Holiness: No appearance of sin (and even less dancing)
When I was a kid, I didn’t have any sense of the size and sweep of worldwide Christendom, or how relatively small my denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, was in comparison with the larger movements within modern Christianity.
Of the roughly 2.18 billion (2,180,000,000) Christians in the world, the Church of the Nazarene currently claims about 2.5 million (2,500,000) members. That’s about 0.1% of the world’s Christians.
By comparison with such groups as the Southern Baptist Convention (which claims over 14,000,000 members worldwide), the Assemblies of God (67,000,000 members), the Russian Orthodox Church (164,000,000 members), or the granddaddy of them all, the Roman Catholic church (1,300,000,000—that’s 1.3 billion—members), we were a very small branch on the tree of Christian thought. A twig, even.
We are “Holier than thou…”
I also didn’t know at the time that our denomination was relatively very young. The Church of the Nazarene had been founded in 1908, meaning that when I was first carried through the doors of the church as an infant, the denomination was not quite 65 years old, while other denominations were hundreds of years of years old, with a couple close to reaching thousands.
Like other churches in the “Holiness Movement” that caught many American imaginations in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Church of the Nazarene was inspired by the work of theologian John Wesley, who founded the tradition that became known as Methodism. Wesley’s teaching heavily emphasized personal piety in personal and public conduct, in reaction to what he saw as a worldly and materialistic Church of England at the time.
By the end of the 18th century, the Methodist Episcopal Church—the church based on Wesley’s ideas—became the largest denomination in America, surpassing even the Episcopal Church (the American offshoot of the Church of England that the founders had brought over with them).
Over time, certain groups broke away from the Methodist church for multiple reasons, such as the African Methodist Episcopal church that broke away in 1784 to become a spiritual home and refuge for Black Americans (and one of the pillars of the Black church tradition in the United States, which has its own very unique expression and core principles).
There were many other splinter groups that broke away from Methodism due to disagreements ranging from basic principles of church government to large-scale public issues such as opposing slavery, the issue which gave birth to the Wesleyan Methodists in the mid 1800s.
By the early 1900s, there was something like a contest between a few of these Holiness denominations, with each trying to be holier than the last one in matters of personal conduct, and breaking off to become even smaller and more holy sects.
Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?
In addition to basics such as the Ten Commandments, these churches threw more and more sins on the fire. These included obvious contenders such as drinking, smoking, adultery, and fornication, but as these dedicated believers strove to be more “peculiar” and separate from the world, they took away things like makeup for women, bare ankles and elbows, mixed male/female swimming, worldly entertainments such as TV and cinema, playing cards, even dancing. (There are lots of versions of this joke, but if you wonder why the Nazarenes don’t believe in pre-marital sex, it’s because they are worried that it might lead to dancing.)
When my then pre-teen child first heard the plot of the 80s movie “Footloose,” they couldn’t believe that there could be a town in America that would outlaw dancing. Given my background, I could not only believe it, but I could still see the fallout of it. Although by the 1980s, the Nazarenes had, in practice, eased their regulations on worldly behavior, the denomination’s principles on paper still had rules against movies, TV, and rock music. I believe that when I was growing up in the church, there were still families who felt they had to sneak off to a nearby town to watch a movie in the cinema and not have anyone from the church see them walking in or out of the theater.
In a burst of religious fervor sometime in my mid teens, (probably after a particularly effective youth revival meeting), I briefly considered becoming an official member of the Nazarene Church myself. However, I ultimately couldn’t bring myself to sign the paper they gave me that said I would adhere to the code.
The search for “plain old Christianity”
In retrospect, I realize that we were not exactly in the mainstream—even within what I now would call Evangelical circles, but I had no idea that we were anything other than “plain old Christianity.”
I had no sense of us being the net result of a series of theological schisms and choices that stretched back over hundreds if not thousands of years, back through disputes among the followers of Wesley, who opposed the excesses of the Anglican Church, which was born from a schism with the Roman Catholic Church, which had its own split from the Orthodox Churches of Greece, Russia, and other Eastern Christians, and so on, conflicts we could probably trace all the way back to arguments between the apostles Paul, Peter, and James.
I always thought that other kinds of Christians, like Catholics and Episcopalians (the latter of which I currently consider myself), were simply mistaken, or misguided, or, heaven forbid, even blatantly in rebellion against the Bible. I never understood why they could not clearly see they were wrong, if they would only read the book. (Although several of these denominations had been the stewards of the holy scriptures, long before my church denomination even existed.)
And I thought that people who practiced other religions were simply ignoring the truth that God had laid out before them in the scriptures (despite having grown up in religious cultures that were, themselves, hundreds or thousands of years old-But I will save that for another post!)
What I later learned is just how many ways there are of interpreting the Bible, and how many pathways there are that can make a valid claim that they are grounded in the scriptures and in the teachings of Jesus.
In the last half-century, I have been a Nazarene, a Charismatic, a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, an agnostic, an Episcopalian, and have participated in services of many other denominations. I’ve even participated in some observances of other religious groups who were not Christian, and still managed in some cases to experience the divine there.
The many kinds of Christian I am
When people ask me what kind of Christian I am, I don’t have a standard answer. I want them to know that I’m the social justice kind who won’t hit you over the head with my Bible. And when it comes to doctrine, there are many teachings from my youth that I have left behind, or with which I still struggle. I try to be as open about that as I can. However, out of respect, I try not to distance myself from my past by saying “I’m not that kind of Christian.”
I also don’t want to “hide my light under a bushel” by leaving out or watering down some of the aspects of Christianity that I learned as a child and still believe, even if they are not always readily accepted in Progressive circles—such as the idea that Jesus really existed, that he was the Messiah, that he died and was buried and was raised again, that I still have a relationship with him as my Lord and Savior. That sin is a real thing, that there is such a thing as evil, and that there will be some kind of second coming and judgment (albeit maybe not in any form we have come to expect.)
In addition to the teachings, I also don’t want to abandon the lessons I learned growing up in a loving and faithful community of believers—life lessons of sacrifice and kindness that supersede the restrictive theology I heard across the pulpit.
I’ve seen a good Christian man care for a drug-addicted ex-con without judgment, a good Christian woman welcome the gay couple who moved in next door without a comment about “their lifestyle” or even inviting them to church.
I’ve seen acts of enormous generosity to the poor—entire families rescued from disaster by their churches, even while the pastor quoted “the poor will always be with you” and “if you don’t work, you shouldn’t eat.” (Out of context, of course.)
I think about my sweet Grandma and Grandpa. Although they were as strait-laced as they come—they didn’t even own a television, even into the 1980s! Yet, you could show up at their house smelling of booze, or cigarettes, or pot, pregnant or having gotten somebody pregnant, on your way home from prison or headed there, having no money in your pocket but what you stole, and they would let you clean up, serve you dinner, and sing hymns with you on the piano before sending you back out into the world—refreshed and loved. Not judged, but truly loved
If I were to go through the world as an ex-Evangelical, or a recovering Evangelical, or “deconstructing” my faith, I would be tempted to throw out so much of the good with the bad, and I don’t want to lose those elements that help make me who I am. I want to remember what I learned about the value of community and fellowship. I want to remember the call to charity and service. I want to remember the love. I want to be able to sing those old hymns again.
In fact, I try not to think of myself as ex-anything, because I am the sum total of all of those lessons I’ve learned. There are learnings of value there, even as I realize that none of those traditions I’ve been a part of have it all figured out, either.
As I embark on this journey to find out the truth about the Bible, God, Jesus, salvation, and the rest, it is important for me to acknowledge where I come from. I am not a blank slate.
As I re-walk my steps, I can peel back the layers of what I learned and take a deeper look at the sources of our faith—the scriptures, the many traditions those scriptures have inspired through history, the use of my reason to examine and interpret the scriptures in their correct context, and the acknowledgment of my own faith experience and those of others. (And yes, for those of you who know it, I did just invoke the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.)
Honestly? It’s a bit of a dance.
It is only by understanding the assumptions, biases, and blind spots that I bring with me to the Scriptures that I can open my eyes to what’s really there on the page, in our history, in our experience, and, I hope, open my eyes to the revelation of what is true.
Some of which, I hope, is that truth which I’m already holding.
