We will so order our lives

There's a promise of commitment congregations in my faith tradition make whenever someone is baptized. This statement is designed to remind everyone that the growth and living out of the Christian life is nurtured in community. The commitment we, the congregation, pledge at baptism, reflects a understanding that, day in and day out, it is the example of other Christians that helps each of us see what the faith is all about.

The commitment promise opens with the phrase, "With God's help, we will so order our lives after the example of Christ that..."

I've been pondering Colossians 3:1–17 recently, that mysterious passage that talks about our new life hidden in Christ and what it should look like. There's a veritable laundry list of things to put aside and things to embrace:

To put aside: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed; anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language; lying.

To embrace: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience; bearing with each other, forgiving each other; love, and the peace and word of Christ; gratitude; praise; wisdom.

When I think about the churches I have been part of and what beset them, when I look around at what the most prominent and vocal Christians in this country are known for, when I mull over what passes for Christian dialog on the Internet, and when I look at my own life, I see too many of the things we should put aside and not enough of the things we should embrace.

And then I wonder about the Christian witness in this world. Are we "so ordering our lives" or not? It seems to me that when the world considers our witness, it does not see enough of the example of Christ in those of us who go by his name. And those children and new believers that we are to bring up and nurture in the tenets of our faith? What exactly is it we are teaching them?

When we get caught up in endless "culture war" finger pointing at those who are not Christian and couple it with the intramural fighting that we've become known for, how is that "so ordering our lives after the example of Christ"? Who, exactly, is coming to know Christ this way—and those who are, what is it they think the life hidden in Christ is really all about?

When we build our churches around things other than those that mattered the most to Jesus himself, what are we teaching our children and new believers about what it means to be Jesus' disciples?

If we say "Christian" on the outside, but are filled with those things we are to put aside and exhibit very little of what we are to embrace, what good are we? When and where this is the case, the picture shifts from engaging in nurturing and building up people in the faith to assessing what kind of damage are we doing to them.

Pastors vs. laity. Laity vs. pastors.

At the end of 2000, I decided I needed to take a sabbatical from four decades in the United Methodist Church. When I walked away, I was worn out, burned out, jaded and angry, first from watching what happened to family and friends who served in the church, and then from what happened to me and people I grew to care about when we also served.

In 2013, as I weigh whether to rejoin the denomination, I'm uncovering a lot of old reminders of why I left. And they're making it hard to return.

At the top of the list of things I need to come to terms with if I return is the terrible chasm and disconnection between the UMC's clergy and its laypeople. It's the main reason I needed to take a break back in 2000, and things don't seem to have gotten much better in the interim.

The UMC is not alone in this regard. Many kinds of churches suffer from the uneasy relationship between clergy and laity. This recent opinion piece on the Alban Institute's website illustrates the issue.

Being a clergyperson, the writer sees the problem from the clergy's perspective. And that perspective is that the laity are sheep who are unreasonably dependent on, and have unrealistic expectations for their clergy. If only the laity would take more responsibility, be more mature, stop seeing the church in terms of what benefits them, and serve and welcome those who are on the outside, clergy tell each other, things would be so much better and we could really be church.

Then there's the counter perspective of the laity. They've seen clergy who do think their role is to have all the answers and the congregation's role is to follow them. They've been led by clergy who like being in charge with a more or less helpless congregation that they alone can lead. They've noticed that some clergy do not want to share power in the church with even their most mature members and will use their position to make sure that does not happen. They've been talked down to by clergy do not think people in their congregation even have ideas, or that if they do, that they are silly, or stupid, or "backwards," and certainly not based on what the latest church thinking happens to be. And they suspect some clergy enjoy feeling superior and "closer to God" than their congregants, and are more than happy to have a handy group of people to blame for things that do not work and problems that arise.

How do I know this? I am in the strange situation of having a foot in both camps. I went to seminary and am ordained, but I have spent most of my service in a lay capacity. I know how clergy complain to each other about their people, and I also know how frustrated the laity are with their clergy and denominational officials.

What I have hardly ever seen is an actual dialogue on equal footing between clergy and laity, where any of these kinds of issues are discussed and perspectives shared. Instead, each camp mutters about the other behind the closed doors of their own camps.

So let me say it here. Laity, you can be pretty immature, lazy and petty. Clergy, you enjoy the power and the feeling of spiritual superiority. And by the way clergy, you do hold most of the cards and you haven't played them very well over the years.

This is not just a UMC problem. It's a problem in all churches. We've got to figure out a way to work together, not at cross purposes. Things would be so different if clergy and laity were actually partners who had respect for each other, rather than people who see each other as problems and antagonists. Let's power share and responsibility share and honor our mutual and separate gifts. To get there, though, we first have to be willing to at least talk to each other. The time to start is now.

What do Christians know, and when do they know it?

I've led a lot of Bible studies and small groups, in both mainline and evangelical churches, and I continue to be astonished about my fellow Christians' lack of understanding of the Bible.

I've found it's the people who grew up in the church who have been the hardest to get into an adult study group. This seems to be because they think they already know what the Bible is about: what it teaches, what it tells us about God, and what its instructions are for living our lives. They learned these things as children and it's hard to convince them they would benefit from reading the Bible as an adult.

What do Christians know, and when do they know it? If you grew up in church, your understanding of Scripture probably started in Sunday School, where you learned Bible stories. So you believe you know the Bible. But really, you don't. Sunday School teaches kids sanitized versions of selected stories with action and memorable characters and miracles and children in them.

Children's Sunday School is a start to learning about what we believe. It's where you get the basics in child-sized, discrete portions. Sunday School is where you learn that Jesus loves you and you learn "what God wants from you."

But it's not where you learn that the whole of Scripture weaves certain themes about God and people, about what our problem is, and what God's solution is. It's not where you realize that the timeless issues plaguing the human race—issues we suffer through today just as people did in biblical times—require God's equally timeless response and our repentance.

It's not where you learn the Bible is not sanitized for your protection. Those perfect characters you learned about as a child are not perfect at all—a real eye-opener for adults who re-read their stories. They seem to be more like us, filled with flaws, making mistakes, and sometimes acting very badly.

It's not where you have to wrestle with the hard parts—the system of sacrifices, the genocides, the treatment of women and children, the slavery. In Sunday School you don't have to ponder how a Bible that was written a long time ago for people living in a very different world than ours still has relevance for us today.

A lot of Christians operate at the same level of understanding they gained as a child. But when we never progress past the Sunday School Bible story view and grow into an adult faith, we do both ourselves and God a disservice.

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The other place Christians tend to learn about the Bible is through Christian authorities, whether a pastor's sermons or the things that Christian celebrities tell us to think as we watch them on TV, listen to them on the radio, go to their rallies and read their books.

Unless you are reading, on your own, the passages these folks interpret for you, you are stuck with  their views on what's important, why it's important, and what you should think about it. Sometimes authorities get it right, but sometimes they're way off base. How will you know unless you are reading the Bible for yourself?

A friend of mine is searching for a new church. She went to one recently where in his sermon the pastor came to some conclusions about faith and the work of Christ that were patently wrong. The pastor had a point he wanted to make, and he was going to make it even though he had to twist Scripture to get there. And so he said that some verses meant something they did not mean at all.

Alarms went off in her head. Had my friend not known her Bible, if she had not read and wrestled with and understood the Bible as an adult, she would not have blinked an eye at the pastor's dangerous interpretation. But because she had, she knew that was not going to be the church for her.

Even if you've spent your life in the church, it's vital to open your mind and read the Bible as an adult. It's important to read big sweeps of the Bible, to see how passages connect, and what messages God repeats to us. It's crucial to experience words that make you uncomfortable or cause you to scratch your head. It's important to read the parts that seem grounded in ancient ways of thinking, and to wrestle with what they could mean for us today. And it's critical to see how the context of a passage helps us to better interpret what it says.

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Some people come from specific upbringings where they memorized Bible verses key to their church tradition's worldview. They believe they know the Bible because they have quotes for many different occasions. Bible memorization is helpful, both for ourselves and for others, but only when the individual verses are grounded in their surrounded passages and not left to stand alone out of context—either the context of the Bible or the context of the occasion for which they are used.

I once knew a woman who sprinkled all her conversations with Bible verses. No matter the topic, she had a number of verses to share that she thought settled matters. The problem was, most of them did not actually apply to the situation, and she was totally unaware that was the case. She had been raised in the "prooftexting" tradition and saw the Bible as a collection of regulations to live by, do's and don'ts, and promises that God was obligated to fulfill. Over the years, she harmed quite a few people by dispensing "biblical advice" in an authoritative tone that was both inappropriate and guilt inducing. But because of her upbringing, she thought she had a handle on what the Bible says, and that she was doing people a lot of good. She had learned things as a child and just carried that system with her into adulthood, never realizing the Bible isn't a recipe book.

We owe it to ourselves and to God not to sell the Bible and our faith short, but to give them the attention and thought they deserve. The rewards are rich, both for ourselves and the people in our lives. But when we are content with the faith we inherited as a child, and what we were taught when we were young, we rob ourselves of an adult understanding. Reading the Bible as an adult is one of the keys to developing a mature faith that is ours, not someone else's, and to helping, not harming people with what it says.