The Us Church

This has been bugging me for a long, long time:

It appears to me that a significant portion of the American church–in the rural south, at least, which is really all I know–is dedicated much more seriously to the preservation and propagation of a specific type of culture than it is to the active worship of a living Savior.

Somehow, I think that this all relates back to the end of slavery, which remains the single most significant event in the life of most Southern Christians, regardless of their race. I think the problem was probably exacerbated, rather than cured, by the civil rights struggle. And I think the problem exists on both sides.

My (admittedly unresearched, only common-sensed and barstool-batted-around) theory is that the desegregation of the public school system (and subsequent integration of colleges / workplaces / social organizations) caused Christians–especially Southern Christians–to begin looking to their church as the primary assigner of their identity. Notice–their church, not their God.

David van Biema wrote an excellent article on this topic for Time Online in January. Focused on Bill Hybels and Willow Creek, the article contains a brutal assertion of the evangelical view of racial difference:

Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions created church climates that unofficially discouraged minority participation. Far from reconciling the races, Emerson concluded, Evangelicalism acted to “drive them apart [and] contribute to the racial fragmentation of American society.”

[That last line from Michael Emerson, author of Divided by Faith, a book influential to Hybels' aggressive approach to evangelical integration.]

And I’m certain the issue extends well beyond race. It also has to do with rural distrust of corporate methods, with small-town distrust of big-city people and ideas, with agricultural distrust of what has rapidly become a service economy. It has to do with an aging population’s fear of the young, and all the things they do differently.

In short, I think that most of what my peers think of as “church” is actually little more than a way to identify, validate, and create more of “our people,” whatever their vision of those people may be.

And I think that may be the greatest criticism that can be leveled at the church: that it has allowed a broken world to appropriate it as a social marker, rather than truly acting as if there were neither Jew nor Greek nor slave nor free inside its doors.

Now…questions, extensions, or criticism?