Enchanted Community

BLOG (6/8/14) WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THE ‘KINGDOM OF GOD’?

Allow me to apologize in advance, just in case this all sounds insufferably arrogant to my readers, because I make no pretense at any impressive theological erudition … but it seems to me that in the ongoing confusion in the several Christian traditions about the very essence of the ‘church’ and of its mission, one can point to one of the sources of that confusion in the thinking of so many about a clear definition of the Kingdom of God. What in the world is the Kingdom of God?

John the Baptist came preaching: “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus, likewise, came preaching the Kingdom of God and calling upon his hearers to: “Repent” (whatever that means) and “believe” this good news (whatever that means). His Sermon on the Mount (Matthew’s gospel) /on the Plain (Luke’s gospel) is replete with the assumption that this sermon is a key to understanding the practical implications of whatever this Kingdom of God is all about. We are taught to pray: “Thy Kingdom come” (or, more literally, be coming, i.e., dynamically realized) on earth as it is in heaven. What are we praying for? We are taught to “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness …” What do we conceive that we are to be seeking?

Do you get my point? If we’re fuzzy on what it is that Jesus is talking about, then the fuzziness tends to influence nearly everything else in our New Testament understanding, including our understanding of the church. This is especially true when one seeks to understand what is the purpose-nature and mission of the thing that Jesus told his disciples that he was going to build (Matthew 16:18), namely: the church. Maybe I can offer a bit of light (not original with me, but most helpful to me) on this.

The whole concept of the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Yahweh, would have had great resonance within the Jewish community, since it had been prophesied and hinted at in many of the Old Testament writings. At the same time it would not have had much resonance within the Gentile community, they not having had the background of understanding out of that Jewish tradition. The first three gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) all make the “gospel of the Kingdom” the major designation of their proclamation, because they were addressed to a Jewish community. But, then you will notice that John, writing to a primarily Gentile community, tends to use the designation: eternal life, to refer to the same reality.

But it doesn’t stop there. The coming of Jesus, God’s Messiah, heralded the in-breaking of God’s New Creation, his eschatological design of rescuing and recreating his whole rebellious and scarred creation. Jesus is basically announcing that, in himself, that eschatological, that rescuing and recreating design of God, is being inaugurated, and that through him is dynamically present, and will ultimately be consummated. Paul, then, will use the designation: new creation, to refer to the same Kingdom of God reality, of Eternal Life … since he knew that this would communicate to a Gentile/Greek/Roman audience the reality of what had transpired in Christ.

There are other words that are used by the New Testament writers that reflect the same ultimate and reconciling work of God. Yes: reconciliation is one of those words, as is salvation, and occasionally: righteousness. They are like different facets of the same jewel—they all refer to the awesome self-giving of God in Christ in order to make all things new: the announcement of the mission, forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, hope, and love—not to mention the empowering by the Spirit of God to make the humanly impossible to be possible (today is Pentecost Sunday: note).

My thesis, which I will pursue in these Blogs? The church is the communal demonstration of that very Kingdom, God’s New Creation, founded on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

How is it such a demonstration? Stay tuned …

BLOG. 6/4/14. THE CHURCH IS “NOT A TAME LION!”

In C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia it is made quite clear that even though the lion Aslan is good, he certainly is not tame. It was not Aslan’s nature to turn a blind eye to those evidences of the White Witch’s alien agenda in Narnia. I have been thinking about that as we look at another emerging eruption of social turmoil in our society—a populist protest against the unholy wealth of some..

The church, in my lifetime, has all to often tried to be tame, and to turn a deaf ear in the face of obvious aberrations from the agenda of God’s New Creation—his Kingdom of God in Christ. Too much of the church tried to be tame, or to sleep through the revolutions that confronted it, beginning in my own career with the civil rights movement, then the question of legitimate wars (Vietnam, etc.), them the revolt of the restless youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Then there was the struggle with the whole realm of sexual identity, the role of women in society, … and now a looming and emerging populist protest against the plutocracy (the 1%) that so dominate the culture in this capitalistic society.

So much of the church is willing to talk about it in the safety of its own enclaves, but hardly to take it into the streets. It doesn’t help that such a venerable as John Stott designated Christ as a ‘controversialist,’ or that missiologists speak of the church as ever being ‘in missionary confrontation’ with the world. So it was too often left to the activists who responded to the zeitgeists of the culture, and to those outside the church who were the champions of justice and of reform to even begin to make it visible.

Still, so much of the church slept through the revolutions. I can reminisce and even get amused at how often I have been accused of being some kind of a radical, some kind of a theological liberal with a social justice agenda—but not so. If anything it is my own orthodox, evangelical, reformed-=-even Puritan—persuasions that have gotten me involved. It is my own sense of Biblical authority that has made me more than controversial, but even radical, because the mandates of Jesus and his message of God’s New Creation begins and ends with a call for social justice that is not the ordinary “do good” stuff. This is not to mention the incredible justice teachings in the Old Testament beginning with the provision in the Jewish Torah right down through the prophets.

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Or Jesus message at the introduction of his public ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim liberty the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed [politically, economically, and religiously], to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” [i.e., the Jubilee Year promised in the Torah] (Luke 4:18-19). Or … “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger [immigrant?] and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in [debtor’s] prison and you came to me … come you who are blessed by my Father” (Matthew 25:34-36). This not to mention that if one will take off his/her unreal ‘spiritual and pietistic glasses’ and look at even the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, that one will realize that it has to be one of the most radical redefinitions of the human community conceivable … I mean, like: “Blessed are you who are poor …Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6:20-26).

Having said that (are you ready for this), the church so easily become totally accepting and uncritical of economic systems, such as we are experiencing now, that never raises a voice again the individualistic spirit of accumulation, of social irresponsibility and its insensitivity toward human beings. And if a church or teaching-shepherd does?—big trouble. Lord have mercy. Where do we go with that one? That’s where the church becomes counter-cultural, salt and light.

BLOG 6/1/14. THE CHURCH’S INABILITY TO IMAGINE ANYTHING ELSE

Face it: if one has no clear conception of what it is that Christ’s purpose is in ‘calling out’ a people—which is what the very word church means, i.e., “a people called out”—then it doesn’t really matter what you consider the church to be. I deliberately intend to be redundant in these blogs in stating that a majority of the folk with whom I have had conversations over many years, and people who profess Christian faith (whose faith I do not doubt), and declare their appreciation for ‘the church’ … have never stopped long enough to look at why it exists in the first place. It is just ‘what is’ and so we are expected to accept that, and reproduce it, no matter how dysfunctional, rudderless, or unaware of Christ’s intent. They accept ‘what is’ as the norm.

But that won’t do. After Christ declared, upon Peter’s affirmation that he (Jesus) was God’s messiah, that he was going to build this new entity (and he used a word common for the calling of a community for any number of reasons) … he went on to make that provocative and enigmatic statement: “ … and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). That means that there is to something intentionally aggressive about this new community. It is to be God’s agent in assaulting the rebellion that has corrupted God’s creation. The church can never be passive about that.

But in the passage of time, the church has been distracted and subverted time and again. It becomes something of a “God in a box”—a place where religious rites are performed by religious professionals, and where the participants are lulled into spiritual comfort and only expected to participate in the ‘churchy’ activities, which take place inside the box, alas! Occasionally some will shake off this sleep of deception and seek to call the church back to its purpose, to a revival of its dynamic sense of calling.

Again, the tragedy is that so many, probably a majority, have no ears to hear this—they have no capacity to imagine anything other than what they have experienced ‘in the box.’ They can only conceive of the institutional box, the professional clergy, and helpful spiritual experiences, but do not connect these with what God has called every one of his people to be and to do.

Yes, the church is called to gather together, but for a purpose. The gatherings are around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and around all of his teachings. “The word of Christ is to dwell richly/abundantly” (Colossians 3:16) among all who compose that gathering. They are to gather to regularly observe the Eucharist so that they don’t lose the core of what Jesus came to be and to do. But … the purpose of those gatherings to so that all of the people of God will be regularly equipped, encouraged, and refreshed to be God’s called-out people, God’s Kingdom people, God’s New Creation demonstration in all of “stink and stuff,” all of the vicissitudes, of the human community still inhabiting the darkness during the other six days of the week—our calling is to be Christ’s people on the other six days. That is where we are to be faithful. That is where we are to be the incarnation of God’s New Creation—not “in the box.”

But it takes the energizing of our minds by the Holy Spirit to get this. The New Testament documents give very little information about the form of the church, but it is relentless in telling us about its dynamic mission. It is always energized to be the missionary arm of the Holy Trinity. Its goal is to become a “beautiful Bride for the Lamb.” It is to be the demonstration of a whole new and beautiful way of living and behaving. It is to demonstrate the awesome love that produces reconciled relationships that are visible and convincing. It is not mushy or merely ‘religious’ in is raison d’ètre, but rather it is a community of light that is always in missionary confrontation with the dominion of darkness. God lives in his people—not in a box erroneously designated as a ‘church.’ The true church has a passion for the fulfillment of Christ’s mission, which takes on multiple forms as it obeys.

BLOG 5/29/14. WHEN IS THE CHURCH GOOD NEWS? … OR IS IT?

In this global landscape of the 21^st century, that is covered with all kinds of religious communities—from hugely impressive and life-giving communities, to border-line whack-o aberrations, all of which call themselves: the church, … comes the question: “Which are, and which are not the church, and what can be our criteria for discerning an answer?” After all, these cover the range from intentional communities of those disciples/followers of Christ seeking to be obedient and faithful, … to cults seeking to establish their local franchise somewhere, and all in between. The answer to this question is never easy. When does a church cease to be a church? And what obligations do we have to either continue in such? And when and how do we determine to separate ourselves (only to find the same problems, proclivities and drifts in another community, alas!)? New church plants do, in fact, have more of the potential of discerning Christ’s intent for his faithful as they meet together.

This question is anything but new, but never to be engaged lightly. Remember that the seven churches in Asia Minor, to whom the Book of Revelation is addressed, were only a generation from their apostolic founding, and already some are warned by the Risen Lord that they are in danger of no longer being among his churches (Rev. 2-3). He names the ways in which they had absorbed alien teachings, and influences, or compromised ethically, or gotten so busy being ‘successful’ (Laodicea) that they had left him outside the door seeking to re-enter. Only the two churches under persecution seemed to have maintained their integrity.

I am inclined to hold very firmly to the proposition that Jesus came to inaugurate God’s New Creation (or Kingdom of God), … God’s “I will make all things new” design, … God’s “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, as in heaven so on earth.” Any way you look at it, Jesus was the inaugurator of that Kingdom, that New Creation, and the essential and inescapable question comes: What does a particular church have to do with the Kingdom of God? How does it demonstrate that New Creation in its life together, and in its very real neighborhood? That New Creation was something entirely new and counter-cultural and transformational.

Jesus opened the way for our reconciliation again to God by his life, death and resurrection. He went about teaching what that would look like and announcing that good news along with the invitations to have a radical change of mind that would enable his followers to engage in radical obedience to him and his teachings. Any community that is going to designate itself as a church is going to be the community that equips and encourages all of its participants in that New Creation demonstration. Or maybe (to quote G. K. Chesterton) it is a community that: “is completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”

When a church becomes merely a safe religious enclave replete with pleasant religious activities … it has lost its integrity and can only be marginally and questionably called a church. Am I bound to a community, which seems irrelevant to God’s design for his church, and for me and my sense of mission and discipleship? Again: no easy algorithm here. God’s people have struggled with this in every generation. A particular church is good news when it is passionate about Jesus and his New Creation, and so smells like, thinks like, and behaves like Jesus—so that it is the veritable Body of Christ in the neighborhood of which we are a part. … Something in that direction.

BLOG 5/26/14. “HOW DID YOU BECOME SO PROGRESSIVE?”

On this Memorial Day, I got asked the question again: “How did guy such as you, with your essentially traditional and conservative Christian-theological beliefs, and a product of the segregated South, become so progressive in your social, economic, and political understanding? How did you get that way?” That question was one that provoked the writing my memoirs recently and was asked by a much-admired civil rights leader and friend of mine. But it was first asked some fifty years ago by a Davidson College contemporary of mine, who had become the president of a prestigious theological institution in the northeastern United States—that, after our modest and somewhat unimpressive neighborhood church in Durham had become racially integrated and engaged in significant ministries among folk struggling with poverty.

His question was asked in the context of our mutually accepted friendship, and without any intent of belittlement: “Bob, I don’t understand how a ‘fundamentalist’ church, such as yours, can have almost the only significant social action ministries in our synod [regional Presbyterian structure]. How do you explain that?” By that time I had begun to realize that I was on a different track than so many of my conservative friends, and there were reasons for that.

I was ordained as a Presbyterian pastor sixty years ago this summer, which was shortly after the Brown-vs.-the Board of Education deliverance by the Supreme Court. I was ordained to become the campus minister for the Presbyterian Church at North Carolina State College (not yet a university). North Carolina State was, at that 1954 date, still an all-male and segregated institution (though there were many internationals there). The deliverance was fine with the mid-western Ag school faculty, but difficult for most of the southern-bred faculty. It was all new to me.

So what transpired in me to form me into what I presently am? It could be partly because students ask all the difficult questions and they questioned segregation. It could be because of some incidents on campus that caused me to make decisions based upon my Christian conscience. It could be that in planning for our synod conferences for university students, which synod included several all-Black schools, that we had a difficult time finding a church conference center that allowed for integrated meetings. It may have been that students pushed me into reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he struggled with the “religious Christianity” conformity of the German church to the Hitler regime, or it may have been the more provoked by some of the international students who came from the middle-East and had been told that America was a racist nation by some of their Communist influences in their homelands.

Whatever it was, it had the cumulative effect of causing me to see what I had never had eyes to see and understand. I had never known any African-American adults on a friendship level until I was in my mid-twenties. But even more, my own Reformed (even Puritan) conviction about the centrality of Jesus Christ in history, and about the authority of the Bible as God’s revelation of himself and his will … and my role as a teacher of those very scriptures, brought me face to face with God’s passion for justice, for the care of strangers, for the poor and oppressed, and for the sick and homeless, together, caused me maybe “to be hoist on my own petard.” So that by the time I arrived as the pastor of the church in Durham it was Jesus and the scriptures that became my expression of leading the congregation in areas of racial segregation, and in the troublesome issue of the Vietnam War. It has gotten more wild in the years since.

So as primarily a citizen of God’s kingdom, I am also a voting and tax-paying citizen of these United States, which means that issues such as minimum wage, immigration, health care, etc. are those issues to which my faith speaks. Such is my answer to the questions of my “progressivism.” [If these Blogs are helpful to you, invite your friends to subscribe.]

BLOG 5/21/14. (CONT.) A HUGE OVERSIGHT IN MY LAST BLOG

The essence of the true Christian community, as an expression of God’s design for the redemption of the human community out of it’s brokenness, and its re-creation into that communion with himself as he originally intended it, is so complex that it defies easy formulae for its accomplishment. I gave it a stab in my last blog, but as soon as I had posted the blog I realized that I had inadvertently left out the most necessary and dynamic factor that makes it all possible—the Holy Spirit.

This is to say: that true Christian community as a ‘merely human’ enterprise is a total impossibility. Outside of Christ our eyes are blind, our ears are deaf, and our hearts are obtuse. It is only as we return to God through Christ, by our heartfelt repentance and faith, that we become—miraculously and mysteriously—somehow the partakers of a whole new life, even though we come as those “poor and wretched, weak and wounded” rescued from the dominion of darkness into the dominion of God’s dear Son. What this means is: that Jesus Christ comes to take up his abode in us—“Christ is [us], the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

The implications of that miraculous transaction are awesome to the max. We become Christ to one another, to our friends, to our enemies, to the world around us. But especially do we become Christ to each other within the Christian community … because … Christ, by the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, comes to live within us. That is what the ‘new birth’ is all about. We have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to respond to our calling as part of God’s New Creation.

At the ending of II Corinthians is a remarkable confirmation of this. Paul gives the benediction: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” Let me take the liberty of quoting to you Gordon Fee’s comment on this (as a major New Testament scholar):

“In many ways this benediction is the most profound theological moment in the Pauline corpus. On the one hand, it encapsulates Paul’s basic soteriology [Google that word], expressed more explicitly in other passages (e.g., Gal. 4:4-6; Rom. 5:1-11), where God in love determined to save his people and thereby took the initiative to bring it about (Rom. 5:18-21). The ‘grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’ in turn concretely expressed that love; through suffering and death in behalf of his loved ones he effected salvation for them at one point in our human history (5:14-15). The ‘fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ [note carefully] conveys the ongoing appropriation of that love and grace in the life of the believing community (3:6-18).” [From Fee’s book: God’s Empowering Presence]

To attempt to create any form of the church, or of Christian community, without that dynamic reality and dependence upon the Holy Spirit is doomed to frustration. As Fee comments many times: If you do not comprehend the dynamic presence of the Holy Spirit in the creation of Christ’s church in the Biblical narratives, then you do not even begin to understand the Christian church or community.

But, when Christ comes to live in me, then he will motivate me to find another (like you) in whom he dwells so that we all share the journey and encourage one another. We attract, and are attracted by, those others in whom the Spirit dwells. Community is being recreated. We become Christ’s ministers to one another, and to the world around us. All of the ‘one another’ or ‘each other’ exhortations in the New Testament documents become the natural expression of the Spirit’s presence, and so recreate us into a healthy intimacy with each other and with the Triune God. Many good studies on the nature of Christian community do what I did in my last blog, and leave out this essential and dynamic reality that makes it all possible. So I’ve filled in my previous oversight in this word to you. Come Holy Spirit!

5/18/14. THE ‘ONE ANOTHER’ FACTOR DOESN’T COME EASILY OR QUICKLY

Our whole digital, Facebook, twitter culture is simply the most current episode of de-personalized, or faux-relationships culture. Think back over the past several decades to such works as: Alone in the Crowd, or The Pursuit of Loneliness, or Bowling Alone and how they rang bells with so many who longed for authentic relationships, but at the same time were fearful of exposing their true selves to anyone else. And yet, as N. T. Wright says (I think in his Simply Christian): there is a common human quest for relationships—we are created for such.

Then think of all of the New Testament ‘one another’words of instruction to those in the infant church: confess your sins to one another … bear one another’s burdens … be subject to one another … love one another as God in Christ has loved you … etc. To create a ‘private Christianity’ in which I can hide myself from those others who have been rescued by Jesus Christ is something of a huge distortion, or subversion, of what Jesus came to do in creating a New Humanity, or a Kingdom Community in which there is again true intimacy between persons, and between persons and God, their Creator.

But, again, such intimacy is frightening to so many of us, and so we ‘fake it” with all kinds of churchy interpersonal activities, but where we don’t have to get too close. The answer? Not easy. It takes time and intentionality. Even St. Benedict’s Rule on monastic life required a time as an inquirer to be instructed and to learn to live fruitfully in intimate proximity with others in the community. Only after one had shown an ability and a willingness to accept the communal disciplines were they nominated for inclusion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together is a good resource for exploring the dynamics, the difficulties and blessings of such.

Any Christian community/church cannot assume that folk are ready for such relationships. Most churches, as a matter of fact, are where one can participate (hide?) in large gatherings for worship, etc. and never have to engage in face-to-face conversation with others about their daily lives, failures, joys, brokenness, sense of mission, family life, marital (and even sexual) life and complications. We assume that folk can join a ‘small group’ or a ‘neighborhood group’ and tune-in right away with others. Not so.

Formation for Christian community is a forgotten, yet essential, piece of our calling. It takes someone demonstrating and assisting and mentoring before we can confess our sins to one another, and to know how to live in harmony with other ‘screwed-up’ people—how to love each other as God, in Christ, has loved us, to live as members of one another, to suffer when any one of us suffers. Most of the New Testament epistles have whole sections on the redeemed relationships within the community that are a hugely influential witness to the watching world.

Yet, again, this takes time. In my own experience it may begin with some simple Bible study, or a shared meals—some kind of house-to-house gathering of those who grow into their understanding of each other. It requires that we know each other’s names, faces, and stories/histories. Confessing weaknesses, real sins, failures, aspirations, and fresh understandings with each other, takes time. And yet such demonstrations of God’s New Creation communities, small as they must be, are the foundation for Christian witness.

Still, I want to reassert my conviction that such true relationships are the path into true freedom in the Spirit. Yes, you can get hurt and betrayed in such, no question—but you can also move to new levels of discipleship and reality and Kingdom community that is one of God’s great gifts to us. “I will build my church” was not some sterile institution building by Christ. It was an essential component of the gospel. … And it’s all too rare!

BLOG 5/14/14. FREE TO COME OUT OF HIDING INTO COMMUNITY

What with the evident universal quest after true relationships, there is so much unreality in the actual pathways we seek to find such. We have all kinds of faux relationships, or contrived relationships. The advent of social media enables us to fabricate ‘friends’ on Facebook, and throw out there a persona that may give us some sense of not being isolated, but we know it falls far short of the real thing. To sit down, face-to-face, and engage in a meaningful conversation becomes more and more rare.

Sherry Turkle has written a fascinating study: Alone Together that details her research on this subject, and especially with the advent of robotic pets and robotic friends, who can be programmed to understand our moods and behavior, and to whom we can safely confess stuff that we can’t tell parents or friends. AI (artificial intelligence) is certainly a contemporary phenomenon that can provide such escape from loneliness, but it still enables us to hide from others and so to never know true relationships, or true community.

What if I were to propose that one of the most liberating disciplines we have in creating true relationships and true community—and true freedom—is the confession of sin—of our true, incomplete, broken, failing, self-doubting, falsely proud, boastful, etc. … selves? What if I were to propose that our Christian discipline of the ‘confession of sin’ is one of the most liberating disciplines we can engage in—a discipline that sets us free to have no hiding places, replete with “Keep Out” signs at the door?

I know I’m proposing something that is much larger than this Blog, … but even Alcoholics Anonymous, long ago, recognized that the first step in recovery is for one to acknowledge: “I am a drunk.” Oh, I know that within the church’s liturgy there are the classic confessions of sin (“We have done those things we ought not to have done …” etc.) but, we have reduced even these to something of an expected part of the aesthetic experience of worship, and often performed mindlessly.

I’m proposing here that there is, maybe, a reality therapy in confession that is a hugely liberating act, in which I come again and again to identify with the basic Biblical and Christian presupposition that this whole creation is experiencing an existential brokenness, falseness, capacity and idolatrous capacity to really screw things up—all of us: you, me, society, the whole scene—maybe most of all would be the ‘super-religious’ types who hide behind their ecclesiastical credentials. This whole creation is (as we say within the community of faith): ‘fallen.’

Jesus came to seek and to ‘save’ (big word: save) just such broken, confused, screwed-up folk. He came to call us out of hiding, to call us into new and redemptive relationships—into his New Creation. By his cross he reconciled us to God, so that we are free from the guilt and blight of our sin, but the doorway into that relationship with him is an act called repentance by which we come out of hiding and say to him: “I am broken. I don’t know who I am. I am not self-sufficient. I come to accept your promise of making me and all things new.” Such confession sets us free to be real.

That, which the New Testament calls ‘fellowship’ (Greek: koinonia), is a word that has intimacy and honesty and freedom written all over it. But that koinonia is impossible while we are still in hiding. Pastor Earl Palmer humorously makes the point that the Christian doctrine of total depravity is the great democratizing principle of the New Testament—it puts us all in the same level of honest acknowledgement about our great need, and of God’s liberating love in Jesus Christ. We come out of hiding when we truly come to Christ.

I want to continue this in my next Blog. Stand by.

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.

5/7/14. DECLERGIFYING THE CHURCH … OR ELSE RECONCEIVING ‘CLERGY’

The report came from Pope Francis’ time in Brazil last year, that in a meeting with clergy there he told them: “that we need shepherds who participate in the life of the people and ‘who smell like sheep.’ ” I like that. Such a statement really rings my bell. For one thing, there is no such category as ‘clergy’ in the New Testament, certainly no sacralized class of persons set apart from the rest of the community. There are certainly those who emerge from within the community who are gifted in teaching and equipping God’s people (laity) in the Word of Christ, and bringing them to maturity in their New Creation lives, … but their identity is with, and out of, the people of God first and foremost. They “smell like sheep.”

I think it was Jacques Ellul who raised to our consciousness, that the whole concept of clergy is one of the subversions of Christianity. Maybe I’ve lived too close to divinity schools and theological seminaries in my lifetime, so that my ‘yellow lights’ go on when I hear ‘clergy talk,’ and hear budding young divinity students talk of developing: “the clergy mystique” and not getting too chummy with their lay members. What this deliberately, or inadvertently, produces is what I call: The clergy-seminary subculture. People go into such careers for all kinds of (often questionable) personal needs and reasons, but when they choose to hangout, and feel comfortable, primarily with other clergy, and to attend clergy conferences, and to remain somewhat aloof from the sheep—then something is badly amiss.

Ellul remarks: “When we are told that the church has ministers, and its life is organized around them, well and good. But at once we have to remember that these ministries are a gift of the Holy Spirit and not a permanent or organized thing. This leads us to invert the biblical movement. We set up pastoral positions or benefices with rectors and bishops, etc. We then fill these posts with people we think are suitable. But this is the opposite of the movement presented in the Epistles, in which the Holy Spirit gives to the church people who have the gifts of love or the word or teaching, and the church has t find a place for them even if it had not anticipated doing so. If, after a while, the Holy Spirit does not give someone who has the spirit of prophecy but someone who has the gift of miracles, then the church must change its form an habits” (The Subversion of Christianity, 1986. Wm. B. Eerdmans. p. 157).

Does that sound strange? If so, maybe you have not read your New Testament carefully. If I read such a seminal text as Ephesians 4 correctly, the pastor-teacher’s goal in the community would be to work himself/herself out of a job, since he/she would have been mentoring others into maturity so that the Word of Christ dwelt richly in, and so formed, the community of God’s people. A clergy-dependent church has a basic pathology in that it never comes to maturity. True gifts emerge from within the community, and are proven there.

Which means that we need either to de-clergify the church, or totally reconceive what it is we’re talking about. Eugene Peterson translates the introduction to John’s gospel with his unforgettable comment that “the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” Jesus identified with the neighborhood to which he was sent, and so was able to communicate with them on their terms—he was incarnate, he “smelled like sheep.”

This means that there are at least two very basic requirements of those who are leaders of the Christian community: 1) that they be profoundly formed by scripture and effective in communicating that knowledge to others, and 2) that they be profoundly familiar with the existential realities of the people among whom they are living. To have community leaders who only have a theological degree, but are questionable in both of those two requirements raises all kinds of questions (and need to be questioned). Theological training schools take note …