Cutting the Cords

This morning in Sunday School we were discussing Phyllis Tickle’s analogy of religion being a cable the holds us to God. Now I have not read her books (I don’t think many in the class had) though I did find some of her talks on the internet. I looked this up because I wasn’t really following our conversation very well, getting confused about where the analogy was going. Anyway I found reading the transcription of her talk to also be confusing. She moves from one generalizations about a world trend to another (pulling theological images from Matrix, equating Martin Luther to a couple of the most liberal theologians of today, and explaining the emergence of Christian Science and Mormonism in a couple of sentences). My head was spinning just trying to figure out if the last five things she said were true so I could determine if the connection she was making made sense. Hopefully her book has a lot more detail and documentation for her claims.

Anyway back to the cable. Phyllis has religion connecting us to God like a cable made up of different strands and layers. Her idea is that when the layer is opened up, we play with the strands, rearrange them a bit and then put it back together. This is why Protestantism looks different than Catholicism and Pentecostals worship differently than Episcopalians. But we started talking about just these cables that connect us with all kinds of things - God, church music, money, sports, each other, etc. The idea was that we get so connected we have to start cutting some of these cables. So having organ music in church is a cable that was cut when we introduced guitars. And some cables (the liturgies that Journey now follows, like writing names on a rock) are worth holding onto because we like them. When we started talking about cutting away the letters of Paul in the same way we discussed not holding onto having fancy altar rails, I got a little concerned. Why not just cut all the cables (one person suggested this was the plan) and just float along the streams of our culture with no intention of a connection with God. I appreciate the questioning about holding things to be too important but something has to be important and we don’t seem to talk about them.

This got me thinking about the music at our church. They’ve got some great musicians who perform a couple of songs each week. But it’s a bit more concert than participation, no common repertoire holding us together. It’s like we have to bring in all this diversity of music but not connection and community. Phyllis’ comment is that the old organ hymns were “performance art, even by those who couldn't perform. It was not a participatory thing.” She then concludes that in emerging churches today (including Journey ?) “what the church failed to do was accommodate to that shift. It still tried to perform, and we still do.” I wish that she had stayed on this topic a bit longer but she quickly moved on to the next world trend (the Internet) without any guidance about what we are suppose to be doing. Do we just cut this cable also; unplug the guitars and let everyone have a voice in what we sing? Somehow, I doubt we’d do so nor would appreciate the cacophony that resulted.

It seems that everyone is telling the church to cut the cables (at least the ones we don’t like) but not what are connection we are suppose to be looking for.