A house united

LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Dr. Allen Hilton, the founder and leader of House United, explains during the most recent edition of “Leading Theologically” that the organization took shape about 15 years ago “when I started to see the people I like in the left wing of the church and the right wing of the church didn’t like each other.”

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“The problem was they didn’t know each other. They were speaking from a distance and stereotyping one another,” Hilton told the Rev. Bill Davis, the host of Leading Theologically, which is airing a series on reconciliation. Listen to their 44-minute conversation here.

In 2012, Hilton facilitated the first Courageous Conversation about a marriage amendment that had been proposed in Minnesota. “We had 425 people come out and talk to one another who disagreed,” Hilton said. “That set the hook for me on a calling to try to get left and right, different cultures and races, talking to each other rather than assuming things about one another from a distance.”

Transformation can occur through experiences, he said, such as building a house together or serving alongside one another at a soup kitchen — “things they would have done anyway as Christian folk,” Hilton said, “but they do together so they know one another a bit. They start to like one another and they can’t believe it because they know what each other thinks.”

“The ice kind of melts a bit. It’s not a ‘Shazam and it’s over,’ but there’s an opening for engagement that wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t come together,” Hilton said. “It’s experience-based ministry, and a lot of the stock-in-trade ministry is conversations — big-room conversations, small, family conversations, corporate team conversations — anything that will help a group realize they can collaborate and their differences are assets rather than threats.”

As workshop participants get to know one another, “they listen better to what the people think and why they think it,” Hilton said. Hilton likes to hear from people “who have brought together difference for a living — military folks, sports coaches, business people who know they can make better widgets if they get more diversity in play.”

In his 2018 book “A House United: How the Church Can Save the World,” Hilton makes this argument, as Davis points out: “We 21st century Christians come by our divisiveness honestly. … The earliest churches battled one another over everything from how to distribute the offering plate money to which of their prophets spoke truth and which falsehood, to whether Moses’ law provided access to God or threw up a blockade on the pathway to God. In fact, the same Johannine community that gave us the gospel with Jesus’ prayer for Christian unity also gave us one of the most striking versions of early Christian division.”

“That is some of the history we have inherited as the church and followers of Christ today,” Davis said. “Here is my wondering: What can we learn from the early church about how to be reconciled to one another and to God?”

Hilton responded that within about a half-century of Jesus’ public ministry, Matthew “illustrated the necessity in Jesus’ mind of going toward one another when we harm one another.” In Matthew 5, Jesus speaks of the urgency of leaving our gifts at the altar to make things right with our siblings in the faith whom we’ve wronged. “The center of reconciliation in Jesus’ economy is kind of clear from those two passages and a whole lot of others,” Hilton said.

“The thing is, original unity is a myth. A lot of people think the early church was perfect and then things fell. The early church wasn’t perfect,” Hilton noted, “and it’s a consolation for many folks to realize that.”

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Davis returned to Hilton’s book: “It’s time to challenge our culture’s unproven and unconsidered assumption that flocking with birds of our own feather produces flourishing lives, individually and nationally. It’s time for us to ask, ‘What would it look like, how would we read our news, how would we choose our neighborhoods and our churches and our friends, how would we even treat one another in a church and nation that could properly be called a house united?’”

The two sides and their splinter groups “are consuming very different pictures of the world,” Hilton told Davis. In former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse’s book “Them,” Hilton cites the chapter on why we turn to like-minded people. In one study, sensors were attached to the heads of people watching their favorite broadcasts on FOX News and MSNBC. “It turned out the part of their brain that lit up is similar to the part of the brain lit up by friendship and by opioids,” Hilton said. “In a lonely culture, we have people who substitute the talking heads on the screen for actual friends.”

Among the 12 men Jesus selected as disciples, “In that group are two opposites on the most political issues of his day,” Hilton said. “That’s outlandish human resources work. You have Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity in the same 12-person room, and yet Jesus did that, and I don’t think he was just showing off. I think he was saying, ‘This is a better way to live.’”

Figuring out the issues Jesus saw as important is as easy as dividing his teachings into two groups, Hilton said: orthodoxy and community, “what to believe and how to be together.” There’s “a whole lot more about how to be in community than there is about what to believe or think. It wasn’t very long before the church inverted that,” he said. “I think that inversion has hurt the ballclub.”

In the cohorts he leads, Hilton said that progressives often recoil at “including the non-includer,” while with conservatives there’s “sometimes an orthodoxy pushback.”

For progressives, “there are people in the room whose identity and life are being called into question by the person who, for instance, doesn’t think gay marriage is blessed by God,” he said. When he talks to conservative participants ahead of time, “They will be in tears at the prospect of going into the room because they know they’re the ones who are going to be stigmatized … and [be] the obviously wrong ones. That’s hard for progressives to appreciate, because they picture conservatives as the strong bully, and it’s not my experience that’s true.”

Inclusion should be much more than “We’re so good, we’ll allow you in,” he said. A friend taught him this lesson: Inclusion happens because “we need you. Who’s missing among us? We can’t be as much of a shalom community, we can’t be as much the body of Christ, if you’re not a part of us. You have something we don’t have.”

“I think Jesus tried to combat arrogance wherever it happened, and we’ve got so much arrogance right now,” Hilton said. “It has to start with, ‘We don’t have all the answers, and mine may be wrong.’”

Leading Theologically is a mission and ministry of the Presbyterian Foundation and the Theological Education Fund. Find out more here.