Unlimited diversity of belief, the bane of our age.

I've been reflecting and praying about diversity and its role in the church lately, for a variety of reasons. First, there's the obvious problem of the Spahr decision. How a PCUSA court could choose to not enforce our constitution or even our basic doctrines is really astonishing. The way that the decision labels sin-coddling as 'pastoral care' should shock and disturb anyone who has read the Bible in any meaningful way.

But then there are even larger issues within the variety of practice that we encounter within mainline presbyterianism today: the vastly different conceptions of the faith within our own household.

All officers in the PCUSA take vows and they are virtually the same. And yet there is so much variety in how people actually use them. Step into one PCUSA congregation and you see one version of the faith and in another congregation (maybe in the same town) there is a totally different one. And this is not to say that this variety is limited to style of worship or manner of sermon presentation. I mean, the diversity of faith that the PCUSA contains.

Call it what you will, whether its known as Secular Humanism, Materialistic Consumerism or the Culture of Death, the spirit of our age has prompted a variety of responses in our congregations. Progressives, evangelicals, moderates and everyone in between agrees that we are called by God to fight against the fallen powers of the world and witness to the gospel. But we have widely divergent views of not only what the fallen powers are that we are fighting but how we should respond. And this is our intractable divide--one act, like Spahr's performing of a 'marriage' for lesbians, is called good by one group and sinful by another. Yet, we all reside within one tent, one communion, one covenant community.

Don't ever assert that I don't take this covenant community called the PCUSA seriously, for I do. I have given my life to witnessing and working within it. My family and I can be put out on the street tomorrow if the denomination or congregation so chooses. I have a dog in this fight and I'm here to stay.

But there is nagging problem that I have yet to really wrap my head around or make sense of, that our level of diversity in the beliefs and practices of our churches are so wide that I don't even know what a basic PCUSA Presbyterian is anymore.

I used to know! I passed all five ordination exams on the first try!

But now.... Now, I just sit, read, pray and wonder. How much diversity are we able to stand, without losing any real core identity that is not centered around mutually fought-over property? The answers trouble my sleep these days.

As a historian, I also wonder: Is this situation new to Presbyterianism? I have come to the conclusion that it is, actually.

Presbyterians in North America have always differed on responses certainly. But we have also relied on a pretty broad agreement as to what Scripture leads us to believe, rooted in the Westminster Standards as interpreted by the church.

Yet, our forebears would be horrified at the theological balkanization that we see today. Their idea of the church was so far different than the amalgam that we see today. And go even further back--to the apostles themselves. I firmly believe that they would be horrified as well with what passes for diversity in the mainline today.

Paul had no compunction in saying to Peter's face that he was wrong about how God deals with Gentiles in the church. And Peter had to agree. He changed his mind and unity was restored. Later in the church, the reformers called us back to the basis of our faith--grace alone, experienced by faith alone, known through Scripture alone in Christ alone to God's glory alone.

Simple really. But then we had to go and do what humans do and mess it up.

The heirs of the apostles and later the reformers started making deals with their cultures. They cut compromises where the faith most confronted the society around them. For all of the trappings of cultural respect, we ditched that which made us salty, that which made us a shining light and we traded it in for the sham notion of cultural respectability.

This is the perpetual cycle of the church: foundation, growth, equilibrium, accommodation, decline and restoration. The question for us then is to ask--in which phase of the church's life are we and what the heck do we do about it? And at what point does our limtless diversity of belief and practice hamper our efforts at making such determinations?

These are some of the questions that keep me awake at night.