Mechanicsburg

Mechanicsburg Presbyterian Church
Pastors Rick Sweeney, Myrtle McCall, DCE Kathy Wells.

I was delighted to be in worship with the Mechanicsburg Presbyterian Church on the Third Sunday of Advent. The chancel was filled with wrapped Christmas gifts for their generous ministry into their community: a wonderful expression of Christmas cheer and compassion. The hymns of the season and the excellent music program at Mechanicsburg were deeply meaningful to me. I realized again how the melodies of our great Advent hymns have penetrated into my soul. I grew up with this music, and the hymns of Advent move me.

But my reflections on the day went off in an academic direction sparked by Rick’s fine preaching on the text about John the Baptist. In an outstanding development of our story of John the Baptist, Rick made the point that we need to claim again the idea of our Christian faith as a movement, not an institution. There is freshness, energy, novelty and creativity in the Christian movement which gets stifled when all we do is institutionalized in the life of the church. What is the difference between Christianity as a movement, the model of John the Baptist and Jesus, and the institutionalization of the church into large congregations and bureaucracies?
Rick’s sermon on that question sent me scurrying back to my bookshelf to revisit one of the classics: Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches in two volumes with an Introduction by H. Richard Niebuhr, (University of Chicago Press, 1976) (First English edition 1931; First German edition 1911). I remembered that Troeltsch made exactly this distinction between "institution" and "movement". Of course, I remembered wrong. Troeltsch’s brilliant distinction which he uses to help interpret all of Christian history is between "church," "sect" and "mysticism". With special thanks to Rick’s good Advent preaching and in memory of John the Baptist who started the Christian movement, I bring to you here a summary of Ernst Troeltsch’s wonderful thesis (volume 2, page 993):

"From the very beginning there appeared the three main types of the sociological development of Christian thought: the Church, the sect, and mysticism.
The Church is an institution which has been endowed with grace and salvation as the result of the work of Redemption; it is able to receive the masses, and to adjust itself to the world, because, to a certain extent, it can afford to ignore the need for subjective treasures of grace and of redemption.

The sect is a voluntary society, composed of strict and definite Christian believers bound to each other by the fact that all have experienced ‘the new birth’. These ‘believers’ live apart from the world, are limited to small groups, emphasize the law instead of grace, and in varying degrees within their own circle set up the Christian order, based on love; all this is done in preparation for and expectation of the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Mysticism means that the world of ideas which had hardened into formal worship and doctrine is transformed into a purely personal and inward experience; this leads to the formation of groups on a purely personal basis, with no permanent form, which also tend to weaken the significance of forms of worship, doctrine, and the historical element.

From the beginning these three forms were foreshadowed, and all down the centuries to the present day, wherever religion is dominant, they still appear alongside of one another, while among themselves they are strangely and variously interwoven and interconnected. The churches alone have the power to stir the masses in any real and lasting way."

Possibly we need a bit of sect-like and mysticism-like quality in our churches.