As I had promised myself, I went back to West Hill United Church yesterday.
Trying to inveigle oneself into the life of a church is a daunting undertaking. It reminds me of something I did when I was in high school. I was friends with an observant Conservative Jew, and as we were talking at lunch one day, we decided to have a bit of an interfaith exchange. We would go with one another to our respective places of worship just to get a taste of our very different lives apart from school. He trusted my assurances that I was not the sort to proselytize and I trusted his assurances that he would be there to guide me through unfamiliar rituals. I remember how strange it felt, sitting in the congregation, listening to the cantor, feeling naked because I was the only adult male in the room who was not wearing a shawl. My difference was obvious. People smiled politely at me; clearly my friend had given the heads up that he was bringing a goyim to the service.Yesterday, sitting in an unfamiliar pew, looking at unfamiliar faces, it felt to me just as strange as it had felt for me in a synagogue when I was a teenager. How much harder it would be for someone who has never known a church affiliation! There I was, supposedly an “insider” of the church, and I was squirming with discomfort.
Today, many churches are overtly anxious about declining memberships, and so they style themselves as welcoming congregations, places where you can find a smiling face and feel at home. West Hill United is no different, with words of welcome to visitors at the opening of the service and an invitation to join members for a coffee afterward. It has been my experience at every church I have ever visited that there is a huge gap between its finely wrought words of welcome and the feeling of being welcomed. The feeling of being welcomed is always contingent upon the efforts of extraordinary individuals who deliberately identify strangers, then do something about it. A church can yack in the air about being a welcoming place, but the feeling a church conveys has nothing to do with institutional will; it is a matter of individual initiative.
Nevertheless, if someone like myself is determined to be part of a community of faith, then it falls to me to meet the community at least half way. Church is not a passive proposition. Unlike the credit card ads, membership in a church gets you no privileges—not without also making demands. And the value of a faith community is measured, not by the benefits you incur, but by the use to which you are put in service of the community.
In fact, I did get something on Sunday: I got the answer (or at least the beginnings of an answer) to a question I posed in an earlier rant — what happens to the old forms, the liturgy, when a congregation resolves critically to scrutinize the meanings which the old forms clothe? Sunday was baptism, one of the two sacraments adopted by churches in the reformed tradition. What I discovered is that West Hill United has adopted the “case knives” approach (see my rant about Huckleberry Finn) as it begins its admittedly fledgling efforts to lay afresh its liturgical foundations. A traditional unpacking of the baptism symbols would characterize it as a washing away of sin and a welcoming of the infant into the body of Christ (the church). To the extent that this baptismal water washed anything, it washed away a set of meanings and put in its place a … what? a tabula rasa? Like an infant? We hear the minister’s words: Jesus appeared in the midst of an oppressed world subject to the over-regulation of Roman administration, offering to this world a renewed wholeness. (Now, we live in a world subject to the over-regulation of a … what? church administration? … Is this part of the meanings implicitly washed away? What do we offer in its place for a progressive baby?) When the congregation stood to offer its commitment, it recited an explicit exegesis of the symbols: water and the font stand for community, our need, and the Spirit; water is essential to life and so points all that unites us as living beings.
Nowhere does water make an appearance as a cleaning agent.
It is worth noting the approach West Hill United did not take. It did not dispense altogether with the ritual. Maybe the retention of the old forms is a political matter; you can push a church only so far before it will break. But if progressive practices are, indeed, motivated by spiritual concerns, then, ultimately, political timidity must yield. And why not? Instead of merely reinterpreting, why not dispense with the old forms altogether? If there is no magic in the ritual except the magic we give it, then the value of the ritual itself is wholly contingent and therefore disposable.
So many questions yet to pose:
• Is West Hill United really so accepting of difference? What if the different path of my spiritual journey leads me to modification, or wholesale rejection, of progressive content? (Even now I find myself drifting towards a view of progressive content as only one half of a larger argument.) Would I still feel welcome?
• What if I start to feel comfortable with progressive content, but still have a hankering for the old forms. Will I attract dirty looks if I spontaneously burst out in strains of Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah?
• With all this revision to liturgy and fresh hymnody, could there arise a subculture of political correctness where people become afraid to use certain words for fear of giving offense?
• Finally (for now), why does West Hill United assert its copyright in its liturgical efforts? See, for example, its “Visionworks” statement of faith. Does it make sense for a church to “own” the words with which a people utters its heartfelt professions of its most personal and deeply held convictions? I can appreciate that the church may wish to prevent others from publishing for profit its efforts, but, in today’s litigious world, it is possible to imagine a scenario where a church (in the manner of the MPAA) sues a 12-year-old for saying her prayers without permission. It would be nice to know the extent of one’s freedoms (rather than of one’s prohibitions) in the use of liturgical and other faith texts, perhaps by adoption of a Creative Commons License.