Unless the Lord Builds the House
How Redeemed Zoomer Means So Well But Is So Very Very Very Wrong
Welp the United Methodists officially sealed their liberal fate. This only happened because the COWARDLY GLOBAL METHODIST CONSERVATIVES RAN AWAY!!! THIS COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!
So tweeted Redeemed Zoomer a few days ago. I came across this interesting thought after watching a variety of bits clipped out by Woke Preacher Clips, including a deeply cringe “hymn,” and one of everyone saying their pronouns. And I thought to myself, “Oh goodness, Redeemed Zoomer.” And also, “I bet all those Global Methodist Conservatives are breathing a huge sigh of relief.”
Looking at all the clips of the conferencegoers, I was struck—as I often am when gazing across the internet abyss at progressive self-professing “Christians”—by how very much the same they all looked regardless of their age, shape, or ethnic background. The more diverse one tries to be, the more one ceases to be different and interesting. It’s the sort of tone-deaf situation that claims to be multi-culti but comes out speaking the same language and eating all the same food every single time.
Still, one can’t help noticing that the demographic skews Boomer and fairly white. I don’t want generational stereotypes to bear out, and thankfully, in my own lived experience, all the people I know who fall into the Boomer set are nothing like the people who attended the United Methodist conference. The people I know personally are all deeply faithful, prayerful, and best of all, self-sacrificing. They would shudder to their bones to have to be in such a room, adorned by a few young, insecure persons lapping up the attention of their elders. In the spirit of honestly-enough-already, why are there so many video clips of people sounding like this? I guess the singer, in that case, is probably a Gen-Xer. But spiritually, he is tapping into the spirit of the dying age, in the cringiest way possible.
I feel immensely grieved for Redeemed Zoomer, gazing out at a desolate world, devoid of human institutions that mean anything. He, like me, has to drive by heaps of beautiful empty buildings, abandoned by the believers and the young. Only a few older hangers-on totter in to mouth the prayers and mow the lawn. Meanwhile, down the road in some ugly, badly-lit warehouse there’s a mega-church full of kids and their parents who probably hear a decent sermon, but without the attendant liturgical forms to enrich and contextualize them. If only the believers hadn’t left, he rails. We can take the mainlines back, he cries.
But he doesn’t understand that we can’t because those people tottering around there were not willing to let go of the meager power they held, nor their heretical beliefs, nor the crumbling infrastructure, nor anything. Gradually, they made the true believer feel so uncomfortable about the basics of the Christian faith that either he, or even she, had to apostatize or just leave. They kept the forms but rejected the meaning, and so those people went away and found the meaning, and are having to cobble together the forms.
The Global Conservative Methodists, just like faithful Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Lutherans before them are walking in the way of Jesus. You might remember that strange moment, in the gospels, when a young man came to ask the Lord what he must do to be saved. Jesus looking at him, “loved him,” and so told him to give up his riches and wealth and follow him. When the young man would not, Jesus let him walk away. Jesus by that time was no longer preaching in the Synagogues. He was out in the wilderness calling all those who had ears to try to hear.
It is not a shame, an act of cowardice to say to the person who will not worship God on his Holy Hill and in his sanctuary, and yet won’t go out of the sanctuary and down to the local Elks Club which would make so much more sense, “Ok, have it your way,” and then go to find the lost sheep and preach the gospel. You look at them. You love them. You tell them the truth. And then you go rent out a school because they have hardened their hearts against the Lord Most High. They are unbelievers who yet still hold all the instruments of worldly and institutional power.
When you take that agonizing but faithful step, all the world is able to see the way things really are. That God is the builder. That everyone who builds must do it according to his plans and purposes or else they are wasting their precious time.
Like all apostate hostage situations, conservatives do prop up institutions by their work and their presence. Because they really believe, they lend a veneer of credibility to the places they worship. There is plausible deniability about the propagation of heresy wherever real Christians are to be found because they are faithfully praying, faithfully cringing over the appalling music, and faithfully trying to snatch one or two souls out of the fire. They are the blessed of God, and so by being yoked to apostasy, by going to heretical churches and trying to keep the coffee hour from falling apart and the roof from leaking, the apostate institutions retain a certain measure of the blessing of God.
But that isn’t good for those people. Until you are in the howling wilderness, you can’t know, as your lived experience, that anything is wrong. You can always cast all your cares on the poor Conservative because his Christianity instructs him that he must bear his brother’s burdens and count his sister as more significant than himself. He then bears the weight of all the dysfunction and feels guilty and bad about everything. Whereas when he says to the one who denies the gospel and its power, “No,” and goes away, that one finally has to grapple with all his dumb and wretched ideas for real. He is finally on the hook for his unbelief, with no one to blame but himself.
And the faithful Christian, who has finally unshackled himself, for the first time in a long time, basks in the astonishing grace of being with other real Christians. I remember the first time I recited the Nicene Creed in the company of a room full of other people who all believed it without crossing their fingers, and how I began to cry, and bite my lip, because I didn’t even know it was a thing that could be.
God is in his Holy Temple, we say sometimes in Morning Prayer, let all the earth be silent before him. We are not to mess around in the worship of a God who cared enough to come and die to rescue us from the destruction of sin. We are not to dither and accommodate half-truths for the sake of peace. We are to love each and every single person who happens by, which means, more and more, drawing the line, telling the truth, and letting the chips fall where they may.
Have a nice day!
Thank you for this, Anne. I am one of the "cowards" who walked away to form something new--the Global Methodist Church. When I saw Zoomer's tweet, I could not think of anything constructive or kind to say, so I kept my thoughts to myself. You have captured so well here what it feels like to enter into a community of people who are united in faith and in the Holy Spirit.
Thank you for the encouraging post, Anne. Your joy in voicing the creed with the faithful remnant resonates in my spirit (Psalm 122:1, also sometimes initiating Morning Prayer).