DO WE SHOOT OUR WOUNDED? 

A former Oklahoma state senator for many years told mea story that I can't quite shake. I pass it along to you because, even though it is painful, it bears a message that we in Churches of Christ need to hear. The senator is an exemplary Christian, demonstrating that one can be both a devoted Christian and an able politician. He was in fact for many years the majority leader on the senate floor. I met this good brother on two successive trips to Lawton, Oklahoma, the first time when I spoke at a Church of Christ and the second time when I addressed a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Between the two visits he had left the Church of Christ and had found a haven at the Christian Church, which happens to be the church he attended with his family as a boy growing up. 

One night when the senator was working late on affairs of state with a state representative, the subject turned to religion. The representative was surprised that the esteemed senator was a member of the Church of Christ. With a little encouragement the representative explained himself by saying, "All I can say is that you Church of Christ folk are the only people I know who shoot your wounded." 

We shoot our wounded! It is a severe charge, a blow to the solar plexis. How dreadful that anyone, much less an intelligent statesman, would have such an image of us! And yet in my heart I know there is truth to his charge. The criticism this time was not that we think we are the only true church, but that we unmercifully reject some among us when they need us the most -- the erring, the wayward, the weak, the broken, the thinkers. 

We may not know precisely what the representative had in mind when he made this criticism, but most all of us in Churches of Christ have a good idea what he was referring to. The senator's wife told me that her husband has told that story on numerous occasions to Church of Christ people, and only to Church of Christ people, and no one has ever questioned the validity of the criticism. They rather eye each other acquiescently as if the representative's charge conforms to their own experiences.

Like all churches, we have our "wounded" who are in danger of falling by the wayside. There are many divorced among us who suppose they have committed the unpardonable sin because of the way we have responded to their tragedy. They soon learn that it makes a difference in the way they are treated. They often feel rejected and unwanted. If they dare to remarry and start over, they do not get much help from the church. We often lay down "forbidding to marry" laws, which the Bible associates with false teachers, and insist that the divorced cannot marry and when they do they have to divorce still again in order to obey our oppressive demands. So, when our people go through a painful divorce and need us most, we shoot them dead. They often go from church to church in search of the grace of God and acceptance, but as often as not they drop out and get lost in the crowd of other wounded and rejected people.

Many of our youth have to go through the rude awakening that our love for them is not unconditional. Back in the 60's (and sometimes still) our kids who came home from college with long hair and/or a beard learned that such behavior made a difference as to how they were loved and accepted both at home and at church. I've known cases of where our girls were virtually disowned for marrying a Baptist, which we have branded "marrying out of the church." Our youth have gotten the message that we love them if they are straight like us. They are not to be radical about any "cause," and they are not to take religion all that seriously. They are to chase the dollar like the rest of us, and the more "successful" they are the better. If they get with the wrong crowd and travel the fast lane on dope and booze and all the rest, we will not love them any more. We will shoot them, along with our kids who are gay. We even shoot them if they go to the wrong church or if they have any thoughts that run counter to our Church of Christism. Many of our youth, long after they have families of their own, learn that when they visit the folk back home they can talk about anything except religion.

It is common for us to call out the firing squad when one of our preachers no longer "walks in the light," which may be no more than that he is resolved no longer to be a sectarian, nor a dogmatist, nor a legalist, nor an obscurantist. We will honor him with position and wealth as long as he follows the party line, or at least watches what he says, but let him open up his heart and say what he really believes, and get turned on to the grace of God and the catholicity of the church, and we crucify him. A growing, thinking minister who seeks to lead his people into a broader, freer fellowship is "wounded" in the sense that he is breaking with tradition. It is a time when he needs us most, and we need him, but we stone him to death. And the "orthodox" preachers will hold the coats of those who cast the stones.

Our doctrine must be kept "pure" at all costs. Only recently I was reading autobiographical notes of one of our missionaries in Japan who came to America to study when he was a young man. Since it was a novelty to have a native Japanese around, one of "our" persuasion, he was enthusiastically received among our churches, until it was learned that he was premillennial. He was at once transformed into one of our wounded, and he was quickly dispatched. He tells how he was literally ushered out of some churches, and an elder in a strange city who he understood was to provide him shelter for the night, turned him away from his door and out into the street with nowhere to go. A foreigner in a strange land, rejected by his own people because he did not say the right things about the millennium! The elder was of course, like the Pharisees of old, defending the faith. The Pharisees helped to nail their "wounded one" to a cross.

It happens to missionaries in the field. They are sometimes left high and dry with their support cut off when they veer from the party line. College professors are not immune to being shot if they become wounded. Not a few have been fired, and that without due process in violation of their civil rights, for going to the wrong church, for attending a Full Gospel Men's Fellowship, or for quietly speaking in tongues in their own private lives.

I recently heard a surprisingly high figure on how many ex-Church of Christ preachers are attending a big congregation in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, all of whom have given up on trying to cope with the system. Some had to quit because of a failed marriage, others because they were branded as "liberals," and still others because they couldn't hack all the legalism and authoritarianism. So they are now in business or work as counsellors. The Oklahoma statesman might see them as part of our morgue, killed through our cruel neglect and rejection.

Even the rank and file among us are not immune to being shot if they become wounded. The worst thing that can happen to our intelligent lay people is for them to think for themselves. If they dare to question our sectarianism, such as our indefensible position that it is a sin for anyone to sing with an instrument, they will likely be asked to give up any class they teach, resign from any office they hold, and otherwise take no leading role. Our wounded ones, who may well be our most creative ones, are to ask no questions, rock no boats, and they certainly are not to challenge "the authority of the elders." Neither are they to question what is said from the pulpit, which is the minister's sacred desk, who may be "the senior minister" whose interpretations are of course right. After all, he's been to a Christian college and knows when you don't. You can of course continue to give your money and warm a pew, but don't dare to think. If you do think, keep your mouth shut!

We have many such wounded ones in our churches who have been shot, but they won't lie down and die. They are sometimes unloved and unwanted, or at least eyed with suspicion, but they hang in and won't leave. They are our heroes who are committed to effecting a change. They may not hear or see much of the grace of God or the gentleness of Christ, but they are themselves manifestations of that grace and gentleness.

There is good news in all this. I would respond to the Oklahoma representative by conceding that we do indeed often shoot our own wounded, and that is to our shame, but that as a whole our people do not want it that way! And we are not the only church that rejects some of its people at a time when they need help the most. It is sin as old as Pharisaism. All of us who are guilty are victimized by a legalistic system that elevates "being right" above the cries of a broken heart.

The good news is that most of our people really care. They are among the sweetest and most committed Christians in the world. In their hearts they want to reach out to the wounded with loving acceptance and forgiveness. They are stymied by a system, but not for always. Christ is moving in among us as never before and we are changing.

And I would say to the representative that the good senator is not guilty of shooting our wounded. Many, many others are not guilty, and when they see it happen they themselves become wounded, and they wait and hope, silently perhaps, for the day when it will no longer be that way. They will overcome! — the Editor