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Meyers is pastor of Mayflower Congregational Church, “an unapologetically Christian, unapologetically liberal” church.  He is also professor of philosophy at Oklahoma City University.

Today’s post is the first in a series of reflections on the book and what Meyers has to say to the church. I invite your dialogue.

According to Meyers in his prologue, “the UCC is a brave and messy denomination that has been speaking truth to power for a long time and insisting that we make more room at the table for those who are forgotten.

It is my sense that for far too long the church has excluded people who are “not our kind of people,” either because they are of a different race, or class or because they are gay or because they understand the scriptures differently than we do.  Meyers invites us to take a longer look at what it means to be a “follower of Jesus rather than a worshipper of Christ. There is a distinction which will become clearer as he continues deeper into his topic.

Meyers describes his Sunday ritual to which anyone who has ever served in parish ministry can relate.  “I came home one cold January afternoon after serving Communion to my beloved flock and took a nap.  Parish ministry is tiring in ways most people do not understand, and a Sunday afternoon nap is as sacred to a middle-aged clergy person as the Psalms. . .Preaching is, after all, an audacious and dangerous act.”  He woke up from his nap and a dream wondering “if I was still a Christian.” 

Meyers had dreamed about churches that supported the status quo in both patriotism and intolerance.  A church that sees its faith as better than and closer to God than anyone else’s faith, a church where one group is in and every other group is out.  In his dream he envisioned a church in which young warriors for Christ were taught to love Jesus by hating Darwin and homosexual people. He awoke thinking, if this is Christianity and these are Christians, I must not be one. He awoke “wondering about the future of the church to which I have given my life.  Is it toxic beyond redemption?   Should it be allowed to die, so that something else can take its place, or should we go in search of Jesus one more time?”

After a few more reflections on the things that bothered him about the church, Meyers made a startling discovery: “As it turns out, the real message of the dream wasn’t self-confirming, it was self-indicting.  Instead of asking, ‘how can I call myself a Christian now?’ a better question might be, ‘why haven’t I done more to promote biblical literacy and invite others to consider an alternative way of being the church in our time?’  It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together.  Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive.”

Meyers is laying out his hope for the future of the church and his belief that without some changes in the focus of the church, in his opinion, the church will in fact die.  It is clear to me that he does not believe that this death is necessary but that if it occurs, resurrection is possible and transformation into a church which follows Jesus will grow out of the ashes of a church that worships Christ but does not follow Jesus.  If the distinction between Jesus and the Christ is not clear Meyers will speak to it early on in the book.

As I read through the book I will reflect on some of Meyers’ key points.  I will not try to “report” the entire book, but will suggest key points for our reflection.

Blessings,

Ben