All of the above

Years ago, a teaching assistant at a major university in Texas was quickly reviewing an exam the class had just completed earlier in the week. 

As he went through the multiple choice section, he would explain why each answer was incorrect and then why the right answer was correct.  

He came to a question where the answer was "D" and proceeded to explain why A, B, and C were wrong without looking ahead to see what D was.  When he got to D, it was "All of the above". 

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A hard thing to deal with over the years was watching fellow travelers say they are interested in discussing something with another person in the interest of coming to "the truth" and then watching as they defended a position with little to no understanding of it and with zero intention of learning why the other person believed what they believed.

From my tribal point of view, we were right - regardless.  The other people were wrong - regardless. 

The assumed question in any discussion was, "What's the right way to think about...?"  

The answer was, "We're right and you're wrong". 

I know that might sound over the top, but in my experience, it was not.

If we were the teaching assistant in the story above, we'd have found a way to explain why "all the above" also excluded A, B, and C as right answers.  The point was to win, not what is true.

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I remember a time back in the early 90's when I'd had a class on the history of the Restoration Movement, the origin of my tribe, back in the 1800's.  One very conservative, religiously speaking, gentleman was very interested in hearing about our tribal history...until we got to a point at which it was apparent that there were some "non-church" or "non-Biblical" reasons our tribe split off from the other tribes that were part of our movement. 

Up until that moment, he'd been "all in" and could see how God was working behind the scenes to make all that happen, etc.  After that moment, he began to have a different response, saying, "All that history you've gone over has nothing to do with (our tribe as it exists today).  Those were different people and they have nothing to do with us."  And he was pretty mad about it, as if he'd almost been sucked into something wrong or evil.

When I gently pressed him on it, he said that our movement was like when a bird picks up a seed from a plant and flies a long way off, eventually dropping the seed and essentially planting it in new location, far away.  He felt the truth of the church was the same - that if someone were to pick up a Bible and read it honestly and not lie - they'd come to the same conclusions as him and they'd "have church" and/or practice their faith like he did. 

For him, truth was an abstraction with no relationship to the context in which it was understood or practiced.  Truth was something that was gleaned from "the Bible" following principles found in the Bible and, when discovered, would or at least could produce pure, 1st Century Christians.

When I pressed him on the origin of "the Bible" and the process that many people went through in the first few centuries, he replied that God had guided the work of 100% unsaved men to produce the Bible as we know it so that others might be saved.

Gratefully, he was at least open to further discussions so that I could explore much of his list of assumptions and ideas, but he would always find some explanation as to why everyone was wrong and he was right.

He was emblematic of so much of the thinking of a lot of people from "my tribe".

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When people from "my tribe" began popping up here and there and talking about this new thing called "grace", they were seen with great suspicion.  How in the world was grace gonna work with being right?

Grace eventually blew through a lot of my tribe's people and at least modified their thinking to the degree that some of them would say things like, "Well, no one's perfect.  We're just trying our best to follow the Bible/Jesus.  As long as we're trying our best, grace covers us.  The moment we stop trying hard, that's when grace starts slipping away from us.  The key is to try hard, that's how you earn/keep salvation."

In other words, when it was discovered that we couldn't deny that the word grace and the idea of grace existed in scripture, we found a way to make it fit into our worldview and essentially gut it of its meaning and make it something we earned - maybe no longer by having all the exact right answers, but now by trying our hardest.  So we were still winning the debate/I'm right/you're wrong game.

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Pride, power, and control.  I am certain that others from my background might see it differently, but that's a lot of what floats around in my head when I think about the last 50 years or so of my tribal history.

I'd spent a lot of time in college and grad school reading about our tribe's historical roots.  One year in grad school, I got to study it from a sociological/social movements point of view and see the social, political, economic, and philosophical roots of where "we" came from.

I was very surprised to see how many other religious groups sprung up at the same time as our with similar motivations, some even sharing some founders for a brief time before they moved on to their own particular groups.

Most people don't like to see how their sausage is made, but I really enjoyed learning about how our tribe had originated in the middle of the turmoil and promise of a rapidly developing nation,

It was a time when people not only felt the great results from the freedom from British rule, they also felt a new religious freedom in which they were no longer held to the traditions and exclusions of religious groups from "the old world"!

And within a generation of the new ways of seeing those freedoms, the disciples of those who were discovering that religious freedom turned it back into an exclusive set of traditions that would grow harder and more rigid than before.

I was born into that collection of people, assuming that they had the keys to the kingdom and were there to help save the world, one argument or debate at a time.

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It's almost humorous now to look back and see the flow of that group. In my time, my tribe has divided and subdivided and then, amazingly, tried to unify a couple times, and now are kind of sort of trying to ignore those who aren't like them from our tribal background. Kind of like that one uncle at the family reunion you're not sure what to do with.

In my larger tribe, on the cofC side of things, we still have very conservative groups - some that don't believe you should support any kind of institutional thing like a children's home or a missionary.  Some of them think that when you "have church" you should only use one large cup and one loaf of bread for communion.  And there's a lot of other fun features they have.

Some of the more progressive or liberal groups among us like to believe, say, or pretend that they're a part of the one, larger, universal church.  Some of them even "pulpit swap" with other kinds of churches, but rarely will they go too far in that kind of exchange.  They might invite a Baptist pastor to speak for them, but they're likely not gonna invite the clergy from the Universalist Unitarian Church down the road.

And then there's the big middle of our tribe, which is also divided.  Kind of like you have middle class in America, but you can easily see how there is also upper-middle class, middle-middle class, and lower-middle class, only in our tribal divisions it's along a spectrum of conservative to progressive.

Some of the medium to larger congregations like to position themselves as being open-minded about a lot of things, but are still very conservative when it comes to actual practice.  You can tell where they land on a lot of issues by which conferences or camps their adults, teens, or kids attend.  

There's a great desire among this big middle collection to be faithful to our tribal roots, but also to be seen as not-as-narrow-minded as our tribal ancestors of the last 100 years - you know, the ones who'd boldly say, "We're the only Christians that will be in heaven" kinds of people.  

Many of them don't think that's true anymore, but they're really not sure where to "draw the line".  For certain, they're not going to openly embrace denominational groups, but in private conversations, they might acknowledge the fact that "we don't know who is saved for sure".

A lot of the left side of the middle want to be open minded about the role women play in a church - either in leadership or as a person standing "down front" during a worship service setting.  

Some have "allowed" women to be part of a song leading team/worship team and a few have gone further and have females to share their thoughts or story "to the church" from the stage.

Most don't allow women to be in any official leadership capacity or decision making role.  Don't get me wrong, women's opinions are sought out or filter up through the channels so they're included, but it's still the case that most men (in my tribal background, that I know of at least) do not want women to be in official spots of leadership or direction - and in fairness, I probably should say that some "want" women to be in leadership, but 100% are not going to go to bat for it.

And there are a lot of little different ways that my tribal background continues to evolve, but always along that line - that straight-edge of right/wrong as determined by some guys back in the 1800's who had a particular philosophical bent to reading scripture. 

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As an insider, one of the things I realized that opened the door for me to exit was figuring out that the most important thing in most church is keeping the doors open and keeping the numbers growing.  

Always be closing, always be promoting, always be finding ways to get people in and to get them to be all in with their money, time, and loyalty.

I'd like to say it was all about Jesus and getting people to know their God through what Jesus has done for us.  That would be amazing!  Like, super amazing!

One of the things in grad school I learned was how to study an organization to see what it does, not just what it says it does.  I learned a lot of tools to use with analyzing how money is collected and flows, how people are directed and shaped, and how to see what actually happens as a result of the existence of the organization or group.

Most groups that I'd call "churches" say they are about something, but if you look closely at their aspirational goals or even stated goals and compare them to what they actually do and talk about, they're different things.

"Don't mess with the goose that laid the golden egg.  Don't rock the boat."  Shape any and all conversation and decisions in such a way to keep community growing and moving toward sustainable growth.  

Modify the verbiage occasionally if it helps the process, move key players around to maximize your resources if necessary, and when needed, do a gentle reset to shake off any problems and firm up your momentum.  

It's amazing how much relational disconnect you can hide behind doctrinal and moral purity.

Deal with any negatives as if you had nothing to do with them and talk about how much you hope for the best for everyone involved.

In other words, again, many churches are about church.  If you're inside one and you hear or read something like this, it is 100% hard to see it - I get that.

I've been there where I've had to walk through the list of things people would say as to reasons as to why they walked away from church and tried to help them see why they were wrong and they needed to go back and give it the old college try once again.

And at some point, more often than not, an option "D" would arise with "all the above" and I would be able to see how I'd just vacated the person's valid reasons for feeling disconnected, disenfranchised, and discouraged - and then basically told them it was their fault for not being connected to a group who, practically speaking, didn't want to be connected to them.

And so enough was eventually enough...

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Grace and peace.

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