Right Here Right Now

It wasn’t a promising moment up there at the communion rail for us teens, kneeling at our confirmation ceremony. Our bodies were fidgety, our heads stuffed with the latest pop songs and basketball scores. My impersonation of solemnity wasn’t convincing. 

But as I kneeled, it dawned on me that the adults were taking this moment seriously, and they were trusting us to take it seriously too. We were making a public profession of faith in front of 200 congregants. Grown-ups had gone to trouble to get us to this threshold, this sacred rite into church membership. Ready or not, I realized this is what seriousness of purpose might look like. And we were being invited into it, a new adventure in life. 

Christian faith has long been divided over a definition of sacred power: does the spirit encompass a heavenly realm only, or does it embrace also the wellbeing of God’s children here and now, on earth as it is in heaven?

Church reveals a cosmos of wonder to wandering souls. All those biblical place names—Jericho, Sinai, Nineveh, Galilee—hint at a strange sacred power. So do Gospel images of action unfolding cinematically in the Judean hills—Jesus walking the shoreline, or overturning tradition in the Temple, or appearing on the Emmaus road, depictions seared in the stained glass and revered in the hymns. 

A Paradox of Piety

But the immersive experiences of church are double-edged. Marvelous invocations—the Ancient of Days, the sweet by and by—transmit indestructible news like nowhere else on earth. Yet the habits of church, year in and out, are fraught and fragile. Paradoxically the attempt to preserve or honor the familiar weekly holy rhythms can slip into a fatal insistence that “nothing should change”—neither the old pattern of worship nor the style of leadership nor the customary forays into Bible study nor the reluctance to let a full-throated gospel speak to social crisis.

Everyone knows the modern-day result of this paradox, and we’re pretty much sick of hearing it—the fading of churchgoing, the flatlining of institutional religious influence. Sociologist Christian Smith’s bluntly titled recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete, provides a fresh and thoroughgoing analysis. By obsolete he doesn’t mean failed so much as superseded by other priorities amid the vampiric conditions of the contemporary zeitgeist: the raging pressures of work, the many alternative forms of community at hand, the overwhelm of online life, the unapologetic authority of one’s own unfiltered subjectivity. This “unplanned obsolescence” of organized faith is felt not only among younger generations but older ones too. Smith’s plea to churches is not to despair but be more realistic about “how the social world works and how powerful social and cultural structures are in forming human life”—and take up the challenge with grace and the hope of success.[1]

“Thought-Adventurers”

What then, and what now? Each generation faces a reckoning. A century ago, D.H. Lawrence declared Christianity was finished. The slaughters of World War I had discredited all European institutions, including the churches that banged away for war. Christianity’s majority status in the West looked pointless—it had done nothing to stop the catastrophe or the postwar malaise. “We must start on a new venture toward God,” Lawrence wrote in 1924.[2] Yet even in howling conditions of collapse, he said, the spirit is kept alive—in tiny enclaves of belief if necessary, like little arks on deadly floodwaters, until the nightmare years recede. To him, humanity’s quest for divine presence never ends: human beings are “thought-adventurers” whose religion must always embody energy and courage if it is to be a living, plausible thing. 

So the adventure blazes on. It moves outward into the world—but inward too, new voyages into the interior, into the church’s mind and heart. To take one recent example, the book Jesus and Justice: Organizing for God’s Reign on Earth Then and Now offers an answer to the old puzzling question: why did Jesus leave his inland region and head west to the Sea of Galilee to preach among poor fishermen? Jesus and Justice authors John Dominic Crossan and Michael Okinczyc-Cruz argue that the Galilee in those years was commercially targeted for exploitation and privatization under ruler Herod Antipas. His aim was to take over the fishing economy, extract the profits, and expand his power. This caused upheaval and insecurity among the voiceless lakeside villagers. (Not once have I heard a sermon on this.) Jesus’ response was to meet conditions head-on and seek out those who now were struggling. His Reign of God was revolutionary in that sense, a call for both spiritual and material conversion.

“In direct response to the ruthless commercialization of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus went to where the action was,” the authors say. “This was a profoundly risky choice. His decision to go where Herod Antipas was investing tremendous resources to exploit the local fishing villagers directly exposed him to the wide array of Roman collaborators and local military forces that were invested in Antipas’ booming lakefront enterprise. This decision also reveals Jesus’ clarity about who he wanted to invite into his growing Reign of God movement.”[3]

This dimension of Jesus’ divine mission might sound too harshly political for some, too earthbound, maybe too close to home. The arguments in the book aren’t new. They’re a reminder that Christian faith has long been divided over a definition of sacred power: does the spirit encompass a heavenly realm only, or does it embrace also the wellbeing of God’s children here and now, on earth as it is in heaven? By temperament and habit, churches will make their own choice. They do so in an era when a vision of the churches’ ethical witness is outshouted by superstructures of power and dystopia, even as millions still seek purpose, grandeur, and renewal. The adventure beckons.

Reflections editor Ray Waddle is the author of “This Grand Errand”: A Bicentennial History of Yale Divinity School (YDS, 2022), Undistorted God (Abingdon, 2014), and other books.