Worshipping Jesus as Phallic Symbol

Have I really written this much all at once? I guess my mind-talk is going full speed and I need somewhere to disperse it.

I am up late on a Saturday night, which comes before Sunday morning, which I am beginning to dread. I am the young pastor who is less than excited to see my church, the source of many good jokes. I may have written about this before. But it's about this time of night I recognize how frustrated I am and that I'm in for a long ride between now and May. I also know it's dangerous to write about one's parish in public, but I'm also not saying anything here I wouldn't say to them directly. Perhaps this is a rehearsal for what I know I need to say.

Basically, when newcomers visit our church, they leave more depressed than they came in. When I introduce myself before the service and invite folks to social hour afterwards, they're interested. After service, they shift their feet and claim to have things they forgot they needed to do. Our congregation has a wonderful history of progressive social action, but this is not reflected in our worship service. Instead, our worship service emphasizes male-dominant language for God. We also use lots of thees and thous and thys and sitteths, even when modern-day translations are printed right next to these, and we're not a particularly high church. Most of our music and language pre-dates both the Civil Rights Amendment and the Equal Rights Amendment. Never mind that in our denomination there's a mandate to use language that is welcoming to all and a blend of music that is welcoming to all as well. Yes, in the PCUSA, you are required to be welcoming in worship to people who are three months old to three hundred, regardless of race or nationality or gender. That's one of the things that made me choose it. But that is lost on our church. No, upon first visit, even though our church is equally racially and gender-mixed, you would get the sense you have shown up at a stiffly conservative backwater. Worship here is like going to a funeral, even on the sunniest summer day: the tone is somber, the music often slow, lily white, and collapses under its own weight. Week after week after week.

This does not go over well among the student population it hopes to welcome. In my four years of living in Hyde Park, I've been to four years worth of parties where students who have had experience with the congregation proclaim that it should die because it is so unwelcoming and depressing. The congregation has many good reasons to be depressed, having survived white flight and gang wars and the devastation of a neighborhood and the loss of most of its members over the past generation. It faces many of the same realities of other urban churches. I had thought though for a while this fall it was beginning to come out of its depression, committing itself to an evangelism and outreach campaign. But, I think my hopes were premature.

What worries me is some of the nasty comments I receive from certain members when I suggest expanding our repertoire of music or using more inclusive language. "Anyone who doesn't like the way we worship here can find themselves another church." Yes ma'am, and I see that they have already done so, in droves. In a city of six million people and within one mile of a large university, only 25 people find our worship worth attending on a regular basis. "You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater." Hmmm...looks to me like the baby done drowned. Anyway, a few of these folks have gotten downright hostile. And you would normally otherwise call them progressives.

Now, before I go on, I need to say that not all people in the congregation favor this way of worship. In fact, I've been noticing the demographics of who is open to new material and who isn't. My congregation has no active members under fifty, and as I said is equally mixed in race and gender. It is the folks under 75 who are most vehement that we keep everything exactly as it is. The folks 80 and up are the most encouraging on the whole, and go out of their way to say so. The men are more willing to accept gender-inclusive language than the women. The women of the choir are up in front, ignoring the words printed in the bulletin, and enunciating every 'He,' "Him" and 'Father' and 'Son.'

This leads me to ask what happened to these women, who are clearly college-educated and lived through modern feminism. Why do they so insist that God is exclusively male? Really, are they only worshipping God for a phallus? Is that all God is to them? Are they really so lonely and unfulfilled?

And how do you ask them that? But, it might be that the absurdity of the question is what may finally break through the walls. Better to do so before we lose anyone else out the door. Including myself.

peace,

Le Anne