Accountability and Responsibility

In one of my last posts I wrote about the need to let go of an insistence upon having to enforce ”accountability and responsibility” in religious expression.  This seems a constant theme of mine these days, but it cannot let me go.

For me this derives from a hyper-awareness of the abuses of spiritual language of the recent past.  Ministers convinced that they were responsible to no one but themselves taking sexual advantage of vulnerable, hurting parishioners come to mind.  People who want to take advantage of the church to pursue their own spiritual quest but who don’t want to give anything in return is another constant theme.  Those who do not wish to be in community because they don’t wish to have anything about them challenged is another category.

I think of Parker Palmer whom I will paraphrase “church community exists so that you will have to sit next to the very person who drives you crazy and know they have something to teach you.” I still believe in this spiritual truth.

And I am coming to realize that we are at a point in history when all these should and oughts find little purchase amidst the many constructions of obligation that have been perverted in the name of responsibility.

Some of our congregations do not hold themselves to the kind of accountability we ask them to uphold to others.  When more are concerned with serving their own needs of sanctuary rather than serving a larger world it is hard to lecture newcomers about the obligations of community.

Many of our new seekers of spiritual connectedness are not looking to join a small select few.  They are looking to find ways to serve something beyond themselves.  They are making commitments of a different order – not to membership of a sect but to human obligation.

How can we define ourselves, our aspirations, our values in a way that is a positive invitation into a mutually responsible religious life rather than define the boundaries before we even begin the invitation?