My Experiences with Liberal Churches

My Experiences with Liberal Churches

Recently I posted a blog essay here about my nostalgia for some aspects of my fundamentalist church upbringing. But what about my experiences in liberal Protestant churches? I have, in the past, been a member of two different liberal Protestant churches. They would probably not call themselves “liberal,” but I call them that with good reasons.

Immediately after seminary, just out of a Pentecostal-charismatic church, where I served as assistant pastor, I was placed in a mainline Presbyterian church in an urban area. I served as Director of Christian Education and Youth for three years while I was studying for my Ph.D in Religious Studies at a major secular university.

The church was affiliated with the then United Presbyterian Church, but it was in the process of merging with the Southern Presbyterian Church to form the then new Presbyterian Church, USA. However, because I had become Baptist upon graduating from a non-fundamentalist but evangelical Baptist seminary, I joined a nearby American Baptist Church (ABCUSA).

The Presbyterian church was nice but not especially biblically-oriented. The worship was liturgical and the sermons were sweet. The pastor was a graduate of Yale Divinity School. I taught the older adult Sunday School class and walked them through the Westminster Confession of Faith about which they knew almost nothing. The people were lovely, but the church was overall liberal in its theological leanings, insofar as there were any such leanings.

After a year in Germany, studying with theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich, I joined an old, downtown ABCUSA church in a major US city where I taught theology at a non fundamentalist Baptist college and seminary. That church was clearly liberal, or at least the pastor was liberal.

I did some research in the church library and discovered that a former pastor had been Walter Rauschenbusch’s teaching assistant. He was a well-known liberal Protestant leader. That helped me understand the ethos of the church.

The church building was cathedral-like with a divided chancel. The worship was every bit as liturgical as was that in the Presbyterian church. The pastor admitted openly that he did not take the Bible literally. When teaching a Bible study on the Gospel of Mark he opened by saying that he did not believe in demons. I came to doubt whether he believed in miracles. In a private conversation he told me that he considered the Bible “history-like” but not historical. He said the value of the Bible was in the transformational power of the stories. I left when I detected that my daughter, then entering her teen years, was not being fed biblically or spiritually.

In neither church did I find the power or the glory that I experienced in the fundamentalist church of my youth. Nor did I find the warmth of fellowship that I experienced there. Nor did I detect any unity of belief or even interest, except in political issues, that I found in churches before or afterwards.

While in Germany, I attended a fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church. That’s right, a SBC church in Munich, Germany. The South Carolina born and bred SBC pastor closed one sermon with this zinger: “The Christian’s attitude toward secular culture should be ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts; my mind is already made up!’” However, there I experienced a real warmth of fellowship among the people and a sincere and profound interest in the Bible and in discovering truth.

I don’t think most of the people in the two liberal churches were very concerned about truth; they were very concerned about the church buildings!

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