I heard of a curious Christian outreach attempt recently. They set up a tent at the local Renaissance Faire. In it, they claimed to offer 'confessions'. However, interested parties found that their idea of 'confession' wasn't encouraging other people to speak of their sins. Instead, they themselves gave a little speech confessing the sins of the Church and acknowledging that we often haven't lived up to God's requirements of us. The particular sin mentioned as one of the examples was The Crusades.
At the time, I was thinking several things that I was not saying, mostly because my thoughts start out pretty nebulous. I know when something sounds 'off' to me, but I rarely know why. I had to go home and think it over for a good while before I thought I had it. Their goals are laudable, and I can see why they thought this might be a good outreach message. But I'm afraid I do have some problems with it, and I think I know how to express it.
The first and most important thing to me is that this is actually not a Biblical practice. No, I'm not anti-Catholic. The Bible does encourage us to confess our sins to each other. But there are two very important factors to this practice. We are to confess our own sins, and we are to confess them to each other. These people, on the other hand, were confessing other people's sins, and they were confessing them to random strangers, with their target being unbelievers.
I'd encourage my readers to take a while and trawl through the letters of Paul in the Bible and the Letters to the Churches in Revelation. Yes, these documents were shared, compiled, and deemed worthy of mass production. However, when you read them, you will find that each church was addressed personally, especially in matters of sin. Paul did not tell the Ephesians what the Corinthians were doing wrong. Though the Church of Sardis was warned that they would not know the hour at which Jesus would come against them if they did not awaken, the Church of Philadelphia was told that it would be spared 'the hour of trial' completely. And there were even blessings offered to faithful members of each of the Churches who did not participate in the sins of the congregation.
Yes, we should encourage our brethren and gatekeep against sin, and we should have a certain level of identity with the Church Universal. But confessing sins is meant to be such a completely personal matter of responsibility that we are not even expected to bear the sins of our local congregation; just our own sin, if applicable, in being silent when we should have spoken, accepting what we should have objected to.
Now, in addition to not being a Biblical practice, there are other problems involved in confessing sins committed by other people, in other places, often before you were born. You have no personal stake in it, not really. You are adopting a sort of 'guilt by identity', but it is not based on anything you did or anything you could have done. Even more recent sins, such as the sexual sins admitted to by the Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, really aren't yours. You didn't listen to him knowing that he was doing these things. You didn't sweep it under the rug so that you could continue to lionize him (I hope). You didn't know he was doing it and keep your mouth shut anyway when you could have protected and affirmed his victims in the moment.
And there really isn't anything you're going to do about any of these sins. Let's be honest. You aren't going to cede Britain to the Muslims; if anybody does that, it'll be the (mostly non-Christian) British politicians themselves. You aren't going to dedicate all of your home church's tithes for the week to a victim of pastoral abuse in another state and another denomination. You aren't going to give up your house to a practitioner of witchcraft because of Salem. Neither should you.
As such, the idea of "confessing the sins of the Church" is largely performative in the same vein as "Native American Land Acknowledgements". The universities that start every event with a "land acknowledgment" are basically only engaging in self-abasement for the purpose of gaining the approval of others. They don't intend to actually give any of the land back, and they even object to naming halls or sports teams in historical acknowledgement of the tribal members who lived there. In my own town, there is a pre-DEI monument at a city park with four trees depicting four prominent chiefs from the tribe who gifted the settlers the land on which the park was built. Nowadays, the local schools will do Land Acknowledgements, but their students cannot name those four chiefs.
Similarly, "confessing the sins of the Church", though kindly meant, really is a method of self-abasement in hopes of gaining popularity. The intent is good; they hope that people who are predisposed kindly to them will listen better, making them more likely to reach out to God and be forgiven. It isn't wrong at all to want this to happen, of course. We wish all sinners would be saved and healed. But if we lose our message in the process of our outreach, we can't do anybody any good. We need to still be the hard path, the uncomfortable choice, the place where the burdens of people's sin have driven them to beg for release and to be willing to "wash in the Jordan River" to be relieved of them, even though "the waters of their own land" are, in their eyes, better. But confessing "the sins of the Church" to strangers, taking on the collective guilt, works against this goal.
See, the Christian self-abasement of performative apology in today's culture and environment isn't about acknowledging the Church's historical imperfections as a path to moving forward in a relationship. The people who most loudly proclaim the Church's sins against it aren't doing so in order to correct the Church in hopes of better attaining God's promises. After all, as I pointed out earlier, these are largely sins which we did not commit and which we can do nothing about. Their intent in accusing us is to delegitimize the claims that God makes on them which they hate the most. After all, if we were wrong about the medieval-era Muslims, if we were wrong about the witches in Massachusetts, we could also be wrong about adultery. We could be wrong about homosexual behaviors. We could be wrong about abortion. They need us to be worse than they are, so that they can dismiss our deity.
They also need for us to come to despise our fellow Christians, and this is something that I have unfortunately seen several times in the past few decades. A Christian starts out with the best of intentions, apologizing to The World for the sins of The Church. But, of course, as I keep pointing out, the Christian hasn't actually fought in The Crusades or drowned a witch. So that Christian is lured away by the performative abasement technique which is part of a Secular Humanist philosophy. Now, according to Secular Humanism, that person is better than "those Christians" who have not yet abased themselves for these sins. Also, the practice of performative abasement focuses on sins, even sins that may have been long forgiven, and never sets you free from the collective guilt of your chosen identity. Which, of course, it can't. God never meant for you to seek forgiveness for other people's sins. And, in Secular Humanist philosophy, you aren't supposed to be set free from it anyway. You're just supposed to show your 'virtue' by an endless string of Sin Acknowledgments. (In a way, you're actually seeking 'salvation by works', in repeating the sacrament. But that could be a whole new post...)
Instead of drawing people closer, you are more likely to affirm any belief they have that Christianity has nothing new or good to offer them, nothing different than any other group of humans, and that anything sin we warn about, well... we're hypocrites anyway. It doesn't matter.
So what should we be doing?
Well, first off, don't take this as a call to stop speaking against the sins of the Church, especially when they are brought up. You don't have to abase yourself to say straight out that God isn't calling us to Holy Wars, that we shouldn't be drowning women for suspected witchcraft, that sexual abuse is wrong especially when the perpetrator is supposed to be in a position of authority in the Church. Members of the Church have done wrong things over time, and it's absolutely appropriate to call out those things as being wrong.
However, if what you want to do is a curious sort of 'reverse confessional' to pique people's interest, I believe it can be done correctly, even though confession is supposed to technically be to other believers. The key is to keep it small-scale and personal. You are not forgiven for The Crusades. However, you have been forgiven, and you have been forgiven sins that other people are hurting from. On top of that, there are still sins being committed within church congregations. You may not be part of it. You might be part of it. You might be excusing it, minimizing it. You might be approving of it when you shouldn't. Or you might have this in your past. Hearing that, for instance, you voted to approve a man in your church as an elder even though you knew that he had a secret child with another parishioner - and that was a sin for which you needed to repent and be forgiven - will mean much more than hearing that you're sorry that someone wearing a hat with a buckle dunked someone in water about three hundred years ago. There are so many sins being excused and minimized in modern society, as well as some sins being lionized and advanced, and too few people are just saying flat-out that they are, in fact, sins. Stating it outright can easily be taken as an attack.
But confessing it can give it the same power, while removing the defensiveness. It isn't brave to say that things are bad when even the pagans will agree that things are bad, nor is it brave to agree with them that the Church is bad. True courage is admitting where you, personally, went wrong, admitting that it was wrong, and daring to tell people in a world that preaches self-empowerment through excusing sin that you can be forgiven.
