On Being the Church

Most people my age can recall with absolute certainty where they were the morning of September 11, 2001. For my parents’ generation, almost everyone can give you the details of where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. Me? I can remember everything about the night of November 4, 1980, the night Ronald Reagan was elected president. There are certain dates that you’ll always remember, and even though I was only five, this is one of them.

For most kids growing up in our working-class, suburban Detroit neighborhood, living in the Motor City meant something. We grew up learning about Henry Ford, automation, and assembly plants as much as we learned about addition and subtraction. Most kids in my neighborhood had dads who worked for one of the Big Three automakers. They didn’t carry briefcases into the giant, shiny glass Ford Motor Company headquarters that loomed over Michigan Avenue – our dads went to work in the factories and stamping plants carrying metal lunch boxes and greasy tools. We knew about third shifts, overtime, and layoffs. And even at five years old, I knew what the United Auto Workers Local 314 thought of Governor Reagan.

In my experience, growing up in a union family was the same as growing up in a political family. My father read Solidarity magazine like it was the Bible and preached it just as confidently. I watched that election year through the lens of a child’s black-and-white thinking and was convinced that a Reagan presidency would certainly mean the start of World War III and the end of my father’s employment. I was terrified.

We watched the election returns roll in that night on our old floor-model RCA television. My mom and my brothers sat on the 1970s-style orange sofa and I sat on my dad’s lap, the safest place in the world, curled up in his arms with my Holly Hobby nightgown tucked around my cold feet. Early into the night it became obvious that our family’s worst fears were being realized: Reagan by a landslide. My dad lifted me off his lap and announced, “That’s it, it’s all going to hell. Time for you to get to bed, baby.”

As I lay in bed that night with tears in my eyes wondering how long before I would see a Russian tank driving down our street, a new, disturbing thought occurred to me: we’re not on the same team. From the first day of kindergarten, I had begun memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance. I had no idea what allegiance meant (or pledge, for that matter) but every morning I started my day with my hand on my heart reciting words about one nation under God. I hadn’t realized that “one nation” really meant two opposing teams jockeying for the highest of positions or bragging rights or both. Prior to that night, I had naively believed that we were a proud country of one ideal, that collectively we were all the good guys.

It was with that same youthful naiveté that I started my career as a born-again Christian, a career that I began as a reformed Catholic, then a somewhat arrogant evangelical Baptist, and finally as a disillusioned non-denominationalist. Despite my propensity to change my religious stripes, I always believed that the minor differences were unimportant, or at the very least that they paled in comparison to what was really important, what we held in common. The Gospel message was what tied us together regardless of orders of worship, pulpit sizes, or robes. In my mind, we were still on the same team, one church, under God.

It was within the context of this naive notion that I received the shock of my life when a trusted Protestant pastor friend declared that the Emerging movement is a dangerous, misguided force that is threatening the American evangelical church. I’ve come to understand that this is about more than a young group of anti-establishment, urban hipsters like I was first led to believe. What in some circles has become a high-stakes theological battle can, in my estimation, be boiled down to two groups arguing over the importance of tradition. And if I’m being honest, sometimes it’s difficult for me to determine which group is more wayward than the other. At the time my pastor friend introduced me to this conflict, I had no idea who these emergents were, or what they claimed to be emerging from. All I knew was this pastor friend had enough fear in his voice to make me think of Russian tanks for the first time in years.

The night Reagan was elected I prayed like any good little Catholic girl would. I prayed that Mary and the sweet baby Jesus would protect us and bargained that I would remember to say the rosary each night if they promised to keep Mr. Reagan from “selling our souls down the river” as my father predicted he would. A bargain whose end I never upheld. I’m not sure if this is what Jesus was referring to when he talked about childlike faith, but it was an earnest prayer from a deep part of my spirit, a spirit that just wanted everyone to play on the same team, to be one. It seemed to me and my five-year-old sensibilities that when the stakes were this high and the Russian tanks were this big, we should stand together against them.

I still have that childlike faith, and I often find myself praying that same childlike prayer. A prayer that Jesus will protect us from ourselves and our divisions and remind us that despite our differences we are all on the same team. I no longer fear the rumble of tanks, but I do fear the rumble of dissension. And sometimes I fear we’re missing the point, which is that we all have the same goal. We can all work together to reach the poor in spirit, the marginalized, and the afflicted. We can still pray together and worship together even if some of us have the audacity to believe in global warming. My prayer is that the American evangelical church will stop being a house divided and become one church, under God, indivisible – less concerned about labels and divisions and more worried about being the church.