An Excerpt From, “What Church Splits Can Teach Us About a Dividing America,”
Russell Moore, in Christianity Today:
“I asked a pastor of a large Methodist congregation what took the churches in the denomination so long to figure out that they must go in different directions.
He responded, “You are looking at this wrong, and a lot of people do. People think there are conservative churches and progressive churches and we just put the one group in one denomination and the other in another and then we’re all happy. You’re wrong.”
“Most congregations are not ‘blue’ or ‘red,’ if you want to use the partisan political analogy,” he said. “Most of the conservative congregations are 30 percent progressive, and most of the progressive congregations are 30 percent conservative. We’re not talking about a dividing line going down the middle of a denomination but a dividing line going down the middle of almost every individual church.”
After that conversation, I started asking different questions of my Methodist friends. I asked one group of pastors, “When the Methodist Church splits, where is your congregation going?” One answered, “Thirty percent of my church wants to stay put, 30 percent wants to leave, and 30 percent just want everybody to get along. [And] Ten percent don’t know that anything’s going on.” Many others nodded.
I then asked, “So what are y’all going to do?” One of the pastors quipped, “Take early retirement,” and the others laughed and said “Amen!” I’m not sure they were joking.
Yet their situation tracks with the state of the country—perhaps not in the reason for the division but in how it is playing out. “ . . .
Russell Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today. He previously served as president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as dean of the School of Theology, senior vice president for academic administration, and as professor of theology and ethics. In August 2022 he was appointed as incoming Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today.
More illuminating (& sobering) background on the earlier church splits are in these two resources:
1) Broken Churches, Broken Nation, by the late scholar C. C. Goen, recounts the major schisms over slavery in three large American denominations prior to the Civil War. (More on that here.)
2) A wave of similar Quaker schisms, over newer social issues but older theological ones, fractured five U. S. Yearly Meetings (thus far) in the 21st century. These are recounted and analyzed in the three-volume study, The Separation Generation.
In the NYT recent interview with Karen Armstrong I was moved by this quote where Armstrong quotes an Islamic scholar’s take on the “Science of Compassion”:
“When we encounter a spirituality that differs from our own and seems alien, Massignon explained, instead of simply dismissing it, we must ask ourselves how the writer came to have these ideas. We must acquaint ourselves in a scholarly fashion with the social, political, geographical, historical and philosophical context in which he lived and worked. And we must not leave this text, Massignon insisted, until we can honestly say that, in such circumstances, we would feel the same.”
When we practice and learn to reach that point with each other, divisions that prevents us moving forward together will no longer exist. Until then, we struggle not with each other, but with our ignorance of each other.
The Quaker name I know for this process is “seeking Spirit in each other.”
The Master said “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you.”
So who, from one of the other slices of the pie in your church, would you take a bullet for, never mind hanging from a cross strangling to death for most of the day?
OK, OK, can we at least come together that hatred is a waste of good passion?