Committed Critic

This is my fourth post (of five) in a series on division within the church––not between denominations, but between different generations and different preferences for how to do church. (Also see parts one, two, and three.)

Ultimately, I believe that our division of the Body into segregated generational groups constitutes a refusal to learn to love another and a refusal to be the Body of Christ in its full sense. The body imagery in Paul’s letters (Rom 12, 1Cor 12, Eph 4, Col 3:15) indicates that God has called us into churches where different kinds of people find fellowship with one another. A simple reason that we don’t act on the love we claim to have –– by welcoming those who are different into our lives –– is that it’s really difficult and we don’t know how to make it work.

Love is not positive regard but intentional action. As 1 John 3:18 urges, “let us not love with word or tongue but in deed and truth.” Building inter-generational relationships requires hard work. This can be discouraging, but our recognition of the difficulty of God’s call does not mean we can pretend he hasn’t called us. Our recognition that we do not know how to love as Christ loved us doesn’t mean we can cast aside his command and move on to more realistic tasks. A divide-and-conquer approach to evangelism (see part one) may seem to more effectively accomplish God’s mission for the church, taking the Gospel to the world. But in the process, I fear, we fail to be the church he has called to that mission.

By calling the Church the Body of Christ, God has given us an identity that is grounded in who God is. The church is not an organization of saved people who meet together; it is the Body of Christ on earth. That body is formed not only by each member’s relationship with Christ but also by our relationships with one another, which is why the greatest of all the spiritual gifts (1 Cor 13:13) is not prophecy or speaking in tongues or knowledge, but love.

If the Body is to mean anything, we must love one another with a love that extends to all its parts. Claiming that one body composed only of hands will reach one portion of the population, while another body composed only of ears will reach another, denies our identity. Claiming that all these congregations really are unified in Christ, even though many of them meet separately precisely so that they don’t have to take each other’s viewpoints and preferences into account, is simply dishonest.

At the end of the day, most of us struggle to know how to love one another; to truly love someone based on no common ground but Christ takes a level of maturity in faith that perhaps most of us lack. Furthermore, we cannot be simply willing to love others. Many Christians –– perhaps most –– would claim willingness to form relationships with people of other generations or backgrounds, and yet our churches remain divided. To turn those words into action takes great effort, and that is a key part of our calling.

The Real Call: Love One Another

Clearly, Christ has called us to love one another, but we must discern how to go about the task. It has been said that when Christ told his disciples to love one another, he was not calling them to a benign positive regard. The command, specifically, was for the disciples to show the kind of love for one another that Christ had shown and would show for them, the love of the cross (John 15:12).

When a Christian chooses her church so that she relates easily to the worship service and the preacher and the kind of people who attend there, positive regard is easy, but a part of Christian love falls by the wayside. The problem is not that we can’t love people at a church where the people are just like us; it’s just that typically we don’t have to. When I attend church every week with people who look like me, act like me, think like me, and worship like me, I can get away with effortlessly having positive regard for almost all of them and thinking I know how to love my neighbor.

Jesus said, memorably, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them…But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” (Lk 6:32-35). In other words, love that is easy to give does not mean much on its own.

What reason could there be for us to form churches full of people just like us except that people just like us are easy to love? And what reason could there be for us to seek out people who are easy to love except that we are too frightened or too lazy to learn a deeper love which overcomes differences?

The Obstacle: Self

A recent New York Times best-seller called Quarterlife Crisis describes the struggles of upper-middle-class twenty-somethings trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The authors conducted dozens of interviews and found a generation faced with endless choices and possibilities, looking for direction. One of the people interviewed said, “I just try to do whatever will make me happier, and think of myself first (kind of self-centered, huh?) But if more people did it, they would be happier.”

Many Christians, young and old, shun such an attitude for their daily lives while using that very standard –– their own happiness –– to select a church. Part of the difficulty in loving other people involves letting go of one’s self in order to love an other. In a sense, if I love someone just like me I have done no more than love myself, and in any event I deserve little praise; after all, people like me are those who love me, who pay back what I lend them. Loving a person when he acts just the way I want doesn’t, as it were, count. While all people have something in common –– the image of God, if nothing else –– I really can only love another person to the extent that I can recognize how he is different from me. Real love must overcome differences, and in the context of, say, a worship service, the preferences of teens, young adults, Baby Boomers, and senior citizens certainly differ.

This need to respect the differences of others rather than expecting them to be like oneself is why Paul confronts division in the Philippian church with a call to humility, urging them to consider others better than themselves, to look to the interests of others rather than themselves. Humility, emptying oneself, is the one way to overcome the selfishness that prevents us from loving one another. We are called to be humble the way Christ was so that we can also learn to love the way he did, with the self-sacrificial love of the cross.

This post is building on my previous post, where I suggest that churches that try to attract one particular demographic or generation, to the relative neglect of others, fail to fulfill the biblical call for the church to be the Body of Christ.

Within the enormous Christian subculture in America, we gather into different churches based on common worship preferences, common levels of education, common race, common social classes, and common generations. The Gospel, however, calls believers to a particular kind of commonality: fellowship of the Spirit in Jesus Christ. The flaw with the plant-all-churches-for-all-people approach to ministry (that espoused by Warren and Kimball) is that it waters down God’s call for Christians to be the Body of Christ –– a body which includes all sorts of parts, often from different classes, races, and generations.

This is not to say that Christians should seek diversity at all costs; Spanish-speaking congregations will have limited fellowship with those who speak only English, and patronizing bids for the inclusion of token minorities in white churches or poor families in affluent churches only trivialize what the gospel calls us to do. Furthermore, black and white churches in the United States, for example, have an ongoing legacy of hurtful relations that must be worked through slowly and sensitively. It may yet take decades or longer for such divisions to be overcome. However, intergenerational divisions lack such a daunting legacy, and a failure to overcome them suggests not an insurmountable breach but an unwillingness of churches to accept the implications of the gospel.

The fellowship –– koinonia, “commonality” –– to which God has called us is a sharing of the body and blood of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16). The loaf of which we partake, the baptism we have received, and the Spirit we have been given to drink (1 Cor 12:13) all unite us into the Body of Christ. Therefore the fellowship to which God has called us and which we must pursue is fellowship in the Body of Christ. Paul writes,

God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. (1 Cor 12:24b-26)

Paul insists that the Corinthians who possess prestigious spiritual gifts cannot look down upon or ignore those whose gifts seem less honorable or less important. All parts of the Body are necessary.

Corinth’s divisions focused on prestige; those I’m trying to address here are generational. So in terms relevant to the question at hand, we might say that if young people seem to lack the gifts of maturity and self-control, older members cannot for that reason claim they are not part of the Body. If older people lack the gifts of energetic passion and accepting new ideas, younger members cannot for that reason claim they are not part of the Body. And even if GenXers lack the gift of humbling themselves before the wishes of older generations and accepting as brothers and sisters those who have failed to make the leap to the postmodern mind set, I cannot for that reason claim they are part of the Body.

Obviously, few Christians would officially exclude other age groups, but how effectively do we obey Paul’s command and show “equal concern” for other generations or suffer with them when they suffer? Many young ministers prefer to plant new churches rather than deal with the hang-ups of older generations of Christians. And even in existing congregations, generations often merely tolerate one another, without forming real relationships.

Our efforts maintain a superficial peace, but they fall short of God’s call.