Or, when we miss the entire point of church
Tim Borys
It seems to me that over the course of a church-going life there are two directions our love tends to grow. And I should admit that I hate it when people say “there are two kinds of such and such,” because we all know there are way more than two kinds of most things. But bear with me.
I’m not talking about people who love others versus people who don’t. That would be both unfair and untrue. I’m talking about where our love becomes most deeply rooted and where it expands over time. For some, it becomes increasingly concentrated in the church, as in love for the fellowship, the Ministry, the people, the shared history, the whole comfy familiar thing. For others, it becomes increasingly expansive, reaching further and further beyond the church toward people in general, including people whose lives, beliefs, and experiences are very different from ours.
And again, to be fair, yes, sometimes it’s both. But I think it’s also fair to admit that one tends to become dominant. At least it did in my former church. And I don’t assume that’s true of every church. In fact, I suspect there are churches where these two loves coexist quite beautifully, where loving the church actually keeps expanding your love for people outside it. Maybe that’s what church is supposed to do. And a good way to figure out which one is dominant is to watch what happens when those loves collide. Although “loves colliding” is already a bit of a paradox if you think about it.
When love becomes increasingly concentrated on the church, something interesting can happen. It becomes more than simply loving the individual people in it. The whole thing — the fellowship, the Ministry, the conventions, the shared history — becomes a package we love in itself. And all of it can get so intertwined that devotion to God and devotion to the church become hard to differentiate. Yes, the people still matter, of course, but the institution itself has become something precious, something we feel compelled to protect and cherish.
When love grows in the other direction, becoming increasingly expansive towards other humans, it gets exercised and nurtured in a fantastically rich and varied way. As we read the text and experience life more expansively, “neighbour” comes to mean not just the person in our tribe, but also the person whose life intersects with ours, even if briefly. That love grows broader, wider and deeper, in almost every category.
I loved my “convention friends.” I really did. But let’s not kid ourselves, many of those were narrow relationships, and dare I say, sometimes fairly shallow ones. We loved each other inside a pretty small shared world. Same meetings. Same conventions. Same Workers. Same language. Same understanding of knowing the secret. There is something really warm and fuzzy about that kind of belonging, but there is also something relatively easy about loving people who inhabit almost exactly the same world we do. In fact, Jesus talks about that.
But inevitably, in most cases our world gets bigger as we age. You meet people who believe differently. People from different religions. People who have been rejected by religion. People who don’t even think about religion anymore. People who are religious in ways you weren’t even aware of. Gay people. Divorced people. People whose lives don’t fit neatly inside the categories we maintained. And some of them are extraordinarily kind, generous, compassionate humans. In some instances they even become your friends. They become neighbours. And somewhere along the way, “love your neighbour” stops being a cliché or a Bible study topic and becomes something in real life.
Jesus did this constantly. He hammered this point about not letting devotion to the things of religion become an excuse for failing to love the human standing right in front of you. His story of the “neighbour” makes the despised Samaritan the one who actually behaves like one. So-called purity gives way to touching what was thought untouchable. Sabbath gets brought back to serving humans, rather than enforcing restrictive boundaries. Sacrifice gets subordinated to mercy. Again and again, the person gets priority over the religious stuff.
And once you begin seeing people that way, you start seeing persecution, oppression, marginalization and downright cruelty toward other humans in some places really close to home. And maybe the most confusing and upsetting part is that you see it done in the name of devout “service,” or more generally, in the name of religion.
That doesn’t mean those things (persecution, abuse, exclusion) don’t trouble people who also deeply love the church. Of course they do. I don’t believe for a second that when devoted church members hear about a Minister they’ve known their whole life sexually abusing a little girl they’ve known their whole life, that it doesn’t rip their heart. I don’t think most people take pleasure when somebody who doesn’t fit the mould is told not to come to meeting, or told to shut up if they do come, or effectively told that the Jesus story doesn’t work for somebody like them. I believe those things cut deeply for almost everyone. But that’s when something happens. That’s when this seemingly paradoxical thing of “love colliding” happens.
I can’t measure anybody else’s love or see inside somebody else’s heart. But I can watch what happens when competing loves come into conflict. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see what gets protected, who gets believed, whose pain gets absorbed, who’s asked to be quiet, and who becomes expendable. And probably most revealing of all, it becomes pretty obvious what, or who, is considered too sacred to question. Or, to use church vernacular, people’s “first love” becomes evident.
That’s when it all gets a bit messy and sad. Because regardless of what you may think about the church, for the ones devoted to it, there’s another sort of grief that sets in. What is happening to the church? What will happen to our fellowship? Why are so many people leaving? What about the Ministry? What about our conventions? What about all the years I put into this? That’s real stuff, real grief.
But grief often reveals a lot. And in matters of love and devotion, maybe grief reveals something about the hierarchy of our loves. When people who have developed a broad love for others discover there’s something in the water in the church, something that subordinates love for others if that love threatens the institution, they usually start questioning things. And eventually they may prioritize love for actual people over love for the institution. Which, when you think about it, looks an awful lot like what Jesus kept doing. And ultimately, this may result in people leaving the church rather than constricting the love for others that has grown in them.
This, of course, deeply saddens the people whose deepest love and loyalty remain with the church. And this is where I think we sometimes misunderstand each other completely. From inside the church, the story can look like people losing their way, losing their faith, losing their vision, getting distracted by “the world,” and ultimately walking away from God. But maybe, at least some of the time, something almost exactly opposite is happening.
The church gave us a book that talks incessantly about love. It gave us stories about Jesus crossing boundaries, touching people he wasn’t supposed to touch, eating with people he wasn’t supposed to eat with, defending people his own religion had pushed aside, and redefining “neighbour” by making the outsider the hero of that story. But somewhere along the way, even with that book and those stories, the church also taught that the church had to come first, even to the point of becoming the very thing, the very way, we’re supposed to serve and love. In other words, love God by loving the church. Love God by loving your brother and sister as long as your brother and sister are both in the church.
But the irony in all this is that a lot of people kept reading the book. And maybe more important than reading the book, they didn’t take painkillers when they saw people marginalized and oppressed and abused. They didn’t numb it out with some weird “God’s ways are not our ways” thing. No, they felt it all and saw it all. They kept widening the idea of “neighbour.” They kept noticing who Jesus ate with, and they went and found another leaf for the table. They saw who Jesus touched, defended, and welcomed. They met new people outside the church and discovered goodness there, and they saw suffering in places they hadn’t noticed it before. Their world got bigger, their hearts got bigger, they got more neighbours, their love grew. Until eventually, the very love they thought it was all about became bigger than the church itself. So big that it didn’t even fit in the church anymore.
And to be clear, a lot of those people remain in the church too. It’s a process, after all. Maybe that’s where it gets really tricky. Like, what happens when the love we learned about while inside the church grows so broad that it starts pushing against the walls of the church itself? What happens when loving the people Jesus keeps putting in front of us begins to conflict with protecting the religious system that taught us about Jesus in the first place?
Maybe in a healthy church it doesn’t. Or at least, when the two do collide, maybe a healthy church knows which one is more important.
Something’s gotta give.
Love WILL win in the end. Wait . . . I think it already has. At least that’s what the book says.
Connected & Concerned Friends: https://connected-and-concerned-friends.mn.co/posts/when-loves-collide