Monday, February 21, 2011

The Church Needs to Go To Hell

The Church Needs to Go to Hell
            I was listening to the eulogy for a good friend recently. The preacher spoke of our colleague as though he were painting a Rembrandt. He was filling in the fine brush strokes on the wash of our friend’s life canvas when he mentioned a sermon he had once heard him preach. It was curiously titled The Church Needs to Go to Hell. I hardly heard anything else after that for I knew where that idea had carried our colleague. It’s a memory I’ll hold as part of the legacy from a deeply thoughtful and courageous Presbyterian minister.
My departed friend was right. The church needs a trip into hell. I took a college logic course that was required for a major in philosophy. I wasn’t very good at it, but learned enough to know a syllogism when I hear or see one. Here’s the logic: if we are truly disciples who follow a living Christ and say that we believe that Jesus “descended into hell,” then it should hold true that we will follow him there, too. If we give lip service to following the way of the cross then we need to go there and feel that hell, as well.
That’s part of what’s wrong with the church. We practice an “out of sight and out of mind” cultural complicity of letting the real world fade beneath the words of scripture and the sermons we hear. As the benediction still echoes in the sanctuary, we get in our cars and drive our familiar ways back to our usually comfortable Presbyterian homes. If we would only turn off on the side roads along our habitual routes we would see a lot of the “hell” that is always just around the corner from us. We are stuck in our routines though, and not too eager to seek out the hell in our hometowns where men and women huddle winter nights around fires in fifty-gallon drums warming their hands and passing around the strong brew du jour. In awhile they’ll stuff themselves in a cardboard box- if they have one- and cocoon themselves for another homeless night.
We don’t wander through our city’s, or town’s, back alleys even in the full light of noon where the drug deals go down twenty-four seven, and teen gang members are carrying AK47’s bought from an adult at a premium who picked up a dozen at the last gun show.  We don’t personally know the kids in foster care whose moms and dads are doing time for the meth-lab bust that sent both parents away for five to ten in a federal prison. We don’t know the seven immigrants looking for a better way of life who are crammed in a public housing one bedroom apartment.
If we looked we might see those a step up the economic rung living in the double-wide perched on crooked concrete blocks that nearly washed away in the last flood who live with all the mud it left behind until another flood will wash it away. We can’t believe that in our county two-thirds of the children are on the government school meal program and that some won’t have a decent meal over the weekends, or if there’s another snow day- well. . .We mistrust the facts. Just more of the “liberal” press trying to sell us a bill of goods about why we need more government and not less.
Or maybe we aren’t even facing the reality of the hell two pews in front of us and the woman who deeply sighed during the lyrics of How Great Thou Art wondering if the words are really true when her life is falling to pieces around her. Marriages gone to hell. Jobs lost. Half empty expensive homes that have never been furnished sitting with banks breathing down the owners’ necks and the sheriff’s car in the driveway serving a foreclosure notice. We dismiss the tears with curiosity thinking that maybe the hymn, perhaps the sermon, or one of the prayers touched her. Maybe all of these did. Maybe the preacher reached one of the four women who were sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen- or maybe it was one of the men who was wounded in the same way and carries the same burden of silent shame.
Anton Boisen, whom some credit as the “father of pastoral counseling,” once said that in order for a pastor to care for those who are wounded he or she has to descend into hell with them. Throwing a rope down the hole of their despair is not enough. The one who cares has to go down into the same abyss in order to lift the hopeless into the light of hope.
Maybe if the church would go to hell just for once it might find its true calling. Sure it scares the hell out of me to even write about it because I’m also part of the church. But maybe if the church is to find its true identity it needs to go to hell.

Phil Leftwich
Honorably Retired


2 comments:

  1. Phil, There are some of us who would be good at helping the Church on its journey. I for instance, would make a good devil, after all I have been a practicing ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church for almost a half century, and during that time if I have not learned that, then I have learned very little.

    First of all, if I were the devil, I would begin by splitting the faithful in three groups, 15% on one side, 10% on the other pole and 75% in the middle with no agenda except to react.

    I would work to destroy trust between people and their pastors, churches and their judicatories, judicatories and their denomination. And, I would have fun doing it.

    I would create great chasms between tradition and contemporary expression, rendering such change as denominational confessions irrelevant and outmoded, encouraging everyone to decide for themselves the truth of the gospel.

    I would enrich dissenters with the resources to find fault with as much as possible and disseminate that in a one sided manner to as many people as possible, disallowing any support for finding solutions that contribute to peace and unity.

    I would make sure that denominational leaders are convinced that they have all the right answers and those who work in churches need to fall in line.

    I would seek to find ways for the community called Presbyterian to destroy its connections and thereby destroy itself.

    I would make it popular to consider success in the church to be mostly in terms of growth in numbers and deemphasize the need for spiritual growth. But, at the same time, I would create a strong mistrust for the leadership of large churches.

    I would make sure that churches take care of themselves and not waste their valuable resources building new churches or supporting weaker brothers and sisters who should be taking care of themselves and at the same time, I would make it an unforgivable sin to ever close a church no matter how ineffective it is.

    I would seek out those thirsty for power hungry for control and place them in positions of influence among those most vulnerable to manipulation.

    I would see to it that the main thing would never become the main thing but that the focus of the church would always be scattered in many directions, especially in more secular directions and that the vision of the church would always be distorted by current fads.

    I would divide and conquer the Presbyterian Church… if I am elected Devil.

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  2. You Devil, you! Isn't that about what we're doing? It never crossed my mind to blame you.

    Phil

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