E.B. White's Trumpet of the Swan tells the story from the perspective of a mute swan, Louis, who is given and learns to play a trumpet as a replacement for his voice. His goal is to play a beautiful song for his chosen soul-mate, Serena, and woo her. In a freak occurrence, Serena is caught in a storm and lands in the zoo where Louis conducts public concerts. The director of the zoo sends the zookeepers out to clip Serena's wings and Louis realizes if Serena's wings are clipped then his dreams are foiled. After a long discussion about the purpose of zoos and the fact that they can't just allow a swan to land at a zoo without taking advantage of the situation, Louis proposes to buy her freedom.
I think the conversation between Louis and the zoo director is fascinating. Zoos have this dual purpose of preserving animals in a way that is humane, yet, they support themselves by putting these animals on display for humans to observe, which means keeping them in cages, or other means, such as clipping their wings, so they cannot escape. There is a benefit to wildlife to have zoos, as zoos encourage amazement and wonder and that can inspire people towards conservation efforts so that their native habitat is preserved.
But these are wild animals, not humans. I think churches have taken the "zoo" approach to their members. Instead of being a safe haven for humans in the wild to receive healing and encouragement, churches cage or clip the wings of Evangelicals everywhere for the purpose of maintaining a zoo-like display to the world.
The pastor as zoo director, leaders as zookeepers
Instead of each Christian being encouraged to find their own Spirit-led path and expression, churches limit their members based on what the pastor and church leaders impose. If the pastor wants to run a soup kitchen, then members wanting to serve will be caged into soup kitchen ministry. If someone wants to minister in a way that the church isn't interested in, then the pastor and the elders will seek to clip the wings of the members to maintain the zoo as intended. For example, I was in a church that had a bad experience with small groups being led astray. The leaders decided that they could not maintain control of the teaching in small groups unless they were personally teaching the small groups, and since they didn't feel they had the bandwidth to teach, they issued an edict that there could be no teaching in small groups. Wings were clipped successfully and then, not surprisingly, they struggled to get congregational members interested in attending small groups. So, then there were occasional sermons on the importance of filling seats in the small groups.
Our pediatrician loved to see cuts and scrapes on our kids. That meant that they were active and exploring the world. Imagine a world where parents protect their kids by closing them more and more off to the world. The kid touches a hot burner, so we cage off the kitchen. The kid climbs out of his playpen and hurts himself, so we put him in a cage we can lock. The kid chokes on a peanut, so we grind all of the food into paste. Are we equipping children to interact with the world or are we creating bubble children that get blinded by the sun when we open their dungeon door?
The church disbelieves the work of the Holy Spirit and only believes in their ability to cage and clip their children's wings to keep them in the fold. If we don't teach our children about sex, then they will be safe from all sexual sin! If we don't teach our children about science, they will never doubt our assertions about how the world works! We teach them a warped version of Total Depravity so that they don't ask why they're in cages while the zookeepers roam free and tell everyone what to do. If we don't keep any non-Reformed, non-Christian sources of information away from our kids, they will grow up with a Reformed perspective! Of course, when these bubble children enter the world and inevitably stray from the faith, it's not because the bubble is a sham, but because the parents had some hole in their bubble somewhere... maybe the kids went to public school, or public university, or they joined the Boy Scouts or a secular sports team. We never look at the spiritual system and its assumptions for why people run away when they are no longer ecclesiastically chained to their beds.
The church as zoo
In one aspect of the zoo, the cages are there to protect the animals and provide a habitat for them to live and grow. If the goal is to release animals back into the wild, they are treated much differently - maybe not even put in cages in the first place, and their wings would certainly not be clipped. So, perhaps what drives the cages and clipping we see in churches can be compared with a different aspect of the zoo, and perhaps for the same reasons - public display and excitement.
So, if the pastor and leaders cage and clip just right, they can put their churches on public display and hopefully generate excitement for their vision of Christianity. They certainly don't want any public scandals and if they build the cages just right, maybe, just maybe, their church will look perfect from the outside. If something really bad happens within the church, the fear that the church will somehow be exposed to public disdain can overwhelm any desire to seek justice. So, maybe a few animals have to be put down to cover up the truth. Maybe the leadership decides to ignore the sins of a leader because it would look bad that their policies and procedures were woefully inadequate. Maybe a member must be shamed into silence because the truth would jeopardize the future of the zoo.
But, as surveys and studies show, people understand that people do bad things in churches. They want to see justice and not a fake, shiny veneer over a cesspool of shame and silencing. Why does church after church think that Jesus is somehow more glorified in coverup and ignorance than in shedding the light on internal sin and pursuing justice. Or maybe it's not really about Jesus in the first place, but about the celebrity pastor and churches that think, like the bubble parents, that shielding their members within their narrow worldview somehow generates perfect righteousness and are ashamed when the formula doesn't work.
Lay members as animals
That brings us to the experience of lay members. If we were born into captivity in this sense, perhaps we never realized what it meant to spread our spiritual wings. They were clipped with teaching about our depraved state and the need for spiritually-gifted leaders to discern truth on our behalf and show us the right cages we were expected to fit into. For those who were injured in the wild and found the church. Maybe it was a safe place at first. The zookeepers worked to mend to bones and heal the bleeding, but then something happened. Instead of being encouraged to return to life with spiritual healing, we were locked in the cage of legalistic rules and teachings.
I think we can get comfortable in our cages with the food the zookeepers provide and the fellowship we experience with the other caged animals, but for many of us, something will happen that breaks our sense of safety and comfort in the cage.
Ideally, we sense the urging of the Holy Spirit to free ourselves of our legalistic cages, our insular community and our spiritual scraps and realize that there's a whole world outside that we should be free to explore, but there are other ways of being lulled out of our sense of comfort.
Maybe one of the other animals in our cage attacks us. Because it doesn't look good for the zoo to have bloody animals walking around, we get quietly ushered to an even smaller cage and hidden from public view. It doesn't feel safe and it doesn't feel comfortable, and maybe the zookeepers think that caging us with the animal that attacked us will force us into a positive relationship (although it generally ends up with us getting eaten).
Maybe one of the zookeepers decides to use us for their own advantage or pleasure. Since they're the zookeepers, we assume they know best, but eventually something doesn't feel right when we are whipped or beaten or worse. Again, we get put in the small cage. It wouldn't look good for the zoo if anyone found out one of the carefully screened zookeepers was abusing the animals.
So, we make our escape. At that point all of the zoo's resources are refocused on getting the wayward animal back in the cage. If that proves unfruitful, then the zoo's reputation must be preserved at all costs. The cages get another few bars, but nothing else really changes.
Churches as recovery centers, not zoos
I think we need to recover the idea that a church is there to be a place of safety and healing, not cages and public display. If one animal is dangerous towards another, the aggressor needs to be dealt with and the victim needs to be strengthened and healed. A rescuer who abuses animals shouldn't be rescuing animals, and shouldn't just move to the next recovery center to abuse the animals there. But, the central point is cages are temporary and for the safety of the animals, not a new habitat. We need to be strengthened to thrive in the spiritual wilds, not hidden in a protective bubble.
Recovering from the caged life
Just like animals raised in captivity can rarely be released into the wild, I think recovering from legalistic and abusive spiritual systems is uniquely difficult. Instead of being fed the views of the leaders, we need to be trained to discern truth from scripture and seek the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. We need to learn how to find spiritual friends within and outside the church to help us have a good perspective. Because the zoos are so pretty and appealing, we need to find the animal recovery centers when we need safety and healing. It is so hard to discern the difference between veterinarian and zookeeper, but it is crucial in finding healing vs just getting stuck in a cage of a different zookeeper's imaginations. I can definitely understand when someone doesn't want anything to do with a person wearing a white lab coat. I'm thankful that I (think) found a recovery center and not a zoo. Maybe I'm not going to ever put on the lab coat, but I can maybe be a warm and encouraging presence to those around me as I seek to find my way back into the wild.
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