If we believe this thing, we need to put our money, our talent, and our time where our faith is. Our churches are rigged: they cannot be reformed from within unless a new generation elbows its way into leadership, but even that could take generations. But you can open your home to a bible study. You can partner with several other couples or individuals and plan monthly gatherings for worship and sharing. You don’t have to stay home. You don’t have to give up being who you are.
Church
Folk love to call meetings.
In 1517, Pope Leo X launched a fundraising campaign for construction of a grand basilica of St. Peter's in Rome. The practice of the time was to grant the privilege of selling indulgences to various bishops, who would retain for themselves and their purposes a portion of the raised funds. An indulgence was a kind of get-out-of-hell-free card: you paid off the church and the cardinal or bishop would issue a document forgiving sin of your friend or loved one granting a pardon from Purgatory. Indulgences were the Catholic Church’s chief means of major revenue as the very rich lavished the Church with gifts in order to guarantee themselves or their loved ones a place in Heaven. Bishop Albert of Brandenburg, having been granted an indulgence franchise in his territory for eight years, told his indulgence vendors that they could promise purchasers a perfect remission of all sins and that those seeking indulgences for dead relatives need not be contrite themselves, nor confess their sins. Proclamation of the indulgence fell to an experienced Dominican vendor named John Tetzel, who journeyed from town to town around Albert's territories. Tetzel would follow a cross bearing the papal arms into a town's marketplace and launch into a sermon, or sales pitch, that included a jingle that Martin Luther found especially objectionable:
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from purgatory springs.
Luther, an Augustinian priest and Doctor in Bible of the Senate
of Theological Faculty of the University of Wittenberg, had long
been disturbed and angered by the church’s cash-for-salvation
hustle. In an angry response to Bishop Albert’s
indulgence sales campaign, Martin Luther prepared in Latin a placard consisting of
ninety-five theses for debate. The placard, in accordance
with the custom of the time, was placed upon the door of
Wittenberg's Castle Church. The power of pardon, Luther
contended in his Ninety-Five Theses, was God's alone. If,
indeed, the pope had the power he claimed, Luther asked why he
didn't simply exercise it: “If the pope does have the power to
release anyone from purgatory, why in the name of love does he
not abolish purgatory by letting everyone out?” Luther's
complaints also went to the Church's justification for promoting
contributions. He complained about “the revenues of all
Christendom being sucked into this insatiable basilica” when
there were much greater needs, including “living temples” and
local churches.
Luther’s proclamations enraged (and likely threatened) the
church leadership so much that, in 1521, they called a meeting.
Church Folk love to call meetings. This was a general assembly
of the Imperial Estates of the Holy Roman Empire, called an
“Imperial Diet,” set in a city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
called Worms. Yes, literally, The Diet of Worms. You can’t make
this stuff up. There, Martin Luther declared, as do I:
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by
clear reason (for I do not trust either in the [pastor] or in
councils alone, since it is well known that they have often
erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures
I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I
cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe
nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.
[transcripts of the Diet of Worms]
I, of course, substitute “pastors” for “pope,” but you get the
point. It is a position every one of us who think of ourselves
as Christian should take, but only if we are prepared to invest
ourselves in actually knowing God and knowing scripture. You
can’t just kind of wing it; hang out in church on Sunday taking
all of your biblical queues from scriptural excerpts up on the
JumboTron. That mess is the worst and most stupid idea any
church—black or white—has come up with, indulging seekers too
lazy to bring a bible or to open the free bibles made available
in the pews. Many if not most of our modern worship services
would be crippled if the light bulb in the overhead projector
went out. We don’t know our own songs anymore. We don’t know
where to find scripture in the bible because we haven’t actually
cracked open a book version of the bible in years. And, even if
we do know how to find the scripture, many of our churches no
longer supply bibles for the sanctuary and we’ve lost the habit
of bringing ours with us.
As I wrote
here:
There will come a time—and I realize
almost no one reading these words believes this—when you won’t
have an iPad. You won’t have a smartphone. You won’t have a PC
or laptop or digital anything. It will just be you. You and a
prison cell. You and a heart monitor. You holding a loved one's
hand as they transition to meet God or meet judgment. What will
you say? What song will you sing?
Ironically, more and more I’m being persuaded that people who
actually do believe are leaving the black church. Their belief fosters
questions that go unanswered and needs that go unaddressed. The
church continues to be dominated by Church Folk. Who die off.
Leaving fewer Church Folk. More gaps in the pews. More struggle
to keep the lights on. The problem quickly become chronic. Your
church is emptying out, but you remain unwilling to even
consider the possibility you yourself are the cause of it.
Actual Belief is alive, while Play Church is dead. And death
feels threatened by life. Actual belief changes you. Death
causes rigor mortis to set in.
Pay To Play
Martin Luther challenged five centuries of the Catholic Church’s
distortion of scripture, just as this ministry challenges the
black church’s distortion of scripture. I am certainly no Martin
Luther, but like him I am often regarded as a lunatic, usually
by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who don’t
know scripture, and who have absolutely nothing going on in
their ministry: no vision beyond sitting on the corner their
church is located upon and counting their money. Like the old
Catholics church, far too much of our modern African American
church experience is simply a racket. It’s the family business: weddings,
baby dedications, baptisms and burials. All of which is fine,
the church indeed exists to support family life. As Christians,
our main
reason for existing is to tell people about Jesus, which we
routinely fail to do. We’ll spend a half hour begging for money,
browbeating and guilt-tripping folk, but will drown out the
invitation to discipleship with loud celebratory music followed
by interminable grandstanding on the part of people seeking
“prayer requests,” most of whom simply want to hold the mic and
blather on indefinitely about nothing.
Not unlike the Catholic Church's indulgences hustle, we use tithing as blackmail to
guilt-trip the faithful into supporting the church or, more
specifically, the church’s pastor whose salary is typically
among the church’s largest line items. Churches in financial
straits could always benefit by the pastor taking less money
from it, by cutting or, better, foregoing his own salary. A
pastor willing to do that usually makes such arrangements known,
as that sets the example and model for the church faithful:
equal sacrifice, which is biblical. Chances are good that, if
your pastor has not made any such declaration, he is browbeating
his membership over money while making no perceptible sacrifice
himself beyond the falsely-constructed ten-percent “mandate.” No
such mandate actually exists in the Gospels or in Pauline
doctrine. It is
false and invented teaching evolved from a
convolution of scripture. Which doesn’t let us off the hook
because, actual scripture teaches us to give everything, all
we have, to the poor [per Jesus: Matthew 19:21, Luke 10:21, Mark
10:21, Luke 12:33, 18:22], to sell everything we own and
pool the money together for the church [Acts 2]. Paul's actual
instructions did not include a specific amount or percentage,
but giving is biblically mandated [I Corinthians 16:2]. I am not
anti-tithe so much as I am anti-percentage. Those who can give
more have a biblical obligation to do so, rather than standing
on some legalistic standard.
Ironically, the
ten-percent tithe (equal giving) is quite a bargain as compared
to what scripture actually teaches (equal sacrifice). Your
pastor giving ten percent of his six-figure salary doesn’t hurt
him anywhere near the way a ten-percent mandate harms the family
of a single mom making minimum wage. The church literally taking
food off of the tables of struggling families so that her pastor
can drive a new Lexus every year is a heinous lie comparable to
this foolishness of the Catholic indulgence. And, like the old
indulgences, this “doctrine’ only works because we don’t know
our bible.
The Diet of Worms was the culmination of an ongoing struggle
between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church over reform,
especially in practice of donations for indulgences. However,
there were other deeper issues that revolved around both
theological concerns:
On a theological level, Luther had challenged the absolute authority of the Pope over the Church by maintaining that the doctrine of indulgences, as authorized and taught by the Pope, was wrong.
Luther maintained that salvation was by faith alone (sola fide) without reference to good works, alms, penance, or the Church's sacraments. Luther maintained that the sacraments were a "means of grace," meaning that while grace was imparted through the Sacraments, the credit for the action belonged to God and not to the individual.
He had also challenged the authority of the Church by maintaining that all doctrines and dogmata of the Church not found in Scripture should be discarded (sola scriptura).
To protect the authority of the Pope and the Church, as well as
to maintain the doctrine of indulgences, ecclesiastical
officials convinced Charles V that Luther was a threat and
persuaded him to authorize his condemnation by the Holy Roman
Empire. Luther escaped arrest and remained in seclusion at
Wartburg castle for several years where he continued to write
and translate the New Testament into German.
While the Edict was harsh, Charles was so preoccupied with
political and military concerns elsewhere that it was never
enforced. Eventually Luther was allowed to return to public life
and became instrumental in laying the groundwork for the
Protestant Reformation.
Reforming The Black Church
We are, this month, looking at the growing phenomena of black
Christians migrating to white churches and what that means to
our culture and tradition. My suspicion in the matter is the
black church, here at least, is simply not getting it done. As a
result, the black church experience is no longer at the center
but is being increasingly
pushed to the periphery of our lives. We no longer believe the pastor to be some magical,
infallible demigod to be served unquestionably and worshipped as
we worship God. Many of us still practice that kind of
ignorance, but, increasingly, mass media and the changing tide
of public perception is emerging a more thoughtful if not more cynical
and more questioning public grown skeptical of our traditional
model of the black pastor as an ersatz Santa Claus. We now know
he’s just a guy, and we now are increasingly less willing to
turn a blind eye to heinous moral failure on our pastor’s part
or to stand for his bullying.
The white MegaChurch offers a great relief from the oppression
of the ever-struggling black church. Teaching on giving in many
of these more affluent churches falls much more clearly in line
with scripture and we eventually learn to trust and, therefore,
to give willingly rather than under the relentless duress of a
place we dearly love yet nevertheless understand we will be
threatened and browbeaten into supporting sacrificially. Our culture is
not as obviously represented in white churches, so the imperative
to involve ourselves in tedious busywork (which we lyingly label
“ministry”) is practically nonexistent; the large church usually
has adequate volunteers. Little is expected of us, little is
needed from us, little is offered to us, so we can simply relax
and be entertained (and, ideally, spiritually fed). This
contrasts sharply to the bondage blacks often experience at
their own traditional houses of worship. Rather than seeing them
as seekers, white pastors must understand that many blacks
attending white churches are more
like refugees from some African dictatorship. It is an
indescribable, enormous relief to be able to just come to church
and worship. It feels almost indulgent, a real privilege.
I don’t believe leaving our churches is the answer. Like Martin
Luther, I believe our churches need a major reformation. Some
black churches are prospering greatly by taking cues from the
white entertainment churches, but that’s not it either. Ours is
a rich heritage that has meaning and value and deserves to be
protected. Our goal should be the surgical removal of dead
weight and clutter. Things not of God, most especially our bad
attitudes and diva fits, need to be called out, shamed and
publicly embarrassed.
The major impediment to reform in our church is we ourselves.
The congregation calls the pastor, and our congregations suffer
from being dominated by the Old Hats, rampant egos and
divas whose leadership role in the church constitutes their only
real sense of self-worth. Most mainstream churchgoers are busy
families and many under-50 congregants lack the interest in
heading some committee or running some board. These tasks are
routinely left to those least anointed, least Christ like and,
therefore, least qualified to perform them. A reformist pastor is rarely called because the people presenting
candidates to the church are the same old, backward,
agenda-ridden, set-on-their-ways obstructionist types who find
change threatening.
Reform cannot come on its own from the outside because too many
of our churches simply do not report to any governing body and
therefore, no one can tell them what to do. Our churches have
little or no accountability.
Therefore, after perhaps decades of futile struggle, many of us,
exhausted and fed up, head out of the door. The congregation
shrinks by five, seven, twelve, fifty percent, but the old Hats
don’t notice or care. Good riddance, they say, as they continue
to sing the same five songs and run in circles, not progressing,
not serving the community, just kind of orbiting the planet as a
quaint anachronism while calling itself a church. The greater
tragedy is untold numbers of us are simply staying home. I know
far too many black Christians who do not attend church at all,
finding the white church to be too much in denial of our
heritage and identity, and finding the black church too
oppressive and out of touch. This ministry exists, in large
measure, for that demographic: for those either not attending,
reluctantly attending, or questioning issues related to the
African American church; a church in desperate need of reform
but, ultimately, unlikely to get it.
What’s the answer? The answer is for good men and women of faith
to act on that faith. This involves risk: to their families, to their
careers. But, if we believe this thing, we need to put our
money, our talent, and our time where our faith is. Our churches
are rigged: they cannot be reformed from within unless a new
generation elbows its way into leadership, but even that could
take generations. But you can open your home to a bible study.
You can partner with several other couples or individuals and
plan monthly gatherings for worship and sharing. You don’t have
to actually call any of this “church,” but you don’t have to
stay home; you don’t have to give up being who you are or
celebrating The Gospel as you love to do.
Pick up the phone. Make a start. Don’t worry about pastors
badmouthing you or trying to haul you before some board or
committee. Don’t worry about people calling you crazy. Reform
can only happen when you, yes you, put yourself on the line.
When you love the Lord more than you love your church or your
magical pastor. Reform begins with conviction followed by
investment. In far too large a measure, the church—our church—simply
isn’t getting it done. Be Martin Luther. Take a chance.
With excerpts freely adapted from The Trial of Martin Luther:
An Account
by Douglas O. Linder (2010) and Wikipedia
Christopher J. Priest
26 May 2014
editor@praisenet.org
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