DECEMBER DIARY
NORMAN L PARKS

Ella Rae had gone to public worship, leaving me to nurse a mild case of the flu. The raw December wind spattered raindrops against the window above my desk, where I had accumulated sundry pleas for aid against my annual round-up of contributions—Agape, House of the Carpenter, World Radio, Baker College, my home Negro church, Herald of Truth. I studied the last-named, thinking of how I had left it alone over the years, perhaps among other reasons because its creator had used me as an example of “dangerous liberalism” in his classes, and thinking too, that perhaps I ought to be positive and send the requested $25 anyhow to share in whatever good it was doing.

Actually I had never heard Herald of Truth and had never discussed it with anyone. Why not listen, I thought, before I write the check? The program was well under way when the picture tube flashed on an erect pastoral figure speaking in a well modulated voice. There as an occasional half-smile, as if to emphasize the solemnity of the message. Also the restrained gesture, such as hundreds of speech classes have been taught to use. At the appropriate time the speaker gave the camera a good left profile, and then, appropriately, the right profile, just as speech classes have been rehearsed to do for a generation. One almost expected the film suddenly to cut out and the voice of an instructor say to his class, “Now, students, lets analyze this performance.”

But the speaker continued his well rehearsed presentation, looking down confidently from his pulpit and, it seemed to this observer, also talking down to his audience. His theme was the Church as God’s means of salvation. The preceding Sunday I had heard Leamon Flatt give a stirring talk on “Churchanity versus Christianity.” The TV sermon seemed to be very much in the Churchanity groove. Few Catholics could have done better. As the church emerged in the presentation, it was not an ecclesia, a way, or a fellowship, but rather a res, an organization, a ship bound from the earthly to the heavenly porta ship distinct and different from its passengers. A person not aboard would never arrive. Across its prow was the one true name, “Church of Christ.” One gets a stateroom by baptism. Get in touch with the nearest Church of Christ. If you do not know of one, write us and we will tell you where the nearest one is (what omniscience!).

The uninitiated were not to be left to their imagination as to what the True Church looked like. The camera gave a fleeting glimpse of a steeple against the sky and then focused on the paneled interior. Front and center on the screen stood the pulpit, the background revealing no rival in organ or choir. Then the view swept the well-filled pews of stylishly dressed, solemn-faced, and all-white members. They did not appear to be doing anything—either praying or meditating or even thinking. The passivity was familiar enough, but the swinging camera appeared to dissolve into brief self-consciousness the customary audience mask worn at sermon time. The environment was circumspect enough for any middle class Caucasian to fit into with ease. The reaction of a negro or a blue-collar worker or a ghetto dweller would doubtless be something else.

This was, of course, very orthodox Church-of-Christism. Since the church is a res, a thing, an entity of and in itself, it has an existence separate from and independent of its members. The sacrificing of an individual “for the sake of the church” is as logical as burning heretics at the stake was to the medieval clergy. In brief, while God adds to the church those who are being saved, the crew of the ship can throw overboard any passenger, just like poor old Jonah, to preserve the “peace” or maintain the “unity’ of the Church.

The upper deck and pilothouse of the good ship, it is understood, are reserved for the church elite—the semi-articulate “eldership” and the very articulate “ministry,” the latter being composed of the professional (for hire) churchmen, editors of the Establishment press, and college administrators. Here the log is kept, the course chartered, and the decision-making process centered, the ordinary passengers being accorded no vote or voice. The Big Decisions, of course, are made by the ministry, while the day-to-day operations are executed by the eldership, customarily in association with the “minister” and, if the group is rich enough, the “associate minister.”

Over the decades and at almost every port of call, the list of hapless passengers tossed overboard from the good ship True Church has grown distressingly long—the anti-pastorites, the premillennialists, the one-cuppers, the instrumental psalloists, the antis, the anti-antis, the wrong songbook users, the anti-college-in-the-budgeteers, the speakers in tongues, the modernists, the dialoguers, the social gospellers, the “softies,” and (that cover-all blanket fit for anything disapproved by the ship-running elite) the liberals. Whole groups may be chased overboard on masse. At other times the purity of the ship may be dramatized for the instruction of the silent majority by making a single college teacher walk the plank to trumpets. Never did the Puritans police a better ship.

When the film’s credit line flashed on the screen the information that the show had been run by the Highland elders, I returned dispirited to my desk, thinking that Carl Ketcherside was perhaps right when he said that possibly the best thing that could happen would be for all of the church houses to burn down one night. Then we would be forced back upon ourselves as people in face-to-face groups, away from institutionalism, away from impersonalism, away from dogmatism, away from churchanity. I took my pen in hand and quadrupled my check to the House of the Carpenter.

Norman Parks, for sixteen years professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University, was chosen by faculty and students of that institution as “Distinguished Professor for 1969,” an honor supported by a cash award of $1,000.