I'm tempted to rejoin the Church of the Nazarene just so I can renounce my membership

With an appearance from Erving Goffman

I have spent a little over half of my adult life in the Church of the Nazarene. It’s where I found a home after flunking out of college. It was where, once I was back at Purdue, I met my wife and later married her. It was where our daughter was born. My first teaching position was at a denominational school, where our son was born.

There was a hiatus over the next 13 years. While in small town Kansas, we got involved in the local Methodist church (the Nazarene church was 30 miles away). When I moved to Portland to be VPAA at a Church of God (Anderson) school, we were part of the local COG congregation. Once it closed, we attended a neighborhood Methodist church.

When our son graduated from high school, we went back to a Nazarene church and enjoyed friends there (especially the more progressive ones). When I became Provost at Point Loma Nazarene, the church was right there on campus. During the year we were in the Pasadena area, we attended a well-known Nazarene congregation there. Upon moving to Jackson, Michigan, we were part of the Nazarene church there for two years but never quite felt at home.

We moved our membership to the downtown Methodist church at the end of 2013 and were there until moving to the Denver area in 2021. Arriving here, we became part of a justice-oriented, affirming congregation which has become our home.

Even though it’s been over a decade since I was a Nazarene, I still feel a strong affinity for the denomination. It provided a network of friends, colleagues, and former students that have lasted all these years. During the eighties, I was a very active participant in the Association of Nazarene Sociologists and Researchers. There were many conversations about the identity of the denomination, its core values, and its role in the broader culture. They awarded me their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. So what happens in the denomination matters to me.

When I look at the social media feeds of Nazarene and formerly Nazarene friends, I’m struck with a stark contrast. Many regularly share images of happy, vibrant church services, pastoral gatherings and new ordinands, and affirmations of God’s love for all — as the recent statement from the Board of General Superintendents on immigration illustrated.

Yet I also see news of congregations disaffiliating with the denomination because the congregation wants to support congregants who are LGBTQ+. There is now court litigation as the denomination attempts to retain control of church properties. I see professors lose their teaching positions, even for being supportive of others who wanted to be affirming. I see pastors losing their credentials. The most recent, which prompted this post, involved a friend who taught at the denomination’s seminary and had held a chair named for the former seminary president (who himself was a great scholar). Even though he is retired, his ministerial credentials were suspended because he thought the church should be more open to gay folks.

I wrote about these latter patterns two years ago in a post I titled Revanchist Denominations.

Last month [March 2023], the Church of the Nazarene — my former home — joined the club. The Board of General Superintendents (six individuals selected by the denomination at their quadrennial general assembly) made an announcement that the section of the Manual (book of discipline) called the “Covenant of Christian Character” and “Covenant of Christian Conduct” were now elevated to the same position as church doctrine.

These covenants covered positions on traditional marriage, pornography, inappropriate movies, dancing, and alcohol, drug, or tobacco use. They now exist in the same realm as beliefs about the authority of scripture, the divinity of Christ, and belief in the Second Coming.

There were likely several reasons why this occurred when it did. First, one of the Nazarene institutions made news when a dean was fired in light of an affirming stance taken by an adjunct. Several Nazarene pastors have been removed from their churches and stripped of their credentials for taking affirming stances. And this week, a new book of essays titled Why the Church of the Nazarene Should Be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming lays out the case on why the denomination should change its stance. I wrote one of the essays for that book.

In that essay, I argued that doubling down on the traditionalist position would result in young pastors and laity leaving the denomination. The last two years have shown that to be the case. Some have left ministry all together rather than deal with the conflict. Others have moved to other denominations.

Denominational statistics tell a troubling story. While the overall denominational membership has grown over the last 20 years from 1.5 million to nearly 2.8 million, that has mostly happened on the global scale. Within the US and Canada, membership was a stable 650,000 from 2005 to 2015 and then fell to 570,000 in 2024. It makes me wonder if the 2023 move to enshrine traditional marriage was an attempt to shore up membership by solidifying expectations, something we argued about regularly at those Nazarene sociologist meetings. If so, I don’t think there’s any evidence that it is working. Given all we know about generational replacement in congregations, things in the US and Canada are likely to get worse.

It is the contrast between the glowing images of ministry on the one hand and the exclusionary stances of leadership on the other that I find so troubling. My wife reminded me that this is somewhat analogous to Erving Goffman’s classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that I had told her about. Goffman noted that we have a front-stage persona that we want people to see and we have a back-stage persona which is more protected. When I used to teach about Goffman, I’d argue that the ideal situation is for the two stages to be fairly close together and generally aligned with one another around your true sense of self.

When the back-stage becomes front-stage, trust is lost. Credibility and authenticity are called into serious question. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to bring the front-stage back into people’s consciousness.

This is the conflict I’m feeling that resulted in the title of this post. As much as I’d like my image of the Church of the Nazarene to be shaped by the pictures of happy worshippers, all I can see is the harm done by denominational leaders exercising power to try to maintain compliance with expectations. The latter is demonstrating values that run counter to the desired public images.

I realize that nobody among the Powers-That-Be would care if I actually renounced my membership. After all, they didn’t care when I became a Methodist 12 years ago. Yet, if it caused anyone to consider whether they might be damaging the denomination’s future, it would be worth it.