The "not quite dead" church, or new names for "mainline"

Thanks to my Twitter feed today I got directed to a conversation on the subject of the "mainline" church, or more precisely what to call said informal branch of American Protestantism.  The discussion was touched off by a blog post by Carol Howard Merritt, on the outdatedness of the term (apparently derived from a railroad line in Philadelphia backintheday) and its general inaccuracy at describing those denominations and their influences historically and currently.  The tweet that lured me into the subject was an article on Religion News Service by Cathy Lynn Grossman, taking up the question of renaming, if such a thing was even possible, and offering up suggested names from others (some serious, some humorous, some hostile).

What follows is thoroughly tongue in cheek.  After the junk I sat through today, even bailing after an hour, I need some humor even if it is of the self-generated variety.  And yet, there might be grains of truth in the humor, hopefully.  Forthwith, my own jesteresque nominations for new names for the "mainline" church.

*Progressive Church -- Yeah, that's a loaded term, implying that other churches are backward and regressive.  Still, there's something to be said for declaring yourself as forward-looking and not trapped in the past that wasn't nearly as glorious as we sometimes think it was.

*Clerical-Collar Church -- In honor of the tendency of (some, not all) ministers in these denominations to be identifiable by what they're wearing, whether the telltale collar (admittedly, not all do this, or not consistently) or by the vestments of various varieties found in pulpits here and there.  It seems fair: it's a kind of early-warning system for those who otherwise might get ambushed by the cool-kid megachurch types who strut around in jeans and cool t-shirts only to ambush you with God-talk.  You approach the person with the collar, you know what you're getting into.

*Liberated Church -- A spin on one of Merritt's preferences, Liberationist Church, but (to my taste) placing the credit not on the church but on the One who sets us free.  Maybe this isn't so tongue-in-cheek as others unless some hoary old "women's lib" punchlines get dragged out of the attic.

*The Faithful Remnant Church -- While other branches of the faith go off on wild goose chases and popularity-seeking experiments (and while some churches in those denominations can't wait to bail out), The Faithful Remnant remains, well, faithful or something like that.  Own your smallness!

*The "Not Quite Dead" Church -- My personal favorite.  Devotees of Monty Python and the Holy Grail will get the reference possibly.  No, not the "bring out your dead" sequence, but later, when Launcelot believes his trusty squire Concord mortally wounded.  Certainly the mainline denominations have been pronounced mortally wounded a time or two (sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with glee to be honest -- and often by our own as much as those of other persuasions).  Yet, like Eric Idle's character in the first 1:20 or so of this clip, even an arrow smack in the chest/gut doesn't seem to have finished us off just yet.  Hey, miracles do happen, right?  Eventually, Concord's going to have to get up and walk, though.  The "sitting around with an arrow in its chest church" doesn't really work.

*The Refuge Church -- Not very funny, but it is largely what the tradition has been for me.

*The Humbled Church -- Yeah, we had the power and influence, and to a large degree squandered it on Sunday blue laws and tall pointy steeples.  We tiptoed into the civil rights movement, sometimes kicking and screaming, and paid for it to some degree.  Our pride has been taken down more than a peg or two.  Own it.

*The "Friend Zone" Church -- When you've had your flings with the cool kids, the ones with the fancy buildings and snappy dressers and all that, and it has left you high and dry, the one who really cared for you most of all will still be there waiting.  Maybe not all that handsome/beautiful, but we'll be faithful and love you.  (This of course puts a major burden on mainline churches to live up to such a claim, but then we should be doing that anyway, right?)

OK, enough flailing attempts at humor.  I wonder if the discussion is only partly about rebranding, and much more about vision.  What do such churches, in their beat-up and kicked-around state, have to offer?  What is our hope?  These are not bad questions to ask, even if Eric Idle as Concord never becomes the mainline church's role model.

Singing the difficult

A week and a half ago I touched off a bit of a kerfuffle on Facebook.  After one of the hymns in the service that morning, I couldn't help but observe that there was a verse missing.  I'm not going to get into the details as there might be a publication elsewhere on the subject, but the verse missing is going to prove controversial for some and outright unsingable for some.  While there is inevitably a theologial angle with any hymn and its discontents, here the difficulties will potentially be much more straightforward and personal.

Leaving aside the specifics of that hymn, I was provoked to wonder how many hymns, over the course of the genre's history, have had at least as much difficulty about them, that perhaps is now lost on us.  I don't mean difficulties with particular points of theology, as in the kerfuffle over the new Presbyterian hymnal's non-inclusion of a praise song over its theology of the cross.  Nor am I necessarily thinking of things like the rampant blood-and-gore imagery of some hymns around Good Friday or the cross, for example ("There is a fountain filled with blood" could be the genesis of a slasher movie, if it fell into the wrong hands.)  I'm wondering if there are hymns that were just flat-out hard, difficult, perhaps even humanly impossible to sing for more human reasons.

I can think of plenty of hymns that irritate me intellectually.  Any Christmas hymn that goes bleating on about snow on the ground outside the stable, the kind of thing that really is not typical of Bethlehem, tends to make me groan.  It's easy for some to offer up after-the-fact rationalization, which only tends to make my irritation worse.

I've known of hymns having particular imagery that caught people off-guard.  I still remember introducing a choir to "Lord, You Have Come to the Lakeshore" and folks being caught off-stride by the second verse's reference to the singer's boat having "no money nor weapons."  That, however, turned into a good, thought-provoking teachable moment.

I'm not necessarily referring to the issues of gender language in hymns, which in mainline traditions tend to get fixed anymore.  I'm trying to think of hymns that include or included words or phrases or images that were or are just painful to some people.  Being a white male I'm probably privileged enough not to experience that kind of shock or pain in singing a hymn; offending white males just hasn't been a standard hymnodic practice.

So I guess I'm asking for help.  What are my dimmed eyes failing to see?  What have I, or what has the church generally missed out on or forgotten how painful it was or willfully overlooked?  I can't think it hasn't happened before.

Philemon's Rant

Dammit, Paul, what are you doing to me?

Seriously, what the hell?

Even in prison you manage to be a pain.

How could you write that kind of letter to me, asking me to do something so out of line, so sure to draw attention...so...wrong?  

Do you know what people will think of me if I free this worthless slave?  After what he did?  

And if asking me to do this wasn't enough, you put it in a letter not just to me, but to Apphia and Archippus and to the whole church?  I know you know there are other slaveholders in the church that meets in this house.  Are you trying to turn all of us into outcasts?  And what are those other slaves going to say now that they've heard this letter from you?  How are they going to behave to their masters?

Paul, I am so angry with you I can't see straight.  How could you ask me, in front of a whole houseful of witnesses, to do something like this?  It's arrogant.  It's disruptive.  It's just completely out of order.  If you were here I'd probably try to choke some sense into you.  I am so angry with you because ... because ...

Because you're right.

Yes, I know you're in prison.  I never forget that.  You know that, don't you?  Do you really have that little faith in me?  

And yes, I know I owe you my own life.  I see what you did there, "not mentioning" that.  I remember what I was before.  If only God would let me forget.  

And yes, I can see that Onesimus is different.  That slave chapped me like no slave I've ever had.  If it weren't for what he took when he ran I'd frankly have been relieved to be rid of him.  Now?  Totally different.  Quiet, humble, gracious. And yet incredibly well-spoken on your behalf.  I don't even recognize him.  It's almost as if he has become an evangelist himself.  And yes, I can see that he really wants to go back to you and Timothy and Epaphras and the others.  I remember what it was like to be changed like that.  To know suddenly what it is to live, not just survive or get by.  Or maybe I didn't completely learn that before.

Last night I overheard Archippus speaking to Onesimus.  Trying to be quiet, but Archippus has a voice like a trumpet.  Obviously he was testing Onesimus.  "You know you could be killed, don't you?"  Onesimus's answer sounded so like you: "If I live, it is for the Lord.  If I die, it is for the Lord."  

You know I'm going to send him back.  You did know this, didn't you?  Did you at least have that much faith in me?  I believe he will be carrying some gifts from the congregation as well.  Receive them in good health.

And you had better come back here as soon as you are freed.  Do you know what kind of ruckus is likely to break out around here?  You better get here and help settle things down.  

I can't believe what I'm doing.  I cannot imagine what life is going to be like now.  

You'd better be here to help, Paul.  

Bookshelves and memory

Oops.  I've let things slide blog-wise for two and a half weeks.  I realize this doesn't affect the balance of power in the Middle East or cure cancer or anything important, but I suppose it does represent a dereliction of duty of sorts.
After a late-morning/early-afternoon visit to a urologist for an ultrasound (of the non-invasive type, thankfully) followed by time playing with old Excel files and trying to put them together into one file (I'm discovering that I'm not a fan of spreadsheets), I'm in my impromptu home office looking at one bookshelf, one among many in this house, and letting them remind me of the variety of bumps and bruises and twists and turns my strange little life has taken.  The nostalgia (some positive, some less so) is less about the books themselves or the contents thereof than about the places in life that caused me to add those books to my library.  Some of them should probably have been given away or traded in to the local library or moved in some manner.  Some of them I'll hold forever whether I ever read them again or not.  Some of them I'd love to get rid of, but then somebody else might read them, and I really don't want to be party to that.
There are non-book items on the shelf, to be sure: a plush Snoopy that plays some winter/Christmas tune if you squeeze the snowflake he's holding, a baseball decorated with images from a drawing at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg (a souvenir from my wife's trip there), a stray pencil sharpener, three composer "action figures" -- Bach, Mozart, Beethoven -- still in original packaging.  But the books themselves are a varied lot that would have told me things about myself I wasn't always sharp enough to notice, if only I'd been paying more attention.
This is a bit of a miscellaneous shelf.  Others are more tightly organized; old musicological volumes on one, hymnals and books on worship on another, texts from theology or biblical classes or church history on another.  This shelf holds stuff that doesn't really fit anywhere else and doesn't really go together.
There are a few books dating from my first trip around as a seminarian: a couple of old handbook/companion volumes to the '75 and 91 Baptist Hymnals, The Church Anthem Book, McElrath and Eskew's Sing With Understanding.  A handful of books on this shelf date from this second turn as seminarian; texts from classes I've taken in Christian Education and Celtic Spirituality, other books acquired not as textbooks but in relation to subjects covered in courses I've taken or that simply have forced themselves upon my mind since starting here -- a couple of volumes on Paul, for example, as well as a Wendell Berry book and a pair by Sara Miles.
As noted above, most of the textbooks I've acquired here are on bookshelves elsewhere in the house, as are most of the old musicological books I didn't give away.  A number of the books on this bookshelf do date back to my teaching years, though.  Not the KU years, but at my previous stop, a small evangelical school in south Florida.  Some of them were books I used in attempting to teach courses in the small church music program the school offered.  That was a strange experience.  I was actually happy for the chance to put that old church music degree to use, but the experience only taught me that, barely more than a decade after acquiring it, my knowledge of the field was hopelessly out of date.  I could no longer avoid the whole "contemporary" worship phenomenon, for example, as I had successfully done while living in Tallahassee.  The end result probably was that I had more to learn in the class than I was able to teach.
Other books on the shelf dating from that period are more general, philosophical volumes on the subject of "Christian higher education" or on evangelicalism more generally.  These were generally an attempt to understand more fully the environment in which I found myself at this particular school.  I can't say the attempt was totally successful, but it did lead to my figuring out that I really wasn't an evangelical anymore, if I had ever been a "real" evangelical in the first place.  At the time the experience seemed a signal and confirmation that I was indeed on the right track, moving away from that seminary experience and into academia.  Perhaps in hindsight, the experience was less of an end and more of a beginning of, or at least a preliminary to the fool's errand on which I now find myself.  A few others date from the period for different reasons; one represents a faculty book club gone horribly awry, a couple of others relate to conferences attended while on the faculty there, and a couple I know date from the period, but for the life of me I can't remember why I acquired them.
There are several books by N.T. Wright on this shelf.  These were in fact mostly acquired before officially setting off on this fool's errand, but have been useful along the way.  Again, perhaps if I'd paid more attention at the time I'd have picked up on the fact that something was going on in my soul to which I wasn't paying sufficient attention.
A few of the books were picked up in the preparation for coming to Union.  One was for the preparatory "communities of learning" program Union offers, and a couple of the others, including Pastor by Will Willimon, were acquired just because they seemed relevant to the experience.  Others are more individual in their purpose in my collection: one by a former college professor of mine, a couple acquired solely because of their provocative titles (such as Jesus Was a Liberal), a couple purchased just to read on long plane trips, a couple from a visit to Colonial Williamsburg recently, and a few here and there that I can't even remember when or why I picked up.
It's a bit of a jumble, which is a fairly accurate description of my life.  It would not make for a good biography -- too jumbled, rather incoherent in too many places.  Life, of course, does not obey literary rules or Hollywood scripts.  At times it feels less like one life than two or three or four.  How many more are yet to come, who knows?
The books have their own merit, of course, as written word does, but they also live in a context, my context, and in some cases that context has overwhelmed the content and given to those books meanings that their authors could not or would not have intended.  They have become markers of a life strangely lived, rather like a jigsaw puzzle with broken pieces; hard to piece together but still revealing a picture when nudged together carefully.  In this case, though, the puzzle is unfinished, and I don't even have all the pieces necessary to complete it yet.

Clearing up some things: the latest health issues

Bodies, wonderful creations that they are, can be strange.  They are adaptive things.  They react when their natural processes are interfered with.
Over the course of the last year, I've been targeted with radiation, cut into (and some stuff removed), and pumped with nasty and sometimes poisonous chemicals.  I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose, that my body has reacted in strange ways.
Right now I have two issues going on, both possibly (but not definitely) related to cancer treatment.
Issue one: excess tissue buildup, or something like that -- possibly scar tissue? -- that is possibly impinging a part of my urinary tract, causing one kidney to become a bit dilated.  Also (related or not?) a buildup of gas where gas cannot, technically, happen under normal circumstances (no, not that kind of gas), in the general area.
Issue two: fingertips that are, well, feeling strange.  Not numb -- definitely not that.  Not hurting, really. But...sensitive? Tight? Feeling as if they're swollen even though they're not?
Saw a urologist today.  I appreciate a doctor who takes a go-slow approach.  I'll have an ultrasound in that general region in a couple of weeks to see if the antibiotics I'm on actually help things return to normal.  If not, I may have to have a stent placed in that tube.
See a neurologist at the end of the month about the fingertips, in search of neuropathy or some similar.
The tissue buildup issue may be related to radiation, surgery, or both.  The finger issue may be a late-blooming side effect of chemo.  Cancer: the gift that keeps on giving, even when you'd rather it not.
The bizarre thing is that, unlike when diagnosed with cancer (I didn't expect that diagnosis but I knew something was up), I'm actually feeling fairly good these days.  Finally with some distance from chemo and the bacterial infection that followed, I could actually say I wasn't feeling sick or draggy.  We were able to go down to North Carolina for a wedding and I didn't actually feel a whole lot of fatigue, no more than one normally might expect.  If there's an infection in there it has a funny way of (not) showing it.  Yet that PET-CT scan last week showed something was off, and a new round of visits to new doctors is the result.
So that's what's what at the moment.  This is not so much the "omg!" kind of news that cancer diagnosis was; these are more "wtf??" results, notable for strangeness and incomprehensibility than immediate threat.  To be sure, if the ureter is blocked that has to be fixed -- I don't need a failed kidney. Still, this doesn't have the same shock value as that news of a little over a year ago.
Meanwhile I start an internship (non-parish version) tomorrow and started a church choir singing gig yesterday.  Life goes on until it doesn't, and ideally that will be some time from now.

Missed opportunity!

What a bummer.  I ended up going to two services today, and in neither case did the preacher take advantage of the rare lectionary opportunity to preach on a whole book of the Bible in one sermon.
Well, okay, virtually a whole book.  A few verses get left off at the end.  But still.
OK, so the book in question is Philemon, one of the one-chapter wonders of the New Testament.  But still.
Apparently for some it is a troublesome passage.  Apparently for some Paul is not explicit enough.  Apparently for some the only appropriate thing for Paul to do was to come out with trumpets blaring, demanding of Philemon in ALL CAPS that Philemon MUST free his slave Onesimus or Paul personally would guarantee Philemon's eternity in some bad place.
Yes, I suppose Paul could have done that.  In the Roman Empire of his time that was a good way to get executed.  But, hey, Paul was already in prison at that point, what's a mere execution?
Thing is, short of such a direct order, Paul does a pretty fascinating job of backing Philemon into a corner.  There are a few things you need to remember about this letter, things that often don't seem to be noticed by the more fretful or condemnatory commentators out there.
One: the letter is not just addressed to Philemon.  Besides the title character, Paul also addresses the letter to "Apphia our sister, Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house" (2).  As a result, this letter, like the other letters of Paul with place names attached (Galatians, Philippians, etc.), this letter would have been read not just by Philemon, but to that entire church meeting in his house.  Paul isn't just asking this thing of Philemon, he's asking in front of everybody.  The whole congregation is going to be watching to see how Philemon responds to this.  (Perhaps the whole congregation, or those who hold slaves, might also be challenged about how they treat their slaves too.  Who knows?)
Two: Paul isn't just asking Philemon to set Onesimus free or to just be nicer to him.  He wants (hint, hint) Philemon to release Onesimus to return to Paul.  Note verses 13 and 14: "I wanted to keep him with me...but I preferred to do nothing without your consent."  Hint, hint.  Now Paul does keep the door open for Onesimus to stay with Philemon, "no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother" (16).  But really, the way Paul frames his letter, those are really the only two options he is imagining.
Three: Paul isn't above reminding Philemon who's the apostle and who's the convert.  "I say nothing about your owing me even your own self" (19b) ... except, well, you just did, Paul.  Even though Philemon owes Paul, in Paul's view, Paul is willing to guarantee anything that Onesimus may have filched from his master (even going so far as to take the pen from his secretary and write that part himself -- "I will repay it" (19a).  Every excuse is being pulled out from under Philemon -- in front of the whole congregation, remember.
Intermingled with appropriate levels of flattery at beginning and end, thus Paul puts Philemon on the spot.  "If you're the man I think you are, you'll do this...for me."  Really, it's a pretty slick bit of maneuvering Paul puts on Philemon.  If followed through, it blows up the whole system; how do you enslave your brother or sister in Christ?
Well, obviously, some people have managed to do so.  I'm going to guess that not a whole lot of antebellum Southern preachers, among others, ever preached from Philemon that often.  People will rationalize, any way they can, when they don't want to follow.  Is it the letter's fault?
C'mon, preachers, you have three years.  Get your Philemon sermons ready.

One year

One year ago today I posted a blog entry that began with the following: "No point in beating around the bush.  That colonoscopy yesterday led to a diagnosis of cancer of the rectum."

In the intervening year I have been bombarded with radiation, cut open and mutilated, and poisoned.  I don't really know yet whether the cancer is still there or not.  I have a PET-CT scan scheduled for September 3 in aid of answering that question.  I'm supposed to have a colonoscopy as well, but that hasn't been scheduled yet because of the infection referenced in the last blog post. In fits and starts, the effects of that infection seem to be fading at last, though I still have to be extra-cautious about what I eat, apparently.

In the intervening year I have ranted and screamed and pouted; made strange jokes and indulged in bits of gallows humor; suppressed even more humor that would inevitably, given the nature and location of the cancer and treatment, descended to "bathroom humor" level; been surprised not to wake up with a bag attached to a hole in my side; taken enough Imodium that I should own stock in the company by now; had legs that would not let me rest at all; been unable to leave the house and gone anyway; preached a sermon while totally hopped up on painkillers; and gone through all manner of other health traumas and indignities that I have not described in this blog, and probably will not.  You can't handle the truth.

In the intervening year I have staggered through Old Testament as one wandering in the wilderness; practice-baptized a baby; broken bread; been on the giving and receiving end of pastoral care; attended my first classes via video hookup; made the rookie mistake I always warned students against, biting off more subject than I could possibly chew in the given paper assignment; led a worship ritual in a park; gotten to know A Brief Statement of Faith well enough to hack my way through teaching a class on it; preached five times and chanted a psalm in worship, for internship credit; tried and failed to be a polity wonk; become a candidate for ordination; completed three of my four senior ordination exams and have the fourth in progress (results not to be known for a few weeks); and somehow managed not to wash out of seminary.

In the intervening year I have gone to Disney World and walked, very slowly and with lots of stops, "around the world" at Epcot; gone to spring training for the first time since moving out of Florida; gone back to Lawrence for the first time since moving and, to be honest, kinda wished I could've stayed; stood on the edge of the Konza Prairie and let the wind nudge me about like tallgrass; finally taken a bite of the Little Apple; been to the Vietnam memorial in D.C. for the first time in years; been to George Washington's birthplace, James Monroe's birthplace (or the empty spot on the ground where scholars think it is), Thomas Jefferson's famous house, and James Madison's not-so-famous house (but no Civil War sites); been to Flying Squirrels baseball games and Spiders basketball games in Richmond and Nationals baseball games in D.C.; spent a tremendous summer working in the soon-to-be-trendy town of Ashland, VA; gone to three of four weddings in a summer of more-weddings-than-I've-been-to-in-my-married-life-so-far-combined, all for outstanding people, classmates, and friends half my age or less; and somehow managed to stay awake for some of it.

I've been alive, wondered if I was dead, sorta wished I was dead, was glad to be alive, didn't want to get out of bed, couldn't go to sleep, gotten up a dozen times in the middle of the night, and am still here for whatever reason.  And here comes another year of it.

So August 24 is going to be one of those days.  Diagnosis Day?  Your Life Is Now Hell Day?  Your Body Is Against You Day?  Whatever.  I guess I'm still here.  And that exegesis exam doesn't give a rip about any of this.  So, hopefully some sleep, and hopefully fresh for a new day of whatever the heck this life is.