Ingredients for a Reformation

My work has taken me to places like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Columbia, South Carolina; and Kansas City lately. Bible belt country where, as one bishop put it, all we mainline Christians know how to do is either "mock or mimic" our evangelical & fundamentalist counterparts. But the problem isn't confined to south of the Mason-Dixon line. North of the border, some of our Canadian friends are wondering how to respond to the recent release of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, the latest addition to a growing stable of atheist titles getting headlines. One congregation I'm working with up there is in the early stages of planning a lecture series that, for lack of a better way to say it, is in its first draft being called "We're Not Them."

And that's part of the problem, isn't it? We lack a better way of saying it.

What IS it we believe, as "progressive"/ecumenical/mainline/"not them" Christians, anyway? Eric Elnes, in "The Phoenix Affirmations," takes a crack at trying to explain it. He's a U.C.C. pastor and the cofounder of Crosswalk America. I admire the work he's done and is doing, the online community he's helped build, the (literal) walk across America, the attempt to say some things that need saying about what it means to be a Christian who remembers that Jesus loved the outcast and fed the hungry and hated hypocrisy and turned upside down a social order that benefits the powerful. But, honestly, I found his prose clumsy and, well, uninspired. Affirmation #3, for example, is "Celebrating the God whose Spirit pervades and whose glory is reflected in all of God's creation, including the earth and its ecosystems, the sacred and secular, the Christian and non-Christian, the human and non-human." Is it just me? Even if it is, and you appreciate the high style and attention to detail he exhibits, who's going to be able to remember that?

I don't really have a solution to this problem but I do know it's something we need to be working on. We need simple language and concepts so easy we can bullet point them. Most importantly, we need a good story.

The New York Times today is carrying an article about the way our stories shape us: "Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent." The psychologists who have conducted this research are interviewed: “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”

Simple language. Clear ideas. Honest, compelling, hopeful stories.

It seems too good to be true, right? But I'm thinking these look like the ingredients for a reformation. And there are at least a few people to the south...and to the north...of me for whom it can't come soon enough.