can make their appearance in any association, but they seem so ghastly in the church because they so flagrantly contradict the stated purpose of the association.”16
So the temptation is to imagine a better church, one that is more attractive, successful, even nicer. And there is nothing wrong with that. We should all long for a church to which people cannot wait to enter, for worship services that are filled to overflowing, for benevolent budgets that expand to include the whole world, for programs that transform lives, communities, even cities. The hard part is living with our disappointment that people don’t always love what we do, or support what is obviously worthy of their best passions, or accept our vision of what the church can be and do. Then is when it becomes difficult to love the church. Then is when it becomes easy to write people off. Then is when we are tempted to look for an exit. But then is also when the crucial question presses upon us: Can we love the church?
Or do we love our dreams of the church more?
I have recently been reading an account of the German church struggle and despite the occasional heroism displayed by various individuals, the witness there was, frankly, disappointing. I wonder if we would have done any better. And I think of those whose task it was to try to rebuild the church in Germany after World War II. How hard it must have been to summon a gospel witness amidst the ruins and manifest failure of the church itself.
But maybe it was no harder than what we face today, where our affluence and abundance of choices so easily trivialize the faith. Maybe our preoccupation with our own decline is more of a symptom of our desire for self-preservation than it is of anything else.
The truth is we are not promised increasing number of pulpits in an ever-growing denomination of successful people. There is very little of that in scripture. Rather there is only (!) manna; only loaves and fishes; only waiting and not knowing and bearing witness and being raised again from the dead. John Calvin insists that the church lives only as it is raised from the dead again and again. Can we love such a church? It seems so paltry at times, so unfashionable, so awkward. Are we really called to love that mess?
A final note: recently I represented our seminary at the inaugural event at another seminary nearby. I was struck by the service, which contained two sermons! There was a good deal of celebration of the success that had already been attained. Success upon success. No stumbles, no failures, no questions, no wilderness, no exile, no losses. Where was the struggle, I wondered.
Perhaps we are blessed to be living with a church that struggles so obviously. It is a gift to be preserved from some kinds of “success.” The hardness, the difficulty, the limits are probably closer to the “narrow way” the church has ever been called to walk. And as affluent and comfortable as we are, we have much to learn still. Only in America might we think that being the church is meant to be one successful thing after another. The crucial issue of our day, as it is of any day, is whether the church will be the church, whether it will, with its words and actions, its life and possessions, bear witness to Jesus Christ. Can we love the Body whose body is always a mess, and is always at its best when struggling? Or would we rather have something neater, cleaner, nicer, more spiritual, something that carries less theological baggage? There is only one reason to love a church that is so messy and troubled. The head of the church seems to do so.
January 31, 2013
We often think of tradition as confining. We learn early on to celebrate “non-conformity” even as we buy the same kind of shoes and shirts. But musicians and bricklayers, I would guess, might tell us that real non-conformity lies on the other side of mastering a particular tradition. One cannot attempt to improvise until one has mastered the instrument or craft and is comfortable enough in that mastery to think imaginative thoughts in another vein. Otherwise, what one is doing is merely cheap and silly and self-absorbed.
The life shaped by Christian discipleship is none of those things. Wallace Alston, in his essay, “The Education of a Pastor-Theologian,” suggests that it is in fact our tradition, particularly in preparing students for ministry, that actually liberates. He notes that in the Reformed tradition, the “ordered life” is a rather different thing from the “driven life” (and by extension, “the purpose-driven life”), just as it also differs from the “scattered” life or the “un-called” life. What is an “ordered life”? Alston calls it a life “lived in the confession of the power of the living God to make sense of human living and dying.” He cites John Greenleaf Whittier’s lyrics: “Drop thy still dews of quietness, till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace.”17
In a similar vein Karl Barth refers to the “ordered life” when he writes that it is the Holy Day, Sunday, that signals true human freedom.18 By ordering our lives the Sabbath liberates us from both the drivenness of our self-justifying busyness and the lassitude of our self-justifying despair.
Alston is bold to suggest what I think to be profoundly true, and that is that no small part of the work of ministry is the task of traditioning. He points out how many sermons today seem to be “first-generation” sermons, all about the experience of the preacher, as if the text had never been commented upon by saints from previous ages whose wisdom might be garnered and made fruitful for today and from whose acquaintance contemporary worshippers might benefit.
There is much that is tired and cliche-like in the term, “the Reformed tradition,” and it is true that worshipping at the idol of such a formative way of being Christian is still worshipping an idol. But again, as Alston notes, the point of mastering or better being mastered by a particular tradition is to be able to bear witness to the essential unity of the church. Our little traditions serve no other purpose than to provide us an entry into the church’s long and broad conversation with scripture’s witness.
So what? Well, so this: there are a number of groups, including various constituencies within our own church and seminary that are trying in earnest to discern God’s plan for the future for both. That future is hard to see for a variety of reasons, not least the various vested interests we might want to preserve. But one thing seems clear to me: trying to discern the future of the church without paying attention to the tradition that has passed the gospel on to us is worse than foolish, and will produce only a stunted and silly, and finally boring something, a something that, unlike the church of Jesus Christ, will be deeply captive to its own trivialities. Traditionalism is not the answer. But the tradition to which we belong is not our enemy. Rather, it is a gift that can liberate us to see beyond it.
February 6, 2013
Yesterday I received an email from a friend with whom I studied in seminary. What occasioned his note to me was the struggle he and his wife were having in their attempts to help the church where they worship. They were in anguish because their pastor wanted to take the congregation out of the denomination, and they, and others, wanted to try to stay. There was a lot of hurt and anger in this note. But in truth, the anguish my friend was feeling about this congregational split is only part of the hurt. Like any divorce there are at least two sides (if not more) and plenty of presenting issues and underlying causes. What my friend was feeling, however, was not just anguish over the split (and anger at his pastor), but a deeper loneliness, a feeling that the church had forgotten how to be a “life together.” Instead, what many seemed to want was a purity of some kind, a righteousness that would be self-evident. They seemed to want their youth back, the time when the congregation was young and vigorous and important. They wanted to be young again, and were suspicious of the old, who were such obvious failures.
One can make too much of the church. Our Reformed forebears sacrificed a lot in protest against the church making an idol out of itself or thinking that it was as important as the One to whom it was called to witness. But I sometimes think that the struggles we are going through to be the church are deeper and more important than mere ecclesiastical squabbles. We are adding to the loneliness of American life with our splits.
Here at the seminary, we say we want to “form leaders