Seventh in a series. Bibliography will be included with the final post. Back to the first post in this series.
(E) Some challenges for post-Christian worship, continued
(E.2) Current Threats to post-Christian worship
Continuing with an examination of challenges for post-Christian worship, I’ll look at current threats to common worship include the esoteric impulse and the danger of invisible oppression (or not seeing who isn’t there), and the idolatry of worship as entertainment.
~~(E.2.1) The danger of the esoteric impulse:
A major threat to post-Christian common worship at the moment is what I call the esoteric impulse. The esoteric impulse leads post-Christian congregations to set up invisible barriers to newcomers. Within my own religious community, Unitarian Universalism, the esoteric impulse leads our post-Christian congregations to not have signs on the outsides of their church buildings, to use unexplained acronyms, to shun newcomers, and to make sure that worship services are not comfortable places for outsiders. Generally, all institutionalized religion requires some sort of initiation ceremony.
Why does this happen? Broadly speaking, post-Christian congregations seem to have a tendency to make official initiation too easy: all you have to do is sign up as a member, maybe after attending two or three short clases. But at some level we post-Christians still want to maintain some firm boundary between our congregations and the rest of the world, and as a result, although it’s officially easy to become a member, there may be invisible barriers that make our religion hard to understand and hard to enter, so that very few people want to join us. I believe this explains why most post-Christian congregations remain small (under 150 average weekly attendance) and ineffectual.
I believe the best solution to our esoteric tendencies is to affirm our exoteric ideals. We want common worship to be open and accessible to all; as post-Christians, we are in some sense explicitly distancing ourselves from creedal Christian traditions which too often serve to shut certain classes of people out.
This also means we must face up to the danger of invisible oppression, or not seeing who isn’t there. The most obvious example is the predominantly white, Anglo post-Christian congregation in a diverse city. Such a hypothetical congregation needs to look around and see who isn’t present — and then to figure out what esoteric impulses are keeping out people of color.
~~(E.2.2) The danger of worship as entertainment:
The final threat to post-Christian common worship is the idolatry of worship as entertainment. Here, the congregation becomes an audience; all they are required to do is to listen (or perhaps watch). No further engagement aside from simple attendance, just sitting there, is necessary. Worship as entertainment is very safe for all concerned because it involves no real risk; everything is kept at a distance; just as at the end of a performance you can applaud perhaps to show your appreciation but more importantly to disengage and distance yourself from the results of that performance.
Rather than disengagement at the end of a worship service, there should be a deepened engagement. I have already outlined some possibilities for such deepened engagement, particularly through encouraging each worshipper to have their own personal devotional life, and in encouraging small groups. However, the worship leaders must take primary responsibility for promoting a deepened engagement during common worship. At the very least, worship leaders have to slip between the Scylla of entertainment and slick professionalism on one side, and the Charybdis of incompetence and folksiness on the other side. We need not be devoured by the monster of entertainment, nor sucked under by the whirlpool of boredom. Instead, post-Christian common worship should be genuine, competently-led, and deeply moving.
Next: Conclusion
I agree wholeheartedly with this series.
You have outlined some very excellent points.
I just wonder sometimes if being this pedantic about matters doesn’t complicate things, unnecessarily so.
The problem with a lot of UU churches is that they are so afraid of NOT being something that they end up being what they DON’T wish to be in spite of it.
UUism was set up as the anti-organized religion. And yet it has become one in spite of itself. The Democratic Process is a wonderful thing but it can be very much to the detriment of newcomers who don’t know their way around yet.
This shouldn’t be like the Masons–this post-Christian landscape we have defined for ourselves.
It takes a very educated person to drift to post-Christianity, which alienates (without meaning to) the IGNORANT. And by ignorant, I don’t mean stupid.
How do you whittle down post-Christianity to the average person who doesn’t have a college degree? Christianity, conventionally speaking, is fairly easy to remember and apply directly to one’s own life.
I would argue that Post-Christianity is the true Christianity not formulated by The Emperor Constantine as a way of perpetuating the Roman Empire.
But how do you get an ignorant person to understand it? How do I get a person to learn the alphabet when they never learned what A, B, or C means?
Kevin — Of course this series is pedantic. I’m writing this series for people in leadership positions in post-Christian congregations — thus the pedantic, precise tone is appropriate because precision is what I’m after — my style here is equivalent to the stuff you find in, say, Harvard Business Review. I preach popular post-Christian ideas every week in my sermons. If you feel this strongly about popularizing post-Christian ideas, you should do it!
I have two nits to pick with you:
(1) You seem to assume that all post-Christians are Unitarian Universalists. But post-Christian ideas are *not* limited to the narrow confines of Unitarian Universalism — there are lots of other post-Christians out there, in many different denominations.
(2) You write: “Unitarian Universalism was set up as the anti-organized religion.” I disagree and I think the historical record supports me in this. Unitarians and Universalists consolidated in 1961 through a very intentional organizational effort. We have had a series of strong leaders and strong institutionalists at both the denominational and the congregational level, and considering our tiny size and miniscule financial resources we have been incredibly organized. In fact, it’s remarkable how much we have managed to do with the skimpy resources we do have. To say that we are “anti-organized” denigrates the organizational efforts of many dedicated volunteers and professionals, and contradicts the historic record of the past 46 years. Could we have been better organized? Yes, often. Are we anti-organized? Not in my experience.
You could, however, make the argument that North American Unitarianism was an “anti-organized” denomination from its beginnings through, say, 1865. Channing, for example, famously did not want to have any real organization. Once Henry Whitney Bellows and Jenkin Lloyd Jones come on the scene, all that begins to change. There were some bad times (e.g., early 1930’s), but on the whole the Unitarians did pretty well with organization. You could make an somewhat better case that North American Universalism was in some sense anti-organizational, at least at the national level (some state conferences were always well-organized, though, and still are) — one of the comments the Universalists had during consolidation in 1960 was that the Unitarians out-organized them.