second verse, same as the first
This morning I went to a different church than usual. I went with Jane, a woman who I’ve know for since I was five and she was seven. Now we’re in our twenties and she’s a nurse and I’m an independent music magazine editor and she is a committed Christian and I am… getting there. Anyway, we both attend the church in which we grew up, but it turns out that Jane has also been attending an additional church. I can’t fathom having enough energy or being enough of an extrovert to go to two services at two different churches, but I suppose Jane likes to make up for lost time since she has to miss quite a lot of Sundays due to the unforgiving schedule of a health-care worker.
She’s been going to a hip new church that’s not called a church at all but rather “Soul Sanctuary.” Very popular with our age-group, apparently. A few twenty-somethings had left our church for this one, Jane said. Our church is thriving — lots of kids, lots of teenagers, lots of 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s but very few 20s. Jane feels this quite acutely, being the oldest of the twenty-somethings who go to our church. And there are quite a few of us — we have a college & career small group that draws 10-15 — but not quite enough for Jane. She’s very social. I guess misanthropic introverts like me don’t notice it as much.
So we went to Soul Sanctuary and it was very nice. Chairs were wide and padded, lighting was comfortably low, worship band (boys on guitars and drums, girls on vocal and keyboard, band leader male) was quite good. After the singing time they take a break for coffee, tea, and pastries, and then go back to the seats for the sermon, which, somewhat counterintuitively, is about an hour long. But you don’t notice the length when your bum is comfortable and you have a cup of tea in your hand. And I have to admit, I’ve always wanted to go to a church where I could consume a hot beverage during the service.
However, I quickly realized that I won’t be leaving my current and long-time church for this one. Soul Sanctuary is very nice, but the differences between it and mine are purely cosmetic, aesthetic. When I was a teenager, this would have wowed me and I would have been all, “Soul Sanctuary is the best EVER!” But they’re just practicing the same kind of androcentric evangelicalism that I grew up with. The metaphors are all the same, the discourse is the same, essentially.
The sermon, preached by a man wearing one of those headset microphones that clips on your ear and sits over your cheek like they wear in musical theatre productions, was good enough. The pastor was preaching in relation to advent and exploring the incarnation of God in Jesus, whose birth we are preparing to celebrate by maxing out our credit cards. He preached from the book of John, and described how that book reaches out to the Greeks, explaning the arrival of God on earth in terms they could understand, using the philosophical concept of logos as a basis. The Greeks, unlike the Jews, were not expecting a Messiah and therefore needed birth of Jesus explained to them in terms that would resonate with their own culture and way of thinking.
In other words, the Jewish metaphors for God didn’t work for the Greeks and so early Christianity provided metaphors that did. And now, two thousand years later, we’re still using the same metaphors. God the Father/Son/Holy Spirit, God as Lord, God as Father. Prince of Peace.
I’ve been reading Gail Ramshaw’s Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian and am finally starting to create a feminist Christian spirituality of my own. I left the church and Christianity over two main issues: the way Christian texts are exclusive and even hostile to women, and eschatological confusion (the latter is a topic for another day).
I thought it was ironic that this man — a good guy, I’m sure, but very much in the mold of pretty much every other white male pastor I’ve known — was preaching about the inadequacy of certain metaphors to some communities and the value in the new metaphors in a church built around those same old metaphors. Like Gail Ramshaw, I don’t want to throw out the old metaphors entirely. I just want some new ones.
And I don’t want to be too harsh on Soul Sanctuary, because it’s obviously working for a lot of people and I’m sure all the people involved are genuine and loving and all that. And I shouldn’t judge a church on one visit. But these were the conclusions I drew today, based on the stuff that’s been rolling around in my brain of late.