Lifting Up the Bible in the Life of the Church
My journey as an ordained minister began some years ago at New York Theological Seminary where I completed the English Certificate Program. So NYTS has a warm place in my heart, and whenever they invite me to do anything, I try to do it! I am honored to be asked.
What I will share with you here is deeply personal. It arises from the spiritual and religious nature of my call to Christian ministry. I have expressed my vocation over many years now as preacher, pastor, and professor. God has blessed me to serve within the richness of culturally and economically diverse religious contexts whether in the Church, the university, or in interfaith settings. This has helped me to expand and deepen my theological perspective on the overarching topic, “Engaging the Bible in Mainline Churches.”
Presently, I serve as Minister of the Word and Sacrament, (Teaching Elder) in the PC (USA). This mainline Protestant denomination is part of the Reformed tradition. It is the largest Presbyterian denomination numbering 2.3 million members in all 50 states and Puerto Rico with over 10,500 congregations served by more than 21,000 ministers. PC (USA) is probably the most visible and influential denomination in North America, yet it reported a loss of 63,804 members in 2011. Here within the New York City Presbytery with a membership of approximately 17,000 in 2010, there was a loss of about 1,400 members in 2011.
In a study by Wayne L. Thomas, Jackson W. Caroll, and Dean R. Hoge, “Growth or Decline in Presbyterian Congregations” the researchers found that mainline Protestant denominations in the United States have experienced membership declines from the mid 1960’s until today and these declines have evoked a vigorous debate about the cause.
Why are so many congregations leaving?
I believe much of the answer to this important question lies within the central focus of the Bible conference at which this paper was first presented: “There has been much talk about the demise of mainline churches in the U.S. in recent years, but there are also signs of renewal. Mainline churches have become more inclusive, more diverse, and more open to God’s transforming grace than ever before in their history. They have done so with sound and energetic biblical engagement. It is high time to reaffirm and reclaim the power of the Spirit that speaks to us through the Bible.”
A 2009 essay by Ronald B. Neal, professor of Religion at Claflin University, “Did Progressive Christianity Dump Its Savior in Brad Braxton?” may help us understand the question of the Bible and the decline and/or possibility for growth in mainline churches. Dr. Neal states: “Decades ago when the famed and controversial pastor of Riverside Church, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and legendary theologian Reinhold Niebuhr were New York celebrities and national symbols of Protestant liberalism, mainline Christianity in America was a potent force in American public life. At that time, the superstars of progressive religion had the ear of America’s power elite—corporate executives, heads of state, and heads of industry. They represented white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, (WASP) dominance.” He further emphasized, “However, power and influence of Protestant liberalism exists in a vegetated state. Nowhere is this more evident than in the…resignation of Dr. Brad Braxton, the…ex-pastor of Riverside Church, New York City.”
To what is Dr. Neal referring?
Neal goes on to surmise that Dr. Braxton’s resignation, after a controversial, brief, nine months, is symptomatic of a deep theological and ethical dilemma among Progressive Christians. He emphasizes that this dilemma, spelled out in terms of race, class, and culture is far from new. Indeed, “it has plagued the Progressive Christian tradition since its emergence in the early 19th century from abolitionism to liberation theology.” For an “uneasy relationship,” he claims, “has existed between literate and so-called enlightened Christians and people of color; especially people of color “who are in any way or another connected to or influenced by populist and charismatic religion.” Dr. Neal, I believe quite accurately, points out that it is exactly these very traditions—firmly grounded in the foundation of biblical literacy and the Jesus Christ of Scriptures—who are thriving and growing in the 21st century while the mainline denominations are gasping for breath.
Progressive Christianity is characterized by a spiritual vitality and expressiveness that includes a participatory ethos, the incorporation of the arts, and lively worship as well as a variety of spiritual rituals and practices such as meditation. It is also characterized by intellectual integrity, including a willingness to question (especially the Scriptures), a strong affirmation of human diversity, an affirmation of the Christian faith with the simultaneous and severe respect for other faiths, and finally, vital ecological concerns and commitments.
This certainly describes my own theological stance as a Progressive Christian, yet as Neal has noted, although Progressive Christians have been allies of America’s outcast populations, “such alliances have not precluded Progressive Christians from being cultural despisers [in the words of the 19th century theologian Fredrich Scleiermacher] of the oppressed.” Indeed, the alliances between Progressive Christians (especially between white Protestants and disinherited black people) has always been and remains highly conflictual. Even when there is class convergence and, or as Dr. Neal describes it, “progressive black Christians who are literate and credentialled, find themselves in the same company of progressive white Christians with similar status,” the racial and background differences—not to mention racism itself—do not disappear.
Thus it is no surprise that Dr. Brad Braxton had an amazingly short tenure. This despite the Reverend Dr. James Forbes, his immediate predecessor—also a black minister—lived through a significantly longer tenure as Senior Minister although he, too, faced the strain and struggle with the church to accept the painful challenge of God’s call to inclusivity. This reality, I believe, has contributed significantly to the decline of mainline Protestantism in the United States in the early 21st century.
How so?
Consider the importance of the astounding membership decline from the middle 1960’s that continues through today. A crucial variable in the decline was that following the Civil Rights Movement, as Neal points out, identity politics of every sort—feminist, gay, lesbian, and black—“became alive and center stage” in liberal white churches. The struggles of that time led the Christian Church in the United States to attempt to question tradition, accept the challenge of human diversity, and begin to place a priority on social justice. Progressive Christians professed to have deep belief in the centrality of the instruction of our Lord, Jesus Christ as coming from John’s gospel to love one another. During this period, as the church attempted to no longer be, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it, “the most segregated hour in America,” the word multicultural came into popular usage. Yet congregations also began to decline.
Research demonstrates, again quoting Thomas, Caroll, and Hoge, that being in the urban South is associated with church membership growth. The areas of strength in membership for PC(USA) are Virginia, the Carolinas, and Florida. They are stable and even growing. The regions with the least membership decline in the 1980s were in the South and South Central regions where churches do not reflect diversity. Thus an important underlying factor for explaining that church growth or decline is a lack of racial and ethnic diversity in congregations.
Neal states an experience of Christian identity that is identical with my own. He writes, “I was shaped by a preaching tradition—the black, Baptist, tradition. This tradition places an emphasis on the centrality of Jesus and the Bible to the Christian faith.” He goes on to highlight that the single population where this tradition has thrived and is most visible is within America’s black population. Yet when you are a theologically educated black minister in a predominantly white congregation, if your preaching and style of worship “are in anyway connected to this strand of American Christianity,” you may become the object of racial, class, and cultural condescension. He writes, “When the congregation is affluent, it only heightens the dilemma.”
I know this to be true in my own experience. Even though the church where I served grew by a little more than twenty percent in a little over a year after I was installed as Senior Minister, this predominantly white controlled congregation became beset by seemingly irreconcilable and conflict ridden politics that led to a vote for the dissolution of the pastoral relationship. It was very much like Dr. Brad Braxton’s experience at Riverside Church. I consider myself a Progressive Christian. Yet I was told that my preaching was “fundamentalist” and “conservative” because it was biblically based and celebrated the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
These theological tenets also characterize Conservative Christianity or evangelical Christians emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who reacted against liberal theology. They organized as a movement in the late 1920s and were led mainly by Baptists and Presbyterians in the United States. Central to the belief system was the inerrancy of the Bible as a necessity for true Christianity. They felt this belief was being violated by theological modernists. What emerged from this was what is now called the contemporary Christian Right with leaders such as Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson. I am not now nor have I ever been a part of the Christian Right.
White Progressive Christianity has often believed in social justice but ignored and mistrusted the book (the Bible) that calls the Church toward and equips it for radical justice in Church and society. Even in contemporary social justice movements, there is no longer the tradition of trusting the Bible and the Jesus of Scriptures. This is understandable considering the centuries’ long use or misuse of the Bible as a tool to oppress women, people of color, gay and lesbian people, and the earth. Yet without the foundation of the Bible, Christian social justice efforts remain fragmented and bound by the domination of the privileged. Without the Bible, there will never be an understanding of the intersectionality of oppression. For example, Neal asserts that even in Riverside Church with its history of liberal Christianity, Dr. Brad Braxton was simply “too ethnic, or too black, or too charismatic.” I, too, was told in my recent pastoral experience that my preaching was “too black.”
Although we find ourselves theologically with the progressive wing of Protestant Christianity with university and seminary training, we bear the marks of biblically based preaching and a leadership tradition that is culturally and psychologically challenging to mainline white privilege. Many of the conservative, biblically based churches are thriving in terms of numbers—Bishop T.D. Jakes’ The Potter’s House and Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. These churches are literally overflowing with members. Although I do not agree with what I believe are their areas of theological conservatism—biblical inerrancy, or the lack of rights of gay and lesbian people—I agree with Neal that because they remain connected to ethnic and religious streams of American life they continue to grow and thrive. Progressive Christians, if we pay attention more closely to this tradition, can experience new life rather than continue on the road to extinction. On the other hand, Progressive Christianity has the needed social justice theological corrective (notably the equality of women, gay and lesbian people, and respect for the earth) that more conservative congregations lack.
We, as the Christian community in the United States, will not be whole until and unless we reach out to and embrace each other—both as Progressives and Conservatives. We must all, as Jesus prayed, become one. We profoundly need each other. I leave you with a final quote from Neal and one from myself. Neal writes, “In a word, progressive Christianity is in need of saviors. Their salvation may rest in the hands of the stereotypically primitive and cathartic world of non-white and non-mainline churches.” My thought is that, “In a word, conservative Christianity is also in need of saviors. Their salvation may rest in the hands of the stereotypically cultured despisers of the white mainline churches.” Finally, we all need the Bible to help us better understand God in Jesus Christ.
