For reasons I do not always understand, I seem to be drawn to the stories of exile that surface in our prophetic texts. It’s like the Hebrew sages were composing musical dramas to reflect the despair of a displaced people–a people having bid farewell to the familiar. Life is a journey, not a camp-out, and like the ancient Hebrews I suspect American Christians were never meant to live statically.
Over the second half of the twentieth century the “protestant mainline” experienced its own exile. It was a giddy ecumenical optimism after World War II that gave birth to unifying movements in several denominations like the United Church of Christ. In a prosperous society that seemed to have no limits, what could prevent us from success? Our sanctuaries were full; our Sunday schools were flooded by an unprecedented baby boom. We built it and they came; it was so easy and it worked so well–for a minute or two.
But we were unprepared for the societal panic that ensued with political assassinations, a lengthy and ill-defined war followed by a collapse of trust in our government. It was in this swirl of turmoil that the religious right offered a ray of hope. Whatever one may say about their substance, they at least offered structure. As a young teenager trying to make sense of a tumultuous world without, and hoping to settle an unsettled sexuality within, why would I not “accept Jesus as my personal savior” and cast all these burdens elsewhere? I could jump on this bandwagon and escape all of my inherent wrongness.
But at 15 my idea of a strong and growing faith was in reality a sanctified naivete. The stage was set for huge mid-life upheavals the aftermath of which brought me back to my mainline roots. In my absence I found that the Christianity of my childhood had sputtered and struggled against a world that did not fit its optimistic agenda. While a faithful remnant stayed behind in cavernous worship spaces, the rest of the folks just found us to be irrelevant. They moved on. Somehow we were hoping they’d all find their way back. Most of them didn’t.
New generations are not interested in easy answers to complex problems. They hunger for real spiritual practice. They look for causes they can whole-heartedly support. They want to see the gospel of Christ in real and human terms and not just “pie in the sky” for an eternal future. They do not care about our labels, our theological discourse, or our buildings. If the gospel of Christ is meaningful to us, then they want us to prove it in our practice and stop hanging onto hope for what “was.” It is time to emerge, to get on our mark and be set to run a race that has long been postponed.
