It’s interesting for me to listen to friends who have told me for years that I need to tone down my provocative nature and be more of a team player now flinch when they go to church and hear someone give thanks for a healing, read a Bible text about a miracle or hear a prayer of supplication for some needed intervention. Political friends who used to tell me to be more loyal to the party, military people who used to tell me accept the frustrations of the institution, and non-profit people who tell me to stop complaining about the lack of follow up and timely responses now tell me they think the liberal United Church should get rid of any language that smacks of an interventionist God. They would like my colleague Greta Vosper who makes a virtue out of being an atheist in a theistic church. They say, “I would go to church if it weren’t for all that talk of a subjective and confusing Deity.”
The thing is churches are full of believers, people who really do believe that there is a God who cares about them, who cares about the world and who can be sought and connected to in something we call prayer. Does everything we say about God always remains consistent or even totally make sense? Not always. As a good liberal I used to fret about the “loose ends” and get frustrated with God-talk that was loose with logic and consistency.
“What happened to you?” ask my like-minded liberal friends? Well two things turns me around on what I now call the “big tent” approach to church. First came all the persons I met living with mental illness, addiction and trauma who only came out the other end alive and compassionately human because of a spiritual transformation. What am I to make of that? I say Hallelujah! Second, having met persons who are indigenous to several continents, including this one, I can say without a doubt in my mind that they have a special connection to the land. In many ways they sound a little like our North American evangelicals but there are differences. Their Pentecostalism is tinged with what many might call paganism, a belief that animals, land and sky have a spiritual energy. Has our rational technological western approach been a positive thing for our environment? Many would suggest our approach has at least in part been responsible for the toxicity of our planet.
I find myself more and more open to these Christian approaches to healing and spirit. I do not practice them myself but I do believe they can and do have powerful effect on others. I am not so arrogant as to believe I fully understand the effect of these approaches.
Where I challenge evangelicals who ask God to do this or that is on the matter of how they take their subjective experience and universalize it. If you believe God healed you and say so I have no issue with that, I can share in that prayer of thanksgiving. But where I draw the line is telling others if they do X or Y the result will be the same as it was for me. I have seen the pain and cruelty of this “it worked for me so it must work for you” approach. Further to stand on one street corner and thank God for sparing you the effects of the lighting that killed someone in the nearby neighbourhood seems thoughtless in both senses of that word.
And many of these evangelicals are always telling me how “hurt” they are when criticized by liberals. To think there was a time in the church when persecution meant more than being mocked by liberals. The Apostle Paul would surely laugh at our lack of resiliency. Yet many of these same evangelicals, so easily hurt, will turn around and tell the person living with cancer, “if you pray to God the cancer will go away.” Really? Do they have any idea of the “hurt” that causes?
So I do believe in a big tent church, one where people of a variety of experience of the Divine can come together to worship, form community and draw on the strength and vision of Jesus the Christ. The limits to my big tent are understanding, compassion and some deeper connection to the Holy One we call Jesus. I learn a lot in that big tent, I watch so much healing carried out in a great variety of ways, some discernable to my rational self, some not. And that is AOK with me.