Stuck in the 6-Point Record System
By Marion D. Aldridge
Making Momma happy is not the goal of the Christian faith. In fact, Jesus did not “focus on the family” at all. Yet week after week, as I attend Sunday school in Baptist churches all over South Carolina, I am exposed to a cultural Christianity that has never advanced past the shibboleths that Mom and Dad taught their children in the home 30, 50 or 70 years ago.
Say” Please” and “Thank you.”
Don’t embarrass the family.
Don’t carry coffee or sodas into the sanctuary.
Don’t question those in authority.
Be nice.
Don’t wiggle or squirm in church.
Someday I intend to make a loooong list of the hundreds of lessons I learned at home and church that were good instructions for a five to twelve year old child that might not be so important to a maturing Christian adult.
Being nice, for example, is ordinarily an excellent idea and a foundational lesson for getting along with people. But neither the Bible nor Jesus always models niceness. Gentility is more a Southern trait than a biblical characteristic. Remember David, the man after God’s own heart. Remember Esther. Do you think she was a bashful wimp? Remember Jesus who drove the money changers out of the Temple? Remember Ecclesiastes 3? There is a time for one behavior and there is also a time for its polar opposite.
Recently I wrote a book, Overcoming Adolescence, half memoir, half self-help, about my own pilgrimage of getting unstuck from selected childhood beliefs and practices. I had a long unlearning curve because I bought the whole cultural and religious package I was being sold as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult. I was obedient. I was loyal. I was not a wave-maker. I was compliant. I was clueless. Being a good kid kept me out of a lot of trouble and that is the best thing about traditions and teaching children conservative and careful behavior. I was not going to die young from (my own) drunk driving and I was not going to embarrass my parents by picking fights at school. But I was also unprepared for those occasions when being nice might not be appropriate behavior. Pastoring my first church after seminary required that I reassess old habits. Giving in and giving power to a power-monger or to a bully is like giving alcohol to an alcoholic. It is bad for them and it is bad for the church and it is bad for me.
I began to learn that there is a difference in these two sentences: I want to be like Jesus; and, I want to be like my parents.
My parents were good, decent, kind, church-going Christians. Recently, I found a hand-written sermon my Dad preached at Immanuel Baptist Church in North Augusta, South Carolina, sometime in the 1960’s. It is a perfect reflection of our religious culture. Dad was a layman and a deacon, and the pastor must have asked Dad to “fill the pulpit” one Sunday. Dad’s text was Revelation 3: 14-16, the passage about lukewarmness making God nauseous. Here is the crux of my Dad’s sermon: We have five opportunities every week to show we are “on fire” for God, by attending Sunday school, Sunday morning worship, Training Union, Sunday night worship, Midweek prayer meeting.
There it is, the perfect description of passionate Christian behavior for a Southern Baptist in the 1960’s. Go to church. Go to church. Go to church. Go to church. Go to church. For those of us who came out of that culture, we could add glory to glory by making 100% in the Six-Point Record System. For those unfamiliar with that device for Christian formation, each person received percentage points for 1) being present, 2) on-time, 3) bringing your bible, 4) studying your lesson, 5) bringing an offering and 6) staying for preaching (not worship: Preaching!). If you did all of those, and I did, you were 100%, perfect, righteous, at the age of 10 or 12. You got no points for feeding hungry people or providing refuge for homeless people.
Attending midweek prayer service and being on time and bringing an offering are all good disciplines, but they are not adequate measurements for mature Christianity for 40, 50, 60 and 70 year olds.The Bible is a Big Book and has a lot of things in it that are more important than being on time.In our religious culture, we were on time but we were racist to the core. We were on time but we would never have considered calling a woman as pastor. We were on time but we assumed that anyone who was different than us was inferior to us—Vietnamese, people in wheelchairs, old people, Catholics. Our brains weren’t big enough even to think about Muslims or Lesbians in those days. We wrote off entire populations with shibboleths such as, “God doesn’t hear the prayer of Jews.”
Telling beautiful Bible stories about Noah and the Ark to our children is crucial in faith development. We learn wonderful lessons: God keeps promises. In God we have hope even after the storms of life. But to sit in an adult Sunday school class of middle-aged college graduates, as I once did, and listen to them try to fit all those animals into the finite space of the ark makes no sense, at least to me. Surely that story is about something more than aardvarks and zebras, gnats and mosquitoes.
I cannot find the origin of the phrase “primitive credulity,” but I like it. We are innocent and naïve, clueless as children, appropriately ignorantI have grown fond of saying, “We don’t know what we don’t know,” and that is true no matter our age. But I am now 65 and I want to know more than I did when I was 15! When we are kids, we soak it all in—Santa Claus, Superwoman, the Lone Ranger, Jesus, Pocahontas, Roy Rogers, the Tooth Fairy. We believe it all. Our information came from trustworthy people: parents and teachers. Even preachers were part of the conspiracy that kept us confused about who is real and who isn’t. What preacher or Sunday school teacher has not told stories on the edge of the truth that made an important point? Parables, after all, are fiction, by definition. Then, because it was our favorite preacher or our favorite teacher or our favorite parent who told the story, we defend the campfire story, we defend an illustration, we defend a myth, we defend a metaphor, we defend an anecdote as if it were the inerrant and infallible word of God. Jack and the Beanstalk is not a true story and adults should understand that.
I have been told that religion is the area in which it is most difficult to grow up and my experience bears that out. When the information about our faith came from the ultimate authority figures of parents and religious teachers and preachers and even seemingly directly from God, then it is difficult for many people to shift gears from childhood credulity to thoughtful maturity and to ask questions befitting an adult. Who wants to be disloyal to what people we love taught us?
Honesty scares people. Change scares people. Mature Christians need to get over their fear. Period. That is the biblical, Christian thing to do. The Bible is clear with its many admonitions to “Fear not,” words spoken by the prophets, by the angels and by Jesus.
Old habits die hard. Recently, I initiated a conversation on Facebook about lessons we learned in our childhood that might be worth challenging as adults. There were some seriously mixed responses. Some of my Facebook friends understood and agreed with my premise that we need to overcome (or at least reconsider, or nuance) our childhood and adolescent scripts, and shared their experiences of behavioral changes. Others responded negatively. One high school friend said, “I think these all are STILL excellent for all of us, no matter how old we are.” All excellent for all of us! No matter how old we are! Wow! No wiggle room there. Speaking of wiggling, I wiggled as a ten year old and I fidget still and I think God loves me anyhow. Wiggling is not a cause for guilt or remorse for an adult Christian!
Review the six bulleted admonitions with which this article begins. Not a single one comes from Jesus or the Bible. Cultural and religious traditions tend to trump transformational or radical Christianity time after time after time. We were taught well by the church. The system worked! We were spiritually formed, but most of us are still living on the pabulum of our earliest years and missing out on the richer, meatier, more textured and seasoned options that were meant for consumption by adult Christians. Or, to use another illustration from St. Paul, we are still limited to the ABC’s of faith when we should be more informed and more skilled in matters of Bible, doctrine, ethics and life.
A lot of Christians and a lot of churches are spiritually stagnant. Other descriptors might be sluggish, lazy, slothful, aimless, purposeless, empty, and dead. What do medical personnel call a lack of vital signs in a patient? Flat-lined! Dead!
Christianity (and the world in which we exist) is entering a new era. The church does not have the culture supporting us. When I was growing up, pee wee baseball leagues did not play on Wednesday night because that was “church night.” Stores were closed on Sunday. Such cultural props are gone nowadays and Christians and churches have for-profit competition—movie theaters, restaurant brunches, college and professional sports. Churches can’t plan fall activities until the college football schedules are posted. The senior adult Sunday school classes can complain that church should be a higher priority, but there is a new reality. Several years ago a pastor in a very non-resort city told me his congregation had to learn to function as a resort ministry. He explained that his church had enough members with mountain and beach houses, with international travel plans, and with commitments to visit grandkids that even his best members were not present in church 50% of the time.
New realities in the world, in my family, in my employment, in my age and health should mean that I am constantly updating my faith. I have commitments and responsibilities I did not have when I was 25. I have problems I did not have when I was 25. I have assets and strengths I did not have when I was 25. I have experience I did not have when I was 25. My faith should look different.
When I was a kid, my faith had a lot to do with Allene and Carlton Aldridge, my parents, and Immanuel Baptist Church, my congregation, and North Augusta, South Carolina, my home town and culture. Since old loves die hard, I do not want to be disrespectful to any of those early, wonderful mentors in my life. But the world and I have moved on. I am no longer the electable high school Senior Class President that I was. That is okay, because I don’t think Jesus would have been elected Senior Class President either. He made people uncomfortable. He challenged them. I am a changed person over the past 40 years, hopefully, transformed by a deeper and more expansive understanding of an unlimited God whose name is not Southern Baptist or Southern Culture or “Quit Squirming,” or “Be Nice,” but whose name is “I Am Who I Am.”
I have discovered in the Holy Bible that there are stories of people who questioned and wrestled with God, and they are not condemned. There are Bible stories of people who embarrassed their families, and they are not condemned. There are people who wandered in the wilderness, and they are not condemned. There are, praise the Lord, even people who danced, and they are not condemned.
I repeat: The Bible is a Big Book and God is a Big God!
Marion Aldridge is a writer and is Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina.
