Mainline churches have been in decline for quite some time.  It is as if we have lost our direction and don’t know how to reach our destination.  We love Jesus, and rejoice that we are loved in return, but we have lost some of our ability to share that love with others.  We respect who the other has been created to be, and don’t want to infringe on their freedom to find their own relationship with God by promoting our message too aggressively.

Mainline churches have lost their meme – in systems language, they’ve lost the idea that got their engines running at 500 horsepower.  Each of us have paradigms that we use to explain the world around us, and the memes that influence our lives are the building blocks in the foundation of these paradigms.  These memes are guiding principles that get us excited and ready to go. 

The meme that the mainline churches have lost is “Christianity as Empire.”  This became part of the foundation of the paradigm of Western Christianity when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

When the Pilgrims and Puritans arrived in America, they saw the opportunity to create that “New Heaven and New Earth” found in Isaiah.  This idea of creating a Christian Empire fueled their missionary efforts as they sent preachers west in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  America did not become a Christian empire, but instead recognized the right and responsibility of people to find their own relationship with God.

Christianity as “empire” lost the power to send us out into the streets when respect for other people’s ideas began to be accepted within the mainline churches.  Mainline Christians respect not only Jewish people, but Buddhists and Hindus.

When Christianity as “empire” was going strong, the Congregational missionaries in Hawaii helped the U.S. government overthrow the native Hawaiian monarchy.  When this meme lost its place of prominence in the mainline tradition, the President of the United Church of Christ issued an apology to the native Hawaiians for the actions of those missionaries.

We no longer want to transform the world into our image, or to rule the world in any way.  That’s God’s job.  We would rather help those “for whom Christ died” find their own particular path.

The new idea was to respect who the other person was and go from there, to invite the other “for whom Christ died” in a manner that would respect who that person was.  Unfortunately, this respect for the other does not inspire us as strongly as did the meme of Christianity as Empire.

How does the church – as the Body of Christ – get the engines running when we no longer perceive ourselves as Christianity as Empire?  Can the idea of embodying Christ inspire us enough to get us going?

Or do we need the idea of acting as the Body of Christ and co-creating the world in which welive?

God’s kingdom that we pray for in the Lord's Prayer really IS coming some day – although Christians and Jews have been waiting for thousands of years.  Could it be that the church, by allowing God’s love to flow through its heart and into the world at large, is charged with helping God achieve the world’s transformation into that “New Heaven and New Earth”?Could it be that WE are charged with allowing God to work through us to bring about God’s kingdom, effectively making us co-creators?

Perhaps we are those who are called to pound those swords into plowshares.  God does have a plan for everybody.  And the world DOES become a better place when we listen to the one who created us.

Humanity has a special place within God’s created universe.  We have free will as well as great creativity  .Visit a cathedral and you can feel the awesome nature of the God worshipped within, this sense of that awesome nature is created by the architecture as well as the sense that God has been worshipped there for centuries.  Visit the forest or the seashore and you can sense God there as well.  God lives in our hearts, and we are called to share that presence.  And when we do, God’s kingdom comes more fully into being.

more column first appearing in the Leader-Herald          2010      2011