The Adam-Shawn Dialogue - second response

To read Shawn's replies please visit http://westmanpreacher.blogspot.com/

Shawn:

One thing that saddens me in the Church today is that we continue to believe the LIE that democratic vote is the answer to determining morality, justice, and most importantly, Truth. If democracy were responsible for determining any of these black folks would still be picking cotton, marching in cities across America, boycotting city buses, and joining groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party in record numbers.

David Friedman wrote in his work The Machinery of Freedom these words:

"Democratic" decision making is a means for finding and implementing the will of the majority; it has no other function. It serves, not to encourage diversity, but to prevent it.

This is the fundamental problem in the United Church of Canada. We seek to govern our Church and our congregations by allowing the majority to decide on direction. This means that whichever special interest group is the biggest will determine how the Church and the God of the entire universe must be made in their image; the complete opposite of what Genesis says:

So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

In the work Demokratie und Republik Proudhon writes:

Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.

I think this is where our Christology in the Church is tested, because our Scriptures quote Jesus Christ as saying:

I am the way, and the truth, and the life.

For Christians, truth might be revealed in democracy or even in dictatorship; however, we the Church have been commanded by Jesus to obey his teachings, and this teaching from John says that our understanding of truth isn't a vague philosophical proposition (like from the Greek philosophy that I so despise), but rather truth is a person - a person that the Church proclaimed to be both fully human and fully divine. This rabbi, the son of a Jewish carpenter was a wandering beggar who had no place to lay his head, but he lived and proclaimed some bold things that the Church ought to consider to be the meat and potatoes worth living and dying for - they are the foundation for our Christology. Jesus' mission statement according to Luke the Physician is this:

The breath of YHWH has come upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim that this is God's year to ACT!!! (paraphrase from Luke 4:18-19)

If the democratic governance structures in our Church and within our congregations refrain from living out this witness, then I strongly doubt that we are the Church. This mission statement from the Gospel According to Dr. Luke is true because Church culture ought to be defined by "the way, the truth, and the life" - namely Jesus Christ. If Jesus is about preaching good news and proclaiming release and proclaiming recovery of sight and opening prison doors, and proclaiming that God is alive today and we are spending time worrying about whether the majority agrees with this proposition we ought to be asking ourselves who is the Truth? Is it Jesus or the Majority?