Church search: United church and liberal Christianity

Part of my "Church search" series...

One Sunday, we decided to visit a United Church. (The United Church is a Canadian denomination formed in 1925 by a merger between a few denominations including the Methodist Church and most of Canada's Presbyterian Church. I don't think there's an exact equivalent in other countries, although I'm sure there are similar churches. It's one of the largest and most liberal Protestant denominations in Canada.)

Visiting that church was my idea. We both come from the more conservative / evangelical side of Christianity (conservative in beliefs, not necessarily in worship style), and I wanted to understand and experience the liberal side of Christianity more. I consider myself somewhere between conservative and liberal. In my experience, conservative Christians are quick to dismiss liberal Christians as "not real Christians." I don't want to be quick to do that, so I wanted to see what these churches are like. I had been to United Churches before (for cousins' baptisms and that sort of thing), but not for years.

I'm not sure if Cathy was all that interested, but she came along. We walked in the church and found that some singing had already started, and I don't think we were late. Almost everyone there looked like they were over 60 years old. The minister might have been one of the youngest people there, probably in her 50s. But the place was packed. People say the United Church is in decline, but this church seems strong for now. However, with its demographics, it certainly will be in decline in the next decade or two unless something changes.

Cathy asked if I wanted to stay. I was hesitant, but I wanted to see what the actual service would be like.

The service that day had a theme of friendship, related to one of the lectionary readings that day, from the book of Ruth. Through the songs and sermon, I don't think I ever heard of Jesus referred to as anything more than a supreme example of friendship. It left me wondering, do they believe that Jesus was the son of God? Do they believe that in some sense Jesus has redeemed us and overcome death? (There are varying ideas among Christians on how Jesus redeems us and I don't want to be too picky about how they understand it, but I have a problem with throwing out the idea of redemption entirely.)

I realize there are people who call themselves Christians, and even some priests / ministers / pastors, who don't believe in God at all. Today I'm not interested in getting into a debate about whether they should be considered Christians or not. My point is that these people still find meaning in Christian practices and worship, even if they believe there's nothing supernatural behind it. While I don't want to disrespect what they find meaningful, personally I don't find much meaning in religious practice without some sort of belief behind it. I'm not talking about complete certainty--God knows I don't have complete certainty myself. This gets into what I mentioned in my previous post about the Anglican Church, rising above doubt.

I appreciate worship that gives me a sense of something greater than myself, greater than the people around me, greater than any human institution. Hearing reflections on friendship with some mentions of Jesus thrown in doesn't do that for me. As I said in that Anglican Church post, I can appreciate a church that can understand and appreciate doubt. That said, doubt can't be the last word. In what the church says and does, it needs to lift us up toward something greater, not sit at the lowest common denominator. This may not be easy to do, but in my experience, liturgical and evangelical churches tend do this better than mainline non-liturgical churches such as the United Church (and yes, my mainline experience is pretty limited). Evangelical churches on the other hand can be less understanding of doubt.

Maybe we visited that church on an off day. Maybe a lot of other United Churches are better at rising above doubt (and maybe have more varied demographics too). Maybe I just haven't been exposed to this form of faith enough to see the beauty in it. But I don't see myself practicing my faith in this way. We haven't been to a United Church again and have no plans to go again. I'd still like to understand liberal Christianity better, and I'm not sure where to look.

One more experience I'd like to share, this one from an Anglican Church:

The Anglican Church tends to vary between liberal and conservative beliefs, but it is one of the churches that many evangelicals would consider overly liberal, kind of like the United Church. A while back, the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton passed some sort of motion about wanting to bless same-sex civil marriages, although without considering them church marriages. That motion probably needed approval at the national level before it would have any effect on their practices, but still, most conservative Christians would consider the blessing of same-sex unions to be a bad thing. (I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this issue. Politically I'm in favour of allowing same-sex marriage, but in the church I'm not sure what should be done given differing interpretations of the Bible.)

The Sunday after this motion passed, I happened to visit an Anglican church. The priest talked about it, didn't really give his opinion, but he acknowledged it has been a contentious issue in the church for a number of years. But what stuck out to me is this: he said the recent decision was made with grace. And though the liturgy of that service, I always had a sense that this church honours Jesus as savior, redeemer, and Lord. Maybe they are overly liberal, I'm not sure, but they still give me a sense of a living faith in a real God.

I'm Christian, unless you're gay--an article

Have a look at this article that a friend posted a link to on Facebook:

I'm Christian, unless you're gay.

Also have a look at the powerful responses that the writer links to at the end of the article.

The odd time that I've written about homosexuality here, I've typically tried to speak out in defense of gay people who are mistreated. But thinking back quite a few years, I did, on occasion, say some things that would've been quite hurtful to gay people. I can picture one occasion, probably in junior high school, when I told someone who'd just said something anti-gay, "I'm homophobic and proud of it." In elementary school, I'd like to think I was a nice and accepting person, but I occasionally joined in making fun of the least popular kids. And based on Facebook, at least one of those people turned out to be gay.

If you heard me say hurtful things like these, I'm sorry. I'd like to think I've treated gays and other mistreated people reasonably well most of the time, but I know there have been exceptions. So once again, I'm sorry. And I want to assure you, if you're gay and you feel like you can't tell most people, if you tell me, you won't lose a friend like that guy in the article did.

Bullying

Last year, I wrote something about the need to fight anti-gay discrimination, even if we believe homosexual activity is morally wrong. If you still think these efforts are unnecessary (or even bad), please read this article:

Teen Commits Suicide Due to Bullying

I know one article probably won't completely change anyone's mind, but I hope it gets you to keep thinking about the issue. This guy didn't identify himself as gay, but a severe lack of tolerance for people who fit gay stereotypes and a severe lack of people sticking up for the guy led to his death.

It got published!

Several days before my last post, I sent a letter to the editor of the Edmonton Journal. It said basically the same thing as what I wrote on the blog, with a few parts left out (like the Stephen Colbert paragraph). Today I found out that letter actually appeared in the Journal on Monday. I'm still waiting for that royalty cheque.

Queer kids

I saw an interesting article in the Edmonton Journal a couple weeks ago about the hardships students face if they are gay. You can read it here (until they delete it from their website; I don't know how long they keep these articles posted).

For at least a few years, I've found myself caring more about what people go through when they find themselves attracted to people of the same sex, so I was glad to see the Journal give a voice to some gay students in this article. Because what I've learned over the years (mainly from reading, because I don't have any out-of-the-closet gay friends that I'm aware of), I do think our school boards need to do more to make sure sexual minorities aren't bullied in schools. This policy should probably include some teaching about homosexuality in schools. Like many Christians, I am concerned that such a policy would discriminate against people who believe homosexual activity is morally wrong, but I still think creating that policy is better than doing nothing.

At the very least, I hope all Christians could agree that kids should not be picked on and bullied for fitting gay stereotypes or for having gay parents. And I hope most of us believe that out-of-the-closet homosexuals still need to be treated with proper respect and dignity. Nikita Rowsell's old guidance counselors need to stop telling people they made a choice to be a target, and start standing up for the people who are hurting. I'd like to encourage other Christians to learn more about the experiences of homosexuals from homosexuals themselves, and support anti-discrimination efforts, with some reservations. I don't think this requires compromising our own morals on sexuality. If we just stand by and let others be persecuted because we're afraid to face some public ridicule ourselves, I don't think we're being very Christ-like. Yes, we probably will need to stand up for ourselves, but let's not let that stop us from standing up for people different from us

And since I don't have any out-of-the-closet gay friends, I'd like to start a search for a new gay friend, much like Stephen Colbert's search for a new black friend. Please leave your applications in the comments. (Just kidding.)

How concerned should I be?

As regular readers and my friends probably know, I am a Christian. You probably also know that the Bible says homosexual activity is wrong. With that in mind...

When Canada introduced gay marriage nationwide a couple years ago, I wasn't thrilled but I wasn't very concerned. On one hand, I don't think every sinful activity needs to be illegal, but on the other hand, this seemed to be giving society's blessing to a sinful activity, not just allowing it. But on the other hand, I just didn't see how gay marriage would harm our society. The Supreme Court said churches couldn't be forced to do gay marriages because that would violate religious freedom, so one of my biggest concerns was allayed.

A couple years later, for the most part I don't see problems in our society stemming from allowing gay marriage. In the legal world it gets kind of tricky though. First there's the issue of forcing marriage commissioners to perform gay weddings (which I already addressed here and here). Then there's the issue of forcing organizations that own buildings to rent out their buildings for gay weddings. I heard about this happening with the Knights of Columbus. But then I searched for an article, and I found out the BC Human Rights Tribunal decided that because Knights of Columbus is a Christian organization, they can refuse to rent out their buildings for gay weddings. They only got in trouble because they cancelled a booking after first accepting it. I have heard that businesses like Bed & Breakfasts can't turn away couples for being gay though. I'm not sure where I stand on that one. I can see that B&B owners would be concerned that they're facilitating sin if they have to rent to gay couples, but then how far should the law go in allowing businesses to discriminate in serving customers?

I think my biggest concern about this issue right now is about freedom of speech. Some people get in trouble for speaking out against homosexuality. I may not fully agree with everything the people mentioned in this article wrote, and I would prefer if they said it in a less inflammatory way. But I'm not a big fan of "hate speech" laws. Don't get me wrong, I think encouraging violence should be illegal and I think any form of hateful speech is deplorable. I just think the line between legitimate criticism of a group and hate speech is too murky. No group should be immune to criticism. I'm not sure exactly where the law should stand on this issue, but I suspect it's going too far now.

Throwing one more link and monkey wrench into this: I have seen arguments that it is okay for Christians to be in committed homosexual relationships. There's a page here that talks about that perspective. I think they make a good argument about Sodom, but I'm not so sure about their arguments about Paul's references. Their interpretation of Romans 1 certainly isn't the most obvious, from my reading. As for the other references to homosexuality in the New Testament, they base their arguments on the original Greek, which I haven't studied. Do any Greek scholars want to comment?