Many of my friends know this, but this often comes as a surprise to others who don’t know me well. I rarely attend Sunday services at a local church. It’s not that I don’t value sharing faith in a community setting or sharing in the sacred moments in the life of the church. Instead, I experience a deep sense of incongruity between the way in which I hear God presented in prayers, hymns, and many sermons and my theological and spiritual understanding of the Holy One. In essence, my experience of the Divine just doesn’t match what’s described in most churches near me.
Essentially, there are two dimensions to my experience of incongruity. The first has to do with the predominant use of male-gender pronouns in churches. The Divine is usually referred to in masculine terms. While in my own denomination, the United Church of Christ, a hymnal exists that uses more gender-balanced references and images for the Divine, in many prayers, sermons, and statements, the Divine is usually male.
If God is really a Divine being, then the Holy One is neither male nor female nor anything that fits into our conceptions of gender. While feminists made us aware of the problem of gender-based images of the Divine in the early 1980s, the problem still exists. What fascinates me is that my other profession, psychology, is very stringent about the use of gender-bias in language. There’s a section of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association dedicated to this. Gender-neutral language is also standard in the legal profession and many other professions. While many professions have taken great strides in addressing gender bias, the church lags behind — even progressive churches.
The other dimension of incongruity I experience in Sunday services is the usual insistence that the Divine is all-power, needs our praise and worship, and has a primary interest in saving us. It’s a deity on steroids, much like a firefighter running into a burning building to rescue a child from the flames. Yes, I can affirm on some level that the Divine is all-powerful. But that’s not the primary attribute of the Divine revealed to us in the teachings of Jesus. Instead, before all else, the Divine is all-loving, all-compassionate, all-forgiving, and is always on our side. The Divine doesn’t need our praise and worship. Isn’t that codependency? And save us? From what? When reading the gospels thoughtfully, it’s very clear in the teachings of Jesus that the Divine is within us and around us. The message of Jesus is to wake us up to this truth, to turn ourselves around to see what’s really happening. Surely, the Divine doesn’t save us from being human. By design, our existence is human. Instead, we are challenged to live fully.
While most of my colleagues agree with me, when I attend their churches, I find that the traditional words and images are typically employed to a great extent. The understanding of God of power and might who displays masculine strength to save us from wretchedness is a significant problem for me because it’s not how I experience the Divine. Further, I find little to nothing in most Sunday services that connect me with my own experience and understanding of God. So, it’s easier to just not be in that milieu.
Decades ago when I began studying theology, I learned an important dictum about prayer and belief. Stated in Latin, its: lex orandi; lex credendi. It means that the way people pray is the way they believe. The reverse is also true: the way people believe is the way we pray. Clergy colleagues will tell me that their beliefs about the Divine are very similar to my own. But I don’t see evidence of that in the worship services they lead. The services may be lively, welcoming of diverse people, relaxed and friendly, but in the end, they reflect deep beliefs in a deity of power and might who must be worshiped and who saves humanity from itself. I am left to conclude that the way they pray really is the way they believe, or they would change.
A few times a month, I find myself in dimly lit churches joining small groups of people for contemplative services that use the music from the ecumenical community in Taize, France. While the language remains mostly male in reference to a deity, the focus is on the Divine presence within and among us. That’s where I find myself spiritually most at home. I’m lucky to live in a city where there are many options for this kind of prayer.
But I wonder: when will those who consider themselves progressive Christians really come to understand the corrupt theologies we’ve inherited? Isn’t it time to push through and seriously reconceptualize the ways we gather for prayer in local churches? How many people find themselves out of place because their experience of the Divine has no connection to what’s done and spoken of on Sunday morning? Perhaps that’s why my friends who are not active in church refer to weekend hikes and gatherings with friends as “church.” These “secular” friends could be onto something.
Photo Source: pexels.com/danwhitefield CCO
It felt like a cultic ritual when I returned to a Protestant denomination I had not visited in a while. I felt like a cultural anthropologist. It was like the participant-observer methodology. I love Taize, some of the Celtic influenced prayers, and hymns, but have trouble with the lyrics, liturgy but also ‘sermon-lite’. Engage some depth; be meaningful and connect with my ‘spirit’.
Pingback: How prayer and belief are connected | Joe Perez
Spot on!!! As a minister in the UCC I work really hard to help my congregation experience the presence of God each week, not as powerful in a war-like sense but powerful in a life transformational sense. Changing us into co-creators of justice and mercy based on the teachings of Jesus. Thank you for your honesty and call for greater awareness on my part as to how I pray and lead worship.