I included recently in the Links To Go a couple of articles Jay Guin published with reflections on statements by Stanley Hauerwas. Here’s one Hauerwas quote that caught my attention:
But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship and I think that’s to get it exactly backwards: that the Christian faith is meditated faith. It only comes through the witness of others as embodied in the church. So I should never trust my presumption that I know what my relationship with God is separate from how that is expressed through words and sacrament in the church. So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations. (found here)
That quote fit with some things I’ve been thinking on, namely the concept of church members as consumers. In my experience, we talk a good game about all of us together making up the church, yet all too often we find ourselves talking about the church as something external to us. We talk about what “they” are doing at church. We talk about a dissatisfaction with our local church and a desire to look elsewhere. When church isn’t what we want it to be, there’s little sense of personal failure; “my church” isn’t doing things right, instead of saying “we” aren’t doing things right.
So help me as I start working through some of this, using blog posts to think out loud. To what degree should our identity as a Christian be tied into our local congregation? Is it enough to feel loyalty to the universal church and not to the local expression of that church?
What about the concept of submitting to the leaders of that church? Seems like that gets harder when they are your peers, or worse yet, people younger than you.
How should we be expected to react when those leaders make a decision that goes against one of our convictions? Not just an opinion item, but something that we strongly hold to be true?
What responsibility do congregations have to one another when members want to stop attending one place and start attending another? What if there has been sin involved?
Lots of questions, and I can think of more along these lines. So I’ll stop muddying the waters and ask you to help me find some clarity. Let me hear some of your thoughts on these issues.
(Oh, and I know that those who belong to other religious groups may find all this a bit baffling, as does Hauerwas when observing Evangelical churches. If that’s the case, I ask that you bear with us as we discuss things foreign to your thinking.)