBT people gathered silently at the front of the convention hall auditorium. There we received communion--our Church's only other recognized sacrament besides baptism.

As I've mentioned, Methodist communion is, like baptism, considered primarily to be God's action. "It is God who sets the table, not I," says my pastor father to his flock on communion Sundays, "It is God who gives the invitations, and he invites everyone." Feeling so rejected by my church at that moment, the simple act (repeated every month) of taking bread and juice--accepting and celebrating God's invitation to me--took on grander import. I wonder sometimes if people who never have to think of their inclusion within the life of the church realize what a gift communion and baptism are, how powerful and radical the open invitation of God is.

It took another friend at that conference to hammer home just how powerful that welcome is. This friend (whose gender I will mask for greatest anonymity) was a minister who was secretly GLBT but who of course had to remain closeted lest he/she be stripped of ordination. That person's support for the cause had to come at a distance, since he/she held a position of some visibility in the church. As the conference wore on and as the contentious votes on sexuality issues approached, I caught up with the person. I asked this minister if s/he were worried and hurt about the outcome.

My friend surprised me, though, by saying it didn't matter. Well--of course it mattered, s/he explained. But a vote about sexuality alone fails to address the underlying tensions and divisions that afflict the UMC. Apart from the hullabaloo about sexuality, my friend told me, the Conference was set to accept another kind of change. A committee appointed to examine and clarify Methodist beliefs on communion had finished its work, and its report was set to be accepted by the Conference as the official interpretive stance of the UMC. "It's all in the report," s/he assured me. "Once people read and accept that, everything else will follow."

The report, "This Holy Mystery," was in fact accepted and is currently in force as authoritative for Methodists. It is, as my friend promised, a firm statement about the open table of communion. All who come in faith are fed. It is not for individual Christians to deny communion to anyone.

Alas, my church (at the 2008 Conference) again declined to liberalize its stances on GLBT people. "But," I can hear my friend urging me, "give it time. Let the radical welcome installed into baptism and communion both work its way through the membership. Everything else will follow." From the seed of that teaching, from the hope of a shared smile, from the promise of a common cup--may a greater, deeper communion follow.

More tomorrow,

JF

Conference Conversations and Tricky Prayer Requests

I had a great chat with a friend of mine today, a pastor from another Methodist church. We share similar perspectives on a number of theological and social issues, so part of our conversation involved hashing out some of the current debates about health care, GLBT rights, and ecological awareness. I had forgotten how refreshing it can be to link into a like-minded/like-spirited person, especially in the context of long-terms struggles for justice and the good. It recharges my batteries, reminding me that in believing as I do, I join other good people of faith and hope.

Together, my friend and I asked the question that's been bugging me of late: how shall we as Christians disagree about fundamental issues? Or, rather: how do I work, pray, and live as one in Christ with people who espouse beliefs I find difficult to reconcile with Christianity? What is my relationship, in other words, to those people who declined to stand along with me at the trial of Jimmy Creech?

Our conversation on that topic reminded me of another conversation I had back in the spring of 2004. On that occasion, I was in Pittsburgh, attending the United Methodist General Conference.

Once every four years, about a thousand delegates drawn from every Annual Conference in the US and from Conferences outside of the US, along with the Bishops, Judicial Councils, heads of UM agencies, and of course thousands of other onlookers, lobbyists, experts, and activists--all of them gather in one location to spend about a week defining what it means to be Methodist. At the GC, official documents like The Book of Discipline (the go-to manual for Methodist polity and doctrine) become in part open to revision. Delegates to the General Conference vet hundreds of proposed revisions to various operational procedures and official stances. The great majority of these proposals involve noncontroversial matters of logistics and meet-and-potatoes operation. But certain topics soon emerge as incredibly divisive.

The hottest debates in Methodism (as in many other denominations) revolve around issues of gays and lesbians in the church. Can GLBT people be ordained as ministers? Can GLBT couples be married? Are GLBT people welcome as members? Can the UMC honestly declare itself as of one mind on GLBT status and rights? These issues had riven the Conference in years past; a mass arrest had occurred, for instance, at the 2000 Conference. Tensions were high in anticipation of similar events this year.

And I was there, as I had been in 2000, not as a delegate but as one of an army of activists/lobbyists for the pro-inclusivity side. In the Conference, I sat in various sub- and sub-sub-committee meetings watching, listening, and taking extensive notes to relay to my own team leaders. I drafted position statements and talking points. I made contact with "friendly" delegates and offered what assistance (info, recommendations, perspectives) I could. Outside of the Conference doors, I handed out flyers, helped to organize para-conference events, lined the sidewalks in silent (and not-so-silent) demonstrations, and basically sought to be part of the pro-GLBT movement.

Of course, the "other side" had a coalition of its own. For every note-taker, sidewalk-liner, flyer-distributor, and talking-points-writer "we" had, the more conservative side had just as many. Indeed, we faced each other on the sidewalk, handed out flyers next to each other breezeways, sat side-by-side in innumerable meetings, taking notes furiously.

And, inevitably, we struck up conversations. Early in the conference, I was assigned to take notes on one of the relatively noncontroversial sub-committees. Most of the work of the conference during these first few days consisted of sub-committees hashing out the hundreds of proposals specific to their committee's purview. I watched along with dozens of other onlookers as fifty delegates slogged through rote votes, peppered with the occasional controversy.

During a break halfway through the second or third day, I spoke at length to one young woman sitting next to me. As it turned out, she was an alternate delegate from the Alabama conference. Just graduated from high school, she was at her first General Conference, representing her constituency, which was overwhelmingly conservative and opposed to the GLBT-inclusive cause I represented. We quickly identified each other as political adversaries, joking about how we worked for the "other side," but then moved on to chat about a number of other topics. Her boyfriend and family. My partner and family.

Another woman representing another conservative group overheard us. "What's your name, young man?" she asked, not unkindly, but not joking, either. I told her, and she opened a little notebook to write it down. "I'm writing your name down so I can pray for you," she said. My Alabaman friend, deciding this was a good idea, also wrote my name down.

This was a tricky moment. "I'll pray for you" can often be code for "You are so desperately in the wrong that only God can help you." I fear this is the message many people outside of the church hear when a Christian tells them this. I considered the possibility that the woman was communicating just that message. You poor, benighted person caught in your destructive, sinful lifestyle--all i can do is pray for you to find Christ. I quickly went through possible responses: question? educate? argue? take offense? ignore?

In the end, though--and I have to believe this was a Spirit thing--it struck me that I should be honored and glad to have someone praying for me. Heaven knows I need it. And so what if the woman's subtext matched my suspicions? Is not prayer still a good and appropriate response? She is, after all, not attacking me but promising to commune thoughtfully and earnestly with God about the well-being of my soul. I realized I wished more of my adversaries did that for me. In fact...

"Can I have your name, too?" I asked. "I like people praying for me, and I'd like to return the gesture." So we exchanged names, wrote them down, and I did pray for my two adversaries. I hope and trust they prayed for me.

Prayer, as CS Lewis said, transforms humans more than it transforms God. Like the act of writing, the act of articulating concerns, submitting them to God, and opening yourself to God's response changes the way I picture those concerns. I hoped, I suppose, that my acquaintances would be led by God to see my point of view--but in prayer I recognize that what God does is up to God. God knows best, not I, and my trust in God's power and wisdom (and--always--grace) must be greater even than my convictions about what side God is on.

As the Conference wore on and debates grew ever-tenser, one side or the other floated the possibility of a schism. Perhaps our differences on the GLBT issue (and the deeper doctrinal matters upon which that issue rested) were too great for us to remain in communion with each other. Perhaps we had best amicably depart. Conference-goers buzzed with nervousness about this possibility. I saw my friend from Alabama, a worried look on her face. She saw me. We caught up briefly with some small talk. Sure is busy. Sure am tired. It will be good to get back home.

Then she stopped. "Do you think we're going to split, John?" she asked. "I hope not," I said. "I don't think so." And we agreed to pray. We prayed not for the other person to see our side of things, but for the church by which we call each other brother and sister to remain whole.

And it did. And it does--barely.

God, be with the people I met in Pittsburgh. Be with my adversaries who believe so differently than I. Open me to their needs, their thoughts, their fears. Make us, keep us, one in you.

More tomorrow,

JF

Here I Am, Here We Are--Creech Trial, part II

I learned what community meant in Grand Island, NE, in 1999, at the trial of the Rev. Jimmy Creech. It was an ecclesiastical trial, not a criminal one, so the proceedings merged the legal with the spiritual. Creech was on trial for violating the United Methodist Book of Discipline, which had been revised to prohibit UM ministers from performing same-sex holy unions. Creech, a vocal advocate of inclusivity in the chruch, defied the prohibition by officiating at a public union ceremony for a lesbian couple.

The Nebraska Conference, following Discipline standards, brought formal charges against him. I was at the trial, ostensibly to do some protest-ish street theatre. I found myself caught up, however, in the theatricality of the trial itself.

The trial took place in a church sanctuary hastily repurposed as a courtroom. Center stage (where the pulpit and altar usually were) sat the "judge," the Bishop of the Nebraska Conference. The choir loft seated a jury of twelve other Nebraska ministers. Facing the judge and jury on the right and left sides of the congregation, church attorneys sat at tables in front of the first row of pews. On one side sat the prosecution (the Nebraska conference) and on the other the defense (Jimmy Creech). There were even gentleman standing in as what I guessed were Methodist bailiffs. And filling the pews behind both tables were scores of onlookers, some wearing Soulforce's "Stop Spiritual Violence" shirts, but most simply dressed in business-casual, as if for a Sunday night service.

The trial itself was a relatively brief affair, as Creech did not deny that he had in fact married the same-sex couple as accused. The jury quickly returned the expected "guilty" verdict. The real tension revolved around the issue of sentencing. Would the jury strip Creech of his ordination? Would they reprimand him but still enable him to retain his credentials as a minister? Or--as the pro-inclusion forces hoped--would the jury return no sentence at all?

Creech himself had asked the jury to do as much in his statement to them. He spoke simply but eloquently about why he had defied the church's rules, aligning his actions with a tradition of civil and ecclesiastical disobedience. By asking the jury to return no sentence, Creech was in essence asking the jury to join him in his act of protest against what he (and perhaps they) saw as an unjust, unchristian rule.

This time, the jury's deliberations dragged on. We in the audience/congregation moved outside to get some air, murmuring to ourselves about what the delay meant. Could it be that the jury was considering taking Creech's offer? By this time, all protests had ended. Fred Phelps and his crew had long since vacated the premises, and the assorted policemen summoned to handle Soulforce's morning mass-arrest had also gone. Everyone seemed weary that afternoon, just waiting for the jury to return.

In time I wandered back into the sanctuary, where more and more people were gathering, hearing some rumor that the jury's decision was at hand. But the waiting continued. Finally someone asked if anyone could perhaps play the piano.

I volunteered. Now, I had been the fill-in pianist for my parents' churches for some time but had been generally unable to practice (not having a piano at my disposal) for the last few months. I was rusty, but I could get through most hymns just fine. So I sat at the piano and took requests.

Some requests were for old standards--doctrinal favorites about faith and duty. Some were the newer social-justice songs (which were also harder to play, being more unfamiliar). I plunked along, and gradually more and more of the congregation joined in.

Then someone suggested "Here I Am, Lord"--a hymn that still felt new to me. It is not a Southern Baptist standard, and the first time I heard it I remember disliking this newfangled hymnizing. (It was also a mite trickier than "Just As I Am"). I began playing with some trepidation.

In walked the Bishop. My heart skipped, and my fingers slipped on the keys, but the Bishop waved at me to continue. Jimmy Creech handed him a hymnal open to the page, and we sang on. As we were finishing the last verse, everyone in the congregation standing and singing lustily, the jury filed in. They joined us on the chorus:

"Here I am, Lord.
Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord,
Where you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart."

I love that song now.

I fled from the piano to the front pew, as the Bishop gave the universal pastor sign for "please be seated."

"As we hear the sentence from the jury," he told us, "I'd like for there to be a division of the house. Would those who support the Reverend Creech please stand with him?"

As I got to my feet, I looked at the crowd behind me--a goodly number for a Sunday morning, really. Just moments before, all of us had been standing together, singing a hymn of common Christian commitment, one in the Spirit/one in the Lord. Now about two-thirds of those gathered stood with Creech, throwing into sharp relief those who pointedly remained seated.

The sentence was read: Creech was stripped of his ordination. He was a United Methodist minister no more. The Bishop thanked the jury, and Creech (anticipating this outcome) led a procession outside to speak to waiting reporters.

The image of the Body of Christ--standing together, then divided--remains at the core of my scholarship and practice. This, I realized, was community at its extremes--unified and conflicted. I keep that paradox of community before me as I ask how I can--must--live with those with whom I disagree deeply.

More tomorrow,

JF

Unity in the Body Of Christ: The Creech Trial, part I

This morning in church we sang one of my favorite hymns, "We Are One in the Spirit." For those who don't know, the lyrics are as follows:

We are one in the Spirit
We are one in the Lord
We are one in the Spirit
We are one in the Lord
And we pray that our unity
May one day be restored
And they'll know we are Christians
By our love, by our love
And they'll know we are Christians
By our love.

If you'll indulge me in a bit of old-school text analysis: the fascinating thing (one of the fascinating things) about this hymn is the tension it presents between the now and the not-yet, the present indicative and future subjunctive moods. We Christians are one in God, insists the hymn (four times, in fact), but we pray that our unity may one day be restored, implying that in fact such unity does not at present exist.

In this tension I find the truest and most poignant picture of temporal Christian community. We are one, but we are as yet disunited. I have even had occasion to see this paradox manifested in performance.

In the fall of 1999, the then-Rev. Jimmy Creech, a United Methodist minister in the Nebraska Conference, was tried before an ecclesiastical court for violating United Methodist prohibitions against performing a holy union ceremony for a same-sex couple. This was the second time he had been tried. The first time, the court refused to convict, insisting that the sections of the Book of Discipline (the authoritative rules for Methodist polity) regarding homosexuality were meant as recommendations rather than as full-fledged rules.

The UM General Conference subsequently established that those sections, a part of the Discipline known as the Social Principles, were in fact regulative. Furthermore, the Church added formal prohibitions against the performance of same-sex holy unions by its pastors or on its properties. Creech, in an act of civil-ecclesiastical disobedience, defied these rules by solemnizing the union of a lesbian couple. Members of the Nebraska conference filed charges, and Creech was brought to trial.

I had met Pastor Creech the summer before at a gathering of GLBT-affirmative Methodists. There he asked if I would attend the trial and devise/produce some sort of theatrical commentary or protest. Eager beaver that I was, I said "of course." The trial coincided with my first semester in graduate school (PhD program in Theatre History), during which time I took a a class called "Performance and Social Change." One of our projects required that we team with a local group or organization that used performance in the service of its social change mission. I chose the United Methodist Church.

I prepped my little street theatre protest, found a ride to Nebraska from one of the Twin Cities' many liberal-progressive UM churches, and arrived at Grand Island, NE, to find that my best-laid plans for dramatic commentary were upstaged by the larger drama that was the trial itself.

This church trial had sent ripples throughout the UMC. Conservatives, fearing a decline of biblical standards, pushed for Creech to be punished, his ordination stripped. Liberals, of course, wanted to see Creech's role as pro-inclusion activist validated, perhaps through the court's rendering of a "no verdict" verdict or a hung jury. The trial as media event attracted reporters, gawkers, and activists from around the country. The Rev. Fred Phelps was there with his small band of sign-wielders ("God Hates Fags," "UMC=Fag Church," etc.). Other sign-bearers set up displays next to him (verses from Leviticus), though they declared that they had nothing to do with Phelps's display.

The event also marked one of the first public displays by Soulforce, a pro-inclusion ecumenical group founded by the Rev. Mel White. White had been a former activist/ghostwriter for the religious right working closely with Jerry Falwell. He subsequently defected, becoming a minister in the GLBT-affirming Metropolitan Community Church. Soulforce sought to use nonviolent protest techniques to advocate within various Christian denominations for LGBT inclusion and nondiscrimination. "Stop Spiritual Violence," read their T-shirts. Soulforce planned (and implemented) a mass-arrest, first blocking the doors of the church with their bodies and then being peacefully led away by a police officer to be booked and fined--all arranged in advance with the police in question (standard nonviolent protest technique). Close to one hundred Soulforce volunteers, all wearing "Stop Spiritual Violence" T-shirts spent the morning standing in line to be booked at a makeshift processing table staffed by local police officers. They sang civil rights-era standards ("We Shall Overcome," etc.)

Already, then, anything theatrical I could do paled in comparison with the multiple and conflicting performances happening all around me.

The biggest performance of all, though, took place within the Methodist Church assigned to host the trial itself. It was there, most of all, that I saw firsthand the unity/division tension I value in the "We Are One" hymn.

More tomorrow,

JF

Cups of Water

Fun fact of the day: the word apophenia refers to a tendency to see patterns or connections amongst otherwise random or unrelated events, ideas, or objects. Christians and other people of faith often get labeled as practicing (or suffering from) apophenia when they speak of odd connections or coincidences between spiritual and material processes. Certainly, certain branches of Christianity often seem to strain to read the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy into current events (see, for instance, Jack van Impe). Other branches are quick to draw causal relationships between natural disasters and human sin (e.g., AIDS and perceived sexual immorality, Hurricane Katrina and the debauchery of New Orleans, even a tornado in Minneapolis coinciding with a meeting of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in which they decided to take a more inclusive stance toward gays and lesbians).

No fan am I of such distasteful sign-mongering. But I think just about every Christian has times where some coincidence between the material and the spiritual seems, well, too coincidental, too convenient. It might not be apophenia and instead be a God thing.

This morning, my devotional reading (from the Upper Room Disciplines) was Mark 9:38-42. There Jesus's apostles tell him about a man--not one of them--who is casting out demons in Jesus's name. "Should we get him to stop?" they ask. Jesus says no, don't stop him, because no one who does a miracle in his name can in the next moment turn against him. "Whoever is not against us is for us," he tells them, concluding that "if some does so much as give you a glass of water because you're my disciples, that person will surely not lose the reward."

The devotional writer, Susan Hibbins, uses this passage to pose questions that relate directly to some of the issues I've been wrestling with lately. Specifically, I've been grappling with the problem of how we Christians should handle fundamental disagreements between ourselves. How should we behave toward other Christians whose deeds, words, or professions seem utterly at odds with what we consider to be core essentials of Christianity?

Hibbins suggests that this passage features Christ addressing a similar question: "How do we react to other Christians who we feel are not 'one of us,' perhaps from another church?" Christ's answer is clear: "Our hearts have to be big enough to accept all who come to us in Jesus's name. Advancing God's kingdom and helping our neighbor is not solely our preserve." To deny those who also claim Christ, she continues, is to present ourselves as a stumbling block to others' faith (The Upper Room Disciplines 2009. Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2009. Print. 281).

It spoke so appropriately to my current questions that, while I recognize the apophenic possibilities, I choose to interpret my running into this as a God thing.

As such, this passage and Hibbins's interpretation present much to admire. Given my own history with the United Methodist Church's ongoing debate about if/how to include LGBT people in the life of the church (ordination, marriage, even membership), I can see adding this passage to an arsenal of pro-inclusion texts, unleashing it against arguments that I as a gay Christian do not belong in church.

But the better use is to turn the passage on my own prejudices. What of the faith of those who would deny me and other GLBT people a place within the church? What of those who preach that AIDS is God's judgment against the sexually immoral or that the tornado visited Minneapolis recently as a sign that God disapproved of the ELCA's more inclusive stance? What about (to return to my original rant) those who would resist the idea that the uninsured deserve access to health care? I struggle at times to see how people who espouse such beliefs can be Christians in the same sense that I am. I note that plenty of scriptures do feature God making distinctions between true and false Christians and that various epistles appeal to readers to practice spiritual discernment themselves.

But I agree with Hibbins that this passage (and others like it) sets limits on me as a Christ-follower. I may (and must) determine which beliefs and practices do and do not match my image of what Christ wishes, but I go beyond my purview when I start deciding who is and is not a Christian. God is much bigger and subtler than I am; God by definition knows lots that I don't. I do my best on an ongoing basis to figure out what I should and shouldn't do, but only God knows who God accepts as a follower.

But this qualification doesn't so much eradicate the question as complicate it: What ought I to do if someone professes a Christian faith in Jesus and behaves in a way I consider anathema to that faith?

More tomorrow,

JF

Who I Am/Not in the Wedding Feast

One of the first things I find I have to teach my college students is how to look at plays and other texts as more than just a mirror that reflects them as readers and watchers. I get the impression that much of high school literature coursework strains to spark interest in teenagers by encouraging students to imagine themselves as, say, Lady Macbeth, Bigger Thomas, or the speaker in Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for death."

I approve of just about anything that gets people engaged in literature and art, but as a theatre history teacher, my job is to get my students engaged with texts in which they do not necessarily appear. Reading a Japanese Noh play, for example, challenges millennial twenty-somethings to take in an art form utterly uninterested in stretching to reflect the college junior of 2009. It's the student who has to put into new perspective her assumptions about what theatre is, what art does, and how life should be represented.

The encounter between now and then, familiar and strange, can be difficult to navigate. But--so I assure my incredulous pupils--the rewards of such a struggle will benefit them as artists: a broader horizon of possibility for art, a humility about the scope of their own experience, and, yes, even a better idea of who they themselves are.

With this in mind, I turn to the pickle of a scripture passage that I as an inclusivity-minded Christian consider problematic: Matthew 22: 1-14. Christ relates a parable: A King has a wedding feast for his Son. He invites all the best people, and all the best people ignored his invitation and murdered his messengers. The King retaliates by 1) destroying the murderers, and 2) sending out (more) servants to invite anyone and everyone, good and bad, to the feast. He then approaches one of these wedding guests and asks why the guest isn't dressed in the proper wedding attire. When the guest does not answer, the King responds by having him bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. "For many are invited," concludes Jesus, "but few are chosen."

I confess: I hate that last message. It's right up there, for me, with Jesus's comment in Mark 7:27 to the Gentile woman asking for help that it isn't right to take the children's food and feed it to the dogs. At least the woman quips right back to Christ, correcting him (a correction Jesus accepts).

Nevertheless, such is the parable as it is presented. The standard evangelical interpretation, available widely online (and which I know from my childhood) is for believers to identify with the invited guests, specifically the second round of guests (i.e., Gentiles). The warning to believers is that it isn't enough simply to accept the invitation; they also have to wear the right clothes, treating the invitation seriously and reverently, paying proper respect to the King and his Son. Thus the passage becomes fuel for the certainty-anxiety dialectic that defines much of conservative evangelicalism in my experience: are you going to heaven? Are you absolutely sure? Because--as this passage shows--you can think you're saved and act like you're saved, but that's no guarantee that you are saved. So you'd better get right with the Lord and don you now his Pray Apparel (sorry, sorry).

And perhaps this is the right interpretation. Worry about what you're wearing and how you're behaving as you enjoy God's party. Or else.

But--in the interests of exploring other possible lessons in this parable--let me look beyond the "where am I" question. Indeed, I wonder whether it might not be more appropriate to look at where I'm not.

Who am I not in this parable? I am not, first of all, the King. Nor am I his Son. I don't issue the invitations to the Kingdom of God, and I don't get to decide who does and does not belong. I wonder, in fact, if we aren't the servants in the Kingdom rather than the guests. If so, then the standing order (bracketing the "kill those who rejected my invitation order") seems to be "invite everyone." If there's winnowing to be done, God will do it.

Sure, it seems obvious that a wedding guest not wearing wedding clothes (which several online commentaries assure me were provided by wedding hosts in first-century Palestine) does not belong. But Jesus in other places has a knack for upending his disciples' expectations about who's in and who's out. "Let the little children come to me," Jesus says. "Let her wipe my feet." "Let me see who in this crowd touched me." "Let me talk to the Samaritan woman at the well." And later, in Acts, to Peter: "Do not call unclean what I have declared clean."

If my least favorite stories in the gospels concern Jesus's kicking people out of the Kingdom, my favorite ones involve him letting the very last people you'd possibly expect in through the back door--the hated Samaritan, the tax collector, the leper, the Roman soldier, the Pharisee, even the betrayer. My faith in Christ's atoning love balances, struggles against, my doubts regarding my own spiritual fashion sense. If there's a right outfit to wear in the Kingdom, like as not I will miss the mark. Try as I might to resist easy, egocentric identification with characters in the parable, I see myself most as that poor chap who's kicked out.

I sometimes wonder if--I hope that--Christ is not merely there in the feast (note that we do not see the Son at the feast) but also there in the outer darkness, waiting to catch us as we're bound hand and foot, weeping and teeth-gnashing. He is, after all, the one who sets at liberty those who are bound, turning our weeping into rejoicing. He is the one who goes with us into dark Gethsemane, into the dark Roman dungeon, into the dark tomb.

More tomorrow,

JF

Acceptance, Tolerance, and Spiritual Wrestling Matches

What a pickle I've gotten myself into!

One of my major concerns as a researcher and as a Christian involves the issue of inclusivity, otherwise known as the problem of exclusions. As a left/liberal/progressive person, my default mode is "inclusivity-good/exclusivity-bad." Liberal-left folk tend to pride themselves on how welcoming and tolerant they are, and I try to be so in my work and life.

Yet my scholarship indicates to me some problems with the purely pro-inclusion stance. For instance, the sentence above smashes together welcome and tolerance as if the two were synonymous. Of course this is not so. As critics like Michael Waltzer and Wendy Brown write, tolerance is a tricky term. It's managed to install itself as a liberal-left buzzword, one of the integral features of any proactive social justice initiative.

Yet tolerance by definition disrupts the warm-'n-fuzzy affect of inclusivity. You tolerate only those things, those people, or those behaviors that you basically disapprove of. If you approved of the person/thing/act in question, you wouldn't have to tolerate it; you'd simply accept it. Welcoming operates on a semantic frequency close to that of full acceptance. Tolerance, Brown reminds us, begins as the stopgap measure in which bitter foes agree not to slaughter each other. "Uneasy co-existence," not "hands joined in unity,"--this is the tolerant state.

When it comes to the Body of Christ, the church, my initial question was how tolerant we as Christians need to be of others whose views seem, well, anathema to ours. I have difficulty, I confess, seeing how my faith can possibly match that of, say, someone who honestly believes that the poor deserve not to have access to health care. Other Christians, by contrast, would flatly deny the suggestion that I as an openly gay man could be a Christian. To what extent, I wonder, ought we to accept or tolerate our ideological/theological others?

I want to say that God's standard is always to be surprisingly, shockingly accepting. I am led to this partly by conviction from (as far as I can discern) from the Holy Spirit, partly from the witness of other saints in the faith (including my sister and my parents) who model for me a radically inclusive faith, and partly from examples in scripture.

As I've written, I do not view the Bible as inerrant and infallible (a position which defines another fundamental disagreement between me and other Christians), but I do value it as an inspired witness (perhaps even as the witness par excellence). And as such, the gospel narratives contain multiple instances of Christ shocking those around him with his radical inclusivity. He did not merely tolerate people; he accepted them, welcomed them, ate with them, touched them, let them wash his feet with their hair--I just don't see him setting up any kind of boundary. Yes, several gospel writers tell of Jesus castigating the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders (a narrative inclusion that bespeaks the antagonism between the early Christian church and some in the first-century Jewish community). But Jesus also spends time in deep, loving conversation with those same people (e.g., Nicodemus in John 3).

But, as I mentioned yesterday, other instances--not as many, I would say, but still some--feature Jesus as relating a more exclusivist picture of the Kingdom of God. The parable of the King's Son's Wedding Banquet (in the first part of Matthew 22) is one of the harshest in this regard. There the King ends up inviting all comers to his son's wedding, only to then weed out those guests not dressed appropriately: "Many are called," Christ says, "but few are chosen." This isn't acceptance, and it isn't even tolerance (the guest in question is bound hand and foot before being thrown into the outer darkness). It is Christ saying--apparently--that the Kingdom is closed to some.

Thus my pickle. I have at my disposal some easy-out ways to interpret this passage--mainly the "it's an interpolation from the human writer, not the actual words of Christ" bolt-hole. It's tempting... The parable of the Wedding Feast itself gets parallel treatment in Luke 14 and even in the Gospel of Thomas 64 (thank you, Wikipedia). Both of these, however, lack the bummer ending that Matthew includes, with the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" that is Matthew's trademark. Since it's that ending that bugs me particularly, I could explain it away as an anomalous addition (along with the particular violence that Matthew's version contains, e.g., the slaughter of the original guests in retribution for their violence toward the original messengers of the King). Matthew, as I recall my Bible training, typically features harsher-than-usual attitudes toward Jews, so the violent fate of those originally invited (the Jews, in some popular interpretations) has some explanation.

But I don't think I do my faith any favors by simply editing out this particular difficult part and side-stepping a spiritual wrestling match. (I have fewer qualms about reading beyond certain other Biblical mandates, mind you--slavery, gender relations, homosexuality, etc.). Truth be told, Matthew isn't alone in preaching exclusivity, nor is the Wedding Feast the sole instance in the Bible of God establishing and enforcing some harsh distinctions. I might as well deal with this example of non-acceptance/intolerance in the Kingdom of God.

More tomorrow,

JF

Incipient Universalism and That Pesky Wedding Banquet...

My thoughts of late revolve around issues of inclusion and exclusion. How inclusive or tolerant ought Christians to be?

Here's the nitty-gritty of what I'm gappling with: I tend to think that God's invitation to all humanity is limitless, more powerful than human resistance and more permanent than mortality. I suppose this would put me somewhere in the universalism camp, and I should explore that in depth later. But for now, just for fun, let's suppose that God's embrace of humanity is as open as the Methodist Communion table. All are welcome, full stop.

L. Gresham Machen, 1920s fundamentalist, suggests that only involuntary organizations need practice extreme tolerance. Voluntary groups--and he implies that the church is such a voluntary group--can and must practice a degree of selectivity, a kind of intolerance toward those recognized as too heterodox to be included. That model works so long as you view the ambit of Christianity as limited by election and reprobation.

Suppose that I do not see the Body of Christ as so limited. Everyone is welcome; everyone is included in the atoning work of God-with-us. In Machen's terms I would be seeing Christianity as a kind of involuntary organization, filled with people who didn't ask to be called but who were nevertheless included by a sovereign God.

My partner, who is not himself a person of faith, was nevertheless baptized in a Methodist church as an infant. As we reflected on this (and as we thought about our own children-to-be), my partner expressed some discomfort with the idea that he had no say in the matter of his own baptism. He got sprinkled--welcomed into the arms of the church--whether he liked it or not. I admit I tried to assuage some of his discomfort, qualifying that Methodist baptism isn't a chain banded around people's necks, obligating them to become Christians later on. People who are baptized as infants in the Methodist church remain free individuals, perfectly able to decide that no church is right for them.

But in a sense, I have to say that my own convictions about who God is and what God does militate against my own spin. The invitation of God, God's outreach to us--this isn't a matter of our choosing. God loves us whether we want God to or not. God welcomes us whether we like it or not--indeed, whether we even realize it or not.

In a way, this view aligns me more with Calvinism than I'd generally like to think. Calvinism stresses the sovereignty of God in the salvific act. We humans have no ability to rectify a relationship with Christ broken by sin. God does it all. Similarly, I seem to be arguing that God as sovereign preemptively welcomes us, overriding any resistance we might offer to that invitation's occurring. It's the ultimate involuntary community.

As such, to follow Machen's argument, Christians must be among the most tolerant of all organizations. The gesture of distinguishing true Christian from false Christian--this, it would seem, is forbidden to Christians themselves.

Ah, but where's your support? asks the conservative evangelical. It's nice to think of a God who accepts everyone; universalism can be very comforting, but does it jibe with scripture? And here I have to be honest that many parts of scripture in fact seem to offer a more restrictive, much less tolerant picture of the kingdom of God.

Matthew 22 comes to mind--the parable of the wedding banquet. The king is giving a wedding banquet for his son. His original invitations discarded and his servants treated shamefully by those originally invited, the king instead invites practically everyone else, "good and bad alike" (22:10). And it's a wonderful party.

All good so far, yes? Everyone invited? But then: the king notices one guest not in wedding clothes. "How did you get in?" the king asks. The guest has no answer, and the king treats him--well--horribly: binding him hand and foot and casting him into the outer darkness where there's "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (vs. 11-12). Jesus's summary? "Many are invited, few are chosen."

That's... not exactly universalism. But neither is it the purely voluntary community Machen imagines. The invitation was to everyone, "good and bad alike." The dressing-up part? The binding-and-tossing-into-the-darkness part? Hm.

Lemme think about that.

More tomorrow,

JF

Inside/Outside

To review: communities of any sort rely to a certain extent on exclusions--selections of insiders and outsiders--in order to exist. A community that includes everyone equally and without question lacks any coherence as a community. If this is so, then is the Church--the universal-catholic body of Christ--a community? If so, where and how does exclusion work? If not, what is it?

I have written extensively about people who insist that the Christian community is extremely, overtly selective, a body of the elect. Between these chosen few and, well, the rest exists a bright-line distinction. Just how permeable this inside/outside boundary is depends upon whom you ask. For Fred Phelps (and to a much lesser, less paranoid-hate-filled extent, some others in the Calvinist tradition), the boundary is a wall erected prior to humanity's existence. God knows who is predestined to choose the Way of Salvation and who is not, and the Holy Spirit enables/pushes those so predestined onto that Way. All others? Reprobate. Never had a chance.

For Steven Anderson (and, to a lesser extent, some other fundamentalist non-Calvinists), the line is not pre-ordained but no less solid for all that. God's invitation extends to all, but humans in their pride can overtax God's invitation and face a kind of expulsion from grace, becoming reprobate. Regardless of their support for or dismay at Anderson (or Calvin), though, most evangelicals would affirm that humans can choose whether to accept God's invitation to salvation but that this invitation closes upon either the human's death or Christ's second coming, whichever happens first. At that point (in most evangelical thinking), a person's insider/outsider status becomes permanent, and she spends eternity in heaven or hell.

The key question for most evangelicals isn't so much whether insider/outsider statuses exist in God's community but about whether humans on earth can discern who occupies the inside/outside zone. Here we return to the dialectic of certainty and anxiety that characterizes much of conservative evangelical faith life: are you 100% certain that YOU are saved? Being concerned about but simultaneously certain of your own insider status (i.e., that you're saved through faith in Christ) is a given for most conservative evangelicals.

On the question of others' the inside/outside status, though, evangelicals split. For many evangelicals--even, I would venture, most evangelicals--the ultimate salvation status of an individual soul is unknowable, a matter between the soul and God. When pressed, for instance, most evangelicals in my experience will stop short of declaring with any certainty whether someone is not saved. Even the most wicked, unchristian person, they reason, might have believed in his or her final moment.

Others, particularly of the fundamentalist persuasion, are more cavalier about declaring certain beliefs or practices (if not particular individuals) as clearly living outside of the bounds of Christian community. GLBT people are the current favorite reprobates for many fundamentalists. Anderson's understanding of scripture, for instance, leads him to believe that any homosexual is definitionally and irrevocably doomed to hell (and that he as a Christian is to rejoice about such a fate). Ditto abortionists.

Consider evangelical response to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who performed late-term abortions. Conservative evangelical radio shows and blogs buzzed what the proper Christian response to the murder should be. Most--really, all of them save for a few extreme commentators--denounced vigilantism and murder. Some asked whether or not relief or even celebration constituted an appropriate Christian response to the murder of Dr. George Tiller since from their point of view the murder saved the lives of thousands of future babies (unasked: how Dr. Tiller's murder may have compromised or doomed the health of many women in need of late-term abortions for medical reasons). But in addition to this debate, evangelical pundits posed a subtler question: how was it that Dr. Tiller was involved in a church--an usher, no less--if he was by profession an abortion doctor?

Most rejected out of hand the very idea that one could be a professing Christian and yet perform abortions. He may have claimed to be a Christian, but (claimed many) anyone who can abort fetuses and call himself a believer is either deluded or mendacious. Moreover, a community of faith that accepts such a person--even elevating him or her to the status of usher--surely this community is at best gravely misguided if not altogether apostate.

Of course, those opinions doubtless represent only part of the inchoate mass of believers called "evangelical," but the logic is widespread enough to merit examination: I can tell by X action or belief that you are probably not really a Christian. Nor is this merely the purview of fundamentalists. In my health care rant of a few days ago, I wondered about how someone could call themselves a Christian and yet affirm a system guaranteed to harm or kill the poor.

This discriminatory discernment (discriminatory in the non-bigoted sense of discriminating) is fascinating to me even as it worries me.

More tomorrow,

JF

Indelible

Fun fact: people excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church are still technically considered Christian and Catholic. Mind you, excommunication isnt' a desirable state, as the excommunicant is denied the confession, absolution, and the Eucharist. But somehow I always thought of excommunication as a permanent condemnation, the Catholic version of Steven Anderson's reprobation, where God decides that you as a sinner have simply gone too far and removes forever any hope of salvation.

Not so for Catholics. Why? Because of baptism, which occurs for Catholics in infancy (generally) and which they consider indelible.

I like that word, indelible. I first heard it in relation to Methodists' understanding of baptism. To be sure, Methodists and Catholics understand the rite of infant baptism differently. But for both, the inclusion into God's care that it implies cannot be removed. Like their understanding of communion, Methodists see baptism as something God does, a sign of God's welcoming, prevenient grace. The understanding with baptism is that the rite activates the child's family and church community into a realization of their responsibility to nurture that child in his or her faith. Ideally, the child grows in such nurture until such time as he or she is able to make a commitment to Christ him or herself (a ceremony called Confirmation).

Crucially, however, baptism does not brainwash the child, nor does it bind people magically to a Christian fate. It is entirely possible, for instance, that a baptized infant will grow up not to be a Methodist or not to be a Christian.

Nevertheless, the baptism is indelible. God's loving invitation remains as open as the communion table, as intimate as water. I have spoken of other faith traditions within Christianity that see the primary attributes of God as Sovereignty or Righteousness. I'm hesitant to select a single divine attribute that all Methodists embrace as primary, but grace seems close.

But grace for Methodists isn't a passive forgiveness or forbearance, nor is it restricted to the singular acts of Christ's incarnation and atonement. Grace is constant and lifelong, not concentrated into one or two high moments. Grace is prevenient--pre-existing our awareness and laying the foundation for our encounter with it. Grace is sovereign, overcoming barriers that defeat mortal emotions and commitments.

And grace is indelible. Its mark cannot be removed. Its invitation cannot be rescinded by any except God, and I am unaware of any Methodist doctrine that suggests that God is ever inclined to do so. Reprobation--the permanent loss of grace--is simply not on the radar screen for Methodists.

This insight has formed the basis for many efforts by LGBT people in the United Methodist Church to achieve equality with heterosexual members. We Were Baptized, Too by James Preston and Marylin Bennett Alexander is the go-to example here. The 2004 General Conference featured a variety of actions by pro-inclusion members and organizations inspired by the idea of being "Watermarked," baptized and thus welcomed by God.

I regret to say the argument has not succeeded. The Methodist Church remains one of many denominations struggling mightily over the issue of inclusion for people who are LGBT. As a gay man, I may not be ordained. I may not be married to my partner by a Methodist minister or within a Methodist church. And, most disturbingly for me, I can be denied membership in any local congregation on the basis of my status as a "self-avowed, practicing homosexual." Somehow my baptism is not enough. I can be excluded from the community Methodist even though the baptism suggests that I have been included from the Body of Christ.

That confusion drives the question I posed yesterday about the degree to which the Church (as opposed to a local congregation) is a voluntary organization in L. Gresham Machen's sense. That is, must the Church, like any distinctive community, practice a heightened degree of intolerance, selecting who's in and who's out carefully so as to maintain its coherence? At first glance the answer appears to be "of course!" No one is forced into church membership or Christianity.

But I wonder, then, about the indelible (and unasked-for) grace that God bestows in baptism (and, though this may depart from Methodist orthodoxy, I would argue the grace comes in more ways than that). If God issues the invitation and welcomes the infant, and if God's invitation is constant, prevenient, sovereign, and indelible--can the community of Those God Welcomes be considered voluntary?

More tomorrow,

JF

Membership and Excommunication

Is the church a voluntary community? To what extent, if any, may a church be discriminating in accepting or keeping members?

These questions came to me as I wrote about L. Gresham Machen's 1923 Christianity and Liberalism. Arguing from the fundamentalist view that liberal Christianity is a distinct species of belief and practice from orthodox Christianity, Machen recommends that those who believe in liberalism be weeded out from amongst the orthodox faithful. Anticipating the cries of "how intolerant," Machen defends intolerance (or, rather, repudiates the idea that communities must be endlessly tolerant) by distinguishing between involuntary organizations, like a nation or state, and voluntary ones. Involuntary organizations must tolerate a wide variety of views. Voluntary organizations must on the contrary work hard to maintain their distinctiveness by policing members. Those members who do not subscribe to the community's core beliefs out not be accepted.

Voluntary communities, Machen implies, have a right and a duty to be intolerant and discriminatory. Lest I seem like I paint Machen as a bigot, I hasten to add that he is correct. Intolerance and discrimination can have non-bigoted meanings. No community can accept all comers equally and remain a distinctive community. If a Jewish synagogue accepted avid Eastern Orthodox believers equally as Jewish believers, the resulting community could hardly be described as Jewish at all but as some kind of Jewish-East Orthodox hybrid. So long as the synagogue wished to remain a Jewish synagogue, it must discriminate between those who wish to join the synagogue in good faith--agreeing to the core beliefs and undergoing entrance procedures specific to that faith community--and those who do not.

To a certain extent, even Machen's example of an involuntary community, the State, must practice a degree of exclusivity. Modern nation-states have citizens, a status of insider that distinguishes them from just any warm body that happens to live within the nation-state's borders (a denizen). For a denizen to become a citizen requires a long and complicated process of bureaucracy, background checks, exams (some of which many natural-born US citizens could not pass), and screenings.

Similarly, most churches have membership procedures of some sort--vows, training, ceremonies, and even examinations. I've described already that Southern Baptist membership typically requires a public confession of faith plus a subsequent baptism, though most churches will accept the word of the prospective member about whether she or he had done those things at a previous church. Methodists have prospective members take a vow of faith before the congregation, who answers that vow with a reaffirmation of their own vows. Baptism may follow.

Neither faith is particularly stringent in its examinations of various members. Local churches generally delight in receiving new members, and most are content to take people at their word. It is not unheard-of, however, for individual churches to refuse membership to people known to be in violation of the church's beliefs. A private religious institutions, individual churches are not legally compelled to accept all comers and may control the intake of members as they see fit.

Once gained, church membership is not necessarily permanent.

I take Machen's point that nation-states (as generally conceived in the present) may not be quite so discriminatory as purely voluntary associations in that most nations have natural-birth provisions. So long as one is a natural-born citizen of the US, for instance, there' s not much that person can do or believe that would neutralize that status. Tim McVeigh, for instance, can blow up a federal building in an anti-government act of terrorism and yet still be a citizen. John Walker Lindh joined Afghanistan's Taliban army in opposing the US, yet he remains a citizen. People may renounce their citizenship, but once granted by birth or by naturalization, it's hard to get rid of (It's not impossible, but the standard is quite high).

Churches have historically had their own processes of expatriation, i.e., excommunication, where a member is permanently or temporarily un-membered from the church. Now, the exact understanding depends upon the ecclesiastical body doing the excommunicating. The Roman Catholic Church, although perhaps the body most frequently associated with excommunicating members, specifies that excommunication is meant to have a restorative rather than a penal effect (see here).

Whereas expatriation from the US cannot be renounced or rescinded, Roman Catholic excommunication can, provided the excommunicant repents. Indeed, the hope is that excommunicating a member will create a wake-up shock resulting from being denied full participation in the Church (and therefore full grace). The shock will then hopefully lead to the person's repentance and reconciliation with the church.

In other Christian traditions, excommunication becomes blurrier in terms of how it may be done, who may do it, and if/how it may be rescinded. Some denominations have formal excommunication procedures. Others (particularly congregational systems) simply declare a person anathema (accursed), generally after having followed several interventions outlined in Matthew 18:15-17, about "a brother who sins against you." I have spoken to people who were excommunicated by their local congregations for being gay. They described a ceremony in which prayers for the excommunicant's salvation were followed by ritualistic turnings-away from the person. Church members shunned the person afterward, avoiding all social contact.

Here, though, I encounter some confusion. Individual churches, local congregations--these are discrete communities that may practice what discriminatory procedures in accepting or excommunicating members they see fit.

But, transcending denominational affiliation for a second--what about the Church in general, the community of Christians, broadly conceived? May this Church be discriminatory? Is it a voluntary association?

More tomorrow,

JF

Communities In and Out

Yesterday I referenced J. Gresham Machen's 1923 work, Christianity and Liberalism (on-line version here). Machen, a Presbyterian theologian and intellectual powerhouse of the early twentieth century fundamentalist movement in the US, compares and contrasts what he sees as orthodox, traditional (Protestant) Christianity and "modernism" or "liberalism" that (in his view) claims to be Christianity. This latter innovation, he argues, is not in fact Christianity at all in that it stands in opposition to beliefs that true Christians consider fundamental, e.g., the literal and error-free status of the Bible, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, Jesus' bodily resurrection.

Given these fundamental differences, he concludes, Christianity ought to separate itself from its modernist variation. Whereas it is, he admits, good for Christians to exist together in love, Christianity remains a "voluntary organization" which can and in fact must make distinctions between members and non-members. Voluntary organizations, he argues, cannot afford to be as tolerant of members' viewpoints as involuntary organizations (such as a State).

I want to explore a bit of that voluntary/involuntary distinction and its implications for the idea of tolerance. First, though, I need to deal with a background concept: community.

Much of my work in performance studies deals with community-based theatre, by which I mean not the local "community theatre" that puts on the annual musical but a form of performance in which members of a community--often but not always assisted by a trained artist--participate in the creation and production of a performance about themselves. Cornerstone Theater Company, based in Los Angeles, is one of the best-known of these theatres in the US. They might, for example, write and stage an adaptation of Prometheus Bound (by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus) that deals with laid-off steelworkers in Bethlehem, PA, or produce an original play about the residents of Fresno, CA. In both cases, members of the communities involved participate in the writing and performance processes.

I've participated in a few of these productions, and they were amazing experiences. At the same time, the act of producing a community brings up some hard truths that disrupt the warm-and-fuzzy associations that community enjoys. For one thing, you realize that, while community generally connotes inclusion and togetherness, no community is boundlessly inclusive. Indeed, a community that includes everyone imaginable without limit is really no community at all, but just plain everyone. A community is a community (and not just everyone) to the extent that it is not another community. All communities depend therefore not just on whom they include but whom the exclude (or at least from whom they are distinguished).

The inclusion/exclusion dynamic of community (dealt with thoroughly by Anthony Cohen in They Symbolic Construction of Community) becomes immediately apparent in community-based productions. A play about a neighborhood community, for instance, must establish from the outset who does and does not count as a member of that community.

And there things get tricky. Who, exactly, gets to decide who's in and who's out of a community? Ask people who identify as members of the community, and you'll quickly discover areas of disagreement:

MEMBER: The people on that side of the street aren't part of the neighborhood.
ANOTHER MEMBER: Yes, they are! They come to all the neighborhood functions.
MEMBER: No matter. That street is the barrier.
YET ANOTHER MEMBER: Besides, most of them have only been here for five years.
MEMBER: Now, wait a minute. I've only been here for four years, but I'm still a part of this neighborhood...

Nor is disagreement restricted merely to the question of who's in /who's out. Ask people to describe the central features of their community, the best/worst moments from the history of their community, the ideal future for their community, the most/least important parts of their community--any question, really, and you'll encounter similar areas of disagreement.

Cornerstone's typical response is to stage the disagreement, suggesting that debate about the boundaries of community functions as part of what that community is. Such is Cornerstone's privilege. As a temporary visitor to most of the communities it deals with, the company's concerns begin and end with writing and staging the show. The community has to live with themselves.

And, for the most part, these community-specific disagreements--while real--don't bring life to a grinding halt. For most people in most situations, community membership doesn't matter. Who cares, for instance, whether so-and-so thinks you're part of this or that particular community? The kinds of community Cornerstone deals with (geographic, occupational, ethnic, cultural) all have generally permeable boundaries. People may disagree about who belongs or not, but no one really has the power to force everyone else to live by his or her opinion.

Community matters a great deal, however, in situations where an authority--an individual, a body of officials, and/or a bureaucracy--has the power to define and enforce boundaries. Crossing a border into another country, for example, makes you hyper-aware of what citizenship means and how you have to perform it via displays of ID (and, to the extent that the border patrol agent will ask you questions, markers like accent, appearance, and native knowledge). People who live on the outskirts or just beyond cities and towns may have to be similarly hyper-aware of tax laws, postal/phone codes, fire/police/hospital jurisdictions, and the like. Regimes of apartheid enforce differential codes for people based on race or ethnicity.

Individual churches, along with the more connectional/hierarchical denominations, could be considered communities governed by authorities empowered to define and police insider/outsider status. The United Methodist Church, for instance, is currently dealing with an ongoing disagreement concerning which authority figure properly wields the power to allow or deny membership to an openly gay or lesbian person.

I generally teach my cultural studies classes that community debates over who's in and who's out (as well as the related issues of who decides and how) are the essence of politics (in this respect I follow French philosopher Jacques Ranciere). In this sense, communities of any sort are political in that they are at some point and to some degree concerned with matters of inclusion and exclusion.

Churches, too, are political entities. The questions, then: who properly ought to be included and excluded from church membership? Who gets to decide? How?

More tomorrow,

JF

The Most Loving Thing I Can Do Is Leave

I remember growing up terrified that my parents would get a divorce. Not that my parents seemed particularly divorce-prone--quite the contrary. But there came a point when it seemed that most of my friends' parents had been divorced, that most of them had step-brothers, step-parents, step-sisters, and even step-pets. I thought of it like a disease that families could catch, and I worried about my family's immunity.

It took me a while to see divorce as anything but something awful, like a sickness or a house fire. As I got older, though, I began to see that sometimes staying together was not necessarily always the happiest ending to a love story. As much as I've waxed world-wise about my family's bout with near-poverty, I had a pretty sheltered life growing up. It never occurred to me that the love between two people could turn sour. I missed how emotional bonds can constrain and choke as well as comfort. Familial abuse--emotional and physical and otherwise--was largely a fairy tale to me.

In college, I began to meet people whose backgrounds told of family life where escaping was a victory and home was losing. I saw for myself how friendships can twist, and how love can mix with toxins of envy, annoyance, despair, and resignation. And I began to see how sometimes the most loving thing one can do is leave.

I think about those lessons when I consider my question from yesterday: how should the church navigate disagreements over fundamentals? My instinct is to say, "Do anything to stay together." I think I do not unfairly generalize by suggesting that in many situations it is the progressive/liberal sides of disagreements within churches that tend to urge staying together. The more conservative/fundamentalist sides urge separation.

In the 1920s, as the US fundamentalist movement enjoyed a brief ascendancy (1920 was the year fundamentalists got that label), a theologian named J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, a response to a piece by Henry Fosdick called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" In a careful, decidedly un-shrill way, Machen (a Presbyterian) outlines what he sees as orthodox Christianity, contrasting that with what he calls "modernism" or "liberalism." At stake are issues that still crop up today in evangelical debates, e.g., the inerrant interpretation of the Bible, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the literal reality of miracles recorded in scripture, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus, and Christ as the sole means of salvation.

Machen claims these doctrinal points as fundamental, noting that "the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight" (2). These points, he argues, are utterly worth fighting for, yet liberalism has in some way or another (often under the guise of higher criticism or scholarship) dismissed these points in favor of secular-naturalistic assumptions. His thesis? That, in abandoning or over-qualifying these fundamental truths, liberal Christianity has ceased to be Christianity at all and should be separated from the orthodox faith.

Now, unlike the all-too-common tendency in today's debates, Machen refuses to pass judgment on whether or not those who hold to liberal doctrines are apostates. Such matters, he insists, are God's alone to decide. "But one thing is perfectly plain," he writes, "whether or no liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear that liberalism is not Christianity. . . . A separation between the two parties in the Chruch is the crying need of the hour" (160).

He raises and dispenses with the notion that separation of that sort is wrong, that it bespeaks narrowness. No, he maintains, "the narrow man is the man who rejects the other man's convictions without first endeavoring to understand them, the man who makes no effort to look at things from the other man's point of view" (160). So long as a person exerts herself to that degree of empathy at least, the actions of that person subsequent to such empathic examination--divorce or unity--are outside of the question of narrowness. It is not, for example, narrow for a protestant to decide that the Roman Catholic church is not a good spiritual home for her so long as she has looked carefully and fairly at Roman Catholic theology and practice. Decisions of this sort contrast utterly with narrow-mindedness.

And such decisions are essential for just about any social group, particularly for churches. Machen advances a distinction between involuntary associations (such as the State), which by nature must be tolerant of many kinds of differences, and voluntary ones, which "so far as the fundamental purpose of their existence is concerned, must be intolerant or else cease to exist" (167-8). Insofar as the church is a voluntary association, it must to a certain extent be intolerant--moreso, at least, than involuntary associations.

Machen's argument is, I must admit, a bracing read, calm, well-argued, and reasonable. It rightfully won him respect from both conservatives and liberals, and I do wish more discourse from both sides of various present-day cultural debates would take cues from him.

I disagree, of course, with many of Machen's fundamentals. Some I simply do not believe are true (inerrancy, for instance). Others I have less of a certain personal opinion about except to resist the idea that they no theology could be properly Christian without them.

But I find his argument for necessary distinctions compelling, resonant with my own hard lessons in the occasional goodness of divorce or separation.

What's to be lost by a church schism? Can schisms be loving instead of tragic and violent?

More tomorrow,

JF

In Essentials, Unity; in Non-Essentials, Liberty

What a screed I wrote yesterday! "I'm angry... I'm shocked... I'm baffled... I just don't understand how a Christian..." It's all true, mind. When it comes to the idea that everyone deserves access to necessary health care, I don't feel like I have a lot of patience or sympathy for Bible-based arguments to the contrary.

And there's the problem--my lack of patience or sympathy. I don't think I brought up any original arguments yesterday, and my sentiments of anger-shock-confusion mirror those of people against universal health care. So I think X way about health care and think that other Christians should think similarly. Others think Y way about the same issue with just as much passion. Neither side appears interested in compromise.

So now what? What's to be done in cases where Christians are so divided about a particular issue that they begin to doubt whether or not their opponents can even be Christians to think/act/believe as they do?

I need to qualify my what I mean by that question. The famous irenic phrase among churches goes "in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity." When I talk about fundamental differences among Christians, I'm not talking about simple disagreements about non-essentials. Any difference of opinion that can be resolved simply by "agreeing to disagree" in the spirit of liberty is not, I submit, fundamental.

The disagreements I'm talking about here are ones that a critical mass of a community of believers has deemed essential rather than non-essential. (Indeed, many fundamental disagreements among Christians revolve around the question of whether X belief or doctrine qualifies as essential or non-essential). Fundamental disagreements cannot be ignored, overcome, or tabled until a later date. They crowd out other issues, overcoming the unifying mechanisms that otherwise keep the community together.

Moreover, fundamental disagreements exert a definitional force upon those in a community. Members of a community are obliged to take some stand on the key issues/questions upon which the disagreement is based. Or, more precisely, everyone in the community will at least be interpreted as having taken a stand regardless of what they do (a person's inaction or abstention are seen as that persons' having made a definitive choice one way or another).

My question, then: when confronted with a fundamental disagreement, how is a community of believers to navigate that disagreement in love and charity? Is it possible to do so? How?

Historically, one answer seems not to be "just look at what the Bible says." As scholars of evangelicalism and fundamentalism note, the creed-less, Bible-only strands of Protestantism have been particularly susceptible to schism partially because of their ardent faith in--not the Bible per se but--the ability of all Christians to read the same words in exactly the same way. They just don't.

I wrote last week on two die-hard, Bible-only fundamentalists, Steven Anderson and Fred Phelps, both of whom read the Bible literally as inerrant/infallible. Yet Anderson and Phelps would each declare the other an apostate, a false Christian (even perhaps a reprobate) for particular their particular interpretation of those beliefs (Phelps' repentance gospel for Anderson, Anderson's denial of Calvinist precepts for Phelps).

Relying on the Bible to provide every answer to every ethical question guarantees strife, not unity. Divergences in interpretation will inevitably crop up. No one criticizes fundamentalists as stridently as other fundamentalists. Even in less fundamentalist churches, however, schisms over matters of literalist interpretation seem common.

What's the alternative? The obvious opposite of Bible-only-ism in Christianity would seem to be (at least according to Bible-only-ists) an absolute hierarchical structure, e.g., Catholicism. Such top-down connectionalism provides a brutal but effective mechanism for managing internal disagreement: what the head of the church says, goes. The Pope and his associated officers have the power to declare what is and isn't doctrinal--and therefore who is and isn't in the good graces of God. Indeed, most of the historic creeds of the church emerged not (or not only) as unifying instruments to draw a disparate body of believers together but (also) as keen-edged blades to lop off those parts of the body that (in the eyes of the creed-makers) did not belong.

But even the "final word" of the Pope does not entirely prevent schism; the various orthodox traditions are proof alongside Protestantism of that.

Most of the Protestant mainline try to find a path between these two extremes, holding scripture in balance with other considerations (such as reason, experience, and tradition for Methodists). Even with them, however, fundamental disagreements can and do calcify around certain questions, resulting sooner or later in some kind of split.

And surely a split within the body of Christ is one of the worse witnesses of love a church can offer to the world. Right?

More tomorrow,

JF

Health Care Ranting

Apologies, but there's a health care rant ahead.

I'm angry that the Christian church has not taken a more prominent role in advocating for health care as a human right. I'm shocked at the number of comments I've read or arguments I've heard from evangelical Christians who see universal health care as the worst thing since people sacrificed droves of children to Moloch. More--I'm baffled. I can see that there are reasonable cases to be made for arguing that the free market rather than federal control provides better health care (I have not heard such arguments, and it strikes me that the free market has had more than enough time to prove whether it's good at health care).

But often I don't hear reasoned arguments but rather xenophobic screeds against the "illegals" who will somehow find their way to free health care. Or I hear the entire health care reform idea as some oh-so-clever ruse to smuggle in government-funded abortion. Or it's just "socialism." And more often than not, these anti-health care folk will wax Biblical about how much on God's side they are (or vice versa), urging all good Bible-believing Christians to up and follow them.

Let me take the three allegations in reverse. First, I'm unclear just what they mean by socialism. I note that it's really only in the US that "socialism" equates to "Stalinist communism" or some such totalitarian system. Most other industrialized nations see socialism as the perfectly sensible idea that some services should not be subject to control by the profit motives of capitalists. Insurance companies do not exist to make sure people have access to health care; they exist to make money. When those two ideals (care, profit) conflict, guess which one wins? As many others have pointed out, it's profit-driven insurance companies that ration care or sponsor "death panels." Insofar as some rationing is necessary--and some is--I'd prefer that the rationing agency be transparent, accountable, and relatively free from profit motive: i.e., the government.

I'm hesitant to argue that the Bible directly endorses any modern economic system. Were I to have to venture a guess on that, however, I'd have to say that references to the early church's members sharing all they had with each other sure doesn't resemble capitalism...

The abortion issue. Setting aside the larger pro-life/pro-choice debate, and setting aside the fact that federal guidelines already make it difficult to see how abortion could be overtly funded under reform bills--setting these questions aside, suppose right-wing critics are correct, and current bills under consideration do have loopholes that could allow someone's abortion to be covered. Frankly, though I don't doubt the sincerity of abortion foes' feelings about abortion, I think this government-sponsored-abortion issue is a ruse, a convenient excuse for opposing the bill. After all, if the abortion loophole were closed, would critics then drop their opposition to the reform effort? I doubt it. Would they, having won the abortion battle, be equally willing to pay for contraceptive/sex ed drives to prevent unwanted pregnancy? Would they be for government-funded prenatal and post-natal care? For adoption and early childhood education? I desist, as I'm repeating well-worn arguments about the paradox of caring more about the unborn than the born.

Finally, though--the "illegal immigrant" issue. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how any halfway inerrantist Christian can have anything but the most liberal attitude regarding immigration. The scripture is utterly straightforward: "The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God" (Lev 19:34, NIV). Certainly loving the alien as yourself means wanting her to have necessary health care. I mean, what's the alternative?

Indeed, that question should be at the forefront of the debate on health care in general: What's the alternative? If you insist on excluding certain groups from universal access to health care (e.g., illegal immigrants, the unemployed, the uninsurable, the poor, others ), then have the honesty to recognize the implications of that stance. To whit: you endorse the death penalty for the sin of poverty, pre-existing conditions, and/or undocumented status. The poor deserve to die of preventable or treatable conditions, such a stance suggests. Ditto illegal immigrants. Ditto people with pre-existing conditions or bad credit. Ditto the unemployed. They deserve un-health.

I don't see any wiggle room here for people who claim to be Christ-followers, especially those who claim "pro-life" as a label. How can such people support anyone's exclusion from life-saving procedures? Or rather, support whatever exclusions you wish. Be OK with the poor or the stranger in our midst suffering and dying. But don't then say that you do so from a Bible-based or Christian ethic. The Bible is simply more radical than that.

One rebuttal to this argument that I've heard insists that the Bible urges charity, voluntary giving, not taxation (which they define as the government's taking money by force). I read one editorial (in a student newspaper) along those lines, suggesting that the best system from a faith point of view would be not "socialism" (which the writer did not bother to define) but rather a largish charity run by the good-willed people of multiple (Christian) faiths to provide necessary services to those who cannot afford them otherwise.

Hogwash.

Organized Christianity has had over two hundred years in this country to erect anything resembling such a charity organization with anything like the scope and reach the writer describes. It hasn't happened yet. I do not think it likely to happen at all.

Now, I do not view the Bible as a handbook to how to structure modern societies (what does the Bible say about interstate commerce regulation? Space exploration funding? Nuclear waste disposal?). But nowhere do I find Jesus, the apostles, the prophets, or other writers saying anything like "Give to the poor--but only if it's via a charity" or "Resist any systemic effort to improve the lives of the poor and needy unless it takes the form of a strictly volunteer organization." Indeed, Christ says that if someone sues you and demands your shirt as payment, you are to give them your cloak as well. Christian love and generosity is that which exceeds any system of giving, not that which substitutes for it.

More tomorrow,

JF

too deep for words

The good news: I have completed the article I was working on after a full day of writing.

The not-so-good news: My brain feels like a hunk of melted plastic. You can tell the hunk of plastic used to be something, maybe even something colorful and fun. A toy? A Playstation 3? But now it's just slag. There's no hope of getting it to do anything more complicated than just sitting there, having mass and taking up space.

I like to think, at empty, beyond-weary times such as this that I earn some kind of points simply for showing up. It's easy to keep to a discipline (writing, exercise, diet, work, etc.) when you've made time for it and saved energy for it. But when you're running late? Running on empty? Kicking at a pile of melted plastic to see if you hear any hint of mechanical noise from the clockworks that used to be inside of it? That's when discipline really...disciplines...

It used to be that I stressed out about times when I felt empty or less-then-jazzed about doing something God-related, like going to church or reading scripture or praying. Now, I have written about (and against) the notion that God sits in heaven above us ever-poised, lightning bolt in hand to strike us down out of impatience or hatred. I do not believe that a God who inspires nothing but fear and (((very hidden resentment))) makes for a healthy faith.

But I do try most of the time not to be casual about approaching the Creator of the Wide Universe. "What is man, that you take notice of him?" asks the Psalmist. Who am I that I expect God to take notice of me? And more--who am I that I ask God of all things for favors? To protect, to care for, to assist. Again, I do not subscribe to the theology of the God who can barely stand us, but neither do I dismiss evangelical reminders to be still and know that God is God.

It's frustrating, then, that there are times when my soul feels like my brain right now--cold, dead, immobile. The last thing I feel like doing at times is forcing myself into the mindset of communion with God.

I take no small comfort, then, in Romans 8:26, which assures me that the Holy Spirit prays in my place, prays better than I am able, prays with sighs too deep for words. To me, this message from Paul suggests that God's love is not dependent upon our transient emotional states or our transient abilities to be spiritual or thoughtful or reverent. I have read that the practice of speaking in tongues (glossolalia) in Pentecostal churches--the Baptism of the Spirit--serves in part as a way for the prayerful intercession of the Spirit to bypass a person's lack of rhetorical flair or fear of saying the right thing. It relieves the pray-er of the burden of praying right. "I have you," says God, "I will speak for you and through you."

I do not myself practice the Pentacostal doctrine of tongues, but really--is it that different from the Methodist doctrine of prevenient grace? Methodists believe that God's lovingkindness for us precedes our awareness of it. Pentecostals have a way of performing the fact that the Spirit's power exceeds our human ability to respond to it. And are not both of these doctrines but different expressions of God's sovereignty--the excess of God over humanity? I had never thought of sovereignty as anything but a mark of God's impossible distance from us, but grace and the Spirit give me ways to think of sovereignty as impossible support, impossible intimacy, a miracle of upkeep for a weary mortal.

I ramble--forgive. It's time to put my plastic brain to bed in the hope that the new day will find it whole and functioning again. In the meantime, an assignment: find a way for the impossible, sovereign intimacy of God to surprise you with how it prays for you, works for you, writes for you, perseveres for you, with efforts too deep for words.

More tomorrow,

JF

From PK to Double PK

Still finishing up a research article due tomorrow... so another brief post.

Before the Steven Anderson side-track, I had been relating my (and my family's) transition from the conservative evangelicalism of the Southern Baptist Church to the mainline Protestantism of the United Methodist Church. In the course of that shift--about a three-year period in the early nineties when I was in high school--I discovered a love of theatre, I internalized a whole new perspective on God, and my father became a Methodist minister. Since Methodists are appointed by the conference bishop, our family moved from the mid-sized city near Oklahoma City to a tiny town near the Oklahoma/Arkansas border.

It was my senior year. Life in a small town was nothing new, really, but I had grown accustomed to the offerings of the larger city--a robust theatre program in the school, a large group of friends, a university atmosphere. The new town had a stoplight. As I said--tiny.

Nevertheless, my sister and I managed, with the help of a supportive teacher, to start a mini-theatre program there. I adapted to the school's smaller offerings (Spanish instead of Latin, for example), and made friends with folk there. Daddy settled into his familiar role as minister, though he had a new appreciation for how much more regularized the Methodist Church was compared to the Baptists. My sister found a social circle of her own, and she and I went back to being preacher's kids.

My mother, though, was not nearly as content. Having largely supported us through her teaching job for the past few years, going back to being "pastor's wife" as a full-time job did not hold special appeal. It's not that she loved teaching that much--she did not. But she had always been either a kind of informal co-minister with my father or a full-time breadwinner herself. In this particular church, the co-ministerial roles were already more or less filled by a capable congregation. Methodist churches, I find, tend to boast more self-sufficient congregations. Since the clergy itinerancy system rarely lets ministers stay for more than five years in one place, congregations often learn to keep the church's ministries afloat themselves. It left less for my mother to do.

As I've mentioned, my mother had a seminary degree herself--a Master of Religious Education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The MRE was at the time she earned it the "women's version" of the Master of Divinity, the terminal degree for ordained ministers. Since Baptists (holding to a literal reading of certain verses in the Bible) forbade women from ordination, the MRE was often seen as the obvious choice. Many times I heard Mama express some regret that she had not gone ahead and pursued the M-Div anyway.

It did not take long, however, for Daddy's immediate superior, the District Superintendent (DS), to notice both Mama's theological training and her desire to serve in the ministry. It was that DS who first encouraged Mama to pursue a path similar to that my father was already on: professional ministry as a pastor.

Now, the understanding at the time was that people coming into the ministry from other Protestant faiths, people who had degrees from non-Methodist seminaries, began as a "local pastor" (or "local licensed pastor," as they were called then). Local pastors have full authority of a minister in their local congregations, but they lack the "member in full connection" status of ordained Methodist clergy (e.g., the ability to vote as clergy at Annual Conference meetings). Instead, local pastors undergo a weeks-long condensed training and are assigned to a congregation or two. Daddy's plan was to serve as a local pastor until such time as he could update his seminary degree by taking a few more classes in Methodist history and polity from a nearby (sort-of nearby) seminary. At that time, his M-Div would be accepted by the UMC and he could pursue "elder" status--fully ordained membership.

The same process, our DS told us, could work for Mama.

Thus, soon after I entered college, my mother became a pastor, and I became a double PK.

I remain so proud of my mother for achieving her dream--realizing her calling--of being a minister.

At the same time as she was moving into her new role, however, I was making some other discoveries that greatly affected my faith life.

More tomorrow (when, Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll have finished the article to my satisfaction),

JF