I am not entirely certain that Jesus had a blog in mind, but we use what we have.
Please take the time to visit some of our linked pages. You will find links to the pastors' blogs and, eventually, links to blogs belonging to community members.
Peace and all good things to you and your's.
Hello, CJCR! It's Megan.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: why are you seeking affiliation with ABC, when ABC's policy specifically states:
"We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.
Adopted by the General Board of the American Baptist Churches by Mail Vote - October 1992
110 Yes, 64 No, 5 Abstentions"
Yes, I know that there's no overseeing body enforcing policies on individual ABC congregations. But there is a body that has formed a policy that speaks for the entire ABC to the non-ABC world. Why endorse with your presence their anti-"love one another" practice?
I did a little research on ECUSA and the ECC too, but could not find clear policy statements concerning gay people and women, my two primary tests for Gospel consistency.
I'm sure Jesus didn't anticipate blogs, but I'm sure he wouldn't find anything strange about spreading the Gospel, by whatever means available.
ReplyDeletePreach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use bytes.
Pax,
Gee. Megan, I don't think that the worms even had a chance to get in the can before you let them out.
ReplyDeleteGood question. And you are absolutely right. I asked one of the pastors at North Shore the same thing. This concerned me deeply. What I know is this, all resolutions are guidelines to be followdd to the degree that a congregation is willing and/or able. They are suggestions. This means that if next year the ABC-USA affirms a resolution that supports the ministry and witness of homosexuals, the conservatives can ignore it the way that many liberals and moderates have ignored the previous one you mention.
It is one of the mitigating political realities of the ABC-USA that keeps it from becomming the SBC. There is almost no, I mean no power at the top. The region of Metro-Chicago affirms homosexuality. Other regions do as well.
The underlying question in all of this is how important it might be to someone (or a congregation) to remain Baptist...of any stripe. Does one assume that the power of this statement is monolithic or not? The individual has so much clout in our tradition that standing against the weight of the entire denomination is common. Really. It is in our DNA.
Also, There is an open and affirming congregation in Andersonville. Their pastor is a lesbian. She might have better answers for you. They have been around for a couple of decades I think. I can aske her, if you like.
You might also wish to look at the Alliance of Baptists. They are an open and affirnming group of Baptists. Some of their congregations are mutually alligned with the ABC-USA and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
This question encourages me to think again about the appropriate use of the term "denomination" for the ABC. It is a confederation...a support group? I like "tradition" though that makes some nervous. The purpose of association (American Baptist Churches) is to share resourses...not make policy...at least nothing binding. It is descriptive. So, some (a few by your reporting) ABC congregations (each vote represents a congregation) affirm homosexuality. They probably did not change their stance at the local level because of the vote. Some may have joined up with different denominations like the Alliance or even gone to the UCC or something like that. The point is that the description of the tradition will change. We have confessions and not creeds because of this. They must be changable, momentary, chronologically based..."relevant."
The think I like most about being Baptist is that it is not monolithic.
Megan again. :-)
ReplyDeleteTripp, then why is it articulated on ABC-USA.org as a Policy and not a Suggestion or an Option or a Some Of Us Think?
I confess to a sneaking suspicion that you want the policies to be less binding than the denomination/federation/support group intends.
But in the end, you're the Baptist. I'm not. So I have to challenge you, but I also have to take your word for it when you show me that you've done your homework.
In the end, I also believe that by joining an organization, whether that's a political party, a church, or a bowling league, one endorses *everything* that organization says and does in its official capacity, however large or small that may be.
In my opinion, that endorsement grows in strength and meaning when one commits to that organization in a clear choice, as an adult (vs. infant baptism and that sort of thing that I know y'all don't do). It grows even more when one commits time, energy and money to that organization.
I left the RCC over a policy difference. (Well, they would have excommunicated me eventually if they'd figured out what I am and what I do, but that's another story.)
I'm not willing to stand up for what they stand for, in this life or the next. What will you say if you hit the Pearly Gates and someone in authority asks, "So Tripp, why'd you join an organization that hates gay people? The original directive was pretty clear, wasn't it?"
Megan, it seems to me that you are neglecting one facet of what it means to be Christian...
ReplyDeleteWe sin. Now, being raised RCC you may have heard something like "The church is without sin." I may be wrong in that assumption. Forgive me if I am.
But the ABC posesses no such theology...at least not overtly. The point of being baptist and non-creedal is so that the theology and tradition will not be static and so that there can be room for difference. One cannot be excommunicated from the contemporary ABC congregation. There is no such thing (Now, someone will find a congregation that will. Ha!). We see it as giving God freedom to act...act in particular ways within communities and within individuals. We can be a cantankerous lot because of it and we split left and right, but this is built into the system. We recognise sin as part of the human institution that is the church.
God does not sin.
Jesus does not sin.
The Spirit does not sin.
We who participate in the Body of Christ sin left and right. We will always. If at the pearly gates I am asked the question that you propose, I assume that my failure will be lumped into the rest of my sins.
But without sin, Megan, there can be no reconciliation, no forgiveness...not even discipleship can exist without sin. The other pastors of this church may disagree with me, but that is what I see. We are always sinning. We are constantly being transformed into the will of God.
I believe that our institutions reflect that.
... and when one finishes the thought about sin, where does one wind up?
ReplyDelete"Go forth and sin no more." Eh?
(Megan again. This "anonymous if you don't have a Blogger account" thing is a drag.)
So. God's expectation is that when we recognize our sins, we will try really really hard not to repeat them. Yes?
So why, when a sin is as thunderingly obvious as the one I pulled out, is it to be continued?
Sinning just to make opportunity for reconciliation strikes me as meaningless, sneaky, artificial and patently ridiculous. None of which I think you intend. So I don't think that's your message.
God will forgive, sure. But to take shameless advantage of that fact seems utterly irresponsible and un-Christian to me.
Again, I'm going to ask, what will you say if/when God asks you "Why did you join an organization that categorically refused to love my people?" Your response above was about what you think or hope God would do, not about what you would say.
The phrase from our earlier conversations that keeps floating through my mind is "holding accountable."
Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteRegarding: "anonymous"
Yeah...I wonder what we can do about that. I'll bug blogger.
Regarding forgiveness...I am merely stating a logical assumption that one needs something to be forgiven in order to, well, be forgiven. What else is the point of the word "forgiven?" Bonhoeffer plays around in this a great deal. Perhaps another post. Sufice it to say that each of our lives, our growth into God's will reflects the nature of both sin and the cross. The cross is redmptive. There is someone to redeem. Our lives reflect this dynamic. It is intrinsic in our very existance and identity.
Unless sin is named as such, what is it that we are forgiven/forgiving?
And it seems that I am more comfortable with people disagreeing on what is sin. I think warfare of any kind is sin. I will happily debate the commandment "thou shall not kill" with the extension of "love your enemy" till I am blue in the face. Somewhere I know that I am called to stand where I do and others it would seem are convinced of something else. Sadly, I would say that the same dynamic exists where homosexuality is concerned.
One scholar will say homosexuality is sin. See: Paul and some of the Old Testament for proof. Another scholar will say that Paul was not talking about homosexuality but idolatry and none of the texts of the Old Testament are speaking of what we think of as homosexuality either. These arguments may always exist. This is the nature of sin...it always exists and we are blind creatures only able to see a portion of the Kingdom, its shadows.
The answer to the question is this: Lord God, if this is a sin, then so be it. I am your sinner. But I have always been your's. I have sought to reconcile. I have desired unity. I cannot abandon those I disagree with in order to create unity for that would surely be division and not unity. I have sought to love all people, even those who refuse to love me. I will not abandon those I love.
The Anonymous Megan.
ReplyDeleteWorking backwards through your post, then, in your last paragraph: you wrote, "I have sought to love all people."
Then why are you joining an organization that refuses to love all people?
Cognitive dissonance. I do not get this.
Is "unity" a higher value to you than love? Is "unity" a higher value to you than God's commandment?
Backing up further in your post... re the scholars, I'm not asking them. Though I would, if they were bloggin. :-)
I'm asking YOU about this decision that YOU are making and YOU are accountable for (with others, I know). You're the one starting a church. You're the one making choices about what that church will stand for. Why are you making this choice, to join an organization which is evidently opposed to what your church wants to stand for?
Backing up further, to sin and forgiveness: do you believe that if you don't sin deliberately, God will have nothing to forgive you for?
I wish I had your confidence, my friend.
I'm pretty sure that no matter how hard I try not to repeat my sins, I am always finding ways to fall into new ones or, unintentionally, back into old ones.
But I believe at the very bottom of my being that it is my job to TRY to live by God's will. And to keep trying and trying and trying until I die. NEVER to rest in sin. NEVER to recognize my sin and choose not to root it out. Even if it comes back as persistently as dandelions or kudzu.
"Deliberately" is your word and not mine. Sin exists. I, like you, try to root it out but it is like kudzu. How is Georgia, anyway?
ReplyDeleteSo, there is always something to be forgiven. That is called sin...the logical loop persists.
How many voted against the article? Abstained? I cannot post and read the information. I assume that being Baptist affords me the luxury of disagreement in a case like this.
I can disagree, stand in tension and love in spite of it all. I feel God has asked me to do that. Some of the organiazation believes that it is sin. Some does not. Give us ten years and we may vote again. It may be a different result. I believe that I am one of those who may make that result possible.
I have been called into the ABC knowing that I do not hold the same views as some in the tradition. But I never expected to. My experience is that many in the ABC do not expect me to agree with them either. I am not sure that we are supposed to agree on everything...or if we are, it is beyond our power to do so and that kind of unity will exist when Jesus shows up again.
I see no conflict of interest.
This a responce to Megan's initial comment in this string:
ReplyDeleteI do not know from where you say what you say or exactly what are the larger contexts of your question: however, Tripp is so affiliated with the ABC through North Shore Baptist, I am affiliatedwith the ECC by being affiliated through North Park Covenant Church and being a a life long member of the Evangelical Covenant denomination. Jane is affiliated with ECUSA. Our statement about seeking affiliation is due to the fact that our tripartite denominational status is in process with our respective denominations.
As far as the statement you mention: While we may or may not fully agree with that Statement CJCR and its pastoral staff due not agree with your appeartant narrow limitmus test of the Gospel.
Such narrowness seems little different to me from any fundamentalist narrowness.
Just to note the ECC position is less explicit than the ABC position but basically the same. This does not though necesarily express my own theologcial opinion.
I think Megan there is a few mistaken assumptions: first that to say that homosexuality is a sin is to hate gay people. While I admit that many people who believe this do in fact hate gay people to say that homosexal acts are sinful is not the same thing as hating those who are gay, and is not necesarily a sign of a lack of love. I can say that someone who cheats on their spouse is a sinner and that adulterors are sinners, and not necesarily hate someone who cheats on their spouse. In fact my standing firm in claiming that doing so is in fact a sin and confronting said person may in fact be an act of love both for the person and the couple.
ReplyDeleteSecond which Tripp has addressed is that affiliation is ip so facto absolute agreement. To think otherwise is unrealistic to the extreem, unless of course you are only going to associate with a very small tiny group of people. Which seems to me to be the opposite of love.
Lastly, again as Tripp has mentioned, the primary purpose of this chruch is to help heal wounds of division within the Body of Christ, the fact is that far more members of the Body of Christ see Homosexuality as a sin then those that do not: The conflict in the Anglican communion is showing this to be the case.
Love is far more complex than you seem to make it out to be. I wish the world were in fact as balck and white as you seem to make it out to be.
Anonymous Megan. And hello, Larry! Do you generally start conversations with strangers by calling them names? How does that work for you?
ReplyDeleteTo set your mind at ease regarding my purported "fundamentalist narrowness," let me point you to my first comment where I wrote, "clear policy statements concerning gay people and women, my two primary tests for Gospel consistency." I said PRIMARY, Larry. Not ONLY. Everybody has to start somewhere; that's where I start.
Clearly I would not be welcome in your church. Best of luck with it.
So Tripp, re "deliberately," are you or are you not deliberately seeking affiliation with an organization or three?
It's so interesting to me that you persist in seeing the matter only from *inside* the church. I, naturally, see it from *outside.* So from a recruitment/evangelism standpoint, then: let's say I were in the Chicago area and looking for a church to attend. Why would I choose one that indicates endorsement of an anti-love policy by belonging to an organization that created one?
Megan, I support the church, but not that specific decision. I do not believe that they made a wise choice. I do not believe that it demonstrated love. And I will stand like Jonah in the middle of Nineva and say "Repent!" I cannot be heard from without those thick walls. I believe I must be inside.
ReplyDeleteSo, my deliberate affiliation is based on this, though it is not primary. We all, from within or without, are struggling to love. I believe that I can only be heard from within. You, clearly, do not. I believe that placing myself within the church demonstrates my love for all, even those I disagree with. My church is not perfect. Nothing is.
Tripp -- yep, dead right, I don't. That's been my experience of church: that voices of dissent are absolutely and completely ignored. My church of origin has no intent ever to reform. I don't believe any other church does either.
ReplyDeletePerfection? No. We've had this conversation before.
But the effort to live fully and consciously into (see, I borrowed your phrase!) God's commandments, including absolute insistence on reform when the church is sinning? Hell, yes!
Which is where, finally, we meet in agreement. If you're in the church to get it to change, I support you. I think it won't work, but I support you.
Larry, though I may deeply regret engaging with you further: from the outside, a person's or organization's choice of affiliations is an indicator of that person or organization's identity. It's a label or name tag that that person or organization chooses to wear. When I see a person wearing a name tag that sports a name, I think, "Okay, that's that person's name." Not "that person's name is something like what it says on the tag, but not necessarily everything it says on the tag..."
Thus it is with a church. If the church says it's Unitarian Universalist, or ECUSA, or Roman Catholic, or whatever: from the outside, looking at that congregation, I think, "That church is a [fill in the denominational blank]." Not "that church has something vaguely to do with [fill in the denominational blank]."
Megan, I did not call you names. I said that I percieved your comment as being a sort of narrowness analagous to a "fundamentalist" narrowness. Yes, you said primary, but given that you are judging us based on a single statement of the ABC and seem uninterested in Tripps contextualizing of that statment left me with an impression of narrowness. That impression may change.
ReplyDeleteYou would be welcome in our church, your comments are welcome. However, I am permited a strong responce to your forceful and uncompromising speach,even if you are right and I am wrong.
We are having an argument, and arguments are welcome in this church. Now I am also not going to simply let pass comments that I think misrepresent the world and how it works.
Institutions are complex realities, and the church is far more than an instititution, and thus far more complex than you seem to allow it to be.
I do not know why you would regret further engagement with me. I think you have percieved something in my responce that was unintended.
You seemed interested in a heated argument I am merely engaging you on the terms you seemed to have laid down.
(Megan)
ReplyDeleteLarry, you may be having an argument. I'm having a discussion. It's a discussion about matters I care very much about, but I'm not trying to change what anyone is doing (the necessary condition of argument). I'm trying to understand why you three are doing what you're doing.
As I go back to your first comment, though, I realize I haven't answered your explanation of your affiliations with my own, and that's not fair. So, the quick background is: I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, left it in my teens, was unchurched but very much Christian till I was well into my 30s, and now I worship with but do not belong to the Society of Friends.
Tripp and I have known each other for around 15 years now, and over the last several years have enjoyed (I hope!) a long string of conversations related to Christianity. I expect that much of what you perceive as narrowness is the result of the shorthand that has developed over years of conversation on the same ground.
I would agree with you that "The church is far more than an institution," and again, this passes over ground that I've covered with others on this blog before. So anyone reading along who's bored, please forgive me for the repetition.
There's the metaphysical Church, the Body of Christ. Which is made up of individual believers and has nothing to do with denominations.
Then there are the churches on Earth, which are physical and institutional in nature. The churches on Earth make policies and practices which either do or don't live out the Gospel message.
When you say "The church is far more than an institution," I think, "Right on. He's talking about the Body of Christ." But then, the Body of Christ has no policies except the Gospel. And there's not a word in the Gospel about homosexuality, to come back to this point.
So when I'm railing about church policy, I'm talking about the insitutional church -- because to talk about policy for the Body of Christ would be malarkey.
Arguments and discussions are the same to me, more or less. And if there was no attempt to move us from a certian position, your line of questioning and the word you used don't make a whole lot of sense to me.
ReplyDeleteUnless of course you were simply having a conversation with Tripp with whom alot can be assumed.
Seeking understanding is transformative, change is always a possibility and to some degree I think assertions where there is disagreement are also a form of persuasion.
Concerning the church: I just don't make the clear and distinct categorizations that you do. The metaphysical church you speak of does not exist, as far as I am concerned, except in that it also exists as institutions. The institutions are as much the church as its metaphysical existence.
Question what is the Gospel to you? And how do you know what the Gosple is?
To be fair I will answer those questions: The Gospel is first the preaching of the coming presence of the Kingdom of God offering freedom from sin and death (both literal and metaphisical/figurative) as taught by Jesus it is then also the reality that in Jesus by his death and resurection the world is transformed, being transformed and will be transformed by God. Through this God shows the world and all humanity that God is Love. God as love calls sinners to repentance.
I know this Gosple because the Bible is in some sense the revelation of God and thus it in its entirety and interpreted correctly gives witness to the Gospel.
(Megan)
ReplyDeleteI'm about to go offline for the rest of the day, so these will just be quick questions and answers before I have to go. Perhaps we'll continue tomorrow, perhaps not.
I'm amused by the New Age phrasing of "What is the Gospel to you?" :-)
"To me," the Gospel is the teaching of Jesus Christ as it has been preserved and reached the present day in writing. It lays out the charge of Christ's followers.
In answer to your "And how do you know what the Gosple is?" I read it.
In your opinion and experience, does any earthly church or combination of earthly churches embody the Gospel fully and perfectly? I think this was what Tripp was referring to earlier when he asked about whether the church was without sin. I didn't answer the question explicitly, but here it is: such a belief never entered my mind. The RCC is patently with, very much with, sin. So is every other church and every other individual human I've ever encountered, most of all me. My experience is that the RCC steadfastly refuses to correct even its obvious sins. That is where we part ways.
The whole Body of Christ vs. earthly church distinction started for me in the context of Tripp's blog, where slippery terminology led to sloppy thinking. If it's less useful here, I'm sure it will go away.
This is my view - from outside the walls.
ReplyDeleteAffiliating with existing church organizations acknowledges the traditions that are brought to the table. It seems that the intent is to use those traditions as a foundation, not for lockstep adherence. I think of these traditions as a stable base from which dynamic change can occur.
Another approach is to dissociate completely from existing church bodies because of their "baggage". What can sometimes occur is for the new tradition to be "whatever you like". Simplistic interpretations, success theology, cults of personality, are some of what can arise.
So, how will this work for CJCR? I don't know. Will everyone agree on everything? No. This discussion seems evidence of that. Will people select single statements or single issues to pass judgement? I would hope that they would consider the whole person, the whole congregation, and how they their lives in God.
Though we may have issues on which we disagree, what we can do is to treat one another with respect and love. That's what I believe Jesus Christ, reconciler, calls us to do.