c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ A pastor watches his son consider seminary, and his heart sinks.”I want to rescue him”from the”vortex of self-deceit and denial”the church has become, he says.

A friend tells how her husband was torn apart in a battle over traditional versus contemporary music at a church in the Midwest.

A friend comes home from a church meeting shaking in frustration. Critical issues of trust and servanthood are being ignored, she says. Ruling families simply want to preserve their control.

While denominational leaders meet in English castles and gaudy convention centers to debate sex and throw down the gauntlet on what constitutes true religion, a religious bookstore owner says his customers tend to be pastors looking for a quiet place where no one picks on them and faithful people who can’t bear the bickering at churches and want guidance on how to deal directly with God.

Church arguments are nothing new, of course. The first disciples argued over preference while Jesus was still alive. Since then, it has just gotten worse. The letters of Paul, which modern moralizers mine for nuggets about sex, were originally an appeal to churches to stop fighting and start believing.

Church leaders shaped European history with their intrigues and warfare. Today we have nearly 300 denominations in America, each claiming some measure of the truth.

I doubt we will see the end of church arguments. Too many careers are at stake, for one thing. But let’s at least be honest about what they represent.

Church arguments are about self-will masquerading as high principle. Like children who use a dead parent to wage indirect battle _”But Mom would have wanted it this way!”_ we enlist God as our ally in whatever cause we are pursuing. We comb the Scriptures for words that support our viewpoint. We say,”God wants …”as if we really knew the mind of God.

Or we cite”tradition,”as if Jesus had written a script requiring liturgy a certain way, facilities a certain way, clergy behavior a certain way _ when all evidence suggests such institutional imperatives couldn’t have been farther from Jesus’ mind. He was waging battle with the forces of darkness, not specifying how much water is required for legitimate baptism.

What Jesus did say was that our prayer should start with humble submission _”Father, you be holy, you be king”_ and that we should ask God for bread that we cannot give ourselves and for forgiveness.

It might be the prayer’s final petition, however, that unmasks our parade of self-will.”Save us from the time of trial.”Or,”Do not bring us to the test.”Jesus didn’t mean an unfamiliar hymn, or a Sunday service lasting 15 minutes too long, or a pastor who makes changes. By”time of trial”he meant the trial that awaited him _ torture and death for having the gall to stand for God and against evil.

He warned his friends that, if they truly followed him, they would face the same torment. Their prayer, he said, should be for strength and courage, for deliverance from this suffering.

We have set that prayer to music and argued over its wording. But the hard question it raises is this: Does any of us suffer for our faith? Does any of us face torture and death for choosing God over evil? As we lobby Congress to preserve favorable tax laws, does our religion mean the least bit of inconvenience? As we blister other denominations for their imperfections, is our churchgoing anything more than a sandbox tiff?

If we were truly standing against evil, would we care about which hymns get selected for Sunday worship, or which stripes of the human rainbow get ordained? If our faith were leading us into serious danger, would we care about the wording on plaques, or gender balance on the podium?

We send mission teams to convert Hindus and Muslims to our way of thinking. But the evil that Jesus faced wasn’t wrong opinion. He faced hypocrisy, cruelty, bigotry, disease, warfare and self-will. He faced what we would face if we opened our hearts to the world and looked beyond institutional victory.

MJP END EHRICH