“On Being Congregational in a Post-Denominational World”
Rev. Dr. Steve Jungkeit
Texts: Isaiah 45: 5-8; Matthew 5: 13-16
“On Being Congregational in a Post-Denominational World”
Not long ago, I received an email from someone new to the area who was curious about our church. “I looked on your website, and I couldn’t find your doctrinal beliefs,” the person wrote. Now, usually, when people ask about doctrines right away, it’s a sign that they’re looking for something different than what we offer at FCCOL. I sent a nice reply, welcoming them to the area, and then referring them to our church welcome statement. But I also explained that even though we’re rooted in Scripture and theology, and that even though we’re deeply committed to the teachings and ministry of Jesus, that we are a non-creedal church. That stems from a deeply held conviction, rooted in centuries of theological tradition, that each of us has the freedom to come to our own conclusions about how our faith holds together.
Some of us are very traditional in our understanding of faith, after all. Others among us are actually a little reluctant about God and Jesus, but have a commitment to the greater social good that Jesus and the prophets articulated. Some of us have had mixed experiences with churches in the past, and are tentative about getting involved. Some of us are brand new to faith, and don’t have much background in the traditions of Scripture and history and theology that make up the Christian story. I suppose there are some who simply need some kind of oasis of sanity in the world, a place where it’s clear that ordinary decency still counts for something. We don’t always succeed, but we try our best to honor the journey that we are each of us on.
I explained those things in my email, and, as I suspected, I learned in a follow up email that we weren’t the kind of community this person was searching for. In fact, I received several more emails after that, telling me, in so many words, that I was in error and that I would be held to account on the day of judgment. I was told that I would be in this person’s prayers. To which I could only say, thank you – because I can always use prayer.
In a few short weeks, we’ll invite those new to our community to formally join us – we’ve called it New Members Sunday, even though that’s a word and a concept we’re trying to rethink. It makes the church sound like a dues paying club, which we’re not. One week from now, after the service, we’ll hold a short gathering for those who would like to learn more about who we are, and what FCCOL is about. In anticipation of both of those events, I thought it might be helpful to speak broadly about the tradition to which we belong. Whether you’ve been here a long time, or whether you’re newly arrived, it can be useful to recall what makes Congregationalism distinctive, and why we are the way we are. It also might help to suggest the importance of this form of faith in the turbulent times we’re living through.
And so who are we? And where do we come from? We can answer those questions, in part, by conceiving of our history as a series of concentric circles, where we arrive, finally, at FCCOL, located at the center. (I hasten to say that we’re not at the center of Congregationalism or of anything else – there is no particular center to our tradition – even if, as I shared last week, an image of FCCOL is on the Wikipedia page for Congregationalism. We are, I guess, the very definition of what it means to be Congregational, at least according to one site!) Each of the rings I’ll name is a way of differentiating different forms the Christian faith has taken across the centuries.
To begin, it’s important to note that the greatest circumference is the one we share with all human beings, regardless of our history, geography or beliefs. We are one human family, no matter our form of worship, or our lack of it. That’s an insight we seek to honor here at FCCOL. Still, we do speak different spiritual and religious languages, and there are different ways of approaching the sacred throughout the world. Christian faith and practice is but one such way. Or many ways, actually.
Within the portion of this sphere belonging to Christianity, moving down to another ring, there is what we can think of as the Church Universal, binding all our various expressions together. There are, broadly speaking, three major strands: The Roman Catholic Church, centered in Rome; the Orthodox Church, centered at one time in Constantinople, with rites now celebrated in places like Greece, Russia, Egypt, and Ethiopia; and then the Protestant Churches, growing out of the Reformation in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. We belong to the last of those, but we are not unrelated to the others. We share most in common with the Roman Catholic Church, from whom Protestants split off 500 years ago. It’s why, a week ago, when I watched the funeral of Pope Francis, I felt a deep affinity for the symbols and rites that I was viewing. But I have felt it too when I’ve had the opportunity to visit Orthodox churches, occasionally with some of you on our Tree of Life journeys. There is something humbling about encountering the ancient roots of those faith expressions, and of sensing our commonalities, even across our many differences.
Moving to the next ring, our third, we encounter Protestantism. It’s a movement that began in Germany, soon spreading to Switzerland, Holland, England, and Scotland. The two major figures associated with the Protestant Reformation are Martin Luther and John Calvin, who responded to abuses within the Catholic Church with a series of, well, protests and then reforms. Protestantism soon fractured into many different expressions, a process that continues to occur today. There are Baptists and Methodists, Episcopalians and Anabaptists, and Presbyterians and Congregationalists.
The latter two, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, make up what we can think of as a fourth ring. It is John Calvin who figures most prominently in what eventually become these expressions of faith. That may come as bad news to some of you, for Calvin has been associated with some of the harshest and most severe forms of Protestant faith. In recent years, though, he’s been read as someone having far more in common with the Renaissance, and with a reinvigorated spirit of humanism, than as the cold and sterile figure that many of us have grown up associating with that name, Calvin.
One of the largest things that Calvin emphasized, something that our own Congregational forbears embraced fully, was something called the “sovereignty” of God. (I note, by the way, that a horse named Sovereignty won the Kentucky Derby yesterday – perhaps this was a Calvinist horse.) These days, I would much rather speak of the primacy, or the insistence of God. Sovereignty is a political metaphor that has become troublesome, especially in an era when democracies are under attack. We can wonder if generations of Protestant Christians, accustomed to ascribing devotion to a form of sovereign power, have become all too comfortable with other forms of sovereignty. We can wonder if, when an individual exercises forms of unchecked or sovereign power, some Christians have been ideologically prepared to obey that kind of power. It is, after all, how God has been imagined and described. And so in a way, if a human being behaves in such a way, they might seem…godly? I can’t say, but it’s a worry I have about the “sovereignty” of God.
In truth, however, Calvin’s notion of the sovereignty of God was intended to guard against that kind of power. Drawing from passages like Isaiah 45, which we heard earlier, it was meant to suggest that, to use an older formulation again, that God alone is Lord of the conscience. That means that no nation, no ruler, no elected official, no party ideology, no financial power, no corporate authority, not even a church, can come between the individual, and his, her, or their relationship to God. That remains a key feature of our own self-understanding here at FCCOL. “Each member shall have the undisturbed right to follow the Word of God according to the dictates of his, her, or their own conscience,” our church bylaws state. Whether or not you wish to acknowledge a debt to John Calvin, and no matter how tarnished the idea of “sovereignty” has become, we have him to thank for the freedom of conscience that we uphold in our tradition.
So that’s a little about the Reformation, and John Calvin. But what makes a Congregationalist? To answer that, we need to enter yet another circle, our fifth. Congregationalism refers to a form of church organization, whereby congregations retain their own authority to be who they are, without interference from a church hierarchy. Not only that, clergy and laypeople in this tradition share the responsibility for discerning who and what an individual congregation might be. We belong to a denomination called the United Church of Christ, which was actually formed in 1957 after several different bodies broadly adhering to this form of governance merged together. The United Church of Christ is probably the most progressive Christian denomination, but its churches are linked through what are called “covenants,” not a hierarchy of control. That means we here in Old Lyme are free to steer our own path, even as we are linked to other communities shaped by similar histories.
It’s a form of organization that emerged primarily in England among independent minded peoples in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. And it resulted in two very prominent groups of migrants, who set out to find a place in which they could practice the freedom they sensed emerging from their understanding of God: the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Both are important for understanding who we are today.
A quick word about the Pilgrims. They were exiled from England, initially settling in Holland. For some of them, though, Holland proved too confining, and so they ventured across the Atlantic in the year 1620, landing on the shores of what became Plymouth. When they set out on their voyage, John Robinson, the pastor to that Pilgrim congregation, said, in words that we’ll shortly sing, “God hath yet more truth and light to break forth from his Word.”
Though we’ve come a long way from their understanding of the world, even now, we retain some features borrowed from the Pilgrims. For one, we understand ourselves to be a people on a journey, and we are called to never cease our explorations into God, into life, into the depths of our own hearts. From the Pilgrims, we understand that faith is not a matter of finding an answer, and then standing still forevermore. It is a lifelong journey, when the answers we thought we had ten or twenty or thirty years ago must be revisited and reformulated ever again. Once Reformed, always reforming, the saying goes. That leads to a kind of improvisation in the life of faith, at least as we conceive it, not unlike jazz. Scales and chords are ever there, but they can be played in ever new and transformative ways. Not only that, John Robinson’s statement – that God hath yet more truth and light – also captures what it is to be a progressive community of faith, for we do believe that God continues to speak within human hearts, and that there is a progressive unfolding of what the reality of God might mean. And so we are a Pilgrim people.
The second group of migrants, the Puritans, followed a decade after the Pilgrims. Nobody has a kind word to say about the Puritans these days, but in truth, I think that’s a mistake. In a way, Nathaniel Hawthorne has done more to shape our imaginations of the Puritans than anyone else. They had their flaws, to be sure, and we’ve had to grapple with the settler-colonial implications of their history. But nothing is easy, and for all that may repel us, they have given us some lasting gifts. They understood the workings of the human heart, and the ways we can deceive ourselves – they had a strong notion of sin, in other words. And so they built guardrails around all their power arrangements, which led, more or less directly, to the separation of powers in the U.S. form of government. They had a deep regard for learning. They had a powerful sense of beauty. And later generations of Puritans, like Jonathan Edwards, were actively integrating the latest discoveries from the sciences into theology.
Above all, though, the Puritans bequeathed to us a sense of public theology, public religion. Drawing upon the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, John Winthrop told this fledgling, utopian community – for the Puritans were utopian through and through – that they were to be a city set upon a hill, and that their conduct toward one another therefore mattered. It’s the most famous sermon ever delivered in America, though technically it was delivered on a ship, the Arabella. The eyes of the world were upon them, Winthrop said. Faith had a public dimension, in other words. It was not only a matter of one’s own private stirrings of heart. This too is something that we have retained from our Puritan ancestors. We too believe here at FCCOL that faith has a public dimension, involving us in the questions and realities of our time. We don’t always get it right, but we continue to believe that people of faith must develop a social conscience, and that such a voice needs to be heard, in public. It’s this conviction that drives our social witness, and our human rights work. It comes, at least in part, from the Puritans.
There are other rings that we could explore – the development in the 19th and 20th centuries of liberal theology; the development of Liberation, Feminist, Black, and Queer theologies in the latter part of the 20th century; the emergence of post-colonial theologies over the last several decades, and so on.
But we do come, eventually, to the center of these concentric rings, where FCCOL proudly sits. We have been, across 360 years now, Puritans, Pietists, Revivalists, Liberal Reformers, Social Gospelers, and so much more. Each generation puts its mark on this place, and each generation makes it anew. These days, we’re committed to asking how we might remain worthy of being the Church of Jesus Christ in a time of rising authoritarianism, bigotry, inequality, and isolation. These days, we’re committed to building an anti-racist future, and we’re passionate about our partnerships in other parts of the world, all of which draw us out of our self-absorption and isolation. We’re committed to supporting our immigrant neighbors and friends. We’re devoted to the renewal of our minds, and we’re finding ever new ways to connect with one another, to break down whatever soft barriers might exist among us, even sitting close together in our pews. We’re excited to nurture the young, and, through community, to help families make it through what can often feel like the wilderness of parenting. We’re alive to music and the arts. And we’re firm in our endeavor to be a fully inclusive and welcoming space for all those who identify as LGBTQI.
Denominational cheerleading isn’t a popular practice these days, and I’m going to guess that relatively few among us spend a great deal of time thinking about the differences between the Christian denominations. I’m also going to guess that there are relatively few among us that lose sleep at night wondering what makes a Congregationalist a Congregationalist. I get that. We get that.
But it helps to know where we come from. It helps to know why we are the way we are. And maybe it will help some of you to feel a little more oriented, and therefore a little welcome, as we forge a future together. For my part, I can say that I’m proud to stand in this long lineage of faith with all of you. We have our blind spots, I’m sure, as our predecessors in faith had theirs. But we also have a deep and noble legacy that can help us to navigate, together, the unprecedented challenges we are confronting. I am confident that now, especially now, “God hath yet more truth and light to break forth” upon this world. Here in Old Lyme. And upon each of us. Amen.