The Universalist minister, Hosea Ballou said it so well (in this a modified version of his quote from his Treatise on Atonement):
“The moment we fancy ourselves infallible, everyone must come to our peculiarities or we cast them away. If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”
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I hate to disagree with such a source, but there's a lot more to forming a church than loving enough to disagree. That philosophy led to a culture in which family and social ties counted for more than anything going on inside the church. Everything there, from meetinghouses themselves to communion silver and even the fabric on the kneelers, became family relics that people loathed to change -- or cast off in some generational upheaval.
Without a common symbolic frame of reference, a congregation cannot feel safe in the presence of life's most disturbing issues. We have gone from naming the resurrection of Jesus as our source of hope, to using a left-wing utopia as a stand-in for heaven. As such, if the 1930s in our movement are any teacher, we are extremely vulnerable just now to exploitative leadership that promises to get us there faster -- and pulls the wool over our eyes.
I speak, of course, of the rise of Stalin, and the way it completely stole the socialist/communist movement from idealists. But it took many of the idealists a long time to work it out, because they had no common language for grieving and regrouping. That is OUR job as a religion -- a language which does not get stuck anyplace in this real world for too long.
Thanks for letting me vent...
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