Monthly Archives: May 2014

Saturday Symposium: Why Go to Church?

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Happy Saturday, Readers! Christ is (still) risen!

We’ve had a busy week here at A Queer Calling. Discussion has been incredibly lively, and we’d encourage you to revisit some conversations. We thank God for each and every one of our readers, praying for you all daily. It is our hope that conversations here can be edifying and challenging, helping us better show the love of Christ to one another. Please know that if you’re a student approaching your exam season, you are especially in our prayers.

It’s time for today’s Saturday Symposium question:

How this works: It’s very simple. We ask a multi-part question related to a topic we’ve blogged about during the past week or are considering blogging about in the near future, and you, our readers, share your responses in the comments section. Feel free to be open, reflective, and vulnerable…and to challenge us. But as always, be mindful of the comment policy that ends each of our posts. Usually, we respond fairly quickly to each comment, but in order to give you time to think, come back, add more later if you want, and discuss with other readers, we will wait until after Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: This week, we taking our question from a reader query! In response to Sarah’s reflection on Christian Formation and the Cost of the Culture War, Kathy posed the following questions: Why do we need to go to a formal church any way? Can’t we just gather with believers? Do I really need to take communion? Do I really need to join a study group? How are Christians supposed to be discipled?

We look forward to reading your responses. If you’re concerned about having your comment publicly associated with your name, please consider using the Contact Us page to submit your comment. We can post it under a pseudonym (i.e. John says, “your comment”) or summarize your comment in our own words (i.e. One person observed…). Participating in this kind of public dialogue can be risky, and we want to do what we can to protect you even if that means we preserve your anonymity. Have a wonderful weekend!

Blessings,

Sarah and Lindsey

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Moving Beyond the Celibacy Mandate

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Time and time again, we’ve described both marriage and celibacy as mature vocations entered into by adults. We started this blog discussing why celibacy needed to be defined by its positive attributes rather than by an absence of sexual relations. Later we asked many married people to tell us how they define marriage. We’ve encouraged the practice of letting celibate people define celibacy and married people define marriage. But, the challenge is that the Church needs a way to speak to all vocations so that individual Christians can discern their paths illumined by the light of Christ. We want to spend some time in this post discussing how churches can discuss vocations in a way where God, through the Holy Spirit, can draw people towards the fullness of life in Christ.

As a first key observation, both marriage and celibacy communicate the same central truth: the nature of the kingdom of God—it is in our midst and we are active participants. When churches help young people focus their sights on the kingdom of God, churches can help everyone discern his or her vocation. Every Christian shares the same starting line on the way to finding his or her vocation: seeking first the kingdom of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given unto you as well.” Keeping the kingdom of God at the center sets our eyes towards the time where all things are reconciled towards God and challenges each and every one of us to do our part in manifesting God’s kingdom through our lives.

What’s unfortunate is that when it comes to LGBT issues, many Christian traditions teaching a more conservative sexual ethic have seemingly lost the mystery of the kingdom of God, focusing instead on a legalistic, “always do this, but don’t ever do that,” form of sexual morality as a way to strive for righteousness. The emphasis on sexual morality can manifest as the straightforward yet often unhelpful, “Don’t have sex outside of a heterosexual marriage” where this moral prescription represents the sum total of vocational guidance given to young Christians in these traditions. In such an environment, many LGBT people can feel ostracized by a seeming mandate to avoid sexual intimacy lest they lose any hope of inheriting the kingdom of God. Newsflash: by virtue of our baptism, all Christians have a solid inheritance. This does not mean that receiving the sacrament of baptism means a person will, for all of his or her life thereafter, be “good to go.” Rather, the point is our baptism invites us to participate in the kingdom of God. Our churches would do well to affirm (and reaffirm and reaffirm again) the power of the baptismal mystery as a way to unite ourselves fully to Christ, so that all Christians can set themselves to the work of showing the kingdom of God to the world.

In many ways, encouraging young people to pursue the kingdom of God is harder than exhorting young people to save sex for marriage. When young people listen for God’s direction, the Holy Spirit might lead them towards vocations where, gasp, they do not enter into marriages. It’s a lot easier for churches to put teenagers on an assembly line where all go through an identical set of rites of passage that culminate in a big wedding than it is for churches to trust that the Holy Spirit’s voice can still be heard above the clamor of raging hormones. In the midst of all the noise associated with becoming an adult in our society, churches should encourage teenagers to orient their ears to the still small voice where God can begin to show every person his or her unique call to manifest the kingdom.

Churches would do well to showcase regularly a belief that all vocations are needed and important. If a congregation thinks about every eighteen-year-old kid it has sent out into the world, then that congregation will realize all of these kids have individual stories. There will be people from that congregation that have done awesome things to serve the kingdom of God who have never married. Part of the allure of the celibate vocation is that there is an unlimited number of potential life stories that align with celibacy. Faithful Christians who never marry are not freaks; they are people who are able to love and serve the world differently than married people. The stories of celibate people should not be relegated to designated times of Celibate Appreciation (i.e. an annual Vocations Week). And it’s okay to let a congregation know if a really cool and inspiring person in your Christian tradition lived a celibate way of life. Catholic and Orthodox Christians have a calendar chockfull of celibate saints, and you still see people marrying regularly in those traditions.

A huge part of discerning one’s vocation is learning how to look honestly at yourself. Discerning vocation requires investigating your authentic desires and noting where they might be different from those of other people you know. As LGBT Christians ourselves, we regard realizing our statuses as LGBT people as a key part of coming to see who we are as individuals. However, in far too many churches, this uniqueness of person is met with a directive about the uniqueness of vocation. We know countless LGBT people who, in the instant they first disclosed their sexual orientations or gender identities, were told immediately, “You have to be celibate.” or “You cannot have sex.” Spiritual advice for LGBT people tends to come in the form of either you have to or you cannot.

What if all priests, pastors, and ministers started approaching situations that involve discussion of sexuality differently? What if spiritual directors left off the specific directives in favor of viewing LGBT Christians as people trying to discern where God is calling them? When spiritual directors start handing down restrictive directives, these spiritual directors are communicating that either they do not trust God to guide an LGBT person or they do not trust the person to listen to God. As we have said many times, LGBT people are people first and foremost. What would happen if spiritual directors started trusting LGBT people as much as they trust straight, cisgender people?

When a person does decide to start exploring a celibate vocation, we want to see congregations willing to support that individual. A vocation is not a cross to bear. A vocation is a pathway to an abundant life. When a person is sharing, “I don’t know if I can continue or even begin in a celibate vocation,” it’s good to come alongside him or her and say, “I know the issue of vocation can be really tough sometimes. I’m here for you. I’m praying for you. How can I help you see more of the kingdom of God in your circumstances right now?” Seeking God’s kingdom unites all Christians regardless of their vocations and enables us to support one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. By encouraging all people to seek first the kingdom, churches do not need to prescribe celibacy mandates. As Christians look for the kingdom of God, the Holy Spirit will guide and direct those called to celibacy to a number of diverse ways of living celibate vocations.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Christian Formation and the Cost of the Culture Wars

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A reflection by Sarah

About five years ago, I taught a course called Christian Beliefs at a Catholic university. During each class period, we would discuss a different topic that connected in some way to the ideas presented in the Nicene Creed. On the first day of class that semester, I gave the students index cards and asked that each fill his/her entire card, front and back, with as many responses to the following question as possible: “What do Christians believe?” I taught that course twice and have not since been assigned to teach another like it, but being the pack rat that I am, I kept those cards and flipped through them last week while planning an activity for my current freshmen. I had almost forgotten just how troubling the responses where.

First, a bit of context: there were twenty students in the class, mainly from Christian backgrounds. Thirteen identified as Catholic, five identified as Protestant, and two identified as atheist/agnostic. Of the thirteen Catholic students, ten had attended a Catholic high school. Eight of those had been through twelve years of Catholic education. Three Protestant students and one atheist/agnostic student had received education at Christian high schools. Given this information, one might think most of these students would have no trouble generating a list of Christian beliefs that would include many of the religion’s core tenets.

As I perused these index cards last week, I was taken back to the shock I experienced as a second-year teacher reading the responses my class had provided. A few were easily predictable:

  • “Christians believe in Jesus.”
  • “Christians believe in Jesus as the savior.”
  • “Christians believe that Jesus died for our sins.”
  • “Christians believe that baptism washes away sins.”
  • “Christians believe you need to ask Jesus into your heart to go to heaven.”

But those accounted for such a small percentage of student responses. When asked “What do Christians believe?” almost every student in the class included at least two of the following on his/her list:

  • “Christians believe gay people are going to hell.”
  • “Christians believe gay people are sinners.”
  • “Christians believe gay people are pedophiles and shouldn’t be priests.”
  • “Christians believe that if you’re gay, you can’t have sex.”
  • “Christians believe that you have to choose to be straight if you love God.”
  • “Christians believe abortion is a sin.”
  • “Christians believe abortion is murder.”
  • “Christians believe in protecting unborn babies.”
  • “Christians believe you have to be pro-life.”
  • “Christians believe you have to vote pro-life.”

Most students who listed two or more of the above had written perhaps one other statement of belief on their index cards. One responded, “I know Christians don’t like gay people or women, but that’s all I ever learned in Christian school. I don’t know what else to list.” Another produced only four items on her card, indicating that Christians believe in Jesus as savior, gay people as sinners, abortion as murder, and Genesis 1 as a literal account of a six-day creation. A significant number also included statements defining Christian beliefs against certain actions, groups of people, or other kinds of beliefs:

  • “Christians don’t believe other religions are true.”
  • “Christians don’t believe you can be gay.”
  • “Christians don’t believe it’s okay if you kill your baby.”
  • “Christians don’t believe in Muhammad.”
  • “Christians don’t believe in terrorism.”
  • “Christians don’t believe in committing sin.”

I remember taking these cards home after class that day and puzzling over them. Had my students just blown off the assignment? Or were they really unable to think of any other theological issues as core tenets of the Christian faith? At the beginning of the next class session, I initiated a discussion about the responses. I asked everyone to work together in small groups and describe in detail their thought processes during the index card assignment. As I drifted from group to group listening to the conversations, what I heard surprised and saddened me. I heard stories of students who were taught to say a few words for the unborn every night at bedtime prayers but had no idea how to describe the Holy Spirit, students whose high school religion courses had covered morality backwards and forwards but had never touched on Scripture or Church history, students who had attended Catholic school since kindergarten but had no idea that Jesus was God until they had read the first chapter of our course textbook, and students who were becoming (or had already become) so disenchanted with the shallow messages they were receiving at church that they were considering leaving Christianity entirely. It became clear that my students hadn’t blown off the assignment at all. In fact, they had taken it very seriously, and many had articulated carefully all the tenets of Christianity they had ever known.

I handed each group a copy of the Nicene Creed and explained that for the rest of the semester, all our readings would center on theological exploration of different parts of that statement of faith. I asked groups to spend a few minutes looking through the Creed and jotting down some questions they had about what they read. It didn’t take me long to see how eager most of the class was to learn. They posed some excellent questions: What does it mean to say that Jesus is one in being with the Father? What does that weird “light from light” phrase mean, anyway? Why do Protestant churches that use the Creed recite the part about belonging to one holy, catholic, and apostolic church? I remember hearing one young woman say to her peers, “I’ve recited this every Sunday of my life, but never really stopped to think about what it means.”

As it turned out, we had a wonderful semester. Truly this was one of the best groups of students I’ve taught in my career so far. And even though one young man informed me crassly that the best part of the whole term was the day I mentioned that nude baptisms were performed in the early Church, I’m hopeful that most students left the course at least somewhat more knowledgeable about basic Christianity than they had been previously. What saddens me is the reality that a group of young Christians in their late teens and early twenties—most of whom had been Christians their entire lives—were in need of such a basic introduction to their own religion. I see this need emerging again and again in my theology courses, but I’m less surprised by it now after having gained a few years of teaching experience.

The fact that such a reality is possible in a classroom filled with students raised in the Church makes me gravely worried for the future of Christianity. It becomes clearer to me every semester that we as a Church have misplaced our priorities. And it’s not always the students from conservative backgrounds who exhibit this lack of basic Christian education. With some regularity, I encounter students who identify as liberal Christians but know only about Christian principles of social justice and little to nothing about the theology that undergirds those principles. If you look at how Christian leaders are portrayed in the public eye, it never has anything to do with affirmations of the Trinity, the power of the sacraments, or the hope of resurrection. More often than not, Christian leaders that most people see publically (especially in the media) are combatting behaviors and social norms perceived to be contrary to the Christian faith. It seems that anyone can create a list of items that Christians are against: gay marriage, abortion, war, capitalism, poverty, etc. It’s no wonder these are the first sorts of things that come to mind for a lot of young people when they try and list core tenets of the Christian faith. It’s regrettable that Christianity is becoming more defined by boundaries of the culture war than by the good news of Christ. We lose people because we lose the opportunity to invite them to follow Christ as one of his disciples.

As a student of church history, I’m all too aware of the fights people have fought with a desire to keep Christ at the center of the Church. But as issues like homosexuality, abortion, and freedom of religion become the defining issues of American (small-o) orthodoxy, I have to wonder if we’ve placed the culture wars at the center. Every day at work, I see the consequences of these religious battles as I look into the faces of the next generation. I can’t help but sound off from my corner of the universe, entreating all Christian leaders of every tradition to return their focus to Christ. Surely, the attractive pull of the Gospel has the power to guide us all into the fullness of life in Christ… while also having the power to bring the next generation along with us.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.