COMMENTARY: I Asked How to Make Church Work, and You Answered

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Six weeks ago, I thought aloud about helping a friend to start a new church. I asked for your suggestions and received a flood of replies, all different and yet all concerned, even passionate, about the importance of doing the faith enterprise well. I hear the same message in […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Six weeks ago, I thought aloud about helping a friend to start a new church. I asked for your suggestions and received a flood of replies, all different and yet all concerned, even passionate, about the importance of doing the faith enterprise well.

I hear the same message in my consulting on church-wellness. People have had it with dysfunctional churches, with lay tyrants who treat congregations as their private preserve, with clergy who hide in endless meetings, and with denominational leaders who make noise but don’t do their basic work of encouraging the faithful.


I sense a deep desire for the faith enterprise to be successful, to make a difference, to tame the savage beasts of greed and arrogance that run amok in this land.

Despite organized religion’s lamentable history _ bickering over power, division over sexuality, leadership issues, financial woes, abuse scandals, political gamesmanship, personality cults _ it seems people still believe that faith communities can do this work.

Here, then, are my suggestions for those who care about churches, whether new or long-standing, traditional or non-traditional.

First, we need to reframe the question that guides our enterprise. For too long, the motivating questions have been these: “How can we be better than others?” “How can we be assured of eternal victory?” “How can we attain right-opinion?” “How can we stop modernity?”

Our framing question ought to be: “How can we make a difference?” We need to teach people that their lives matter, that they are more than economic units and political tallies, that their small decisions about time, money and loyalty make the world better or worse.

Second, we need to recognize that people can live their entire lives without religion; they no longer depend on the church to provide education, science, political control, entertainment, culture, art, health care or child care.

What we cannot do without faith is to turn away from the shallow and self-serving and to imagine our lives as noble and significant. Without faith, we cannot build a just and sustainable society. Without faith, we live as predator or prey, not as neighbors. Without faith, we merely take our turns getting the goodies, and there is never enough.


Third, people get plenty of advice on how to earn a living; what they need is guidance in how to live a life that has integrity and enduring value.

That means teaching healthy values, especially in the areas that Jesus considered important _ namely, mercy, love, sharing and inclusion. I wish Christianity could get off its noisy bandwagon about sex. I’d like to hear preaching about honesty and kindness.

Fourth, I think we need to help people discover the true nature of friendship. People tend to have work groups, maybe social sets. But friendships like those described by Jesus _ abiding, love-based, accepting, non-judgmental _ tend to be elusive for many adults. I think faith communities should be promoting friendship, not institution.

Fifth, for people to live with integrity, they need to address the dark sides of our cultural and political systems. We need to move beyond simplistic labeling, such as liberal vs. conservative, or Republican vs. Democrat. A predatory economy chases us all. Mindless and soul-depleting entertainment shrinks us all. A political system dominated by money and lies endangers us all.

Finally, we need to help people embrace a living hope _ not grounded in having more than others or in winning life’s many competitions, but grounded in God’s love and in Christian community. The despair that many people feel goes deep and won’t be touched by Sunday cheerfulness.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest in Durham, N.C. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)


KRE/PH END EHRICH

650 words

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