Worldly Thinking

I heard a challenging sermon this weekend on the Christian’s relationship to “the world.” It was on the whole a well-balanced sermon, but it was particularly challenging to me because of the baggage I brought to it. I grew up, until my teen years, in a German Bretheren church that emphasized a retreat from “worldliness.” My emotional baggage about what constitutes “the world” is therefore heavy.

I’m not quite sure of the provenance of my branch of the Bretheren movement. Our church was comprised almost entirely of first and second-generation German immigrants. This site provides a general overview of the Bretheren movement that in many ways resonates with my experience;. This site and this site also provide interesting background. Aspects of the “exclusive” or “Darbyite” Bretheren were evident in my German Bretheren church. In particular, we emphasized dispensational theology and eschewed contact with Christians from other churches or denominations, whose Christianity was suspect by virtue of belonging to such other churches or denominations. We also had no “professional” staff or pastors; we “broke bread” (took communion) every Sunday; the “breaking of the bread” service was a separate service during which any adult male in fellowship with the church could share a hymn, verse, or testimony; only individuals who were specifically approved by the Elders could participate in communion; women were expected to wear head coverings and not to speak during services; and there were no musical instruments during the breaking of the bread. Yet, the Darbyite Bretheren seem to have some kind of central leadership, and my local congregation was not part of any such centralized network. I also see elements of the Schwarzenau or “Dunkard” Bretheren in my experience. Perhaps, because the church was ethnically German, there were strands of both Darbyite and Schwarzenau Bretheren there.

Whatever its roots, the Bretheren Assembly I grew up in — it was called an “Assembly,” not a “church,” to avoid the taint of institutional religion — stressed the hostility between believers and the world. “Worldly” meant just about anything a young boy might want to do, like play little league baseball, read comic books, listen to “secular” music or “Christian rock,” watch TV, join the Cub Scouts, have a Christmas tree, or do just about anything other than hang around with other Bretheren kids at one of the Assembly-sponsored camps. It wasn’t “worldly,” however, to drink alcohol, even prodigiously, or to smoke tobacco — these were, after all, a bunch of Germans.

Thankfully, my parents exercised a significant amount of wisdom and ignored many of the sillier restrictions. And, there were aspects of the Assembly that I still appreciate. It instilled a deep love for the scriptures. We studied things, such as the symbolism in the Tabernacle described in the Old Testament, that you never hear about in contemporary churches. Nevertheless, I have a primal urge to withrdaw from the world that gets triggered whenever I hear even well balanced sermons about worldliness.

In a forthcoming posts, I’ll talk some more about what “the world” means in Pauline and Johanine theology, and will discuss a balanced, Biblical concept of the relationship between the Church and the world.