UNITED CHURCH’S ATHEIST ‘PASTOR’ IS BEST IGNORED
Reaffirmation of faith demonstrates strength of belief, writes Jason Byassee.
“All I know is Jesus changed my life and I can’t stop preaching about him.”
The seminar question in my class was, “Why do you preach?” And the answer above was not from an evangelical American, or a Pentecostal recently emigrated from Asia, though we have such students at the Vancouver School of Theology.
It was from a young aspiring minister in the United Church of Canada. She is evangelical in spirit, inclusive on social questions and passionate in her manner of presentation. And she is far from alone.
I am also an evangelical, though with some lefty commitments. My native United Methodist Church in the southern U.S. is able to be both mainline/ liberal and also evangelical in ways that are rare outside the U.S. South. I am surprised and delighted to find a similar combination in students at the quite-liberal VST.
Those under 40 tend to be like the student I quoted above. They have had some weird experience of Jesus that changed their life. They left behind aspiring careers in law or media or medicine or whatever and took up ministry, which promises far less money and social prestige, but far more satisfaction, both in this world and the next. Some of their Baby Boomer forebears in mainline denominations in Canada may have thought that to be more inclusive to the historically excluded gay or lesbian person, First Nations person or other excluded minority, they should tear down historic Christian doctrine.
They find the opposite is true. What the church has long taught about the Trinity, Christology, the church, the sacraments and so on, enables God’s welcome to the outcast. It is a myth that the inclusion of gay and lesbian persons requires the dismantling of historic Christian commitments.
It is a myth recently perpetrated by atheist “pastor” Greta Vosper. Headlines screeched last week that the United Church was unable or unwilling to oust someone claiming not to believe in God. This is like a chemist claiming disbelief in the periodic table, or a French teacher who thinks grammar rises to the intellectual level of trolls and fairies. Vosper has long used her denomination’s anxiety over her “beliefs” as a lever to sell her bad books. The whole sight is an embarrassment.
We don’t know the whole story of the United Church’s response. The brief, one-sentence affirmation from the Toronto Conference that Vosper remains a minister in good standing smacks of legalese.
As a committed Christian theologian, I don’t like it. Vosper is free to believe whatever she wants. But she takes it upon herself to speak as though she were some sort of pope of the United Church. Her colleagues resent being spoken for. There are religious communities to the left of the United Church that would be glad to have her. She should do the honest and decent thing and move along.
But she in no way represents the students I teach who will be the United Church’s future. I find none of them interested in her theology. They are familiar with it, the same way they are familiar with quack cures in medicine’s pre-history. They are learning instead from figures like Eugene Peterson, Sarah Coakley, James Cone, Ellen Davis and Douglas John Hall. That is, from committed Christians, conversant with modernity but fascinated by ancient wisdom, trying hard to pray and share good news with their neighbours.
To ask whether they believe in God is a boring question. Ask what sort of God they believe in. And you will hear all about Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, undoer of injustice, renewing the world God loves.
I don’t mean to speak for my students, from whom you will hear plenty in the years to come. But I do think the United Church of Canada needs some work on the public-relations front, and I hereby appoint myself.
My colleagues and students tell me on the quiet that the onesentence lawyerly response is perfect. It says, essentially: meh. Vosper’s theology is not sufficient to invite an interested response. She can continue to feed her thin gruel to her dwindling congregation in the anonymity she deserves. Vosper has apparently been tweeting under the hashtag #heresytrial. She and her fans can continue to think they are bravely advancing into a risky new world with all the noise of the battering ram through the open door. Who thinks belief in nothing is creative? No one not born in the 1940s, that’s who.
Meanwhile, you will find my students opening new congregations, evangelizing their neighbours, feeding the poor, protesting environmental injustice, praying with the sick, and burying the dead in hope of the bodily resurrection and God’s promised new creation. I worry about Christian communions that think they have a future. What need do they have for a God who raises the dead?
The United Church will continue declining in numbers and prestige for years to come. Then, one day, from its inevitable rubble, little communions of hope will spring up. The God of the Bible always and only works via death and resurrection. And that God has done much more with much less promising material than this.
Last week at VST chapel the United Church pastor on campus, Aaron Miller, preached about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He spoke positively of speaking in tongues, he compared the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost to the Spirit’s overshadowing of Mary in the incarnation, and spoke of the way God includes us in God’s own life. The God this next generation believes in is Trinitarian, fleshed in Jesus, poured out by the Spirit in our lives. There could be no better response to l’affaire Vosper than that.
God has done much more with much less promising material than this.