Disillusioned with Big Business, Big Health, Big Religion

I’m not a fan of really big things, unless it’s Roughrider scores, the Rockies or those giant oddities erected by tourist-hungry prairie towns.

My last shreds of confidence in Big Business were torn away when AIG’s crash destabilized the entire world economy and BP’s negligence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico.

Big Justice has troubled me ever since I’ve been a volunteer in its prison system and life-threatening experiences with large urban hospitals have left me angry with Big Health.

Read Also

Increasing farmland prices blamed on investors

a major tax and financial services firm says investors are driving up the value of farmland, preventing young farmers from entering the business. Robert Andjelic said that is bullshit.

So maybe it’s not surprising that I’m also becoming disillusioned with Big Religion. Let me say first that I have been pastor of two large churches and had some wonderful experiences there.

But since then, I’ve mostly worked with small rural congregations and they have generated in me a hunger and an unease that seems to be growing among ordinary Canadians

The hunger is for spiritual friends. I hunger to share my faith, wrestle with life’s hard questions, in a close-up way with people I can really get to know and trust.

It’s not easy sitting in a field of pews. I guess I could stand up in the middle of the sermon: “Excuse me, pastor, but I’m kind of disturbed about that passage ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword’ that we just read.”

Embarrassing, but tolerant clergy might respond. However, it would be chaos if several hundred wanted answers.

And what I really long for anyway is not answers but conversation. I want to explore the edge of these ancient mysteries with others who sense that they touch on our greatest struggles and joys. Really small rural churches are just the right size for that kind of sharing. They can tell their personal stories, pray for each other and their waterlogged crops. Yet many feel like religious cast-offs in their national organizations.

That’s why I feel uneasy. Too often I get the sense that the most common prayer of our religious organizations is not the Lord’s but the one Ronald McDonald taught: “Super-Size Me.”

Successful ministry is defined by numbers. Small churches get the message loud and clear: “shrink and you’ll die. Get big and you’ll live forever.”

I’ve visited religious headquarters around the world. Not many in the West celebrate and support the life of small religious groups, unless they are program units in much larger organizations.

Churches too small to afford their own clergy are often officially barred from exercising the religious practices that give them life. Worst of all, the wonderful possibilities for spiritual friendship that come with their small size aren’t nurtured. It’s assumed they are on palliative care.

Ironically, many world-changing religious movements began in small fellowships of people, often persecuted or un-homed, who were hungry for spiritual friendship.

In my faith, early Christians deliberately chose for three centuries to meet in homes and small places, until Emperor Constantine decided that such gatherings didn’t suit the majesty of the his empire and he super-sized them.

Perhaps hungry Canadians should look to rural churches where spiritual friendship, rather than religious spectacle, is still the norm.

Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon.