Background

I am currently attending a Disciple Bible study class, it is called Jesus in the Gospels. Some intriguing things are happening that I would like to talk about, but it is going to take several posts to really explore. I thought tonight I'd start off with a bit of background.

This is my first adult study class at the church we are currently attending. We began going to this church full-time about a year and a half ago, and we spent a year before that alternating between the "new" church and the "old" church before we switched. We went to the "old" church for close to 15 years. It is a surburban church that is closer to our house--our kids pretty much grew up in that church, and in some ways, so did I.

The first church is what I would call an evangelical Methodist church. It is in a pretty conservative section of the metro area (if I told you I live in Michele Bachmann's congressional district, perhaps that would give you an idea), and although there are certainly more conservative congregations, this one is fairly conservative. You would want to don your flak jacket before you suggested in a Bible study that perhaps a certain reading in the Bible did not really literally happen the way it is described in the text. (Or, since this is Minnesota, instead of a flak jacket, maybe you would just want to put on a parka to ward off the icy chill and uncomfortable silence that would descend on the room.)

The new church is really an old church--we were married there, and our two children were baptized there. We attended there for a couple years before we moved so far into the exurbs that it became somewhat impractical to trek to downtown Minneapolis with two small children every week. It is a reconciling congregation, which is Methodist for welcoming to members of the LGBT community. (This is a minority position for the Methodist church, worldwide or even just in the US.)

I find these weird contradictions--that in a political sense one church is conservative and one is liberal, and I guess you could say in some theological senses also, but in a sort of cultural sense the downtown church is much stuffier and traditional whereas the suburban church is casual and laid back. One's relationship to God, in particular, is expected to be kind of reverent and distant according to the downtown setting--God is mysterious, awesome, unknowable, his grand plan eludes us. But at the suburban church, Jesus is jes' folks. He's right here with us. God is lovingly overseeing each little detail of our lives, and above all, God is good, all the time.

In terms of my relationship with my church, I was frustrated with what seemed like a straightjacket of the first church--the inability to ask inappropriate questions, the lack of discussion of opposing views, the idea that we had all the answers about who God is and what he wants. And as a politically liberal person, the church's position on a few subjects, such as homosexuality, pained me. It seemed like I was way too liberal for that church.

Now of course I am having the opposite problem. I am happy that the new church has reverence for God (sometimes lacking at the old church), but he seems so far away now. And the cafeteria-style theology of believing in whichever bits seem right to you that the conservative church rejects I also find myself having a difficult time with. I'm starting to feel like the fuddy-duddy in the room, even as I appreciate the openness and tolerance of our new home.

So, I want to talk about some of what has been going on in Bible study, but I'll begin that on another day.