First published in the Baptist Times - OUTSIDE EDGE column - 2 April 2010
One of the functions of church is to bury people. Unfortunately, it often does so while they’re alive.
In burying embarrassing unresolved conflicts, churches suppress people’s grievances, and the festering hurt and resentment from camouflaged wounds can set up infected patterns of action and reaction that poison a whole community, over generations.
Uncovering the history of conflicts within and between local churches, and prompting the transparent honesty that can lead to them being healed, is a job for the brave. It seems no less fraught than the current Rwandan process, bringing perpetrators and survivors of genocide face to face for confession and reparation.
Tensions between churches may go so far back that present members have only an inkling of the original cause, or the traumas, feuds and spiritual influences that have scarred the church in ensuing decades. Positive thinking and a desire to emphasise the good can be counter-productive without willingness to reveal and heal the negatives. Pressure to achieve ‘harmony’ results in people being soothed into frustrated silence.
A recent ‘healing wounded history’ day for local churches, led by Acorn Trust’s Russ Parker, reminded church leaders and members that the memories and stories that connect and divide churches have power to keep pain alive, repeating and reinforcing the original pattern of conflict. Every inter-church conflict has winners and losers. The winners need repentance; the losers need healing of loss. Until this is done, the Enemy wins all.
By the end of coffee time, one courageous leader of an independent fellowship stepped forward to apologise publicly for having claimed he could do better than the traditional church he had left - whose leaders then repented of their rigid attitudes to worship that had alienated a brother. They prayed together and wept.
Leaders and long-term members of other churches followed. Recurring words in these open confessions were ‘arrogant’ and ‘insensitive.’ People confessed causing damage and admitted to still feeling hurt.
My first experience of official Christian Unity initiatives was at the age of 14. At a talk by our parish priest to a group of protestant churchgoers on ‘What Catholics Really Believe,’ the politely sceptical audience cornered us youngsters afterwards and demanded to know why we belonged to a church that believed in buying its relatives out of hell and worshipped Mary, dead saints and plaster statues instead of Jesus. Dumbfounded, we said that the priest had just explained we did none of those things, but they preferred the cartoon version of Catholicism.
It would seem funny now, except that decades later I still hear the same misconceptions. Ignorance, arrogance and insensitivity are not the only blocks to the unity Jesus Christ died for.
There are practical problems to achieving one undivided Christian church: churches don’t want each other’s difficult people, or a war between rival organists and worship leaders, redundancies of salaried staff, a conflict of leaders and hierarchies, or potentially explosive resurrections of buried emotions and histories.
Dismissing these human reasons and focusing on debate over theological issues can use up decades and centuries. Non-Christians - as well as many dedicated churchgoers - perceive it as arguing, are shocked by ‘friendly’ rivalries between denominations, and often comment on the fact that churches preach community but continue to practise separately. In-fighting and politics make church a hazardous environment for the unassertive.
Pressured to forgive, people feel trivial or unspiritual for minding the subtle put-downs, officiousness and gossip that often go unaddressed.
One day of repentance and reparation for pain inflicted and suffered is worth a thousand years of debate, however sincere the debaters in their search for correctness.
Real oneness, in spirit and truth, between churches and within churches stands no chance of ever happening till enough people are willing to pay the cost.
It means allowing each other to express the whole range of different experiences of God and of life and entering the depths of one another’s suffering, rather than trying to bury the differences and the inconvenient emotions.
When we want the wholeness Jesus wants, to the point of being willing to die for it, then dying to pride seems a good place to start.