United We Fall

The United Church is making news over the last few days, because they are holding their General Council. The big news is that delegates are entertaining resolutions against the Northern Gateway Pipeline and affirming a boycott of Israeli goods.

Yes, this is a church.

Oddly, they seem to be getting the most flak in the mainstream media for the move that is most germane to their nature as a church: passing a resolution against gossip. Aka, as good Catholics know, the sin of calumny. Apparently, an interest in actual morals is out of fashion.

They are also adding officially a new statement of doctrine, the “Song of Faith,” poetic in a way only a committee could accomplish. The point, it seems, is simply to be as vague as possible. Something good poetry, of course, never is.

How about their position on Scripture? Just try to work it out from the relevant passage:

Scripture is our song for the journey, the living word

passed on from generation to generation

to guide and inspire,

that we might wrestle a holy revelation for our time and place

from the human experiences

and cultural assumptions of another era.

God calls us to be doers of the word and not hearers only.




The Spirit breathes revelatory power into scripture,

bestowing upon it a unique and normative place

in the life of the community.

The Spirit judges us critically when we abuse scripture

by interpreting it narrow-mindedly,

using it as a tool of oppression, exclusion, or hatred.

They do work in some politics:

We are all touched by this brokenness:

the rise of selfish individualism

that erodes human solidarity;

the concentration of wealth and power

without regard for the needs of all;

the toxins of religious and ethnic bigotry;

the degradation of the blessedness of human bodies

and human passions through sexual exploitation;

the delusion of unchecked progress and limitless growth

that threatens our home, the earth;

the covert despair that lulls many into numb complicity

with empires and systems of domination.

We sing lament and repentance...

Apparently, it is important in the United Church to have the right politics, but your opinions on matters of religion are pretty much up to you.

In the meantime, one further story getting a little attention is the decline in United Church membership. Its high-water mark was 1965, with a million members (note that not all “adherents,” i.e., folks who consider themselves United Church, are “members”). It is now only half that, and the average age of members is 65. In other words, no new members are coming in; it is just a matter of time until all the current members die off.

This seems a natural consequence of the path the church has taken. If your interest is religion, why join a religion that has no interest in it? If, on the other hand, your interest is politics, why join a church instead of a political party?

I fear this path in turn is a natural consequence of a “bottom-up” church membership structure. The average person is not all that religious, and not all that moral. If you make the average person the arbiter of your church, you have nowhere to go.

This seems to be a recurring problem for Protestantism. The fires burn bright, the spirit speaks clearly, for a generation or so. Then the decline is swift, and the spirit moves on.

In these cases, politics becomes the obvious substitute for religion, because it offers a cheap moral justification. Having the right politics is painless. And it "proves" you are "moral," one of the chosen; you can then feel righteous while going about doing what you damn please.