Just Read the Layman

 I just put down the latest issue of the Layman (January, 2009) ... a tour de force of dissatisfaction.

I have some sympathy for them ... there was a time in my life when dissatisfaction sat on both of my shoulders, but with the passage of time, I've either grown addled or I've grown! Obviously, some would say addled. But I like my peaceable stance; I’d like to think that I’ve grown.

If the current Layman reflects where a good many of our brothers and sisters are living right now, it's pretty far from where I live.

Wish I had some answers - I don't.

With the turn of every page, I saw a determined Layman creating two camps with an absolute chasm between them - an unbridgeable gulf growing wider by the day. Again and again, churches leaving were lifted up and celebrated, along with all the numbers. On every page: the supposed failures of the PCUSA – our emptiness and our unfaithfulness, our desertion of the gospel and our abandonment of the historic Reformed faith, and so on.

Part of me is burdened with sadness – because the two camps are never so clearly delineated – there are folks with sympathies and sentiments rooted in both and on all sides of the questions.

Part of me is resigned to the darkening mood of the conversation, or what’s left of it.

Part of me is simply frustrated – how can the conversation be enlarged?

Part of me is hopeful, too. If Jesus’ ministry were judged on the basis of numbers and popularity, we’d all have to agree that his work was largely a failure. Only in the aftermath of the resurrection and subsequent missional expansion does the work of Jesus take on a larger significance.

So, who’s to say?

Church history is replete with times of God shaking things out. Our own history – often fatally flawed with our incessant desire to write it all down and then test one another’s orthodoxy or orthopraxy – has seen countless moments of division and reconciliation, off-shoots and new denominations. So who knows exactly where the power of resurrection will manifest itself? But we believe and trust: “God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17).

As some of our brothers and sisters pack their bags and move to a new town, I can only wish them well. I’d love to see them stay a little while longer, but their discontent only grows stronger – a discontent resolved only by living in a new neighborhood with less irksome neighbors.

I suspect they’ll find, however, as all folks do who move, that a good deal of the discontent is a spiritual inclination always in need of someone or something against which to express itself anew. Dissatisfaction, like some primordial hunger, is never assuaged; it will only find new reasons to live.

I am happier than ever in being a Presbyterian – our faithfulness to the gospel is expressed in a willingness to constantly explore the boundary regions of love. Jesus is a boundary crosser, and so are we. There’s always some risk in such ventures of faith, but risk is part of it.

When all is said and done, our immediate family may be a little smaller, but so was Gideon’s army, and those 300 were more than enough to win the day!