Lizard Eater advises us to learn to give testimony, to share the story of our experience with liberal religious community. She advises:
1. Make it personal-Don't preach. Tell what involvement in your church has done for you. Use the pronouns "I", "me", and "mine".
2. Make it short-Three or four minutes should be enough time to deal with the essential facts.
3. Keep your church central-Always highlight what belonging there has done for you.
LT at TheLivelyTradition wonders [is it] the church that saves[?] I don't want to repeat the argument that "religious community" is insufficient as a source of transcendence. Some agree and some disagree.
As I understand LT's point, to be saved requires a transcendent source. The religious community is of this world, a product of human interrelationship. How then can it be sufficient for salvation?
Lizard Eater may object, but I wasn't speaking of salvation, I was speaking of why I have found the church to be meaningful, even transformative. And a chorus of Unitarian Universalists could sing, we are already saved. The Unitarians and Universalists have been singing that song with various lyrics since Murray got of the boat in New Jersey. I will not touch on the question as to whether Murray intended his audience to hear the message in such a facile form, but that many did can not be denied.
But that doesn't stop a small but determined collection of Unitarian Universalists from thinking about salvation. We point out that the testimony exercise that Lizard Eater has creatively modified for our use was originally about the saving power of Jesus. I continue to insist that any religion worth practicing is about "salvation."* I further insist that despite our longs standing neglect of this central question of religion, that few of us can claim that our salvation is complete, and that our sanctification is irreversible. I think Channing was on the right track about salvation through the development of character, it is a failure of the Unitarian side of our tradition that we didn't develop that idea, settling instead on the nonsense that we were too good to be damned.
For me salvation is about relationship with the source of being, to be saved is to be in right relationship with that which generations of people have called God. For me, Salvation means wholeness, right relationship with that " transcending mystery and wonder affirmed in [many] cultures, that moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the the forces that creates and uphold life." Many people come to churches because they hope that perhaps that community will help them with relationship development "with something beyond me," lately we have been calling this seeking after "spirituality." The God that people have been taught is dead (for them,) and they wish to renew their relationship with that _________which lives.
It strikes me that what people are saying is that they are experiencing religious community as a means to grace, that participation in a church is similar to participating in a sacrament. I agree with LT, the idea of the church saving souls (fully realizing the souls relationship with the divine) seems to make the church itself the object of our devotion, our ultimate commitment. But if participation in eucharist, matrimony, holy orders, baptism,confirmation, confession, and extreme unction are considered to be means to grace in the road to salvation in the Catholic tradition, I am not sure why we can't consider participation in religious community to be a blessing, instituted among us to aid in our growth toward wholeness to rephrase the idea of sacrament for our use.
Read all of the TheLivelyTradition post to see how LT develops his thinking about the problem of salvation within religious community in a throughly Protestant way, with its emphasis on decision.
*Each religion has an idea about what it means for human beings to be whole, or to realize their full potential, or to be fully Aware, or if this world is hostile to God, to leave this world and go to a perfect world. This idea that religion is about salvation I owe to the Rev. Scott Alexander - whose Universalism includes brokeness and incompletion, and whose humanism includes Transcending Wonder and healing grace.
I think that calling church membership and participation "a means of grace" is a particularly apt way of putting it. thanks.