And it came to pass in these latter days that both of the Pastor’s cars needed the healing attention of a body shop at the same time (in fact the Pastor wrote these very words while sitting in a rented Fiat 500L as he waited for his spouse who was finishing up her work day; a second rental car had yet to be provided and the Pastor’s family was experiencing the very First World inconvenience that is life with one car). Neither the Pastor nor the Pastor’s Wife worries too much about the appearance of their vehicles, but both cars had been on the receiving-end of damage that really needed to be fixed, and so both cars were admitted to an establishment called George V. Arth & Son, which is down by the Oakland Museum of California, on the cusp of Chinatown. George V. Arth & Son came highly recommended by Yelp and by the Pastor’s insurance company. It’s too early to report on the quality of their craftsmanship, but the people at the front desk seem to have the kind of gentle bedside manner the Pastor and his wife appreciate in those who make a living working on automobiles. What’s most interesting about George V. Arth & Son is the fact that the company has been in business and has been owned and operated by the same family since 1877.
Astute readers will note that the body shop currently in charge of fixing the Pastor’s two automobiles, has been in business since before the first modern automobiles went into production (Karl Benz started building and selling cars in 1888). George V. Arth & Son started as a wagon repair shop, but unlike most such businesses, George V. Arth & Son survived because thirty years after papa George set up shop, when Henry Ford started producing his Model T, George Jr., adapted and learned how to fix automobiles.
I don’t know when George V. Arth & Son last worked on a horse-drawn wagon (and for all I know they’d still work on one if someone asked), but I’m assuming there were several decades of transition, as cars gradually replaced wagons in the shop, but the business did change, and it has kept changing. The change from wagons to automobiles was a change from working in wood to working in steel, and in the last twenty years or so, George V. Arth & Son has had to change again as, increasingly, cars’ bumpers are made of plastic. This adaptability has allowed George V. Arth & Son to be the oldest body shop west of the Mississippi River.
There is, I think, an analogy between faith and auto-body work. In order to survive faith must be adaptable. We must be willing to change what we believe and how we believe. For example, for 90 percent of Christian history, a majority of the followers of Jesus believed slavery was an acceptable practice, but that has changed. We who are Christians also have changed our embrace of anti-Semitism, and in the United States anyway, we’ve given up on the idea that monarchs rule by Heaven’s favor.
Progressive Christianity—as it is understood by the Pastor whose cars now are subject to the tender ministrations of George V. Arth & Son—is a system of faith that embraces and seeks to understand the changes necessary for the long term survival of the faith. There’s nothing new about such an approach to theology and spirituality, in fact the two millennia of Church history are filled with examples of people who led by exploring the margins of belief, looking for the ways in which Christianity needed to change: St. Paul, for example, and the Church Fathers; Irish Monks such as St. Columba; medieval Theologians like Hildegard von Bingen and Thomas Aquinas; reformers like Marguerite de Navarre and John Calvin; abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Neoliberals like Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoffer and the Brothers Niebuhr; Liberation theologians like Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero, Rosa Parks, and Jane Spahr. Like George V. Arth & Son, the church has survived because it’s been able to change.
Some things don’t change, of course. The auto body shop currently healing the Pastor’s cars still fixes vehicles, and the Church remains committed to the glorification of God and to the proclamation of God’s reign of justice, compassion, peace, grace and joy in the world. Many are those who seek to understand the ways the church needs to stay the same and to focus on what doesn’t change. Their work is important and for their efforts the Pastor is grateful.
But the Pastor also is excited about understanding the ways the Church needs to change.
Ben