The previous pages talked about who we seek to support in our ministries: the Unchurched and the Underserved. And they told the reader what Heritage Old Catholicism is. On this page we want to talk about how we go about our service: which is with love and non-judgement, and with flexibility. A faith tradition should have theological rigor and consequent boundaries, but those boundaries should be wide ones, that are flexible to support a lot of space in the non-essentials. And that is also what we seek to do. As theologians and church leaders, we seek to follow a well-thought out and sound theology, that’s part of the job of defining a sound Church that people can trust. This work needs to be there, but we also recognize that churches fail miserably if theology is turned a straight jacket that hobbles rather than helps the clergy, whose jobs are pastoral in nature, not engaging in philosophical and theological discourse. And so you will see that our clergy will use different pre-approved liturgies, or ones that they themselves wrote to best serve their people, which were then approved by our theological reviewers. You will also see some of our ministries calling themselves Independent Catholic, to try and separate their identify from possibly being confused with Roman Catholicism , especially in areas which have a heavy local presence from that faith tradition. All of these “differences” are non-essentials, as each of our clergy tries to find the best way for themselves and their people to follow Jesus’ command to “Follow me” within the generous Heritage Old Catholic frame. Our founding bishop, Dr. Robert Bowman discuses this in some detail in a paper he wrote in 1997 for the consideration of U.S. Independent Catholic bishops in an ecumenical meeting. His paper, “What is it to be Catholic? (A Call to Unity)’ can be found in the Library section.
Author, theologian and minister Carl Frederick Buechner, 1926-2022, also described the dilemma and way forward very well in his 1988 book, Whistling in the Dark. We think it describes very well why practicing diversity in the non-essentials is not a lack of theological rigor, but is in fact the only reasonable way to proceed, especially when the mission field for the United Catholic Church is to the Underserved and the Unchurched.
“There are Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians. There are Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists. There are Disciples of Christ. There are Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. There are Moravians. There are Quakers. And that’s only for starters. New denominations spring up. Old denominations split up and form new branches. The question is not, Are you a Baptist? But, What kind of a Baptist? It is not, Are you a member of the Presbyterian church? But Which Presbyterian church? A town with a population of less than five hundred may have churches of three or four denominations and none of them more than a quarter full on a good Sunday.
There are some genuine differences between them, of course. The methods of church governance differ. They tend to worship in different forms all the way from chanting, incense, and saints’ days to a service that is virtually indistinguishable from a New England town meeting with musical interludes. Some read the Bible more literally than others. If you examine the fine print, you may even come across some relatively minor theological differences among them, some stressing one aspect of the faith, some stressing others. But if you were to ask the average member of any congregation to explain those differences, you would be apt to be met with a long, unpregnant silence. By and large they all believe pretty much the same things and are confused about the same things and keep their fingers crossed during the same parts of the Nicene Creed.
However it is not so much differences like these that keep the denominations apart as it is something more nearly approaching team spirit. Somebody from a long line of Congregationalists would no more consider crossing over to the Methodists than a Red Sox fan would consider rooting for the Mets. And even bricks and mortar have a lot to do with it. Your mother was married in this church building and so were you, and so was your oldest son. Your grandparents are buried in the cemetery just beyond the Sunday School wing. What on earth would ever persuade you to leave all that and join forces with the Lutherans in their building down the street? So what if neither of you can pay the minister more than a pittance and both of you have as hard a time getting more than thirty to fill the sanctuary built for two hundred as you do raising money to cover the annual heating bill.
All the duplication of effort and waste of human resources. All the confusion about what the Church is, both within the ranks and without. All the counterproductive competition. All the unnecessary empty pews and unnecessary expense. Then add to that picture the Roman Catholic Church, still more divided from the Protestant denominations than they are from each other, and by the time you are through, you don’t know whether to burst into laughter or into tears.
When Jesus too the bread, and said, “This is my body which is broken for you” (1Corinthians 11:24), it’s hard to believe that even in his wildest dreams he foresaw the tragic and ludicrous brokenness of the Church as his body. There is no reason why everyone should be Christian in the same way and every reason to leave room for differences, but if all the competing factions of Christendom were to give as much of themselves to the high calling and holy hope that unites them as they do now to the relative inconsequentialities that divide them, the Church would look more like the Kingdom of God for a change and less like an ungodly mess.“