c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and a former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ This wasn’t a throwaway announcement. The preacher was alerting his flock that change might lie ahead.

Elders are to begin a six-month discernment process, he said. Does the congregation build on suburban land it owns? Does it spin off a daughter church?

Then the crucial words: We run the risk of becoming too comfortable here, he said. Without fresh challenge, the fire could go out.

In one 30-second announcement, the pastor not only got everyone’s attention, but stated the dilemma that has virtually paralyzed religious congregations in America: the paralysis of comfort.

If the first and middle thirds of the 20th century were the era of castle-building, the final third has seen raging battles in defense of comfort and its handmaidens, privilege and tradition.

Like their European forebears, Americans have expressed their prosperity by building large houses and large worship facilities. Mega-wealth in the 1920s produced a generation of mega-sanctuaries, whose interiors reflected excellent and costly taste and whose exteriors resembled the granite towers of industry.

The trend picked up steam in the heady days after World War II, when congregations suddenly found themselves with overflow crowds. Gothic towers gave way to towering steeples, but the message was the same: We have made it.

Then protectionism set in. Specific divisions have occurred over gender, language, sexuality, worship space, Scripture, sometimes even theology. But the underlying issue has been comfort vs. change; an issue far deeper than liking or not liking the way things are.

People identify with their institutions and derive self-esteem from them. Professional sports are grounded in this search for derivative self-esteem. So is a consumer economy in which Pepsi drinkers think themselves hip, and”DKNY”on anything lifts the chin a bit.

Religion knows this process well. Many a cathedral was billed as an expression of a town’s intrinsic value. Many a downtown church has stayed in business by helping members feel more prosperous than they are.”Robert E. Lee used to sit there,”a proud churchgoer once told me, as if that fact conferred present value.

People use their institutions to escape the world. Religious congregations are particularly effective at offering temporary respite from the world’s problems. Ethnic diversity, for example, stops at most congregations’ doors. Cultural modernity is discouraged. The blurring of class lines is conspicuously absent in religious congregations.

People, finally, use institutions to gain the illusion of control. Volunteer organizations thrive on dispensing bits of power, rather than pay. Religious congregations, in doing the same, seem particularly attractive to people whose home life or work life are out of control.

Fighting to maintain this delicate and unstated web of meaning leads the faithful into some disturbing battles. An hour-long debate over a comma, guerrilla warfare over a paint selection, 30 years of bickering about”thou”vs.”you,”centuries of arguing over the correct volume of baptismal water, bloodshed over vestments, choirs walking out over contemporary music: These wars lead neither to victory in anything that really matters nor to clarity about the will of God, but to frustration and shame.

Sunday’s announcement about possible change was, therefore, no minor matter. This is an understated congregation that bought a surplus elementary school and nurtured a dress-down atmosphere. But even dress-down can become a comfortable idol. Talk of a new facility in suburbia stirs fears about stained glass and ornamented chancels, and raises the question: How much of people’s faith is tied in with not being grand?

Counter-trend, of course, isn’t any more authentic than trend. Both can paralyze the believer from making that leap of faith that carries one beyond derivative identity and vicarious faith. For the”fire”of which the preacher spoke isn’t about style or counter-style, overstated or understated wealth, using antique silver vessels or earthy ceramic ones, or anything comfortably external. The fire grows in the belly where sin-sickness, hopes for wholeness, gratitude, and a yearning for life all swirl together.

The wise and healthy church will stop fighting over externals. The custodians of externals have dominated religious life for too long. Decades of fighting over the forms and furnishings of worship have left congregations divided and discouraged.

Congregations won’t fill empty pews by rearranging the externals, but by daring to touch the fire of people’s deepest yearnings.

MJP END EHRICH