The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

If you can't love thy neighbor, tolerate

Lately the church I've been attending for 40 years has been going through a schism. I won't bore you with the details; suffice it to say it pits one part of the congregation against another, and the issues are more about personalities and patterns of liturgy than interpretations of faith.

This is the first time in the 40 or more years since the church was founded that this has happened. That probably makes it unusual. Most churches, especially Protestant churches, seem to go through such internal indigestion regularly.

Alas, that doesn't make it any easier.

Since it is the first time for my church, it's even more difficult.

Those who hold to one view probably will, if they "win," take the church out of the denomination to which it now belongs. If they don't "win," they'll probably go somewhere else. On the other hand, if the other part of the congregation doesn't get what it wants, it will probably force out the present minister and keep the church within the denomination in which it was founded. Then the other faction presumably will go elsewhere.

Either way, everyone loses.

The church will be smaller; people who once were neighbors will now be enemies; and much of what churchgoing is supposed to be all about will have been discarded.

Although this is a first for the church to which I belong, this isn't the first such struggle in which I've been involved.

I once was an officer in another Protestant organization where a similar difference of opinion--I find it hard to call it a difference of faith--took place. That one ended in the resignation of the laity and the retention, at least for the moment, of the clergy. But the organization never really recovered. Again, everyone suffered.

I suppose the moral of this tale is that no one loves such confrontations, least of all me, but inevitably they happen.

But I am troubled.

I am troubled because I find myself on neither side of the question, an uncomfortable position in which to stand. Inevitably, friends of long standing don't agree with me.

Both sides would like me to be with them, but I find I can't.

I'm not sure I know all the reasons, but I do know a couple or three.

First, what has ensued--or so it seems to me--is a secular, rather than a religious, difference. It's not a matter of faith; it's a matter of how things in the church are going to be done. That just doesn't seem Christian to me.

Second, to me being a Protestant hinges on the foundation that what one believes and how one goes about acting on that faith is a matter between God and the individual. It's not up to someone else to tell me what that is.

Third, the church that is not wide enough to allow this is not a church to which I find I can belong.

Viewed from others' perspectives, I'm sure this is not acceptable. Human beings don't like differences in general, and they particularly don't like them in questions of religious faith.

Millions of people have died because of such differences, most recently in such places as Bosnia, Israel and Algeria. And I'll only mention the most terrible difference of all--the Holocaust.

Even in the United States, while we've learned to accommodate religious differences, it has seldom been easy. Today we have shed blood in this country in the battle over abortion, a struggle that incorporates religious and secular belief. We struggle with whether or not prayer should be allowed in public schools.

We have no monopoly on tolerance.

Yet it seems to me, if we are to continue to survive as a healthy society, we must.

We must be able to make room for others, even if we don't agree with them, even if they look and talk differently, even if they seem threats to the way we live our lives.

We may not be able, as the Bible counsels us, "to love thy neighbor as thyself," but we must at least allow our neighbors to exist and to believe what they wish to believe.

Suppressing faith succeeds only in strengthening it. Seeking to limit the deepest convictions of others invites at the least ill will and at the worst disaster.

Despite the certainty of some, no one has a permanent pipeline to God.

Not even me.

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