“Churches die that don’t ask “Why.”
Yes? No.
The importance of asking the “Why” question was one of the premises of a denominational workshop I attended recently. Meaning, for congregations to survive and thrive, they need to ask what their most fundamental reason for being was. A reasonable assertion with which I agree, but I believe that it is out of proper sequence.
That question has already been answered for the mainline Protestant churches, in our history, in our creeds, in the lives of our saints (Luther, Calvin, Knox, Bradford, Anne Hutchinson, Mother Ann Lee, John Woolman, Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther King, Jr.). Their answer: we live for Christ.
So we really do not need to ask the “Why” question at this juncture, other than to be reminded of the established answer. Long overdue for consideration is another, equally fundamental question: are the churches private or public institutions?
My answer: we behave like private institutions, but we really should be thinking of ourselves as public institutions. For lack of asking and answering that question, congregations of the mainline have been slipping off the religious maps for fifty years, even though we may have always had the answer to the “Why” question.
But who has ever posed that question to them? Has any church ever encountered such a question? Likely not. The operating assumptions of American Protestant churches grow out of a pietistic history focused on our individual salvations. “Forgive us our sins.” The communion table is an exculpation event to wipe out, blot out (in the Biblical phrase), our sins. As prayed, congregants usually mean My sins. That transaction in the sky between God and Christ takes place for our private benefit. Such is the nature of Protestant piety as our congregations celebrate God’s gift to the people, for the people, of the people.
Do our congregations ever think of ourselves against the backdrop of the cultures around us–political, artistic, natural–other than to oppose them? When we receive communion, or when we approach the communion rail, do we come as a citizen of the body politic? And does a congregation ever conceive of itself as a citizen in the aggregate?
Might the sins we confess before receiving Holy Communion be different ones under that perspective?