The Church of My Youth: Six Points

I was thinking this morning about the church of my youth and the Southern Baptist Sunday School which was the center of it. There was the Six Point Record System, the extensive organization, class officers, weekly Teachers' Meetings, Assemblies, rigorous age grading, separation of men and women, Reports, the Sunday School Report at the following Church Service, etc. Fortunately all that is documented in an online full text of a 1936 book on thesubject. Anybody who grew up Southern Baptist in that era will enjoy looking through this. Or maybe nothing has changed!

And then there was BTU with its Eight Point Record System.

All good disciplinary training if perhaps a bit legalistic and short on spirituality and divine mystery.

Images below are screen shots from the book at the link above referring to the Six Point Record System.

-->

Christian Faith, A Three Legged Stool

A Peter Beinart article in the April 2017 issue of The Atlantic points out a correlation between the increasingly vicious and hateful political climate in the USA and decreasing participation in organized religion. The differences in positions between left and right have always been present, but we seem to be losing respect for each other and, in Beinart's words, "have come to define "us" and "them" in even more primal and irreconcilable ways."

Beinart provides statistics showing that the percentage of US citizens rejecting any religious affiliation increased almost 300% from 1992 to 2014. And even the "percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990." Beinart quotes Geoffrey Layman of Notre Dame: "Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don't really go to church." And, Beinart states, "... liberal non-attenders fueled Bernie Sanders's insurgency against Hillary Clinton.

You can read the article to see why Mr. Beinart believes these religious and political trends are related, but I have a slightly different take on it. It seems to me that if we give up on the idea that we are all the result of the creative activity of a benevolent God who is "gracious, merciful, and abounding in steadfast love," we lose respect for each other and one of the most important bases of our civilization crumbles. And we fight.

What are we to do? Well, one possibility for Christians is to do a much better job of learning and teaching the essentials of the Christian faith. What a mish-mash of Christian theologies we have allowed to develop in the American culture of freedom!

Now, before launching into theological issues, let me make it clear that I am not ordained, am not a preacher, and am not speaking with any authority. What I am describing below is more personal testimony, a description of what I have come to believe, at this point, over a lifetime in Christian churches of various labels and a smattering of Lutheran seminary education about theology and Church history. So here goes:

It seems to me that the Christian faith stands on a three legged stool.

• The first leg is Sacred Scripture, the written expression of "The Word," the Bible Jesus knew and read from and quoted and referred to and to which the writers of the New Testament referred, and the New Testament, written and assembled, by the Church, after, sometimes long after, the ministry of Jesus. The first complete listing of the NT Canon, after all, is from the fourth century AD.
• The second leg is Jesus, The Christ, eternal Anointed One, God in flesh, Immanuel, who came and lived among us and showed us The Way and died, at our hands, for us. 
• The third leg is The Church, The Body of Christ, established by Jesus, and led by the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised, to follow his example and to develop and teach the basic theologies of the faith, the Holy Trinity, and the divinity of Jesus.

The diagram below is an attempt to show how these three legs, Sacred Scripture, Jesus, and The Church, fit together and to present a pretty complete picture of the theology of Christian faith as I currently understand and experience it.

Don't like diagrams? I'l try to explain. I believe that Sacred Scripture is the story of our developing understanding of God, that Jesus was God in flesh, with us for a specific period of time, and that the Church is his legacy, his body, through which we jointly can be in union with The Triune God, and abide in Him. That is pretty much unbelievable, isn't it. It almost sounds ridiculous. Well, I just label it Divine Mystery, subject to our best efforts to explain the unexplainable.

Church is where Christians belong. Church is not a civic club, a social club, a networking organization, or a social service agency. Nor is it a hospice, just taking care of old folks as they die off. It is the Body of Christ, intended to go about doing good just as Jesus, the original Body of Christ did.

Just as Jesus and his followers took up space and attracted attention in the first century, the Church is supposed to take up space and attract attention in the world today. We are to be a community, salt and light and leaven, always going out from the church building and having a positive influence and inviting and drawing people in. That is not evident from what we see? Well, Jesus never promised that the Church would be perfect but only that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it.

If we did a better job with Christian education, maybe we could reduce the mish-mash and focus on these essentials and maybe the Body of Christ would grow and some of the viciousness and hate would moderate.

If these ideas seem strange, Google "church as the body of Christ scripture" for more food for thought. And read John 6 closely for a better understanding of worship, Holy Communion, and unity with Christ. These are not easy or simplistic teachings as evidenced by the response to talk of flesh and blood by some disciples as described in these verses from John 6: 

After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you want to go away as well?" Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God."

Last Two Dollars

I was having trouble understanding the man, but I believe his last words as the police walked up were, “I’m down to my last two dollars.”

One of my favorite workouts is a five mile or so walk in the City of Columbia at a 17 minute per mile pace. It is a good time for thinking as well as exercising. I do it once a week or so, and yesterday was the day. On such a journey, one sees and experiences the city much differently than driving.

I do not stick to busy and crowded Main and Gervais but take the side streets through neighborhoods and by smaller businesses. Lots of lawyer offices, medical offices, non-profits, historical homes, etc. Today I walked south on Pickens, crossed Taylor, and saw something unusual at the bus stop on the southwest corner.

There were two men there, a forty something Black man sitting on the bench, and an elderly Black man, legless, lying flat on the concrete sidewalk on his back beside a wheelchair. I wasn’t easily distracted from my walking and whatever was going through my mind at the time so I just kept moving on.

I assumed the two were together, the younger looking after the older, but I wondered if I should have said something or perhaps asked if he needed help getting the man back in his wheelchair. I thought of the Good Samaritan and began to feel a little guilty for just passing on by. So, a hundred yards or so further along, I stopped and turned to look just as the younger man got up and walked off. Maybe he was going to call for help.

So, at that point, I had to walk back and do a little investigating. I asked the man if he was taking a nap. He said he was trying to. I asked if he was OK. He said yes. I asked if he needed help getting in his chair. He said no. So, I left again. But I still felt there was unfinished business so I went around the block and passed the man again.

On this third pass, I bent down and tried to talk to him, though he was difficult to understand. I asked if he needed me to call an ambulance. He said no, that he was OK. I asked where he lives, expecting that perhaps he is a resident of the Marion St. Tower, nearby home to many poor and disabled. He said, “Right here.”

Then a police car with two officers pulled up. Just as the man mentioned the “two dollars,” one of the officers asked the man if he was OK. He said he was. Then an ambulance arrived. The officer thanked me and said, “We’ve got it.” I felt dismissed. Maybe the officer was thinking I had called in the situation. It looked like the ambulance drivers were about to get a stretcher out, but I didn’t stick around to see what happened. 

So, what is wrong with that situation. It’s not lack of “health care” since the man is obviously on Medicare, probably because of age and certainly because of disability. There is a good chance he suffers from some mental illness because almost certainly he has had opportunities through the SC Department of Social Services for some housing and has rejected those opportunities. Surely he has!

I hope the ambulance drivers took the man to the closest emergency room and that the police called the Department of Social Services to send someone to meet him there and arrange appropriate nursing care and housing for him. If the man insists on being on the street during the day to panhandle and enjoy some social interaction and independence, let him do so. But the City of Columbia should not allow him to spend helpless nights on the street. It is dangerous, unhealthy, unsafe, and unacceptable.

Mental health reforms, apparently inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, might have had some good results but also had a lot of unintended and unfortunate consequences. I frankly don’t have any sympathy for people wanting the government to provide their flu shots and birth control pills and pay for their annual physicals, but our system for caring for the helpless needs a lot of improvement. That is a priority.

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for the man. He won’t be difficult to spot. Next time I see him, hopefully in his chair, I will find out his name, how old he is, how he lost his legs, how much income he has, and the name of his social worker. I’ll give him a few dollars. Then I will call that social worker who will tell me that she can’t discuss the case because of privacy concerns. Then I’ll find Mr. ______ and give him a few more dollars and tell him that he must give his social worker permission to talk to me if he wants any more help from me.

And maybe once he has a safe place to sleep and bathe and get clean clothes and eat three meals a day, his SSI or SS income will be enough that he won’t always be down to his last two dollars.