Many of the issues that I have been facing in the past few months center on what – at least to me – is a needless struggle between following Jesus – primarily as revealed in the Sermon on the Mount – or the doctrines and dogma that seem to be a plague that may well be the true reason behind the continuing decline of many of the “mainline denominations” in our current culture.

My thinking on this was brought to the forefront while I was reading the book that I introduced in the last post: Changed By Grace: V. C. Kitchen, the Oxford Group, and A.A. by Glenn Chesnut (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2006). As a result this post will take a look at more of Chesnut’s writing with particular emphasis on the life and work of V. C. Kitchen.

Chesnut introduces Kitchen with these words: Victor Constant Kitchen (1891-1975) was a New York City advertising executive. His firm – Doyle, Kitchen & McCormick – had its offices at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. He had a great interest in the Calvary Rescue Mission for down-and-outers at 246 East 23rd Street near Second Avenue, an operation which was supported by Calvary Episcopal Church and run by Oxford Group members.

In November 1934, the same year that Kitchen’s book [“I Was a Pagan”] came out, an Oxford Group member named Ebby Thacher came to visit a stock broker named Bill Wilson in his kitchen in the second floor apartment at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn, and told him about the group and its teachings. As a result Bill visited Calvary Rescue Mission, began learning more about the Oxford Group, and eventually (after his vision of the light in Towns Hospital) began attending Oxford Group meetings at Calvary House, where he got to know Father Shoemaker himself. Bill Wilson eventually founded Alcoholics Anonymous as a split-off from the Oxford Group of some of the members who were recovering alcoholics, who saw their drinking problem as their central spiritual issue(1-2).

A few pages later Chesnut continues his profile of V. C. Kitchen, writing: Kitchen had already been taught in church when he was young that we are justified by faith alone and not by works of the law. But before he came in contact with the Oxford Group, he thought that faith meant belief in church dogmas, and that we could automatically obtain the fruits of the spiritual life simply by believing the right doctrines and performing the correct religious rituals. As Kitchen put it: “In my early church life I was taught salvation by faith. But I was not taught how to make my faith anything more than a belief in certain doctrines. It seemed I had only to stand up, say I believed in Christ and submit to baptism. I then became a ‘full-fledged’ member of he church. There was to me no real birth here. I was not even an incipient saint. And there was no growth thereafter. I remained an adult spiritual infant. The faith that was nothing but a credulous belief lay stored in my memory, like a suit of clothes stored in the attic, and just about as useful.” And one of the biggest problems he had had as a child, Kitchen said, was that the church told him to believe all sorts of teachings about God’s enormous power, but gave him no proof that any of these things actually worked at the pragmatic level of life.

In order to be intellectually honest, people living in the modern scientific world had to ask a major question about any kind of religious system, which required a credible answer . . . What the founders of the modern evangelical movement had realized was that no spiritual system could be effective in the modern world unless it responded to this Enlightenment attack . . . Unfortunately, by the beginning of he twentieth century, there were people all over the world who claimed to be evangelicals, but who were in fact teaching only the old authoritarian and legalistic religion of woks righteousness: being “saved” meant following all of their rigid fear-based rules about what kind of clothes you could wear and how you had to fix your hair, and so on and so forth, and it meant accepting all their particular sect’s laws and rules with a blind and unquestioning faith(58-59).

And so it seems to me that not a lot has changed over the years. The issues and points of contention may be different, but the difficulty largely remains unchanged. Sadly, in many many situations the standards for being Christian today would likely not be recognized by the person for whom Christianity is named – Jesus the Christ!

This now becomes a launching point for our continuing discussions.