Dead end of public confession

Time for the confessional: the dead end of public confession

Here I discuss the apparent need to confess one’s sins in public, be it at a revival meeting in church of on internet; but there are alternatives.

There are two things that I want to discuss here and they are interlinked. First of all, the Christian church is in a constant need of revival, renewal and reformation. Revivals are there in order to help people making a personal commitment to Christ. It has to do with personal conversion and renewal. A church cannot survive unless there constantly are members that are personally converted in their faith. It is then easy to see that most revivals have a way by which these conversions are publicly put on display so as to inspire others. It is about witnessing of one’s newly won commitment to Christ. This witnessing would always have an element of confession of sins which could take different forms. But there is a limit to what you can confess in public (a congregation is a public space). I think this is the weak point in any revival. I wholeheartedly agree that we need revival in church, yes we need people who are personally committed to Christ; but I also wholeheartedly disagree with the way witnessing takes place many times. It is not sound to any group of people to hear about all the dirt in somebody else’s life of whatever kind. There must be a way by which this could be avoided and yet a credible witnessing could take place.

Secondly any revival has today got fierce competition in the various kinds of electronic media and face book is only one such place. There is undoubtedly an inner urge to open up, to tell others who I am and what I am up to. But many are not aware of the side effects. Giving details of your personal life on line, even in an e-mail, means that you are opening the door also for unwelcome guests. You could easily be used by others in a ruthless way. If ever, there is now a desperate need to keep a space that is personal and private if you still want to feel that you are a person of style and integrity. You simply do not want to divulge anything to anyone at any time.

The interesting thing is that the classic revival meeting in the church and a young person sitting with face book online are facing the same dilemma. Where to draw the line? How do I maintain my integrity without becoming totally impersonal? I am afraid that the answer to these questions must also be personal; the main thing however is that a person is courageous enough to think through this dilemma and set a standard so as to keep up a certain personal approach that is inviolable and then becomes the hallmark of that person’s integrity.

Electronic media is really a farewell to innocence as you bare yourself to a global space where there are many forces at work that ruthlessly would like to take advantage of you; just one example. Even though the contacts that are made may be of a very shallow nature, you may feel the hurt if you are no longer wanted. So a new verb has been created that just points out the mercilessness of the whole thing: “to unfriend”. In other words, someone could unfriend you, meaning that by pressing a button you would no longer be part of the virtual group created. In real life you would probably at the least be able to find out why and still have some kind of relationship to the person who used to be your friend. These are not things to play with. Virtual reality could become the reality and if that is the case, such unfriending and unwelcoming could well ruin your life.

Likewise, if too much is said in a person’s witness in a church revival, that could also be held against him or her, sooner or later.

There must be a way forward. Here I opt for saying something about what should happen in church and I leave (however much there is a need to address this problem as well) the virtual reality for the moment. Thanks to a PhD student in Uppsala whose paper I was asked to critique last week, I have returned to some texts written by Professor Bengt Sundkler, Sweden’s perhaps foremost Africanist (1905 – 1995). In a book about the Lutheran church in Bukoba, northwestern Tanzania, he describes the East African Revival called Balokole (Bengt Sundkler, Bara Bukoba. Church and Community in Tanzania. London: C. Hurst & Co., 1980 [1974], 113ff.). It affected most mainline Prostestant churches in East Africa from the late 1930s onwards. It is very clear that this revival gave the opportunity for African Christians to enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, where also personal lifestyle and morals were decisive. Sundkler offers three conversion stories, and they are rather detailed regarding personal sins in the life before the real conversion, of people who then have served in prominent places in church and society.

Here again is the same dilemma, which, to my surprise, Sundkler does not address. Where do you put the limit for your personal confession? Do you open up completely? Do you let it all hang out? Certainly there is oftentimes an inner urge to do just that in the confessant, who at the time feels that this telling is his or her moment of liberation. But as we know by now, there is another side to the coin. There is a limit to how much you as a bystander can stomach. You do not want to hear everything that took place in your neighbour’s life. There certainly is a limit to that. I am surprised that Sundkler does not even try to address this very painful dilemma. What is more enchanting is the comment he makes about the Swedish missionaries, many of whom also took part in this East African revival. In the revivals that took place in Sweden in the 19^th century, the official Church of Sweden could not accept. The truth is that the official church, to which all these people belonged, rejected the one revival after the other. This is sad church history, which of course led to the formation of a number of new churches. Here Swedish missionaries, says Sundkler, took part and became accepted by the Africans. One can easily sympathise with what he says about the missionaries, but he still does not address the real problem: how do you confess, and what do you confess? He does not even put the question and in addition one is not told whether he himself fully became part of this revival movement.

However, there is an answer to the dilemma, and that answer could have some meaning even to the person who is challenged by present electronic media. I very much want to defend the existence of revivals in the church, even though we might think differently about how they should be done, but responsible leaders have to make sure that people are not able to “let it all hang out” in public. There are other channels for that, and again I am in fact amazed that Sundkler does not even mention this route (he was also a bishop in Bukoba for a few years, 1962 – 1965). The church has since the early beginnings an institution called (private) confession. Typically you would go to a priest. There you could open your heart in an open conversation between the two of you. You may then confess your sins; in a short liturgy, where you confess your sins in general but also are able to mention the sins that burden you in particular; you are also told by the priest that in the name of Christ your sins are forgiven. The priest is bound by his vow of professional secrecy (the vow is made at ordination). How sad that this institution is confined to the Roman Catholic Church and that Protestants have allowed this crucial function to lapse. But there are signs that this institution of private confession in the church is having a revival. Present times of temptations to leave out too much of your privacy on internet could be met by an increased interest in such an institution.

Revivals are greatly needed in the church, but these do not have to feed on filthy, vulgar and lewd stories about past sins. It must suffice with more general statements and it should suffice with the very sincerity of the person whose life apparently has changed and become renewed.