I visited a United Methodist Church this morning. I think that this
will be the church that I will attend regularly. I have been shopping
for churches over the past three weeks, and there are enough churches
within walking distance from me that I can probably shop some more, if I
wanted to do so, maybe for another month or two. But I want to
establish my roots somewhere. I want to know where I will be going each
Sunday morning, as opposed to reinventing the wheel every week (i.e.,
figuring out where a church is and how to get there, going through the
process of deciding if I want to keep going, etc.).
There were many things that I liked about the church that I attended
this morning. The pastor stands at the door and greets people at the
end of the service. The church was relatively small, yet active. It
was small enough that I could learn some of the people’s names, and they
could learn mine. But it is not a dying church, for a group of
teenagers and young adults were confirmed this morning, so that should
put to rest the whole evangelical myth that mainline Protestantism is
dying off. The church focused a lot on God’s love. The worship style
was contemporary. On the one hand, I like traditional hymns because
they have more theological meatiness for me to chew on (and blog
about). On the other hand, I find contemporary praise songs to be
pretty and more conducive to my adoration of the Lord. I do wish that
more people this morning lifted up their hands while singing, but that’s
probably something I’d find more in holy roller evangelical churches,
and their dogmatism turns me off. I may lift my hands in worship next
week, and hope nobody says anything, or thinks that I’m showing off or
trying to draw attention to myself. There are just some praise songs
that make me want to lift up my hands!
My favorite part of the service was when one of the teenagers listed
the questions that he still had about God. This communicated to me that
it was all right, in this church, to commit to faith and to serving
God, while still having doubts and questions. His questions included
whether every word of the Bible is true, the problem of evil and whether
the free will defense actually solves it, and what God thinks about
other religions. I’d like to focus on what he said about the Bible. He
asked if he had to accept every word of the Bible, or if he could pick
and choose, based on what he identified with. He said that he tended to
go with the latter because there are a lot of weird things in the
Bible. The congregation chuckled at that.
Earlier in the service, the pastor was talking about how she asked
the teens to pick the Scriptures to be read that morning, and she wanted
them to find something about God’s unconditional love, since that was
the topic that they chose for the Sunday service. They found Scriptures
about God transforming people, but she asked them to find something
about God loving people where they are, warts and all. The Scriptures
that they found were Isaiah 56, which is about the eunuchs being
accepted by God, and the story in Acts about Phillip baptizing the
Ethiopian eunuch. I was impressed that these teens knew the Bible well
enough to be aware of those passages!
The authority of the Bible has been on my mind occasionally, as of
late. I have been reading Pseudo-Philo, which, as far as I know, no
Christian considers to be inspired Scripture. Yet, I have found it to
be edifying. This morning, I was thinking about its telling of the
Jephthah story, and how Jephthah’s brothers are trying to convince
Jephthah to forgive them for throwing him out due to their envy and to
help deliver Israel from her oppressors. Jephthah replies that it is
difficult for him to forgive—-that he is not God, who can forgive so
easily. I thought about how I admired Jephthah’s honesty and humility
in this case, and yet about how human frailty should not be totally
appeased because it can lead to disaster (envy leading to rejection of
others). I also thought about the tension between God’s mercy and God’s
justice in Pseudo-Philo. Do I feel compelled to accept Pseudo-Philo as
authoritative? No. I disagree with it, even as I try to learn from
it. But am I religiously edified and instructed by it? Yes.
Anyway, I can probably write my way into a pit, and I do not want to
do that right now. I guess that, overall, I rest in God’s love for me,
and, contrary to what some might think after reading my comments above, I
do not have a religion in which I am the boss and I can just do what I
want. I believe that God wants me to love others, that there is a
standard. There is a sense in which people will follow the parts of the
Bible that resonate with them—-that is unavoidable—-and yet I also
think that people should somehow be challenged by Scripture to live
better.
I’ll stop here.