Convening and Coalescing Christianity
The Cleveland Public Library of Denominations
What if a denomination decided to run like the Cleveland Public Library: open membership, no restricted stacks, and no VIP reading room?
The Cleveland Public Library (CPL) is nicknamed “The People’s University.” They earned this nickname by pioneering the practice of open shelving. Anyone, not just scholars or professionals, has been allowed to enter the library, locate the book or other resource for themselves, and engage in a process of self-education since the 1860s. While most people would assume that’s how public libraries operate, it was an innovative concept in the mid-19th century. The Cleveland Public Library was also one of the first public libraries to have a dedicated children’s reading room and was an early adopter of other developments that democratized knowledge access, like neighborhood branches and mobile libraries.
The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) was born of a similar impulse. While most histories of the Disciples movement will refer to an anti-hierarchical and anti-clergy attitude among at least part of the movement (the Campbell side, mostly), it might be more accurate to say we are pro-laity. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that Disciples are the CPL of Denominations.
Self-Education Among Disciples of Christ
Our movement has maintained an egalitarian view of religious truth. It is available to all. This has meant that the baptismal waters, Sunday School lectern, the pulpit, even the administration of the Lord’s Table can be accessed on the basis of self-education. The congregation has held the authority to determine who ministers in those spaces, but we have resisted any impulse to restrict them to the professionally credentialed.
We have struggled to manifest this in practice. We have had to confront our racism and sexism since the beginning. As our movement eventually embraced seminary-trained professional clergy, we’ve not always known how to handle the authority that such ministers carry. More recently, we find ourselves confronted with questions regarding sexual orientation. If we’re going to be the denominational equivalent of the Cleveland Public Library, does that mean there is no “restricted area”?
For well over 200 years, Disciples have been conducting an experiment built around this question: can a religious movement that affords the greatest latitude of Christian freedom also embody the strongest bonds of Christian unity? Today, this experiment is encountering a number of confounding variables, but one persistent threat is the impulse toward rigid theological exclusivity.
Noah’s Arking the Culture
While religious faith in general has been in decline for the past 30 years, the movements that appear to be growing are the ones with explicit theological systems. The growing movements usually are not content with clarity; they take on an oppositional character. I could point to hundreds, if not thousands, of examples. But ultimately, they would come down to the same template—the in-group establishes its theological faith statement, identifies other groups that are not aligned with the theological faith statement, and uses fear and vilification to produce compliance.
This practice of creating us-versus-them dichotomies has the appearance of righteousness and upholding the truth. However, the underlying goal is controlling people, not liberating them with truth. Humans have an innate impulse to conform, and there have always been people willing to use that impulse to their advantage. They will use fear, threaten the removal of belonging, and even cast doubts on people’s salvation.
I call it Noah’s Arking the culture: telling people God’s judgment is coming and they had better get in line and get in the Ark (i.e., their particular church or movement) or else drown in the flood.
And it seems to be working. The movements that appear to have the greatest traction right now are the ones employing Noah’s Arking practices. Some of the practices I do encourage. I believe that congregations need to become far more explicit about what they believe. However, when they take that to the point where they stifle dissent, vilify those who disagree, and rely on catch-phrases and authoritarianism, they have betrayed the very freedom scripture teaches that truth brings.
Convening and Coalescing Christianity
Consistently, people will accuse theologies they disagree with as the Noah’s Arking the culture culprits. Since at least the early 20th century, American Protestant Christianity has framed the internal debate as something like liberal versus conservative. Once it was the modernist/fundamentalist divide. It evolved into an ecumenical/evangelical split. Today, it is often couched as a choice between progressives and traditionalists.
However, the real divide in American Protestant Christianity is less a divide between liberals and conservatives and more between coalescing and convening. Coalescing Christianity promotes dogma and uniformity. It identifies who is in and who is out, who is right and who is wrong, and ultimately who is saved and who is damned. Coalescing Christianity practices the Noah’s Arking of religion, and it is as likely to happen among liberals as it is among conservatives.
Convening Christianity, on the other hand, invites broad discussion and believes that within the body of Christ different parts will look and function quite differently. Convening Christianity practices theological and intellectual hospitality. It invites discussion and welcomes differing points of view.
By painting coalescing Christianity in the most unappealing way and describing convening Christianity as beautiful and pristine, am I engaging in the very vilification that I say I oppose? Probably. I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips. Convening Christianity isn’t easy. It often means that discipleship gets caught in an endless cycle of taking turns. Still, it does seem to be the better way, as exclusive as that advocacy of inclusion might sound. If the biblical touchstone of coalescing Christianity is Noah’s Ark, the biblical vision of convening Christianity might be the feeding of the 5,000, or Pentecost’s experience of everyone hearing the gospel in their own word, or Revelation’s portrayal of the gathering from every nation, tribe, and tongue. In each portrayal, the unifying agent isn’t dogma; it’s the person of Jesus Christ.