De-coherence May Save the UMC.

The task given the apostolic church by Christ is to carry on the ministry of Jesus, to witness to his death and resurrection, and to worship in fellowship in the Holy Spirit. 

The Christian community coheres around these tasks. The signs of this coherence are the two sacraments instituted by Jesus: the baptism that inaugurates disciples into mission and fellowship, and participation the reenactment of his last supper with his disciples that reiterates the fundamental story in which all disciples participate. 

Despite this inheritance, clearly spelled out in scripture, rather early in its history the Christian church, particularly in it hierarchical forms, began seeking coherence by establishing secondary markers of identity and clear boundaries. The formation of hierarchical patterns of church leadership and relationship, culminating in the early church councils and the creeds created managed coherence. 

Under the rubric of orthodoxy this managed coherence allowed for the systematic direction and coordination of ministry and thus more effective use of ecclesial power. But a moral judgment of whether managed coherence was better or worse for the mission of the church is less important than the theological reality  that the coherence that emerged at Nicaea and Constantinople was based on secondary goods rather than the necessary features of Christian community. Orthodoxy may have been, in a particular place and time, good. It was never necessary. 

And for all its potential good, the actual results of managed coherence did include significant decoherence and exclusion. Orthodoxy in the sense of hierarchy, dogma, and liturgy created a center around which the church could cohere, but it also created boundaries that pushed out any Christians or Christian groups who didn't recognize the papacy, disagreed on doctrine or scripture, or who used alternative liturgies. Efforts to unify the church resulted in fragmentation and mutual anathamatization that in some cases are still ongoing. I remember vividly how a Syrian Orthodox colleague was refused entry to a Greek Orthodox monastery because he was "out of communion."    

After all, a boundary is defined only when someone is placed outside it. There can be no boundaries without divisions. And othering has become an enduring basis for Christian coherence since the early church councils, although agreement on who constitutes the other has changed over time. 

As Graeco-Roman culture slowly evolved into the culture of Christian Europe and then toward modernity at least among some Christians the older basis for coherence determined by the councils gave way to new. A consistent hierarchy and liturgy diminished as a source of coherence among some Western Christians during the Reformation, while dogma and the attribution of authority to scripture became central. 

This shift in focus would be cemented in the Enlightenment, a cultural movement that focused on possession of a common mind, defined by common beliefs and their authoritative basis, as the key source of social unity and coherence. 

But a common mind is far more difficult to achieve than a shared baptism. 

Not surprisingly the enlightened Protestant churches experienced a rapid decoherence, particularly among American Protestants who were cut off from the coherence provided by a national church supported by a coercive government. By the end of the revolutionary war American Christians had began a process of division that resulted in 10's of thousands of new Christian groups.

At the same time in the US context a new form of coherence emerged, one arising from the embrace of the emerging American culture. Protestants might not agree on everything from infant baptism to predestination to the meaning of the Lord's Supper, but they could agree that they were Americans. Thus was born the Christian denomination, unified with other denominations by its American social context while being distinguished by doctrine and practice. The religious denomination was a close cousin to the monetary denomination, with bills of distinctly different values united as a common medium of economic exchange. 

And with this embrace of American culture as the source of overarching Protestant coherence came the subtle new marker of Christian coherence: agreement on those moral values derived from American culture but asserted to originate in scripture. 

That these moral values could include slavery, racial discrimination, misogyny, consumerism, capitalism, and violence against perceived enemies, none of which find a home in the teaching of Christ and his apostles, only indicates their real origin in American culture. Even without the trappings of a national church such as was found in Europe, American Protestantism cohered around a national and ultimately nationalistic religion, It was a religion that until the middle of the 20th century also created boundaries by excluding Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, and which continues to to exclude Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs from its fictive "Judeo-Christian" heritage. 

And the mark of American Christian coherence around our national culture: an American flag in every sanctuary.  

Then in the last half of the 20th century American culture began to lose a dominant center and unravel into multiple regional and ethnic cultures. And it is this national decoherence that is actually at the root of United Methodist decoherence, not disagreements about doctrine, authority of scripture, or ethics. 

All three sources of conflict are merely symptoms of an America no longer possessing a sufficiently coherent culture to support a national Christian religion based on common beliefs, common authorities, and nationally shared moral values. Under the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the denominations of America's national religion have divided, de-cohered, one by one.  The very model of denominationalism, first challenged by non-denominational churches, cannot endure without a larger common cultural currency. Culturally it is dead already.

And that is not a bad thing, because our apparent coherence wasn't based in fidelity to the mission Christ bequeathed to his apostles. 

The community first formed by Christ and calling itself Christian cohered around continuing his ministry, witnessing to his death and resurrection, and engaging in fellowship in the Spirit. 

But what followed as the Church developed; an emphasis on beliefs, hierarchy, liturgies, and accepted authorities, made secondary matters central to coherence even as those matters made disagreements and deviations inevitable. Those things most intended to unite to church were its slow, inevitable undoing. In our time the identification of Protestantism with American culture and the formation of a national religion simply reiterated the disastrous alliance of the early church with Rome and its inevitable corruption by the cult of political and military power. 

Now we are in a good place. 

We've burned ourselves up and out participating in contemporary America's current orgy of xenophobic fear, anger, and disgust with all those "others" who are now so close at hand there is no border to protect us and our anachronistic forms of coherence. 

Now we have a chance to both shed the mistakes made by the Christian embrace of Rome and its oppressive demands for orthodoxy and re-appropriate the best accomplishments of the early Christian efforts to witness in context. We have a chance to break free from America's actually-never-Christian culture and witness to a nation whose people deeply need the salvation offered by Christ. 

That we won't do it together, at least for the near future, is good as well. In a complex cultural setting there need to be many experiments in mission, many different approaches to evangelistic witness. Our decoherence, which is necessary, need not be incoherence. If while divided we seek true unity in Christ and his mission they might know we are Christians by our love.