Faith Works 6-23-23

Faith Works 6-23-23
Jeff Gill

Churches and culture in times of change
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Any attempt to make general statements that include church bodies like the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the United Methodist Church (UMC), and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (DoC), let alone adding a few more, is probably a fool's errand.

That's what you come here for, right? Okay, all kidding aside…

I've asked you to think and theologize along with me about the stresses and splits going on within some major Christian traditions in the last year, and I teach history and polity for my own tradition, which had a major split in 1968 which is both not over for us, and started long before that year. So there are aspects of church division in the US I see through certain lenses.

One factor is that there's a common story in the history of groups like the SBC, UMC, and my own DoC. They all came about more as a rural, and frankly poorer body, demographically, than the earliest Christian groups that dominate the colonial history of the US. Presbyterians and Anglicans, who become Episcopalians after the Revolution, are usually the more established, literally and figuratively, Christian traditions, with Congregationalists in New England, now the United Church of Christ (UCC) having an actual state sponsored or "established" role. Baptists began in American history as Congregationalist heretics; the DoC were apostate Presbyterians; Methodism is a revival movement from within then breaking from the Anglican church.

These rural rebels went their own way, but grew fastest and furthest on the frontier, the SBC into the Deep South and then due west into Texas, the UMC with circuit riders into all the gaps on the map between county seats, and the so-called "Disciples crescent" marks the highwater mark of this movement following their western Pennsylvania and Ohio and Kentucky beginnings across the Midwest and curving down into Missouri and Oklahoma and into north Texas, founding Texas Christian University among other institutions in their heyday.

What this all means, in brief for this installment, is that these movements were both countercultural on one level, but deeply aspirational, culturally, in others. We all were outsiders struggling to build farms and workshops and stature, culturally; class aspiration was a huge part of the history of each of these movements in ways Presbyterian or Episcopal church members never had to worry about. Work hard, do well, behave properly, move up.

Which has, I would argue, come back to bite us, after we so closely tied ourselves to the culture around us as the Civil War ended, and through three more martial eras of American life, Spanish-American and World Wars I & II.

As has been exhaustively discussed in many other venues, the "mainline" Protestant churches which for a long time held a hugely disproportional role in leading American culture have dropped far back in cultural significance. What I think that facile analysis misses is that in fact those Christian communions never really "controlled" the main flow of American culture, but they did intersect for a few generations. Somewhere in the wake of "The Ten Commandments" (1956) & "King of Kings" (1961) as mainstream Hollywood products, the culture shifted. We can debate how or why all day, but they did. It's usually shorthanded as "The Sixties."

Many churches had effectively handed their Christian formation over to the culture, because the culture of the country and of their church were seen as roughly the same. When the national culture changed, many churches tried to grab at the steering wheel, and at varying points realized "we don't drive this bus anymore, do we?"

To which many Christian bodies had different reactions, including those we're seeing play out this summer. I'll have one more installment of this series next week.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's seen a split or two play out, never in a good way. Tell him your experiences with division and separation at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.