ROBERT : This is the history . . .

This is the history of the Church that many of us were taught : Jesus came, Jesus died, Jesus rose again and ascended into heaven. Paul made his mission trips and took the Gospel to the Gentiles and wrote his letters. King James found a copy of the original scriptures that God had graciously  dictated in the English of the King himself and the Pilgrims brought religious freedom to the new promised land called America. There was a Great Awakening in the States in the 1800’s and the ‘true’ Church was born.
      That version of Church history is a little like saying that American history is made up of the story of the first Thanksgiving, the Declaration of Independence, and the landing at Normandy on D-Day.
      Such a truncated view of the history of the Church that many of us were taught has left us with little knowledge of and a great deal of suspicion about the ancient ways of the Church, the ancient ways that sustained the Church in the first place, the ways that made it possible for there have been any Church for the Pilgrims to bring over or anyone to revive or anywhere for you and I to go to wrestle with the Christian faith at all.

In the post-Reformation world, as the various reform and renewal movements began to spread across Europe and into the New World, there were great changes in the ways of the Church.
      Some of what went into those changes were honest and necessary reactions to the excesses of the Catholic Church at the time. Some of the changes had as much to do with shifts in the culture and society and politics as they had to do with the Church. But either way, as Phyllis Tickle once observed, ‘In some ways we threw out the baby of the ancient along with the bath water of the Roman.’
      We who come from more evangelical traditions very often bring with us an ignorance of and a suspicion of the ancient, a fear of anything that smacks of being too Catholic. We were taught to be afraid that such things will lead us astray somehow.
      Among other things, we were taught that liturgy was dead and lifeless and cold and rote, even though such liturgical practice was at the core of the worship and devotion of the early Church. We were taught that we need not take the Eucharist each week, even though it was the central act of Sabbath worship for the early Church. We were taught that fixed hour prayer was somehow not prayer in the Spirit, even though it was at the very center of daily devotion and practice in the early Church. Such a list can go on.
      These days, more and more of us are afraid that those who taught us to be so afraid of the ancient were not actually right about it at all. I am among them.
      And what I really am afraid of is that the ones who sustained the Church for all those years before the Reformation in Europe and the Awakening in America may have known some things about communion with God that I do not know. They are the ones who sustained the Church from days of Paul to the days of Jonathan Edwards. The crowd that I grew up with did not even exist yet.