Everything Methodists Know About War They Learned in Kindergarten

METHODIST MINISTER Donald Sensing takes his Council of Bishops out to the woodshed at: One Hand Clapping

The United Methodist Council of Bishops passed a resolution (that speaks only for the council) which states in part that it deplores,

... the cycle of violence in which the United States is engaged has created a context for the denigration of human dignity ...

News flash 1: all war denigrates human dignity. News flash 2: This is not a "cycle of violence." It is warfare, which is quite another thing.

The implication seems to be that if only the United States would stop killing terrorists, they would stop killing us. This war, so the council implies, is really just a tit-for-tat exercise with no rationale. Peace will bloom automatically if we simply step outside the so-called "cycle of violence."

This is literally kindergarten-level thinking. "Just stop it!" is how parents and teachers deal with little kids because their disputes are inconsequential, done for inconsequential reasons. It really doesn't matter whether Billy or Bobby had the ball first, so demanding that they stop slapping one another over it is reasonable.

But is that where the thinking level of UMC's Council of Bishops is stuck, at kindergarten? Do they really mean to imply - and imply they certainly do - that we are fighting this war over inconsequential reasons, and therefore we should just stop it?

In a time when the membership of traditional Christian churches is falling, and we see many more pews empty than full, one of the root causes of this is the compulsion of church leaders to appease rather than guide and confirm. Where a strong cup of coffee is indicated, they persist in serving weak tea.

As I have noted before, I am one of those souls who is a "Christian-in-Crisis-Only." Whenever I do attend an Episcopal church I am always struck by the persistant light turnout. It was once the case that you could see an Episcopal church full on at least two occassions, Christmas and Easter, but in recent years even these services result in churches far from full. Still we are told that this country is, in Christian terms, the most religious nation in the western world. With all the compromise and equivocation and yearning for inclusiveness we have seen in our traditional faiths over the decade, you would think the churches of our traditional religions would be full to the rafters instead of empty down to the basement. As they say, "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on."

Last year, just to see what it was like, I attended a service at The Crystal Cathedral in Anaheim. You've likely seen this congregation in the cable show 'Hour of Power,' if only to deride the show-business aspects of it. It is different in person. What I saw was impressive and eye-opening. This was a vast cathedral structure and it was packed to seams with dedicated worshipers as well as, I imagine, not a few of the curious such as myself.

But while the structure of the Crystal Cathedral is fascinating I didn't get the sense that it was architecture that filled the hundreds and hundreds of seats several times on every Sunday, but the gospel being preached and the moral certainty of that gospel.

Still, it is not the size or the show that fills or empties a church, it is the meaning within the message. A few years ago, my wife and I, somewhat on a lark, attended a small Christian church in an obscure town deep in the Florida Keys. This was a humble structure -- stucco, one-story, dirt parking lot, the stained-glass windows made not in some far away studio, but crafted by the members of the church. Unlike the major churches in New York City where I lived at the time, this church was full. And when a church is full, the spirit is full.

Whatever else a church may be, it is not a place that people who are serious in their spiritual quest go for luke-warm platitudes and sermons that amount to little more than acceptable moral relativism with a few footnotes from the scriptures.** A church, great or humble, is not a place to serve small fires and milk to the human soul, but a place we repair to make a guided searching inventory of the contents of our souls and the actions of our lives. It is a place where we seek to examine the foundations of those core beliefs that support our works and days. If we arrive at such a place in the expectation of clarity and vision, and find instead only vague platitudes and a road map to nowhere, the spiritually serious will soon search elsewhere.

Sadly, the road map to nowhere is all too frequently the guide used by our more traditional faiths in the last few decades. The withered fruit of teachings that seek to appease rather than instruct is seen in dwindling congregations across the land. Teachngs that seek to please all, please in the end, only those that demand such equivocation. And the irony is that the very factions who work to reduce doctrine to pablum will leave when the faith is finally rendered impotent and harmless. Their work will be done and they will move on to water down the certainties of another faith with demands that the next church become so inclusive that by including all it stands for nothing at all.

This creeping Unitarianism is not found only within the Methodists but across the entire spectrum of traditional Protestant faiths. In seeking to "modernize," to make their message acceptable to all those who claim to be "stakeholders" in the faith, the leaders of those faiths have crafted a message, epitomized in Rev. Sensing's report, that is such thin broth it satisfies few and leaves the rest hungry. Those that are hungry will always seek food. If it is not found close at hand, they will move far away.

A common plaint among the leaders of the dominant Protestant churches in America is that their faiths are dying while Fundamentalist faiths are growing. Fundamentalist Christianity in turn is seen by many within both the liberal religious and political establishment as the leading danger to our Republic. They see it as a threat to their program to reduce religion in the United States to nothing more than a hymn and a handout. But Fundamentalism is not a question for the traditional faiths, it is instead an answer to the the question the faiths have asked their own adherants: "Do you believe as we believe?" More and more among Americans, the answer to those traditional faiths has been, "Just what is it that you do believe?"

It is obvious that religious fundamentalism is a clear and present danger to the American way of life, I would observe that it is not fundamentalism of the Christian variety. What Fundamentalist Christianity does threaten, however, is the rice bowl of the UMC and the UCC and others of their equivocating ilk. Perhaps in their search for the reason why their faiths are fading, these church leaders might finally look to what they say and what they do as explanation enough. It may well be that a faith that weakens its beliefs in order to achieve universal inclusiveness is a faith not worth holding.

A phrase we have heard many times in the last few weeks concerning the behavior of Muslims in Iraq and other countries in the Mid-East is "Weak horse, strong horse." It means that people will, given the alternative, choose a faith, a politics, or a leadership based on their innate perception of its strengths. Weakness has no attraction. Since the power of faith comes from the strength of belief, those who would lead others towards faith today need a system of belief whose roots strike deep into the rock on which Peter stood rather than one that builds in the sandbox of Kindergarten. Many things have been forgotten by those who would find or keep a faith, but one thing is still known: You build on rock and not on sand.

Of course, that's just my opinion. God knows I could be wrong.

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** Note: I do not mean to tar all Methodists with the brush of the UMC. Many in the faith do not indulge in tea-party services and sermons to no point. Exhibit A may be found in Rev. Sensing's own sermons which are found at Sermons at Trinity .

Posted by Vanderleun at May 15, 2004 9:27 AM