The Limits of Inclusiveness

All of us in the United Church of Christ know the mantra:  "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."  Some of our congregations absolutely insist that the pastor include this statement in her opening remarks each Sunday.  The UCC seems to be building an identity of being the church where everyone is welcome.  The denomination is about to launch a new web ad campaign stressing our extravagant welcome.  Rare is the UCC church that doesn't proclaim "All are welcome."  On occasion someone will say "Oh, really?"  And they will ask us to think about who isn't welcome in our church.  The thrust of this question usually is that we may proclaim a universal welcome but we don't actually extend a universal welcome, that there are people whom we should welcome but do not welcome.  The thrust of the question usually is, in my experience at least, that we should be doing more to live up to the universal welcome that we proclaim, not that there is some good reason to question the proclamation itself.

Now, I don't mean to say that there aren't people whom we should welcome but do not welcome.  There certainly are, but I want to ask the question of our supposedly universal welcome from a different perspective.  I ask:  Are there people whom we should not welcome?  Are there people who are in such a place on life's journey that we should not welcome them into our local UCC congregations?  I answer the question yes, there are people whom we should not welcome into our UCC congregations.  I don't mean people who are unsafe around other people.  I take it for granted that someone who is an uncontrollable threat to the congregation's children, for example, is not welcome in our congregations, but I have something else in mind when I say yes, there are people whom we should not welcome into our UCC congregations.  We should not welcome into our congregations people who reject the identity that a congregation has established for itself, whose presence will detract from that identity, and who will not speak and act in a way that at least does not contradict that identity.  Let me use my UCC church in Monroe as an example.

Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ is a small congregation, but we are a growing and vital congregation at least in large part because of a specific identity that we have created for ourselves in the communities which we serve.  We are the only theologically progressive, non-literal, Open and Affirming Christian church in Monroe and its surrounding communities.  We proclaim on our weekly worship bulletin and on our web site that "we take the Bible seriously not literally."  We welcome gay and lesbian folk into the full life and leadership of the church on fully equally terms with anyone else.  We have created a safe place for gays and lesbians in an area where there are precious few such safe places for them.  This is our identity.  This is who we are.  This is who we want to be and who we intend to be in the future.

From time to time people come to worship with us who are unaware that we have named and claimed this alternative Christian identity, an identity sharply at odds with the conservative, evangelical, popular Christianity by which we are surrounded and among which we are such a minority voice.  Sometimes they just don't come back.  Once one of them stood up in the middle of my sermon, shouted "you're wrong!" and stormed out.  Once we had a visiting couple who said they liked my sermon and liked the fact that we use piano and organ and sing traditional hymns (or as traditional as they get in the New Century Hymnal) but who also insisted that the do take the Bible literally and that they "have a problem with the homosexual lifestyle," whatever the homosexual lifestyle is supposed to be.  These and other visitors to our church raise for me the question of whether they would indeed be welcome as members of the church.  I answer that they would not.  They would not because where they are on life's journey is inconsistent with where the church is on life's journey.  There are, it seems, indeed limits to inclusiveness, limits set by our claimed identity.  Yes, there may be people who struggle with our identity but are willing to listen, willing to learn, willing to be transformed.  They may be welcome.  Those who simply reject our identity or who just want to change it are not.

There are limits to our inclusiveness.  There must be limits to our inclusiveness.  It is a fundamental fact of organizations  that an organization must have a boundary.  Without a boundary an organization has no shape, no form, no identity.  I suppose the identity of an organization could be that it consists of whoever happens to show up, but even there there is a boundary.  Some people show up, some don't.  Some are in, some are out.  That's not much of an identity, but I suppose it is an identity of sorts.  Most organizations, however, have a more specific identity than that.  Churches certainly do.  Every organization is organized for some purpose.  It may be the local garden club, or the local chapter of the ACLU, or the local chapter of the National Rifle Association.  Whatever the organization is, it has some identity:  local folks who love flowers, or civil rights, or guns.  People come to organizations because of that identity, because they share that identity or at least want to learn more about it.  The people of the local garden club presumably would not welcome people who wanted to turn it into a group of developers intent on paving over as much of the community as possible.  The people of the local chapter of the ACLU would not welcome people who wanted to require Christian prayer in the public schools.  The people of the local NRA chapter would not welcome people who wanted it to endorse repeal of the Second Amendment.  Organizations have boundaries.  Identity establishes boundaries, and boundaries mean that some are welcome and some are not.

The same is true of our UCC churches.  They--we--have an identity.  That identity is first of all as a Christian church.  It is appropriate, indeed it is necessary, that a person at least self-identify as Christian in order to be a member.  Beyond that many of our local churches have established a more specific identity, as we have in Monroe.  It is appropriate, indeed it is necessary, that a person accept that more specific identity in order to be a member, or at least be open to it.  To use the Monroe Church as an example again, I would not, and I am convinced my church would not, welcome an individual or a group that wanted to join us for the purpose of repealing our Open and Affirming commitment.  I would not and my church would not welcome anyone who by word or deed in any way detracted from the welcome and acceptance our gay and lesbian members find with us.  (Indeed, I am uneasy referring to "gay and lesbian members" and "us," for they are us, they are a valued and much loved part of us," of the church and its identity. We would not be the same us without them. We would be a poorer "us" without them.)  A Biblical literalist whose contribution to discussions at the church consisted only of citing isolated passages from the Bible as ending discussion on any topic would not be a constructive addition to our community and would not be welcome, or at least would not be welcome for long.  We have an identity, and that identity creates boundaries.  Those boundaries create necessary limits on our inclusiveness.

This is not to say that the identity of a local UCC church can never change.  It can, but that change must arise out of the people who have claimed the original identity that the church may, from time to time, need to change.  That indeed is how the Monroe church's Open and Affirming identity came about, but a church that has claimed a specific identity has the right to defend that identity from those who would come in from the outside solely or primarily for the purpose of changing that identity.  When that identity includes being a safe place for people for whom most churches are not safe places, as it does at our church in Monroe, the church has the right, indeed the duty, to protect the safety of the church for all its members.  Exercising those rights and fulfilling that duty may require saying to some no, you are not welcome.  Organizational identity creates limits on inclusiveness.

Most UCC people don't like to hear that there are limits on our inclusiveness, but I am convinced that there are such limits and that there must be such limits.  Total inclusiveness is inconsistent with identity, indeed, it is inconsistent with a church's nature as an organization.  It is inconsistent with the UCC's self-identity as a Protestant Christian church.  It is inconsistent with the identity of an Open and Affirming church.  It is inconsistent with any other identity a church may have claimed.  A "just peace church" is not an appropriate place for a military hawk.  A "green church" is not a place for a global warming denier.  A church with a rich music ministry is not a place for one who objects to the use of musical instruments in worship.  The examples could go on and on.

The UCC's emphasis on extravagant welcome for all people is largely a reaction against the excessive narrowness of so many churches and especially against the exclusion from so many Christian churches of gay and lesbian people, divorced people, and others to whom those churches object on narrow moralistic grounds.  As such it is a welcome and necessary corrective.  Yet just as we take the Bible seriously not literally, so we must take the UCC's claim that all are welcome seriously not literally.  Extravagant welcome, especially of those whom other churches reject?  Yes.  Limitless welcome?  No.  Limits are necessary.  Limits are healthy.  As I have said many times to many people, let's change "We welcome all" to "We welcome all who welcome all."  That at least is a start to our establishing those necessary, healthy limits that we in the UCC so often deny.