The Slow Death of a Big Church

Last Sunday was an interesting day for me.

I got the blessing to be away from Marble for the day in order to be the guest preacher at Broadway Presbyterian Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Broadway is a small church on 114th and Broadway, just across the street from Columbia University. It was also the site where I did my seminary internship during my third year at Union Seminary.

Broadway is a fascinating little church. It is, as are many small, neighborhood churches in New York, weird and wonderful. In worship on Sunday (held in the Fellowship Hall because it's the only air conditioned room suitable for worship), there were 40 people gathered. College professors and the mentally ill, immigrants and life-long New Yorkers, white, black, hispanic, gay and straight, young and old. There is an incredible music director there, Patrick Evans, who basically moonlights at Broadway from his weekly job as Music Director at the Chapel at Yale Divinity School and the faculty of the Institute of Sacred Music. So we gathered in folding chairs in a circle around the communion table, sang classic and new hymns, played instruments and danced around the table, shared the peace, broke the bread, heard the word, laughed and prayed. I haven't had that much fun in church in a long time.

I know too much to romanticize the small church. Living in it is different than being a visitor for a day. But there is something incredible and alive for me about being in a place where there is no anonymity. Every relationship is first-hand. Every decision in leadership is accountable. It would seem to me that because the feedback loop is so tight, the moral formation that happens in a church like that is somehow richer.

Worship at Broadway and the fellowship time were done about 11:30 or so, so Patrick and I shuffled up a couple of blocks to Riverside Church, where Dr. Brad Braxton was giving his final sermon as senior minister. Maybe you've followed the drama at Riverside, maybe not. Patrick and I were curious, so we scooted into the back of the cathedral as the prayers of the people were ending. There was a version of "Great is Thy Faithfulness" from the choir, a very dramatic gospel solo that I didn't know that was sung from the perspective of a person being scorned but God held them up (not hard to draw a straight line from there to the pastor's own situation), and then Dr. Braxton took the pulpit.

A couple observations. First, Dr. Braxton's a great preacher. Great. I hadn't heard him before, but he preached a durn good sermon on the first chapter of Philippians that was offered right to the heart of the occasion's circumstances. Not deep exegetically, but it didn't need to be: the sermon was really rich in imagery and example, it was passionate, political, and personal.

Second, I don't know how much race and question of whether Riverside is becoming a "black church" was at issue in the internal effort to remove Braxton, but as a visitor, I have to say that I felt like I had indeed walked into a black church. 90% of those collecting the offering were black; the music that I heard (even the traditional hymn) was infused with gospel; strangely, even the white Associate Minister had certain inflections in his voice that sounded black; the congregation responded to the sermon and the music with talk-back and clapping and some hand-waving; and Dr. Braxton preached a sermon that drew mostly on the black church experiences of his upbringing and "brought it home" with a explicit reference to the blood atonement. To me, it felt like black church happening in a white church space. Now, I like black church myself. But if there is a tension at Riverside about race and worship aesthetics, and if whites there feel threatened by the black church culture (not saying they should, but if they are), I can understand why from my experience in worship there.

Finally, the whole experience just stirred up again my deep suspicions about the founding energies and sustaining impulses of big churches. Dr. Braxton assured the congregation that, according to the Scriptures, God, who begins every good work in us, would be faithful to complete it. He said that God began the work of the Riverside Church, and while it was yet unfinished, God would make sure that it was completed. I'm not sure I agree. I wonder whether Rockefeller built Riverside, not God. I wonder whether Riverside was created as a temple to Liberalism... and whether such a work, dedicated to a such a deity, cannot (and should not) stand in this day and age. I wonder whether liberal Christianity itself is what is cracked and crumbling. Dr. Braxton is not a traditional liberal. He is a liberal evangelical--someone with a message and intellectual core that deviates from 20th-century mainline liberal orthodoxy. Liberal evangelicals don't want to "de-mythologize" faith any further, rationalize everything (a la John Shelby Spong), or relativize Christianity. In Braxton, I heard a brilliant preacher who was not an orthodox liberal. It made me wonder whether Riverside was a temple built with money gleaned through (imperious) liberal economic practices, to enshrine an (equally imperious) liberal intellectual tradition--both of which are now cracked and crumbling.

God finishes the works that God begins. But all around us, there seems to be evidence (in our economic life, our environmental crisis, our church culture) that we're living in a world built by human hands, according to human ideals and human visions (of which liberalism is but one). If institutions in our world seem a bit precarious... perhaps it's because the foundations beneath them are ours--and they are in worse shape than we realize.

The stone that the builders discarded, scripture assures, will be the cornerstone (or capstone) of the new edifice God builds. I always imagined from this biblical image that the new building would be a grand one--sweeping buttresses, arched ceilings, huge windows... something like that picture up at the top of this post. But I'm beginning to think more and more that perhaps God intends for us to build social and communal and economic and religious structures far less grand (and more adaptable) than those we human beings, in our grandiose dreams, have imagined.

E.F. Schumacher lately decreed that small is beautiful. After Sunday, I remember why, when all is said and done, I agree.