Sick Religion or Healthy Faith?

Beliefs and Practices for Healing Christian Communities

Ahlgrim

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498280808
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Is it time to get rid of religion? Not so fast, says Ryan Ahlgrim. It's time for us to define and demand healthy faith. Despite the dysfunction and divisiveness seen too often in religion, we continue to need a community of love, and we yearn for a transcendent encounter that can heal us. So instead of abandoning religion, Ahlgrim outlines twelve characteristics of a healthy religious community, and describes what a healthy Christian community of faith believes and practices. Along the way he reveals the power of story, the genius of Jesus, and the path to wholeness. In the end we are faced with the most daring and fulfilling choice of all: to embrace a community of love that trusts in God.

1

In the Beginning Was the Community

When I was four years old, my family moved into one of the suburbs of Chicago and my mother wanted to find a church for our family to attend. She wasn’t particular about what religious label was on the sign, so long as the congregation was friendly, genuine, and did not teach that her stillborn baby was in hell because he hadn’t been baptized. My parents tried a number of churches of various denominations, but my mother found something objectionable with each one—like the church that played organ music during the minister’s prayer. She considered that emotionally manipulative.

Eventually my parents visited a small church around the corner from our house. They liked it: the congregation warmly welcomed them, and the minister and his wife seemed genuine. The church belonged to a Christian faith tradition my parents had never heard of, but their former minister said it was “kind of like cousins,” which was good enough for my mother. So my family began attending the church.

Or to be more precise, my father attended the worship services, my siblings and I attended Sunday school, and my mother stayed home. The attitude of my parents was that worship services were for adults and Sunday school was for children. So for the next eight years I attended Sunday school on most Sunday mornings (I say “most” because I often skipped so I could stay home and watch cartoons on TV). Sometimes I arrived at the church while the worship service was still in progress, so I would go down into the basement, where the classrooms were, and wait. Above me I could hear the organ swell while the congregation sang hymns of praise. It filled me with a sense of God’s majesty. Soon the service above me would end and children would begin streaming into the basement for Sunday school.

During those years I experienced my church as a gentle and safe place. The kids were friendlier than my schoolmates, and the Sunday school teachers were kindly and never threatening. I didn’t have to worry about grades or a report card. I simply enjoyed doing crafts and learning Bible stories—and eating ice cream at the annual church social. Fourth grade was especially meaningful because I had a teacher who connected the Bible stories to actual history. He displayed photos of the ruins of biblical cities and showed us replicas of the kinds of coins that were used in those ancient times and places.

When I was twelve, the minister offered a class to prepare youth for the rite of baptism and joining the church. I begged my parents to allow me to join the class. My mother was reluctant. “You’re too young. There’s so much more for you to learn first about God.” I assured her that I already knew all about God. She relented. Several months later I was baptized, thereby becoming an official member of the congregation. I thought to myself, “Now that I’m a member, I should probably begin attending worship services.” So I did, but I soon made a disappointing discovery: the worship services were boring. My parents had been right—this was for adults.

Discouraged, I went to the minister and laid out my problem. “Church is boring. I don’t know the songs and I’m not getting anything out of the sermons. I like Sunday school a lot better. Would it be all right if I just went to Sunday school and skipped the worship services?”

The minister was unperturbed. “Here’s what I suggest you do: hum along for now until you get to know the songs, and then sing them as loudly as you can. When the sermon is being preached, write down on a piece of paper what you think is the main idea. And during ‘sharing time,’ when people in the congregation get up to say what God has been doing in their lives, you can stand up and share too.”

I told the minister I would give it a try for three months, but if worship services didn’t get less boring I was going to go back to just attending Sunday school.

Three months later, to my utter surprise, I was enjoying worship services more than I had ever enjoyed Sunday school. I discovered that worshiping God with the congregation is more exhilarating than simply learning about God in Sunday school; my experience of a faith community had been enlarged and enriched.

A year and a half later I fell out of a tree, hit a fence, and shattered my left femur. As I lay in my hospital bed, I felt abandoned by my school friends. Unlike a hospitalization earlier in my childhood, I was not deluged with cards and visitors and phone calls. Other than my immediate family, no one wrote me, no one called, no one visited. I wondered what was wrong with me. Then one evening several youth from the church came to my room. They wished me well and dropped off a stack of get-well cards and letters from everyone in the church’s youth group. As I read the letters, tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew where I belonged.

Why do we believe what we believe? Why do we commit ourselves to certain ideals and a way of life? Why do we embrace a particular religious faith, or abandon faith? Why do we become convinced of, or deny, a purpose in our lives? Why do we reject God or put our trust in God?

We often assume that our beliefs are the result of rational examination and private experiences. Certainly these play an important supplementary role. But I would suggest that something else plays a far more fundamental role: community. Our beliefs are largely shaped by our experiences of community.

During my adolescence I realized that if I had been born into a Hindu family I would have likely become Hindu in my religious beliefs. If I had been born into a Catholic family I probably would have turned out to be a Catholic. If I had been brought up by atheists, or by parents who didn’t participate in any religion, I would very possibly have made similar choices. What if my parents had decided to attend that congregation with the organ music backing up the minister’s prayer instead of the congregation around the corner? I’m sure my religious experience would have been significantly different, and my religious convictions would have turned out differently.

Community forms our convictions. Some people are perhaps born with a stronger or weaker sense of independence, making them more or less receptive toward community involvement and influence; and some people are perhaps born with stronger or weaker transcendent sensibilities, making them more or less inclined toward religious involvement and belief. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the shaping influences of community.

The family that raises us is our first and most important community, shaping our relationships, our trust or distrust of the universe, our rules for living, and many of our most basic assumptions. As we grow, other fundamental communities come along: schools, peer groups, work environments, religious institutions. They contribute further to molding the content of our convictions. Whether we have been passive recipients in these various communities, or have actively chosen and embraced particular communities, or intentionally reacted against them, they have all had their influences on us: helping us see in various categories, process information in various ways, and interpret our lives.

Sometimes different communities teach us different, contradictory ways of approaching life. What we learn at school may be different from what we learn at home. What we learn from our peer group may be different from what we learn in church. When this happens, we become flustered; our model of reality now has parts that don’t fit together. We may try to ignore the contradictions by compartmentalizing our beliefs: holding one set of convictions when in one place and another set of convictions when in another place. Another option is to choose between contradictory beliefs, discarding the ones that appear less favorable to us. Or we may try to integrate contradictory convictions in a fresh way.

Whichever community has the deepest emotional hold on our life is the community we are most likely to turn to for testing the claims of other communities. But the more communities we belong to, and the more they differ from each other in their convictions, the greater becomes our capacity to critique all of the communities we are involved in—even our most beloved ones—noting their strengths and weaknesses.

This capacity to critique our communities, including our religious communities, is essential for nurturing a mature, robust, well-functioning faith within a pluralistic society.

I believe in religious communities; I believe in their potential to address the entire constellation of human needs. But to have credibility in our world, and to have positive usefulness, religious communities must be healthy.

Admittedly, there is no objective definition for “healthy” when referring to our spiritual, emotional, and social well-being. Having a normal temperature and normally functioning limbs and organs are good measures for physical health, but how are we to measure mental, spiritual, and social health? Sigmund Freud boiled down human well-being to the ability to love and work, which makes sense to me, but even that minimal definition of health is a social construct; it is what makes sense within a certain culture. Definitions and understandings of health change over time as culture changes. And definitions of what is religious are probably even more fluid! So my aim is not to propose an objectively true and constant definition of a healthy religious community, but to suggest a description that may be persuasive and useful for our culture at this time. Thirty years from now (if not much sooner), I assume my definition of a healthy religious community will be out of date, and others will propose characteristics more fitting for tomorrow’s culture.

Let me suggest for consideration twelve characteristics of a healthy religious community:

1. Holds clear core convictions, often grounded in a foundational story

2. Cares for all people and nature

3. Aspires to bring a needed benefit to the world

4. Provides supportive friendships

5. Uses the talents of its members

6. Facilitates cooperation and conflict resolution while curbing behavior destructive to the community

7. Protects individual conscience

8. Fosters personal growth

9. Insists on intellectual honesty

10. Adheres to transparent, ethical practices

11. Offers leadership that serves the community, not itself

12. Enables connection with the transcendent

Holds clear core convictions, often grounded in a foundational story. A family that had left my congregation and joined another church returned to my congregation a few years later. I asked why they had decided to return to our congregation. One of the parents told me, “My son asked me what our church believed, and I realized that after five years of attending there I didn’t know the answer. We decided we wanted to raise our children in a church that knows what it believes.”

A healthy religious community doesn’t need to have a detailed, written set of beliefs, but it does need some clear core convictions. For instance, one church in Washington, DC puts its core convictions this way: “Our one law is to love God and neighbor. We are not concerned about your signing off on a creed. There have always been persons who ...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: In the Beginning Was the Community
• Chapter 2: A Story to Live By
• Chapter 3: Jesus of Nazareth
• Chapter 4: The Risen Jesus
• Chapter 5: The Right Hand of God
• Chapter 6: The Path to Wholeness
• Chapter 7: Trust Exercises
• Chapter 8: A Healing Christian Community
• Chapter 9: Other Religions and Our Ultimate Destiny
• Chapter 10: God
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography