Today's short...

I was trying to address the notion that church splits are often caused by
people changing doctrinal statements ... like hell/no hell ... midstream. I
value unity and do not think that issues like hell have to be
dealbreakers.

So, what do you think about it? What are your deal breakers? Have you ever
left a church because of doctrinal changes? What do you think about protecting
unity in a local body?

This, from KansasBob's comments to the previous post. I'm keeping it short today, after a series of more in-depth posts; that's part of moving back to half-time at St. Peter's, which has meant much higher impact-per-hour-of-my-time but left me short for blogging this week. I'll also re-iterate that there's good stuff on Bob's blog, and I am of the sense that we are committed to many of the same things on this wild journey of faith.

Hell is definitely not a deal-breaker for me. It's more... inconsequential, as far as hell-believers don't try to threaten others with their belief. And harmful, as much as they do (which is often quite a bit. I remember FCA in high school... crackle crackle! Scary. Not helpful in helping me serve the world as Christ re-membered).

My church (the United Church of Christ) is without "doctrinal statements"; we are a covenant people. We promise to walk together in Christ, before God, with faith by the Spirit - within that covenant, no doctrine need separate us. That would be my ideal for the universal Church as well.

I've never left a church for doctrinal reasons, and can't imagine doing so within the UCC/DoC/mainline Protestant traditions. I'm enough at peace with radically different doctrines of the Pentecostal/evangelical sort to even be in that sort of community, if the community was focused on serving the world as Christ re-membered (Jody and I are tossing that phrase around lately as the purpose of church). In practice, this seems pretty rare for churches, though there are lots of individuals who are living exceptions (KansasBob, you may be one - the Internet Monk is - Ron on the Bill Tammeus blog comments - etc.).

"Protecting unity" - unity is valuable, as much as it serves the purpose of church previously stated. Unity for its own sake is just clubbishness, often at the expense of outsiders. In the Pearson example, it seems that hell was a deal-breaker for 90% of that congregation, though not for Carlton. I'm interested in unity in terms of practical working-together-in-service, not at all in terms of metaphysics (i.e. "I believe / don't believe in hell").

There's disjointed responses for a Tuesday. More good stuff is in the works, including my first column for the KC Star's FaithWorks feature - not this weekend, but the next I think. -h