HEAR OUR PRAYER, O LORD

Grant that thy Church may be delivered from traditions which have lost their life, from usage which has lost its spirit, from institutions which no longer give life and power to their generation; that the Church may ever shine as a light in the world and be as a city set on a hill.

HEAR OUR PRAYER, O LORD.

What I Did During Summer Vacation

Well, not me, obviously....

 Maybe the future of Christianity is in small independent churches, probably a lot of them house churches supported by their local congregation and householders.  I have a friend who is working on writing and compiling a small hymnal for such a small congregation.  Believe me, he never thought he'd be doing that fifty years after we were in college together. But I'd never have thought I'd be writing something like this.   Maybe the future of Christianity is going to be a lot like the ferment of the early Reformation in which old forms and ways are going to have to give way to newer ones, Women's roles, LGBTQ+ issues, different cultural and regional ways found where old forms and ways have failed.  I don't think that big churches and even many small church buildings are going to play much of a role in it. And there is also the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement.   Maybe that was where things started to go wrong, to start with, building big churches. Earliest Christianity was pretty much a home-church affair, that's what the Protestants imagined they were restoring, though that's not possible or, perhaps, even what we're supposed to be doing.  

I had a professor in seminary who had been involved in a "house church" movement.  The idea originates with Paul, but he was just using the social structure of his day, where a paterfamilias literally decided everything for the "house," which consisted not of a nuclear family as we think of it, but an extended one, down to servants.  A bit more like a British 19th century landed gentry model (I'm quite sure the Brits took the idea from the Romans....)  What the father decided, decided the house, so if Paul converted dear old Dad, the family followed (again, a model not unfamiliar to those of us who grew up in suburban America in the '50's and '60's).

The Roman household was larger than the nuclear family today: cousins and wives of adult children, and their children, lived there.  So when Paul curses out the "stupid Galatians," he's referring to a family connected by blood, but also everyone to home Pater is also Patron ("Patronus" from Harry Potter is not far of the mark here, as the Patronus spell conjures a protector against all ills, even Dementors).

Anyway, house churches in modern America were simply small gatherings of believers, committed to worshipping together.  But it's a fragile enterprise, and the whole movement started gamely but soon fell apart, for what could well be explained in sociological terms.  Or perhaps they were just ahead of their time; or perhaps we can't recover that model, because the society that (briefly) sustained it is no more.

No matter.  The idea of church is worth sustaining, and I believe it will sustain.  I've known tiny churches that were positively radiant with holiness (none of it holier-than-thou).  I've seen large churches that make wonderful...country clubs.  I gave a lecture to a Sunday School class in one of those churches, a class attended by my brother-in-law and his wife, my sister-in-law.  She praised me for my teaching skills; but I could tell most of the room was not happy with my pronouncements, mild as I thought they were.  That church would find a place for me; but it would not welcome me.

Frankly, I've learned to adhere to Groucho Marx's dictum that I wouldn't join any club (or church) that would have me as a member.  But I still hold out hope there is a small one somewhere that would take in a wayfaring stranger, as longs as he didn't talk too loudly.  I haven't been in a church yet that wasn't some kind of disappointment; but I'm sure I disappointed them, too; and they just kept quiet about it, in true Christian humility. 

We need the church so we can learn humility from each other.  We'll always have need of that.