Stance and approach
Thursday, March 25, 2021 at 01:17AM 
What attracted me first to the Anglican Tradition and what keeps me with her might be described best as her particular stance and approach to the Christian faith. Stance and approach are also good organization development terms because they help define the ethos and culture of any organization. For example, if an organization’s culture creates a stance of “winner-take-all,” then the approach of people in that organization will reflect a cutthroat mentality. If, however, the stance is one of openness and humility, then people in the organization will most likely approach their common life with a spirit of collegiality and cooperation. In other words, over time organizations tend to take on certain adjectives created by the stances they take and the approaches they incarnate.
Anglicanism, as I have experienced it, fosters openness and humility. At our best, we recognize that we don’t have all the answers to life’s problems. What we do have is Jesus, crucified and risen, and his grace is sufficient. By staying in community with one another, even without all the answers, we’re able to listen deeply and respectfully to one another while humbly and patiently waiting on God’s grace. Our unity is not in our uniformity, but rather in our shared trust in God’s sovereignty and providential care. This stance helps us maintain a “big tent” of a church with space enough for many.
We, as I hope we all see, live in a time where this “big tent” stance in the secular culture is being blown away. We are now all encouraged to pick sides and to defend our politics (which has become a new religion unto itself); where if one has the right thinking on an issue or, in church terms, the right doctrine on a question, then one’s stance and approach do not really matter. It is enough you are right and others are wrong. That apparently gives the self-righteous permission to behave in any way they wish, because after all, they have the right belief.
It may be my own confirmation bias, but I see this showing itself most alarmingly on the Right (although the Left has their share of this as well). This approach justifies any and all levels of cruelty against the “other side” (just read some of what has been written about the well-known Bible teacher Beth Moore when she announced she was leaving the Southern Baptist Convention). Classically, it is the ends justifying the means. Since our “end” is true and right, then whatever means we employ to get there is justified. Of course, such a stance has never been understood as moral within Christianity.
Marilynne Robinson has observed that “nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.” I like that. Maybe nothing true can be said about anything at all from any posture of defense? As church leaders, I hope we’ll attend ourselves to the stance we nurture and the approach we take in our congregations. Might our stance be less defensive and more grounded in humility? Might we let go of trying to be right all the time (over against all those other people who are clearly so wrong!)? Might we actually approach our common life trusting in God’s sovereignty and providence? God doesn’t need us to watch God’s back. God won’t be outflanked by the sin of the ones that we have deemed as enemies of the cross of Christ. That was already tried once before on a hill outside Jerusalem. It failed then and it’ll fail today and tomorrow.
+Scott
Reader Comments (1)
Scott's comment, "It is enough you are right and others are wrong" took me into a few odd thoughts. Recently Bill Maher said, "Half the country is having a never-ending “woke” competition... The other half believes that we have to stop the lizard people, because they’re eating babies." It was a comment about how our nation has difficulty doing great things anymore. It was in a NYT piece by Thomas Friedman on US - China relations. He wrote that Maher took a position that "China can still get big things done. America, not so much." Friedman saw the issue in these terms, "{there's} got to be something between authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can't do anything nat all." There's more nuance in the article. I found myself thinking that as the church lives within the broader culture, we will also share in the some of those dynamics. Scott's suggestion that a stance of humility might help seemed right. I wonder if we were more humble might we be more able to do great things as a church and a nation.