Skip to main content

What's the point of church?


We should above all be honest and ask ourselves what we gain from religion. What is the use of all the preaching, baptizing, confirming, bell-ringing, and organ playing, the community houses with or without motion picture equipment, the efforts to enliven church singing, the unspeakably tame and stupid monthly church papers, and whatever else may belong to the equipment of modern day ecclesiasticism?

Will something different eventuate from all this in relation to the righteousness of God?

Karl Barth

Last week I was handed the minutes of the Ministry Committee at church going back as far as 1973 when the church moved into the current building. As secretary of the Ministry Committee I should keep hold of these, I was told. Fine.

I've read through a few of the minutes. I've found it quite depressing. Year after year it seems the church has been doing the same things. Year after year this committee, and by extension, the church, has done things like set the date for the harvest festival service. All I can think is: what's the point of it all? What are we doing? Why are we doing it? I just found the above quote from Barth and it summed up for me the situation.

All this church has done is hold services and has done very little else in terms of outreach, social justice, working in the community, or experiencing the power of God. Is this liberal? Is this Christian? Is this Unitarian? All we have done is maintain ourselves, conservatively doing what we've always done because, well, we've always done it.

All we've done is maintained ourselves, and, actually, we haven't done that. The membership of the church in 1983 was 155. In 2005 the membership was 59. This seems to confirm to me that left to itself British Unitarianism is going to be dead in 20 years. This will happen, unless we find our Gospel, our Voice, and do something.

Comments

LaReinaCobre said…
It's ironic that when its primary goal is to preserve itself, a church will die. I'm reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and in it he writes about how individuals and groups enclose themselves in "circles of certainty" - from this perspective, they exist to affirm a preconceived notion of present and future rightness. In doing so they are oblivious to reality - so fixed are they on what they think they know.

The relevance of church ... certainly a question I ponder this morning as I prepare to bicycle there. I have little hope (still, a little hope) that what I hear today there will help me to cope with the personal and familial issues that feel to be crushing me right now.
5:18 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What does it mean to be non-creedal?

Steve Caldwell says "The problem here isn't humanism vs. theism for theist Unitarian Universalists -- it's the non-creedal nature of Unitarian Universalism" This is a good point. We need to think much more deeply about what it means to be a non-creedal religion. The first thing I want to say is that there is more than one possible understanding of non-creedalism. The Disciples of Christ are a non-creedal church, they say here : " Freedom of belief. Disciples are called together around one essential of faith: belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Persons are free to follow their consciences guided by the Bible, the Holy Spirit study and prayer, and are expected to extend that freedom to others." Quakers are also non-creedal and say here : Quakers have no set creed or dogma - that means we do not have any declared statements which you have to believe to be a Quaker. There are, however, some commonly held views which unite us. One accepted view is that th...
3 comments
Read more

LOST and theology: who are the good guys?

***Spoiler alert*** I'm continuing some theological/philosophical reflections while re-watching the series LOST. One of the recurring themes in LOST is the idea of the "good guys" and the "bad guys." We start the series assuming the survivors (who are the main characters) are the "good guys" and the mysterious "Others" are definitely bad guys. But at the end of series 2 one of the main characters asks the Others, "Who are  you people?" and they answer, in an extremely disturbing way, "We're the good guys." The series develops with a number of different factions appearing, "the people from the freighter" "the DHARMA initiative" as well as divisions among the original survivors. The question remains among all these complicated happenings "who really are the good guys?" I think one of the most significant lines in the series is an episode when Hurley is having a conversation with ...
3 comments
Read more

Is humanism theologically tolerant?

OK, well this might be controversial, but I feel the need to say it. Is humanist tolerant? Please note I'm not asking about humanism within society. Clearly humanism certainly believes in tolerance within society and I'm forever glad they are often the only people in the media calling for a separation of church and state. No, what I'm talking about is descriptions of Unitarianism like this and adverts like this , discussed at Peacebang here , which say that humanism is one option, Christianity is another, God is one option among many. The trouble is, humanism, by definition is theologically opposed to theism. This is very different from the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism. These two traditions may be vastly different, but Buddhism, by definition , is not opposed to Christianity, and Christianity, by definition , is not opposed to Buddhism. But humanism is consciously defined in opposition to Christianity and theism. So to say that humanism and theism can bot...
14 comments
Read more