I'm working on expressing something difficult. I've participated with glee in every contemporary form of worship from returning to Latin mass and being a professional cantor for Roman Catholic churches to praise choruses, social justice demonstrations at General Conference, and liturgical dance. Lisa and I just walked out of First United Methodist Church Medford's Christmas Eve gathering.
I went there last with my mother, Paula Craig, in 2006. The service was not earth shattering but it was warm and worshipful, candlelit, and a reminder of the light that comes even to the unremarkable, like us. Since then, in the name of being "a church for people who have given up on church", they have given up on church. The black-suited pastor with the rock star mic in his ear greets everyone, and the atmosphere is convivial, but they have installed a coffee bar where an altar used to be. Their half page glossy brochure that has taken the place of an order of service makes its first priority to draw your attention to "the coffee shop that is on the stage", and let you know of the opportunity to get your fix "during the service at our marsh-mallow break" that is the howdy session where a Passing of the Peace might once have been.
They promise that in this church you don't "have to check your brain at the door", but they have lobotomized everything within reach. Without so much as an opening prayer or invocation, All were directed to rise only to face a video screen for a canned, brief Message of Hope (?) from a slick production company who hired an African-American voice-over actor to deliver a folksy message but dared not show his person, or any other person for that matter. We sat to read and sing carol lyrics off the screen, a large bell choir rang pop arrangements of two familiar songs and, by the marsh-mellow break, we were ready to flee. We asked each other if we might ought to stay for the sermon, assuming their might be one, either out of loyalty or morbid fascination, but the allure had worn off before the questions were fully uttered.
Into the much more numinous night we went, full of disbelief, rather than the reverse, and disappointment. No sense of the special clung to this informal hob-nob, no honor for or adoration of deity, whatever that might mean to anybody, and almost no sense of participating in a religious ceremony at all existed to suggest a connection with mystery or hope in the midst of darkness. Even writing this necessary critical cry in the wilderness seems dry, dead, and unsatisfying because giving up on church leaves no sacred space for holding suffering. Does The Church, in all its mysterious experiments, in the midst of a next reformation, have no use for depth anymore now that The Screen replaces The Cross? Must all need for worship be given up in the hope that folks starving for the comfort of Love in their life will bring their tithes in exchange for a shallow, grab-and-go, cheerful, hang-out? God Become Flesh is not a marsh-mellow. Woe.
http://www.examiner.com/article/people-who-have-given-up-on-church?cid=db_articles
--Brandon WilliamsCraig.....2012-12-25 08:41:24 +0000