BLOG 4/19/15. THE CONFESSIONS OF THIS ‘GADFLY’ BLOGGER

I get asked with some regularity (like this morning) why and how I got into blogging? That’s an interesting question and so I’ll take a stab at an answer. I’ve got sixty years behind me of being designated as: clergy (which designation I do not even like). I’ve jumped through all of the hoops of the traditional and dominant ecclesiastical paradigm, and since I am by label: Presbyterian—which very traditional denominational bunch are often caricatured as being over-obsessed with “decency and order” and so are part of the dominant order. I was a very sincere young follower of Christ, and was ‘baited’ (which was, I suppose, providential) with the proposition that one could really serve God best by: “going into full-time Christian ministry”—as though all the other Christians were not also in full-time Christian ministry by virtue of their baptismal vows! Anyhow …

Yet the very wearing of that clergy designation has been a disconcerting experience, and provoked in me not a little cynicism about the hollowness of such a designation, and the fact that there is never any such designation even hinted at in the New Testament documents. I hope I have at least been a positive and encouraging disciple-maker to the generations of folk whom I have worked with as clergy. Yes, and I have known, and do know, others who have worn/wear that designation wonderfully and fruitfully—but not because they are called clergy. I, early on, came to the conclusion that there were a whole lot of vain egos, and thoroughly screwed-up personalities, who like the title reverend, or doctor, who somehow had missed the whole point of true church leadership, and of especially of disciple-making. It made me chuckle when I read the quote from somewhere (maybe G. K. Chesterton) that “the church is much too serious an enterprise to be left up to clergy.”

Along the way, I also found the classic definitions of the church all seemed to emerge out of such a false clergy-dependent form of church institution, what with preaching, sacraments, liturgies, etc. Living next to a divinity library for a decade I also read up in the vast field of ecclesiology, or the study of the church. That led me then into the field of missiology, or what is the Christ-given mission of the church—and my lights went on. It is only within the last several generations that missiology has emerged into a major field of study, and given us a good focus on what Jesus Christ called the church to be and to do in the world, and how the Holy Spirit energizes the church for the missionary calling of all of its members.

But then, that caused for me, even another problem, since I found in the remarkable set of circumstances through which I have lived just how un-evangelized so many who make up the church itself really are, and how inept the church seems to be in equipping all of its members/Christ’s followers for that missionary calling which is given them by Christ in their daily lives and incarnations. Missiology creates problems because it requires that ostensible church institutions subject themselves to the constant searchlight of how they are forming themselves to be colonies of the Mission of God/Missio Dei, … which can be most disillusioning.

Then along came a brilliant South African missiologist by the name of David Bosch, who wrote in Transforming Mission, that missiologists become gadflies in the company of ecclesiologists. It was then that I realized that my formative experiences of these many years have morphed me into an ecclesiastical gadfly. I, thereupon, began to write eight or ten books in which I was emerging more articulate in my own thinking about the church, and assumed that my last one of a trilogy on the subject (The Church and the Relentless Darkness) was the final one. But then some of my younger family members and young friends insisted that I needed to keep writing, so set me up with this Word Press web sight, and now you become the victims/beneficiaries of this ecclesiastical-missiological gadfly, and these regular blogs are my contribution. Got the picture? If you find them provocative, recommend them to friends. Thanks.