This Is My Church
But I don't belong here
My little urban church has had a couple of tough years. In early 2020, prior to the pandemic, a schism formed between the older and younger members resulted in the resignation of our pastor and about a 40% reduction in membership. Then, the pandemic hit, further decimating the membership by a forced closing of the narthex doors in favor of remote "churching" via Zoom. Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz was not just the Restaurant Slayer. His zeal to wield emergency powers also included closing houses of worship. For Governor Walz's cowardice under fire, I also award him the honorary title of Diocletian - Lord Protector of State Sponsored Sciences, Destroyer of Christian Faiths.
My church went dark for months, maintaining only weekly online church services for the few dozen Zoom-active members. Having been forced into way too many Zoom meetings in my professional life over the past three years, I simply state that Zoomed church services are just bad television. Anyone who requests a Zoom meeting with me must know that in my office I have no less than six screens. One must be incredibly compelling to draw my attention away from the other five for any length of time. The same is true with Zooming church services from my house. The church simply is not going to get 100% of my theological attention if, instead of sitting in front of an impressive and sacred alter that honors my Lord, I am seated comfortably in my profane appointed living room watching the service on a nine by twelve inch screen.
Some months later, my little church resumed in-person church services in conjunction with the ever-present Zoom monitors. Following Fauciesque and CDC guidelines, social distancing and mask wearing was required. The social hour that followed our typical church service was eliminated. As one walked into the church, braided yellow ropes blocked seating in every other pew and mask monitors were stationed at every door. The church choir was eliminated as well as singing praises to our Lord was deemed a super spreader phenomenon. I attended a few services under these strict guidelines finding myself one of only about 12 people that dared leave the house for such a risky endeavor. Although being before the altar once again brought warmth to my soul, the entire service, with continued Zoom-related technical difficulties, interrupted the flow. The bottom line was that the “new normal” church service simply not compelling. The utter futility of the whole ordeal kept me away from physically attending my church for most of 2020 and 2021
About every three months or so, I checked into my church service only to find the braided yellow ropes banning parishioners from sitting next to each other were still in place. Mask mandates had been dropped in favor of the warning statement, "mask use strongly encouraged." The choir was all but disbanded. Life was too short, I concluded, and I went about making better use of my time on Sunday mornings.
Throughout these two years, I continued to read the weekly email newsletters and send my monthly pledges electronically. I honestly followed the church communications closely ever looking for a crack in the church’s Covid armor that would indicate that they were ready to resume normal (historical) liturgical church services. Sadly, no such weakness in the fortification emerged. If anything, a religious dogma emerged. Not a religious dogma like acceptance without question the real Presence of the Eucharist, but acceptance without question State sanctioned sciences.
Earlier last month, my heart yearned for the Advent season experience. I returned to an in-person church service a few weeks ago. The pews now held about 30 fellow parishioners and the Zooming apparatus worked more soothe and was less intrusive. But the little yellow ropes still barred people from entering every other pew. Masking, which I believe is entirely a personal choice, was about 20% and the coffee hour after the service was restored. My church service started to feel a little more like it did before the “Covid is the existential threat to humanity” crisis launched in March of 2020. Then, I opened the new hymnal…
I had read in my monthly newsletters that the church had raised a committee to research and purchase new hymnals. My assumption was that the necessity for such work was to replace the tattered paged, broken spine and faded covered hymnals that had served my little church for many decades. On the first hymn of the service, the organ master played a familiar tune. I reached for my new hymnal to begin singing along. Although the tune was the same, the words were different from the old tatter-paged version. Instead of singing praises to God, this new set of lyrics honored diversity and inclusion. My heart sank as I returned to a seated position following the hymn. I had the same heartbroken feeling as Ralphie in “A Christmas Story” after he solved Little Orphan Annie’s decoder ring. I had returned to church for a God experience and I was served a political commercial. Instead of singing praises to the Holy Trinity, our new hymnals had us singing praises to a modern trinity - a secular trinity known as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI.)
As if we do not get enough of the DEI commercialism in our daily lives. DEI virtue singling fills our social medias. Schools and universities live by the sword of DEI by hiring valiant and noble knights to patrol the school grounds ever protecting fair student’s ears from discouraging words while slaying mighty hateful, bigoted, racist, and insensitive campus dragons. DEI is wrapped into our investments thanks to the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock fame. Because of Fink’s worshiping at the alter of DEI, an entire corporate movement towards adopting ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) standards has been launched. Boardrooms across our lands are in an absolute panic that the investment and banking communities will dox them out of existence if they do not comply with ESG standards. Boards of directors, instead of preforming their fiduciary duty of protecting the organization on behalf of shareholders, are frantically trying to adapt their operations into accommodating the nebulous and undefinable “stakeholders.”
I imagine if Jesus entered my church, he would kick over the tables of the modern money changers. He would scream at the DEI exchangers, the individuals scrubbing the profane and political message of DEI and exchanging it for the appearance of something glorious and Holy. Jesus would take down those yellow ropes and tear off those masks and say, “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” He would want us to embrace one another and sing praises to his Father not cower in every other pew. Our obligation to Caesar ends when we have rendered onto him what is his. There is no pathway to God that has government as a steppingstone.
When a society endeavors to remove God from the central square, it will necessarily adopt other deities to worship. Western nations have been on this unholy crusade for many decades. We have mocked God’s Invisible Hand and replaced it with an infallible bureaucratic one. I have concluded, if it is to be humankind’s lot that we destroy ourselves, it most certainly will not be because God created an inferior vessel incapable of overcoming our own stupidity. It will be because, despite God’s creation of humanity in His own image, our gift of free will lead us away from His Divine protection. We will choose, unquestioning, to follow lord nefarious to the depths of his realm. What is at stake for our modern churches is not converting our services into a state approved commercial for ESG via DEI worship, but to fight that urge with all our hearts and draw our wayward souls back into God’s warm embrace. For after all, it is not God who has forsaken us, his blessed children, it is us who have forsaken a loving God for a few shiny trinkets of social acceptance.
As I sat in my church a few weeks ago, I concluded that I love my church, I love its beautiful architecture and I love its people like I love my own family. This is my church, I concluded, but I don’t belong here…
The hymnal is becoming all but unrecognizable- I struggle to sing some of the new words with clumsy rhyming schemes and attempts to combine poetry with modern sensibilities (which seem to change faster than the seasons). Recently we sang 'this is my father's world'. But the specificity of the word 'father' is out of favor, so they changed the words to 'this is God's wondrous world'. Hmm...
Sadly, I too have been separated from the church where my family had been actively involved. The congregation was divided by a small group of adamant mask-wearing, jab pushing adherents to “the science.” When I and others pointed out that the faith was why we came together, the response was visceral and vicious. These folks were some of the longstanding members, and the leaderships’ silence was deafening. We are keenly aware of the importance of congressional worship, and feel that void in our lives.
Very well written, sir. Thank you.