Thick and Thin

From 1962 to 1980, my life was anchored by First Congregational UCC in Camden, Maine. The pews were filled on Sundays, the music was world-class, and I was in everything: children's choir, Sacred Dance Troupe, youth group.

First Congregational Church UCC, Camden, Maine

Every week, the children's sermon was built around that weekend's Peanuts comic strip. Sunday school had felt-board stories, maps, and Bibles showing the places where those history-shaping events happened—places I hoped to see for myself one day.

I cannot tell you a single thing about the theology I learned there.

This isn't a complaint. That church formed me almost entirely through its people. One of my best friends was the minister's daughter, which gave me the shortest path to whatever that church knew. What I learned for sure was relationship. When I return home every summer, I still worship with this community. It has changed, but it remains familiar, and a few folks still remember me from childhood.

Yet I’ve asked myself over the decades why I don’t remember any theological teachings. I went to Sunday School, was part of Pilgrim Fellowship, and was confirmed. But the teachings feel thin, while the community remains thick within me.

When people write about "thick" and "thin" religion, they usually mean doctrine. A thick church asks you to publicly believe specific tenets, with consequences for declining. A thin church accepts you on whatever terms you show up with—no expectations. A common critique follows: the mainline went thin; thin churches emptied, so the remedy is to get thick again. More doctrine equals fuller pews.

That is not my experience. I cannot tell you if I was underserved on doctrine, because I don't remember the doctrine I was served. What I remember are the people, and the way I experienced God through them. Fifty years later, that is still what remains.

To move beyond the binary, I think of faith in three dimensions. There is content, which is what you are asked to believe. There is demand, which is what you are asked to do. And there is formation, which is what happens to you over the years, whether intended or not. 

I can still tell you what Camden asked of me and what it made of me. Content is the only piece I lost. Camden asked a lot—choir, dance, youth group, Sunday School, week after week. But what formed me was not the schedule. It was the people standing next to me while I kept it.

For me, thickness is not doctrinal; it is relational. A church can ask almost nothing of your beliefs and still form you for life. A church can require every article of the creed and form no one. The critique that tells us to "thicken up" turns the only dial it has—asking people to believe more—and then wonders why belief alone fails to hold them.

When I found a home in the American Baptist Church in my late twenties (that’s a whole other story), I was captured by Walter Shurden’s concept of the Four Fragile Freedoms: Bible freedom, Soul freedom, Church freedom, and Religious freedom. Each pairs a liberty with a responsibility. The "thin" is the freedom; the "thick" is the responsibility that comes with it. You take up that responsibility because you watched others carry it. It has to run through people; there is nowhere else for it to go.

In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg critiqued mainline churches for offering "religiousness without religion"—a place where belonging became the whole point. But our Congregational tradition has faced this in every century.

In 1662, New England Congregationalists faced a crisis: to become a full member, you had to testify to a personal conversion experience. The founding generation could do this, but their children—raised inside the faith—had no dramatic conversion to report. To keep grandchildren from going unbaptized, leaders created the "Halfway Covenant," granting partial membership to upright adults who couldn't produce an experience on demand.

Within a decade, in Northampton, MA, Solomon Stoddard took the opposite approach, opening the communion table to the “halfway” adults on the theory that communion was a means toward faith, not a reward for arriving. Years later, his grandson Jonathan Edwards reversed Stoddard’s open table—and the congregation ousted him for it.

Faced with the same problem, every generation reaches first for content or rules, because content is the only thing an institution can strictly require. Today at First Congregational UCC in Salem, Oregon, we are saying something else - anyone who agrees to abide by our covenant is welcome into membership. Belief is understood to be a personal journey and not a requirement for membership. Every Sunday, I ask people to engage deeply, but it costs nothing to refuse. I would not change that freedom for anything.

My three siblings and I were raised in the same UCC church. Today, all four of us are people of faith: a practicing Catholic, a Jehovah's Witness, an unaffiliated Protestant, and myself—an ordained pastor who has spent 27 years serving mostly UCC churches.

We are four-for-four on faith. If Camden UCC was merely "sociability with a steeple," it should have produced four people who walked away from church the moment they moved. Instead, it produced four people who couldn't stop seeking. None of us walked away from God, and Herberg's whole case is that there was no God in it to walk away from. Only the belonging. My own children have recently returned to Christian faith, holding beliefs wider than I was raised to imagine and finding their own communities in which to belong. 

From here I would say that Camden did not fail to produce believers; it mostly failed to produce Congregationalists. The desire traveled; the doctrine did not. Whether that is a failure depends on what you think the form was for.

So, let me close by asking: what parts of your faith were you given, and what parts did you have to go find? If the people who handed it to you were gone tomorrow—if the choir stopped, if the building closed (and maybe they already have) —what, exactly, would you still be carrying?

May the thick and thin of your faith journey be a gift to you and generations to come.

Your fellow traveler,

Pastor Robin