Saving Jesus
from the Church

Saving Jesus
from the Church

ROBIN R. MEYERS



I dedicate this book to all the men and women who have
chosen the parish ministry as their life's work, and yet do not
wish to be considered harmless artifacts from another age. May
all those who labor in the most misunderstood, dangerous, and
sublime of all professions be encouraged and inspired by the
possibility that one's head and one's heart can be equal partners
in faith. Lest the church end up a museum piece whose clergy
are affable but laughable cartoons, we must once again dedicate
ourselves to this wild calling-one that led us away from more
comfortable lives and into the only profession where radical
truth-telling is part of the job description. May we fear no man
and no creed, save our own timidity, and may we encourage
and support one another in pursuit of religion that is biblically
responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying, and
socially signifi cant.


CONTENTS

CONTENTSSI XChristian ity as Compassion,
Not Condemnation 117SE V E NDiscipleship as Obedience, Not Observance 141EI G H TJustice as Covenant, Not Control 163NIN EProsperity as Dangerous, Not Divine 183TE NReligion as Relationship, Not Righteousness 203EP I L O G UEA Preacher's Dream: Faith as Following Jesus 223Acknowledgments 233Notes 235About the AuthorCreditsCoverCopyrightAbout the Publisher


P R O L O GUE

P R O L O GUE

A
A
m I a Chris tian?" What a strange question for an ordained
minister of the gospel to ask. Born a minister's son and
raised in a parsonage, I spent my childhood in the conservative
Church of Christ, where no musical instruments are allowed in
worship. As a college student, I discovered the Congregational
Church and the liberal United Church of Christ, which I was
warned to avoid, and then never looked back. The UCC has
been my home ever since, a brave and messy denomination
that has been speaking truth to power for a long time and in-
sisting that we make more room at the table for those who are
forgotten.

Try as I might to be a "normal" kid (as a teenager I once hid
copies of Playboy in plain sight, lest I be mistaken for a saint), I
was a member of a generation that got its marching orders from
Bob Dylan and Martin Luther King Jr. When I was at the tender
age of sixteen, two of my heroes were gunned down just weeks
apart, one on a hotel balcony in Memphis, the other in a hotel
ballroom in California. The faint smell of tear gas hung over
many college campuses in those days, and the New York Times
reported that God was dead. The last thing I wanted to grow up
to be was a preacher.

As fate would have it, or destiny (if I could figure out the dif-
ference between the two), the seeds of the ministry had already


Prologue

Prologue

Now, forty years later, twenty-five of them spent as a UCC
minister in my native Oklahoma, I came home one cold Janu-
ary afternoon after serving Communion to my beloved fl ock
and took a nap, which is my Sunday ritual. Parish ministry is
tiring in ways most people do not understand, and a Sunday
afternoon nap is as sacred to a middle-aged clergyman as the
Psalms. Rising before dawn and still fooling with the sermon
(or fi nishing it), many of us preachers are obsessive-compulsive
types who believe that no matter how many times we have done
this before, this time we will get it right. Preaching is, after all,
an audacious and dangerous act.

After the service, we stand in line, listening to "Good sermon,
Reverend" a hundred times (all of which can be erased if just
one person says, "Good morning, Reverend"), come home, wash
off the aftershave and perfume residue from all those hand-
shakes and hugs, sit down to eat, and then lie down to sleep.
It's a ritual as old as the priesthood, but there is also something
subversive about it. Sleeping at odd times of the day can open
the heart to strange dreams, when the ego stands down and the
id and superego collide without a mediator. This day was no
different, except for the dream. I woke up wondering if I was a
Christian.

I had folded myself into a fetal position and drawn the covers
over my head. From the other room, I heard the talking heads
of TV yelling at one another, arguing over what to do now that
we were mired in this hopeless war in Iraq and creating ter-


Prologue

Prologue