I came of age at the tail end of the era when most CMC churches had a written set of lifestyle standards for church members. While many contemporary CMC churches have stated expectations about loving, forgiving, and serving each other, 30 years ago the expectations were more explicit. For instance, men in our church didn’t wear ties or shorts, women wore dresses, and families didn’t have TVs in their homes. While many CMC churches left that era at various points over the last 50 years, many of us remember when these kinds of expectations were normative.
Several memories from that era have stuck with me. I remember the feeling of subdued joy among the women when they would no longer be required to wear only dresses but could now wear skirts and blouses. I remember bleary-eyed nights, feasting through the night on a school friend’s TV and video games, determined to milk every precious moment of TV time I could pilfer. Then there was the time I wanted to wear a tie to a formal event but was not allowed because my parents said, “The church hasn’t decided to do that yet.”
In the current climate of intense discussion around religious and civil liberty, figuring out how much of our lives belong to the rest of the body of Christ can be intensely challenging.
Of course, one of the thorny challenges from that era was how change to these community expectations came about. Change often occurred subtly, as though by default. When a large enough contingent of people decided to live differently, expectations for the church were changed. For example, I remember hearing rumors that various church members had TVs. Eventually the church’s lifestyle standards regarding TVs had to be changed if they were going to continue carrying authority with the group.
We might be tempted to look back and scoff at these earlier attempts of our church communities to work at living together in an agreed upon way. Yet even if a church community no longer speaks into questions of dress and television, we are forced to work out other shared commitments. For instance, what do we believe about divorce and remarriage, the roles of women in church, and how COVID is handled? All these controversial issues require a church to hold some kind of consensus about the expectations of the community.
In the current climate of intense discussion around religious and civil liberty, figuring out how much of our lives belong to the rest of the body of Christ can be intensely challenging. This challenge is reflected not only at the local level, but conference-wide. How tightly do we hold sister CMC churches to our shared Statement of Theology and our Statement of Practice? What level of agreement is necessary for us to have enough shape and form to effectively move together?
Years ago, CMC’s annual “conference” was not understood as a noun, but rather as a verb. Churches came to “conference” together, to “confer” and decide what shape the church should take to best represent Christ’s kingdom. They believed there was strength in shared commitments, beliefs, and practices.
We are still “conferring” about how to best live out our shared commitments. In my time as a CMC pastor, we have debated the question of divorce and remarriage and whether the Bible permits a divorced person to pastor a church. These questions and the careful debate surrounding them are very important to the life of the church. Even so it is not uncommon to hear some advocate that individual Christians and churches should be permitted to make their own decisions without the “control” of or accountability to a larger conference or denomination.
While it’s appealing to avoid dealing with the “crazy folks” who just don’t get it, no church can function if its members don’t share common commitments. This is true for families, businesses, organizations, and CMC more broadly.
Significant challenges exist for the broader church in a secular culture. We must continue to develop a robust and engaged group of disciples that is willing to wrestle hard together and mutually submit to one another. I continue to appreciate the opportunity to process difficult and important questions in the part of Christ’s body we call CMC. Let’s continue “conferencing” around challenging issues facing the contemporary church. We need each other!
