Midwinter 1994

by O. T. Roberg

At the 1994 Midwinter Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church, President Paul Larsen said:

One of our problems is we’ve got to start rethinking ourselves apart from our Scandinavian roots. I want to be instructed, and nurturing, and knowledgeable, but folks, that gotta die [sic]. God has called us to reach the face of America.

These words were part of similar lengthier comments in the middle of an address on prayer. They left me mystified. I am not sure what he means. Why do we need to start rethinking ourselves? Do we think about our Scandinavian roots in ways that are harmful to the life of the church? Just what is it “that gotta die?” If the president of the denomination feels we need to change the way we think, what do we need to change and why?

President Larsen may feel that we have a destructive preoccupation with heritage. He perhaps thinks it is a stone around our neck that keeps us from reaching out to “the face of America.” Is “Scandinavian roots” a force that helps the church exclude non-Scandinavians from its life? Does he use this term to refer to a false sense of ethnic pride, an awareness of Covenant history, or just what?

I think that there is some truth in the charge that ethnicity in a church can keep it from reaching out to the public. This may happen in our denomination. However, ethnic nostalgia is very different from an awareness of church history. And the president needs to say if he thinks that our denominational history is irrelevant to the current challenges faced by the church.

Why cannot taking our own history more seriously help us to reach the general public better? Many Covenanters have struggled in the past both to ease the suffering of and to bring the gospel to the public. Their efforts may be instructive for us. But, if we need to rethink ourselves “apart from our Scandinavian roots” (I don’t know if he means history), what should we discard, and what will take its place?

The President himself cannot seem to decide. He first said “that gotta die” without explaining what “that” is. He then went on to say that we should keep part of “that”:

We covet, as Paul did a heart for those who are of our kind and of our heritage. It’s never repudiated. It remains a special place in our heart.

In this statement we find both more bad grammar and confused thinking. I thought that he was growing impatient with a nostalgic sense of heritage. If it is never repudiated what should we do if it is hurting the life of the church?

We may covet too many illusions about our past and create a special place in our heart for them. This special place in our heart may not be in touch with any special place in our brain. Fortunately, God has given us the gift of history to keep us from doing too much of this. History, unlike heritage, is not something that can be easily treasured because there is so much troubling stuff in it. But much of this troubling stuff is the meat that informs our current efforts to be ethical Christians. It can do so because so many people in our own past have faced problems so similar to those we face today. We can argue that we should de-emphasize our notions of heritage because they are based on illusions of who we are. History, however, stays with us as a record of who we actually have been. This is true for every group with a record of shared religious and/or social experience. It is hard to make a case for the history of one American religious group being less important than that of another. If we do not need Covenant history, we also do not need the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

For a long time, I felt no reason to study either Covenant or Scandinavian-American history (they are not the same). In Confirmation, I probably saw Covenant history as the only history. Later in high school, I became absorbed in American history and dismissed the importance of what I had learned in Confirmation. However, my journey into the history of larger society led me to the question of how I personally fit into this history. Nothing I was studying or learning gave me a personal hook into American history. Then somehow, somewhere, and sometime I realized I needed to start thinking seriously about the people (including my ancestors) in the social and religious groups of which I was a part.

Covenant history, then, helped me understand my own relationship to the modern world as nothing else could have. One special voice from the Covenant past rescued me from the modern present. In college, I had become quite involved with the student left. I felt that commercial considerations were responsible for our involvement in Vietnam. People on the left were the only others around who seemed to agree. But I could never freely work with them because I could not embrace their ideological view of the world. I thought that my own unique views had created my own unique dilemma.

Then Rev. Marcus Ch’eng came to my rescue. This star protégé of Covenant China missions had first been attracted to the Chinese revolution because of its ethical promise. But he could not fully embrace its ideology. This caused him much personal suffering. His pilgrimage served as an invaluable model in helping me gain perspective on what had happened to me. He showed me that my views were not so unique. It was an amazing experience to find someone who had similar thoughts and frustrations before I was born. No one else could have helped me as Marcus Ch’eng did. His experience (to paraphrase Wordsworth) was the grain of sand through which I could view the entire world. Would Paul Larsen throw this non-Swede out with the bath water of Covenant history?

I think that our history can help us today in many more ways. Some are:

1. Our history as immigrants can help us continue to see ourselves as immigrants in a world where people think of themselves as better than immigrants.
2. Our struggles with Americanization, i.e. loss of native language and church affiliation, may help Christians in ethnic groups facing similar problems.
3. The efforts of the missionary community to function in the midst of social revolution in China may be instructive for mission communities in like situations today.

This is only a beginning of a longer list.

I do not remember just when I decided to take another look at the history of my own denomination. Possibly it was when some of the wisdom of the Black History movement rubbed off on me. African-Americans I have talked with about my own historical quest have been very supportive. They have not seen it as indulgent, racist, or exclusivistic. I wonder what Paul Larsen might think.

I do not think that we as a denomination need to “rethink our Scandinavian roots.” I would rather hope for a president who encourages us to see our history as an irreplaceable resource for helping us be more responsible today. It would be a shame if our President’s aversion to history reflects an inability to study it impartially and take the risk of learning from it. Lenin once said that his party did not need historians; I hope that Paul Larsen does not feel the same way about the church.

I wonder further if he uses “Scandinavianness” as a convenient scapegoat to explain why the church is not growing in the way it might. In attacking it, Larsen seems to project himself as an outsider who champions other outsiders in the church. I hope that those willing to follow him ask the question of whether he really speaks for them or is just patronizing them.

It seems to me that, at Midwinter, President Larsen could simply have said that we need to be true to our past by reaching out to wider circles of people in the present. But he seems to feel a need to reinvent the denomination. I think that he should take a better look at what is already there. He might also take the slogan of Black History Month to heart:

A mind is a terrible thing to waste and the past is a terrible thing to forget.