BLOG 8/28/16. WHERE DOES THE CHURCH ENGAGE THE REAL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD?

BLOG 8/28/16. WHERE DOES THE CHURCH ENGAGE THE REAL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD?

Oh, I’m going to get in trouble for this, … but here goes: One of the tragic distortions, or subversions, that also has become one of the sacred traditions (that became a sine qua non) of the church’s definition of itself … was that of a sacralized class of humanity designated as clergy. Hey! I’m one of those. I was told as a youth that if I really wanted to show my profound Christian faith, that I should consider—get this— “going into the ministry” (or ‘full-time ministry’). That involved getting the blessing of the regional church authorities, then fulfilling certain educational standards, etc. The fact was, that though the proposal sounded reasonable to an innocent young adolescent, … I didn’t have a clue what a clergy was, or what he/she did besides lead worship and preach a sermon on Sunday morning. But they were ostensibly the super-Christians who guided the church. Along the way there were many disillusioning realities. These seventy-plus years later, and watching the demise of the ‘Christendom’ culture, and the traditional church expressions, I am working on re-conceiving our understanding of church leadership, and how such leadership surfaces, and what their role is.

After going through the proper theological training and being ‘ordained’ into ‘ministry’, I was tossed into the cold water of reality, and began to discover, early on, how out-of-it so many of the church folk were about the essence of Christian discipleship, or of any responsibility that might be theirs in the mission of God to communicate the thrilling reality of his New Creation into the corners of the human community–they were ‘anything but’ contagious practitioners of  God’s New Humanity. My initial engagement as a campus pastor was the beginning of my real equipping for that which my own heart wanted to be and do in carrying out Christ’s missionary mandate. Students have a delightful way of demolishing idols, asking all the dirty questions, being unimpressed with my ‘clergy’ credentials, and keeping me close to reality. But it was when I was plunged into the pathological reality of a church community that was a classic mix of some true faith on the margins, but mostly community of fractured people trying to practice a superficial form of religious Christianity, … that I had to get real, and to admit to myself that almost nothing that I had learned in theological school prepared me to engage and equip the real people and their difficult daily lives (it was a blue-collar, low-wage industrial neighborhood). This is to say that I came to my present understanding the difficult way—like: making mistakes and learning from them, of having to deal with huge and traumatic social upheavals, economic injustice, tragic national policies (like the Vietnam War).

It was in that ‘cold water’ of reality that two phenomena came across my mind. One was that there were a group of young Roman Catholic priests in France who realized the same thing I was seeing, namely, that in their traditional priestly role, they weren’t in contact with the very industrial workers they were supposed to be ministering to. So what did they do? They got permission from their bishop to become industrial workers, and to take jobs in industry so that they would be in daily contact with the secular workers they wanted to reach. It was a controversial and fruitful, but brief, movement and soon was terminated by the dominant ecclesiastical order. But I liked it. Those worker-priests got the message. Where does the church reach real people and contagiously communicate to them the love of God? The other phenomenon was that in Latin America, when there were not sufficient priests to reach into the villages, … there emerged small communities of faith which would gather at the end of the day, or week, and the literate participants would read to the folk in their modest homes/huts from the gospels, and they would discuss it, and pray about how to implement it. Those Base Ecclesiastical Communities were incredibly fruitful, because every person saw himself or herself as a priest. The leaders were chosen because they were the practitioners. See where I’m going?

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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