5/11/14. WHAT I WISH I HAD KNOWN WHEN I STARTED (60 YEARS AGO).
In recent months I have put into writing my memoirs for my family and a few close friends. In some ways it is a record of my career as a missionary, not from the church, but to the church. For most of my sixty year career as a teaching pastor, I have been dealing with the probing, often skeptical, minds of university students and young adults who have been honestly struggling with the issue of the church: What is it? Why is it? How does it get so screwed-up? Is it essential to my Christian life? … and such questions. At the same time I was deeply involved in its life, often in a lover’s quarrel with it, while serving in a number of capacity both denominationally and ecumenically.
Mid-career, I was constrained to write on the subject of evangelism while I was denominational director of the church evangelism unit. I learned how essentially unevangelized so much of the church really was. That produced a book (now out of print) entitled: Joy to the World. Later in my career I found myself in a most painful encounter with irrational forces and personalities within the community that clarified my thinking on the very real and inescapable subject of spiritual conflict (so often addressed by the apostles). That produced: Door of Hope: Spiritual Conflict in Pastoral Ministry, which was first published by Herald Press of the Mennonite Church. After it was out of print, the folk at Ashland Theological Seminary wanted to use it for their D.Min. courses, and asked if they could get it reprinted. So it was done by the folk at Wipf and Stock Publishers (which began my association with them).
In my post-pastoral/semi-retired years I was asked to develop a ministry of encouragement to the students and faculty of our theological seminaries by a renewal movement within the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. That engaged me even more profoundly with the ‘fogginess’ in their thinking about ecclesiology and then missiology to the point that I began to describe myself as a missional ecclesiologist. I was in provocative and searching conversations with students and faculty and students in about fifteen different theological schools. Here were these wonderful folk who were preparing others, or were being prepared, for pastoral leadership in churches, and yet had little clear concept of what the role of the church really was in the design of Christ’s gospel. This was distressing to me.
Meanwhile, the church was caught up in a cultural ‘diastrophism’ that was sweeping away all of the assumptions of the Christendom culture, which had so determined its life for a millennium, and a half.
It was, again, the probing questions of some young and persistent minds that provoked me into writing, what was to become, a ‘trilogy’ on the subject of missional ecclesiology. What I was provoked to do, and able to put into writing, were the lessons on this critical subject, which I wish I had known when I began my career sixty years ago. I put my conversations together into a dialogue form with a composite (not fictitious) person, and so engaged the question: What is the church? Out of this came Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church. This was followed by the second of the trilogy, entitled: Refounding the Church From the Underside, and engages the question: Why is the church? And finally, my friends were asking why the church seems to get so confused, and to drift away from its calling, and this produced: The Church and the Relentless Darkness, which, again seeks to unpack the never-ending problem of the spiritual warfare in which we are engaged.
I wish I had had such resources when I began, but at least for those interested these works may be of value. They are published by Wipf and Stock and most are also available on Amazon, most also in Kindle. I can hope that they will be equipping and encouraging to the emerging generation of thoughtful Christian folk.
