The ‘church of the subgroups’ comes under fire at conference
By Craig M. Kibler, The Layman Online, July 10, 2006
MONTREAT, N.C. – The “church of the subgroups” has come under fire by two members of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity, who said the approach to church life by renewal groups and advocacy organizations “very easily devolves into something the New Testament recognizes as a sinful distortion of Christ’s will for his followers.”
Mark Achtemeier, an associate professor of systematic theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, and Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, spoke to about 275 people during the “Hope of the Church” conference July 5-8 at Montreat Conference Center. The report of the task force on which they served was approved by the 217th General Assembly in Birmingham.
In speaking about the state of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Achtemeier began by reminding the audience of the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. “This teaching is sometimes misunderstood as saying that there is not an ounce of goodness to be found anywhere, among anyone,” he said. “Properly understood, the doctrine is not quite so pessimistic, but it does bear the disconcerting reminder that no area of human life is immune from the distorting effects of sin.”
Humans as “fallen creatures,” Achtemeier said, “have this tendency to lapse into sin even in the course of our best deeds and our most noble intentions. As I began thinking about the state and future of the Presbyterian Church, it occurred to me that to a remarkable extent our investment in the church’s future, our hope for its renewal, has been channeled through the work of subgroups – renewal groups, advocacy organizations, societies for the promotion of some particular aspect of mission. These are, by and large, the vehicles through which Presbyterians have sought to secure a more faithful and a more hopeful future for the broader church.”
While briefly acknowledging that history shows church life has been “renewed and revitalized by the work of select groups of Christians who share some particular calling, some common dedication to an aspect of the church’s mission,” he also said that “the devil continues to prowl about like a lion seeking well-intentioned people to devour. And one of the great ironies of this subgroup approach to church life is that it very easily devolves into something the New Testament recognizes as a sinful distortion of Christ’s will for his followers and an abject failure of the church to live up to its divine calling as the one body of Christ.”
Achtemeier then used the church in Corinth as an illustration of the denomination today, “where subgroups have become the primary focus of people’s loyalties and the life of the church is consequently degenerated into a never-ending battle among competing visions and interest group agendas. When Corinthian Christians think about the Gospel and the church, they tend to think principally of their own like-minded fellowship. ‘I belong to Paul.’ ‘I belong to Cephas.’ ‘I belong to Apollos.’ ‘I belong to PFR.’ ‘I belong to the Covenant Network.'”
The problem with having a subgroup serve as one’s primary marker of Christian identity, he said, is that “all those other groups wind up looking rather less Christian. They are the parts of the church that don’t count, really. Those other groups are the problem, the ones that aren’t really part of God’s will. So it’s here in the circle of the true faithful, the loyal followers of Cephas, where the really authentic and vital center of church life is to be found. And so the ‘church of the subgroups’ dissolves into arrogance, into boasting, into putdowns, and most of all into bitter and never-ending conflict.”
Achtemeier never mentions that the members of the task force, and even leaders of the denomination, are susceptible to the same dissolution. Instead, he says that Paul launched a sustained critique of the “‘church of the subgroups’ throughout his first letter to the Corinthians and his primary counter to the claims of these groups is to lift up the cross of Jesus Christ. When one group rallies around Paul’s own preaching, you’d think that he’d be flattered. But Paul’s response to that is to ask, ‘Was Paul crucified for you?’ Has the Presbyterian Coalition, has the Witherspoon Society, gone to the cross for your salvation?”
He said that the renewal groups and advocacy organizations “think that we are right on the basis of our Biblical analyses, of the scholars who support us, of the powerful preaching that galvanizes our membership.” Achtemeier said, however, that against all those “assumptions of rightness, Paul launches a devastating critique of the human wisdom that forms the basis of the competing agendas. If human wisdom and human programs were adequate vehicles of God’s will for us, there would have been no reason for Jesus to go to the cross. Christ died because our human wisdom and effort and good intentions were not sufficient to save us. God made foolish our human wisdom by exposing its powerlessness and putting to death its pretensions on the cross. And Christ has revealed the foolish pretensions of human wisdom by showering his blessing and sending his spirit even on the least of these.”
According to Paul, Achtemeier said, the cross is the foundation of the one church “and not the agenda of your interest group, however well-intentioned. There on the cross, by this mighty act of God, all of your groups have been joined together into one building, on one foundation of divine mercy, and all these different voices through the church, all these different programs and teachers and groups and agendas are mere day laborers, each seeking to add a few bricks here and there, and whether their work stands will be determined by time.”
In the end, he said, “Paul is convinced that the results will be a rolling back of these sinful distortions that corrupt our common life. When the scope of God’s mercy on the cross of Christ really begins to catch us up, it undermines our arrogance, it deflates our wisdom, it cuts through our proud pretensions and, most strikingly perhaps, frees us from the desperate need of having to be right all the time. It opens the door of the one church to us.”
It is “not on our shoulders to make the world safe for God,” Achtemeier said, and it is “not an item on our agendas to make sure Jesus will come again. It is not incumbent on our wisdom and our programs and our successes to make redemption a reality.”
“Just as God’s victory is not the result of our wisdom,” he said, “neither is God’s defeat going to result should mistaken opinions carry the day for a time. All things are yours, says Paul, the pressure is off, there’s no need to be afraid. Paul’s confidence as he writes to the Corinthians is that this depressurizing of the ecclesial environment will actually allow us the grace and freedom to deal graciously with those others across the aisle whom Christ also loves.”
Achtemeier said the task force “caught a life-giving glimpse of the one church.” He said its members “found that glimpse of Christ’s encompassing mercy dispelling fear and mistrust. We found it undermining our arrogance, fostering humility and allowing love to flourish in spite of our differences. We caught a glimpse of what it means to be built on that one foundation together, working with one another, for the sake of the one church.”
He said the General Assembly caught that same glimpse in the task force report. “An overwhelming majority of our recent assembly voted to reach out across the boundaries of our subgroups and seek a different kind of life together,” he said. “A smaller but still substantial majority voted to underscore the possibilities our polity provides us of working more graciously with minority positions in our life together, even though their human wisdom might be mistaken.”
Wheeler was just optimistic about the report. The task force’s “highest hope,” she said, was that its approval “would send a clear signal about the power of the Gospel to hold together people who disagree. It’s a much-needed signal. This country, according to a recent study, is an increasingly sorted into social, political and religious enclaves. The study says that the less people have to do with those who differ from them, the more adamant and extreme their views and the more vulnerable they are to persons whose paid profession is to exploit differences in the interests of political power. The wider world is even more violently divided, with religion implicated in most of today’s shooting wars. Because our report tried to offer something for all sides, a balanced package we called it, we were hoping for headlines from the 217th General Assembly that would surprise a world that takes conflict for granted. Something like, ‘Presbyterians say their unity in Christ is greater than their differences.’ It didn’t happen.”
She said that the report turned into “a political football denounced by various interest and affinity groups because it didn’t conform to all of the planks in their platforms. In the nine-month interval before the assembly, these groups churned out mountains of negative analysis. One side did more of this than the other, although both sides did it. So it’s understandable that the assembly’s affirmative, but split, vote was determined a defeat for the side that was more negative. The headlines were predictable. Victory for some, loss for others, the same sort of power politics for which the task force was asked to provide an alternative. That was a disappointment.”
Looked at another way, Wheeler said, the results were encouraging. “The persons and groups that have a vested interest in keeping the church in combat mode may have succeeded in dominating the headlines, but I do not think they won the day. I am pointing the finger at myself and fellow task force members – about half of us are former leaders of Covenant Network, Presbyterians For Renewal, the Presbyterian Coalition and More Light Presbyterians. Let me also be clear that these voluntary groups benefit the church in many ways, they raise serious issues that would otherwise be neglected, they provide important educational resources, they give a home to Presbyterians who feel alienated or isolated in their actual home settings.”
She said, however, that these groups also have “determined what the Presbyterian Church focuses most of its time on and its style of engagement over tough issues. As a result, most of the time in General Assembly and in many presbyteries is spent on just a few topics and, because a good fight stimulates support for groups like ours, we regularly stage big battles with the goal of total victory. ‘Winner take all’ means that the loser loses all, so the loser invariably fights back and the conflict never stops.”
Wheeler said the task force report pointed to a “different way of being the church, one that seeks understanding and persuasion of those others, rather than outright defeat. We pleaded with the assembly to mold a future in which for all Presbyterians the primary affinity group in the Christian family is the Presbyterian Church (USA). I think that the assembly took a major step in this direction. Fifty-seven percent of commissioners voted for an important set of measures that was strongly opposed by many affinity groups and had the ringing endorsement of none of them. That amounts to a kind of declaration of independence by commissioners, a determination to make up their own minds, or maybe better, to seek the mind of Christ, despite an avalanche of mostly negative propaganda. Propaganda that urged the defeat of the task force report.”
As for the future, she said there is “a great deal to do in remolding our common life, there’s much to do to build on the constructive influence of those well-organized groups and to mitigate their corrosive effects. Such groups need to be brought into conversation with each other and with the rest of the church, the majority who don’t belong to such groups. The task force was intended to model this project and now it’s time to extend it to the wider church. Specifically, it’s time to build a new culture in this denomination, a denomination that has sorted itself into subcultures – left, right and middle. A new culture that makes a place for everyone, and his and her Biblically-formed conscience.”