Caucusing about the Creeds (or, pew aerobics)

Kendall Harmon at TitusOneNine frets about this report in Episcopal Life concerning a "pew aerobics" theological exercise:

The Rev. Tom Woodward of Santa Fe, New Mexico, once devised a startling way to show a congregation its belief, unbelief and the value of community.

He calls it "an experience with the Nicene Creed."

After explaining that they would be reading through the creed phrase by phrase, Woodward would give the charge:

"When the phrase is something you understand on one level or another, and believe, stand up or remain standing. When the phrase is something that makes no sense to you, or is something you do not believe, sit down or remain sitting."

The resulting dance, he says, appeared to be something akin "to a rebellious exercise class," with folks popping up, sitting down and squirming to watch their neighbors as they stood and sat and stood again.

At the end, Woodward would ask what they had observed. "The answers were always the same: No one stood all the way through the creed, and no one stayed seated all the way through, and there was always someone standing for every phrase."

(Emphasis added.)

Kendall Harmon says that "what it tells us is that we are church which is failing to teach the faith effectively ...." 

No, Kendall. What it really tells us is that when it comes to credibility, many so-called "core" Christian doctrines are pretty much on a par with, say, astrology. And deep down, many of our pew-sitters know it.

Think about it:  Conventional Christians fervently profess (for example) ancient trinitarian claims about the nature of God, while rejecting with equal fervor the contrary claims of (say) the LDS Church.  This is decidedly curious, inasmuch as none of these claims is supported by anything remotely resembling competent evidence; all rest essentially entirely on "faith" — which in this context is no more than a euphemism for wishful thinking.

That, not any failure in teaching, is the reason Tom Woodward got the results he did in his experiment. I suspect his results could be replicated in many Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran churches.

Some scripturalists insist passionately that Christians would return to The True Faith if only the church would teach that faith more effectively. To me that sounds a lot like certain companies that never seem to be able to meet their sales objectives.  Quarter after quarter, in reporting results to their stockholders, the managements of these companies make excuses for their failures: Customers didn't buy because of winter weather; they didn't buy because of the stock market; they didn't buy because the planets weren't aligned correctly. These managements claim that Next Quarter Will Be Different (Really, We Mean It This Time).  Hoping to make it so, they fire their sales executives, or change their marketing messages, or switch advertising agencies — anything except facing the fact that customers don't buy because the product just isn't good enough.

That's what these True Believers sound like.

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Related posts:

• Shortening the Nicene Creed
• Another Way to Read the Creed
• The Nicene Creed, Revisited
• Why Say the Nicene Creed?
• A sales-oriented approach to evangelism

Comments

[bls]

I don't think it says either of those things, actually. I think it says that even after 2,000 years, the Creeds still say some important things.

If they were as awful and outdated as you say, wouldn't the vast majority of parishioners have stayed seated through just about the entire thing?

Anyway, most of the people who stay away from Church aren't objecting to the faith; they object to the Church itself, which they see as bigoted and unloving - and they see Christians as "hypocrites":

""A full 72 percent of the people interviewed said they think the church ‘is full of hypocrites,’" said LifeWay Research director Ed Stetzer. "At the same time, however, 71 percent of the respondents said they believe Jesus ‘makes a positive difference in a person’s life’ and 78 percent said they would ‘be willing to listen’ to someone who wanted to share what they believed about Christianity.""