Christian Church visit to the White House

On November 1st we heard that a Christian delegation visited the White House, the Church of the Brethren was included which is a pretty neat opportunity for such a small denomination. When I try to explain what the Church of the Brethren is to my friends, I tell them we are kind of a cross between Mennonites and Baptists (originally German Baptist Brethren so I figure they could maybe grasp that connection). The next question is “what is a Mennonite?” I guess if you aren’t part of the larger US based denominations you can get lost in the Protestant shuffle, if the church of the Brethren even qualifies as a Protestant denomination. This small group formed in the early 18th century was really after what it meant to be the church in the original sense, to follow Christ’s commands in a way that brought us back to the early church of the 1st century.
As I read the excerpt from the White House visit, I could not help but think how far we have strayed from our beginnings as a faith community. Founded as a counter-cultural response to the State Church’s control in Western Europe, our early Brethren found their way to America and “freedom” to worship as they pleased. Think of how hard it must have been; to pick up everything you owned and leave the area that your family had lived for as long as you could remember, in order to escape the oppression that existed. Just the thought of the 30-day passage in open seas would have been enough to give me pause.
The Church of the Brethren is not alone. I appreciate ecumenism in the sense that many of our faith traditions based on the saving message of Jesus Christ have common foundations. Many acknowledge that Jesus Christ as the gateway to a relationship with our heavenly Father, made possible by His sacrifice on the cross and resurrection. This sacrifice allows His “life example” the power to both show us a better way to live and provide for the erasure of our sins. When we boil down our similarities, we often find them more numerous than our differences, but these differences are often what we tend to focus on. Some of these differences are rather comical, like learning when to say the right words at the right time so you don’t look silly in a worship service. Others like how to “properly” baptize a new believer take on more weighty concern, but in the end we are all searching for the appropriate response to the gift that Christ has given to His people, the church.
The White House meeting was hailed as a “substantive” meeting that discussed issues of strengthening our country’s “fraying” safety net, extending unemployment benefits, job creation, education, Middle East peace and the travel ban with Cuba; all in a non-partisan environment. I can hail the non-partisan part, even if it sounds like the topics were not an indication. What I want to know, is what makes these Christian churches…Christian? We seem to have settled in to this mentality that our mission is to serve people’s needs, and those needs are related to physical well being only. Our churches are not competing with our spiritual adversary for souls, but with the United Way for funds. We have settled for taking care of financial hardship, basic human needs, peace between nations, improving our educational opportunities…all great and worthy things. But not the best thing.
As Jim Collins pointed out in his book, Good to Great, the enemy of great is the good that we do which distracts us from our core reason for being. The Church of Jesus Christ; whether you consider yourself Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, yes even the little Church of the Brethren group mainly in Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Church based on the Gospel message of Christ was only called to do a few specific things. Under Christ’s authority, we are called to go, make disciples, baptize and teach. In short, we are to proclaim the mystery and majesty of the faith that dares to make the outrageous claim that God came down in human form in order to walk around in our shoes, save us from our sinful ways, and be able to have a personal relationship with our Creator. When the veil was torn in the Temple in Jerusalem, we stopped looking for a God that lived there, and started looking for one that resides in our hearts.
When we take the mission of the church to mean, “feed the hungry,” we are perverting the very Gospel message we are called to preach. We are made of spirit, soul and body (1 Thess 5:23); and we ignore the needs of spirit and soul in favor of the body at our peril. Jesus said that the poor would always be with you, but you will not always have me. Just as the State Churches of Europe allowed their human interpretation of Christ’s message to manipulate the Church structure in a way far removed from Christ’s message; through involvement in political control rather than community support, participation on murderous crusades, purchase of indulgences to save family members from purgatory, I could go on and on, but we are allowing the same thing to happen to us today. It is easy to look back several hundred years and point to what the Church of that day did wrong, it is a much harder task to point to what we are doing wrong today, as we are guilty of the same human manipulation of Christ’s message.
Our message should always focus on Christ first, in telling the Gospel story to anyone that will listen and expecting a response that only God can provide, through the working of His Holy Spirit. Since we humans can’t do miracles apart from Him, we settle for the things that occupy our own feeble abilities. Our outreach to the poor should only be based on our response to Jesus Christ through His Spirit, not as an end to itself. That does not mean that we should not support the physical need we see around us, but that we should frame a response to that need based on our relationship with Christ. We have an individual spirit that reveals our conscience, which also reveals our response to the Greatest Story Ever Told. Why are we so ashamed of this story that we find it easier to do a little good with our own hands, eschewing the very great that could be done with God’s hands? I am embarrassed at our “Christian” Church leadership that settles for treating only one area of human existence with dignity, which only allows the body to be served while we ignore the spiritual connection that is possible with our Creator through Jesus Christ.
The greatest evidence of this refusal to embrace the message of Christ in our lives and in our communities, is the abdication of our responsibility to help our neighbors. That’s right, the one thing we think we are doing OK with, serving human needs, is the greatest area in which we as the Church are failing. We have abdicated our responsibility to our neighbors by allowing a government mechanism to serve those needs. Not only are we allowing basic human needs to be served absent of the saving message of Christ, we are content to structure ourselves so that our tax money goes to a central authority, then to an anonymous citizen that could be right next to you. It is certain that pooling our resources can have a multiplicative effect, but we are not even seeing a return there in a system fraught with corruption. What did we expect to happen?
It is a hard thing to identify a need with a neighbor, to take a personal interest and walk around in their shoes as Jesus did for us. It is a lot easier to text our friends about their dire circumstances and direct them to the local welfare office. It is an even harder thing to admit that we may need help, to ask our neighbors for support that may involve risking a closer relationship. It is much easier to send in an anonymous form, to receive an anonymous check in the mail. God’s way is not easy, it forces us to see things face to face, then deal with them in a very personal way. That is His way toward relationship with Him and each other, and one we have attempted to circumvent.
This is the system we helped to create, in the name of Christ, to serve those in need. What a weak and twisted structure we have built with our own hands. Our entire society is suffering, the results of this failure to embrace God’s plan that existed at the founding of our nation is now met with ballooning deficits, more people taking out of the system than paying in, and retreating neighbors that lob anger at each other instead of love. These results are just that, they are results of a broken system that human hands have tried to improve from a Godly one, yet we now only respond to the results as needing to be changed. The calls to lower the deficit, stop the spending, clean up the corruption…those calls are only addressing the results of the problem and will also fail, doomed to create an even larger rift between our people. The only true answer is falling back to God’s plan, to develop Christian communities where we have a genuine, personal care for each other that begins with our sharing a Gospel message that can save not only the human, but the spiritual side of us as well.