July 20, 2001 Edition

Bishop's Corner

License Plate Christianity

By Bishop  Timothy W.  Whitaker

It was a privilege to participate in the 2001 Annual Conference of The Methodist Church of Cuba. Melba and I made many new friends, and we learned about The Methodist Church of Cuba that is growing rapidly.

On the last day of our visit we were informed that the Cuban government now requires that vehicles owned by Christian organizations carry a special license plate. This license plate is easily recognizable because of its distinctive dark orange color. Presumably, the government wanted a way to maintain better oversight of the Christian organizations in Cuba.

The Christians have responded to this new situation with good humor. They are delighted that now they are able to recognize their brothers and sisters in Christ as they pass one another on the roads and streets of Cuba. Moreover, they have discovered that they receive more assistance on the road because people know they are Christians! Shortly after I heard about this new policy, the driver of our vehicle pulled into a service station to get diesel fuel. The worker told our driver to leave. Then the driver explained to me that the worker at the service station had just refused to serve a truck driver, but because he wanted to help the Christians we needed to go around the block until the truck driver left and return to fill up on fuel. The policy of the government appears to be having unintended consequences.

I am impressed by “license plate Christianity.” In Cuba and many other places the identity of Christians is very distinct. People in the society know Christians think and live differently from other people. In these kinds of societies the Christians are confident in their identity and eager to invite others to experience the meaning and joy of the Christian life.

In America we need to develop more of a “license plate Christianity.” Here, the government will not attempt to identify us as Christians, but we should choose to emphasize before others that we have embraced a distinctive identity that involves beliefs and behaviors different from many in our society.

Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney in “American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future” state: “A crucial challenge for liberal Protestantism is to recapture some sense of particularity as a community of memory and not merely as a custodian of generalized cultural values. This will require among other things a countering of the secular drift that has had a disproportionate impact on its traditional constituency.”

Commitment to Jesus Christ involves embracing the courage to be different if necessary. As the Anglican theologian Alister E. McGrath observed, “Jesus Christ was not crucified just for reinforcing what everybody already knew.” Being different is not the same as feeling superior. Nor is it an attempt to retreat from engagement with the culture. It is an effort to strengthen the identity of the church of Jesus Christ as an alternative, distinctive community within a pluralistic and secularized society.

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 © 2001 Florida United Methodist Review Online