A recent book on business management claims that one of the most frequently mentioned causes of poor productivity and lack of job satisfaction is job situations where there is no clear idea of what workers are to do. Lacking a clear sense of what their job is, they never seem to please themselves or the boss and their job is never done. By nature, pastoral ministry is more open-ended than many other jobs. We contend that this is not only because pastors have so many different tasks to perform and so many different kinds of people to work with but also because of the nature of the church.
As Acts 5 shows, from the very first, the very first church had to fight tooth and nail with itself over who it was and what it was supposed to be doing. In this sense Luke might say to us, "Don’t flatter yourselves in saying that your world puts such rigorous challenges upon the fidelity of your church. It’s always been tough!” To which we might respond, "That’s our point. You had to create and continually re-create an enclave of faith in an unbelieving world, and so do we. We must make our way in a world every bit as pagan as yours.”
Which helps us better understand why Luke tends to tell the story of the early church mainly in terms of its early leaders—Peter, Philip, Paul, Dorcas, Lydia. Sure, the church is ordinary people called saints. Yet from the first these ordinary people depended heavily on other ordinary people to keep raising the right questions, to keep telling the story, to keep speaking the truth in love. So the church could elsewhere speak of these leaders as true gifts of God for the building up and survival of the church (Ephesians 4).
To all those disheartened, depressed pastors out there (and their name is Legion) we say that there is a condition much worse than being a "failure”— namely, to be a "success.” To be a successful pastor today is almost as damning as having a "happy” marriage. If, by happy marriage, we mean one free from conflict, we know that a marriage has become happy because someone lost very early in the game. Ironically, the one who has lost, often appears to be the one who has the real power in this "happy” marriage. Sometimes, the most gruesome game of control is exercised by those who claim to be weak. The depressed person in the marriage has all the power because the other person’s life is controlled by the desire to try to set everything right so the depressed spouse will not be so depressed.
Many "successful” pastors are happy only because they surrendered so early. They let the congregation know that they judged the success of their ministry purely on the basis of how well they were liked in the congregation. The congregation, if it wants to keep its pastor from being depressed, responds in kind, letting the pastor know that it is all right with them to have a preacher who has a pleasing personality rather than a truthful message.
These words are addressed to those pastors who know better. And precisely because some pastors know better, know that too much of their ministry is grounded on a false view of the church, they are tempted to self-contempt in a way that undermines their ministry.
The problem is compounded because our church lives in a buyer’s market. The customer is king. What the customer wants, the customer should get. Pastors with half a notion of the gospel who get caught up in this web of buying and selling in a self-fulfillment economy one day wake up and hate themselves for it. We will lose some of our (potentially) best pastors to an early grave of cynicism and self-hate. What a pastor needs is a means of keeping at it, a perspective that enables the pastor to understand his or her ministry as nothing less than participation in the story of God.
To the extent that the church and its leaders are willing to be held accountable to the story which is the gospel, ministry is a great adventure of helping to create a people worthy to tell the story and to live it. The faithful pastor keeps calling us back to God. In so doing, the pastor opens our imagination as a church, exposes us to a wider array of possibilities than we could have thought possible on our own.
In Gladys, in someone willing to call us to account, the congregation was free playfully to explore alternatives to the status quo, possibly to investigate new forms of community whereby its members might become the sort of people who are willing to live on the basis of God’s plans for the world rather than their possessions. She helped the church to worship.
On Sunday morning, when the pastor calls the church to worship, when the pastor prays, preaches, and offers the eucharist, the pastor does so in the confidence that, if the church grows adept enough at turning toward God in Sunday worship, it will be able to do so on Wednesday evening at the meeting of the Christian education committee.
Failing at such truthfulness, we acquiesce to the sentimentality of a culture which assumes that we have nothing more to offer empty people than to make their lives a little less miserable.
What sort of church would we need to be to produce a few more like Gladys? What sort of congregation does it take to allow a Gladys to speak the truth without hating her for it? What sort of pastor is required to love people enough to want nothing less for them than salvation? How can I, as pastor, be lonely because I have been faithful, rather than lonely because I was promiscuous with my love? Such questions can keep a pastor alive for a lifetime of ministry. Such questions help us discover what a wonderful and entertaining adventure it is to serve the world through the worship of God.
Looking back over the preceding words, we realize we have said much that challenges the contemporary church and its ministry. That seems odd because we thought we were writing about the church in a way that would be positive, that would offer hope for pastors and laity. Our goal has been to empower people in the church by exciting their imaginations to see what wonderful opportunities lie at the heart of Christian ministry—once the integrity of the church is reclaimed. Empowerment arises from finding ourselves as part of an adventure that is the most exciting game in town.
One of us recently wrote a book on clergy and laity "burnout” in the church. Why do people, having once put their hands to the plow, look back, fall back, drop out, and burn out from the church? Scores of commentators on ministerial malaise urge pastors to strengthen their ego, take a day off, take up a hobby, stand up to the board and tell them where to get off. These would-be defenders of the clergy all seem to assume that the problem in ministry is primarily a problem of improper psychological disposition in the clergy or unrealistic demands by the church, and so on. Of course there is some truth in their assessment. As we have said, the way many people go about ministry makes it a lonely enterprise for them, full of peril, and ultimately destructive. A day off a week is not a bad idea for anybody, even pastors.
In our opinion, such solutions only waltz around the symptoms rather than get to the source of the problem. The pastoral ministry is too adventuresome and demanding to be sustained by trivial, psychological self-improvement advice. What pastors, as well as the laity they serve, need is a theological rationale for ministry which is so cosmic, so eschatological and therefore counter-cultural, that they are enabled to keep at Christian ministry in a world determined to live as if God were dead. Anything less misreads both the scandal of the gospel and the corruption of our culture.
The parishes of two pastors have stuck in our minds. One is a Presbyterian pastor in inner-city Philadelphia, the other is a Presbyterian pastor in suburban Long Island.
"I don’t need to travel to Nicaragua to make a ‘Witness for Peace,’” the pastor in Philadelphia told us. "I can see that this culture is violent, bankrupt, and dying by looking out the front door of my parsonage. Each morning, I run the pimps and drug dealers off my front doorstep when I take my daughter to school. Every evening, I unlock the church at dusk and let in the bag ladies who spend the night with us. These are three to four women who, if they didn’t sleep and eat with us, would die on the sidewalk. My little congregation doesn’t have to go to
Managua to make a witness or to see this society for what it really is. Every Sunday, when we meet for worship, it’s ‘us against them.’”
There, in inner-city Philadelphia, is a "colony of heaven.”
"When I talk to my people,” said the pastor from Long Island, "they talk about themselves as if they are under assault. It’s as if they are in a kind of war. Here are people who have got the tools and the skills, the education and the intelligence to compete well in American culture. But when you talk to them about their children, their marriages, their jobs, it’s like talking to people in combat.
They tell me, in so many words, that their values have broken down and they don’t know what to do about it. They come to church, not because it’s the ‘thing to do,' not on Long Island! They come to church out of desperation.”
With talk of this sort, coming from Presbyterians for heaven’s sake, we feel justified in announcing, as we did in chapter 1, that the world has ended and a new world is being born. The church is the colony that gives us resident aliens the interpretive skills whereby we know honestly how to name what is happening and what to do about it. Yet while the American church was busy thinking it was transforming the world, the world declared victory in its effort to extinguish or to ignore the church. Lately, the battle has again heated up in places like Long Island and Philadelphia, so much so that we are now driven back to a reconsideration of our churches and our ministry.
Finally:
Be strong in the Lord . . . . Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador
in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. (Eph.
6:10-20)
This passage, ending the Letter to the Ephesians, is not likely to be a favorite biblical text. Yet we quote it here as a fitting way to end these reflections on the adventure of Christian ministry today.
There are many Christians who, out of deep concern for "peace and justice issues,” would gladly dispose of Ephesians 6:10-20. They are troubled by the use of military metaphors to describe the Christian life. "Be strong in the Lord . . . Put on the whole armor of God, . . . taking the shield of faith, . . . the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.” This mixing of the martial with the evangelical is dangerous, they warn. They recall the dark days of church history when Christians marched out with banners unfurled to crusade, to conquer, to set right, to purify, to make holy war. Our church, The United Methodist, recently had an unholy row over whether or not to put "Onward, Christian Soldiers” into our new hymnal. What have these military images to do with the religion of the Prince of Peace? it was said.
Although we have no interest in praising the military or defending "Onward, Christian Soldiers” (or, for that matter, the equally warlike "Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Northern Christians sang while marching southward to kill people like our great-grandparents!), we do find it interesting that the writer to the church at Ephesus reached for military metaphors to describe what it meant to be a Christian. Like those Presbyterians on Long Island, here, it would seem, was a group of believers under assault. Perhaps we forget, in a time of tame churches, toned down preachers, and accommodationist prophets, that there was a time when the church believed that though there was nothing in Jesus we needed to kill for, there was something here worth fighting for, dying for.
The gospel is so demanding that it not only expects us to be willing to suffer for its truth but also supposes those we love will have to suffer. Jesus broke the hearts of many a first-century Near Eastern family. Imagine, in a time of governmental persecution of the church, what an anguished decision it was for a Christian parent to seek baptism for a child. Was it fair of these first Christians to take their children down a path that might lead to their children’s murder?
No ethic is worthy that does not require potentially the suffering of those we love. Nothing cuts against liberal ethical sentimentality more than this. We wish that there were some means of holding convictions without requiring the suffering of our friends and families. We try to make "love” an individual emotion that does not ask someone else to suffer because of our love. Of course, such thinking makes activities like marriage or childbearing incomprehensible since these practices inextricably involve those we love suffering as part and parcel of our joint endeavors.
Pastors sometimes complain that it is unfair of the church to expect their children and spouses to make sacrifices because of the pastor’s vocation. Of course, some of the sacrifices may be trivial and demeaning, arising from misunderstandings about ministry rather than from the nature of ministry. But the church should not be surprised that faithfulness to the gospel entails sacrifice even among those who may not feel called to minister in the name of the gospel. Luther once commented that idolatry involves a question of what you would sacrifice your children for. The church has no quarrel with the sacrifice of children—except when such sacrifice is made to a false god. Our God is real, and makes real demands of us. Discipleship, according to Ephesians 6:10-20 does not come cheap. God is about serious business. Any ethic worth having involves the tragic.
The God rendered by Ephesians 6:10-20 is a passionate God who presses the church’s speech to its imaginative limits. We suspect that the church loses its vitality when its speech is cleaned up, pruned down, domesticated to ensure that our relationship with God is predictable and nice. Today’s church suffers from suffocating niceness and domesticated metaphor, the result of modern interpreters of the faith who think they know more about faithful discipleship than whoever wrote Ephesians 6:10-20.
We expect that the beleaguered colony in that Presbyterian parish in Philadelphia would understand the call to "put on the whole armor of God . . . for we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness . . . Take the whole armor of God, . . . the breastplate of righteousness, . . . the shield of faith, . . . the sword of the Spirit.”
A Princeton student being interviewed by a reporter was questioned about the prospect of American troops going to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded there. "There’s nothing worth dying for,” was her response. Which means of course that one day she shall have the unpleasant task of dying for nothing.
The gospel gives us something worth dying for and sacrificing our loved ones for as opposed to the nation’s attempt to give us something for which it is worthy killing. Precisely because we live within nations that base themselves on the presumption that citizens have a duty to preserve them through violence, armor is required for those who would live otherwise. If Christ’s quarrel with the world is only a matter of making the world a little less violent, a little more just, then accommodation rather than armament is the name of the game.
We recall someone who proposed, in jest, omitting the traditional Prayer for Enemies from the new Book of Common Prayer because, "Episcopalians are now so nice that we no longer make enemies.” Truth makes its own enemies.
The writer to the Ephesians wrote these words "in chains” (back then, Christians were given jail cells rather than T.V. shows). He told his congregation that, if you plan to follow Jesus, get ready for a real fight.
Our hunch is that this text from Ephesians 6, telling Christians to prepare for battle, means more to some younger Christians than to older Christians because of a difference between the generations. Most of us who are white and over thirty were raised in a church where the main agenda of the church was to help Christians adapt to the world as it is. Yet we are meeting more young Christians who are looking for a church where the agenda is how to help people survive as Christians.
We would have you note that the armament listed in Ephesians 6 is mostly of a defensive nature—helmet, shield, breastplate—the armor needed for survival rather than attack. Military metaphors and marching songs for Christians are frightening when Christians are in the majority, particularly when the main social agenda of Christians is to work to make the world a better place in which to live, particularly when Christians think that the main service they render is to create "peace with justice.” Disciples, as Jesus notes, are to be like salt. Too much salt, ingested in great quantity, leads to gagging and sickness. Small amounts of salt season and delight. Although there may be no particular virtue in the church being small and insignificant (as the world measures size and significance), the church ought to have the honesty to admit that we don’t seem to do too well when we are the dominant majority or when we are invited to have lunch with the President at the White House. We Christians have never handled success very well. We seem to be at our best as salt, as a struggling congregation in inner-city Philadelphia rather than St. Peter’s in Rome. (Although, in fairness to the present resident of St. Peter’s, as the old Constantinian synthesis crumbles and the church appears increasingly out of step with the reigning "principalities and powers,” even pastors who work in places like St. Peter’s begin to feel colonial— if they are determined to be faithful. Just let the Pope tell us that our Western middle-class need for uninhibited sexual self-expression is less important to him and the church than the poor of Latin America, and some of our brightest academic ethicists shall attempt to relegate him to the domain of those who are out of it, behind the times. These charges probably do not trouble the Pope. He is accustomed to serving God in Poland.)
Paganism is the air we breathe, the water we drink. It captures us, it converts our young, it subverts the church. The writer of Ephesians did not have to be convinced that the world was a hostile, inhospitable place for discipleship. He wrote these words "in chains.” His world recognized the subversive nature of the Christian faith and put him in jail. Our world recognizes the subversive nature of the Christian faith and subverts us either by ignoring us or by giving us the freedom to be religious—as long as we keep religion a matter of personal choice.
The world has declared war upon the gospel in the most subtle of ways, ways so subtle that sometimes we do not know we are losing the battle until it is over.
Several years ago, on Orientation Sunday in Duke University Chapel, the text assigned to the preacher by the lectionary was not Ephesians 6:10-20 but Ephesians 5:21. The preacher’s heart sank. "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, [obey] your husbands.”
"I can’t preach that,” the preacher thought. "Only Jerry Falwell would preach such a text! Especially is it an inappropriate text for a progressive, forward-thinking, university church. Forget Ephesians 5. The word for our day is ‘liberation,’ not ‘submission.’”
But the preacher decided to let the Bible have its say. He began his Orientation sermon by saying:
You despise this text. No one but Jerry Falwell or some other reactionary would like this text. What an ugly word! Submission.
And yet, we know that, taken in the context of the day, this is a radical word. Women had no standing in that day. The writer of Ephesians 5 expends more words giving advice to husbands, telling them about their duties to wives, than words to wives telling them what they are to do for their husbands. Scholars agree that this is not a text about women’s submission in marriage, it is a text which urges mutual submission in a strange new social arrangement called the church. The tone is set by the opening verse: "Submit yourselves to one another” (5.21).
And that is why we despise this text. Our word is liberation. In our day we have seen the liberation of just about everyone. We have, in Hannah Arendt’s words, thought in terms of freedom from rather than freedom for. Our culture has perverted "liberation” to mean freedom from the demands of others in order to be free to follow the demands of the self. And the sooner that husbands can be liberated from their wives, parents can be liberated from their children, individuals can be liberated from their community, and we all can be liberated from God, so much the better! Why do you think that we're all here at the university? To get liberated! To stand alone, on our own two feet, autonomous, liberated! And when we finish with you here at the university, and you have your degree, you will not need mother, father, husband, wife, children, God, anybody. We call it "education.”
Yet the writer to the Ephesians says that is a way which leads to death, not life.
And that is odd. That goes against conventional wisdom. In the oddest of ways, the Gospel brings about a head-on collision with many of our culture’s most widely held and deeply believed values.
Being a Christian is not natural or easy.
Thus the writer to the Ephesians says that you had better not go out unarmed. It is tough out there. The world lives by different slogans, different visions, speaks a different language than that of the church. So we must gather to "speak the truth in love” (4.15) that we might grow up in our faith. Weak, childish, immature faith is no match for the world. Being a Christian is too difficult a way to walk alone.
Last year I was talking to one of our students who is a member of a dormitory Bible study group here on campus. (Did you know that, according to our calculation we have about 50 such Bible study groups that meet every week here at Duke?) He was telling me that he had never been in a Bible study group before, never felt the need of it back in Des Moines. "Why here?” I asked. "Have you any idea how difficult it is to be a Sophomore and a Christian at the same time here?” he replied.
It’s tough out there. Paganism is the air we breathe, the water we drink, and I'm not only talking about what they do in the dorms on Saturday nights—which is often quite pagan—but also what they do in the classrooms on Monday morning: Paganism defined as the worship of false gods who promise us results. You better not go out there alone, without comrades in arms, without your sword and your shield.
So we must gather, on a regular basis, for worship. To speak about God in a world that lives as if there is no God. We must speak to one another as beloved brothers and sisters in a world which encourages us to live as strangers. We must pray to God to give us what we cannot have by our own efforts in a world which teaches us that we are self-sufficient and all-powerful. In such a world, what we do here on Sunday morning becomes a matter of life and death. Pray that I might speak the gospel boldly (Eph.
6:20).
A couple of years ago, I was invited to preach in the congregation where a friend of mine serves. The congregation is located in the heart of one of our great cities. The congregation is entirely black people who live in the tenement houses in that part of the city. I arrived at eleven o'clock, expecting to participate in about an hour of worship. But I did not rise to preach until nearly twelve-thirty. There were five or six hymns and gospel songs, a great deal of speaking, hand-clapping, singing. We did not have the benediction until nearly one-fifteen. I was exhausted.
"Why do black people stay in church so long?” I asked my friend as we went out to lunch. "Our worship never lasts much over an hour.”
He smiled. Then he explained, "Unemployment runs nearly 50 percent here. For our youth, the unemployment rate is much higher.
That means that, when our people go about during the week, everything they see, everything they hear tells them, ‘You are a failure. You are nobody. You are nothing because you do not have a good job, you do not have a fine car, you have no money.'
"So I must gather them here, once a week, and get their heads straight. I get them together, here, in the church, and through the hymns, the prayers, the preaching say, ‘That is a lie. You are somebody. You are royalty! God has bought you with a price and loves you as his Chosen People.’”
"It takes me so long to get them straight because the world perverts them so terribly.”
Of course, the conventional objection to a text like Ephesians 5:21-33, a sermon like the one just given, or citing pastors like the one in Philadelphia is that such talk encourages "sectarianism” among churches or, as we noted above, sounds "tribal.” The church must not withdraw to its own little enclave, we are told. It must be involved in society, helping to make American society a better place in which to live, working to change the structures of injustice.
We believe that such talk fails to appreciate how difficult it is to define justice, how the political structures themselves limit our definitions of what is just, and how odd it is to be Christian. The story which comprises American capitalistic, constitutional democracy and the story which elicits the church are in greater conflict than these Christian transformers of culture know.
In our asserting the integrity of the church, the need for the church to be en guarde with respect to American society, some would charge us with retribalizing Christianity, calling the church back to a sectarian posture it has long since left behind in exchange for being allowed to be free to be the church in America. We counter that the tribalizing of Christianity is done by those who identify Christianity with the liberal, Enlightenment notion of individual rights given by the modern nation state. Tribalization comes about when people take their loyalty to the United States, or the Roman Empire, or Cuba, or South Africa more seriously than they take their loyalty to the church. Tribalism is the pinch of incense before the altar of Caesar.
We praise any pastor, in Philadelphia or Ephesus, who cares for the colony enough to give his or her people the armament they need to resist tribalization by pagan societies, which live as if God were dead.
People often ask us, Is what you are saying liberal or conservative? The question is frankly political. "Whose side are you on—the progressive, open liberal or the closed, reactionary conservative?” We admit that we are quite openly political, but not as that term is usually understood. The conservative-liberal polarity is not much help in diagnosing the situation of the church since, as presently constructed, we can see little difference between the originating positions of liberals or conservatives. Both assume that the main political significance of the church lies in assisting the secular state in its presumption to make a better world for its citizens. Which position, conservative or liberal, is most helpful in that task?
We want to assert, for the church, politics that is both truthful and hopeful. Our politics is hopeful because we really believe that, as Christians, we are given the resources to speak the truth to one another. Fortunately, hope is not limited to the programs of the right or the left. Hope is described as the church—a place, a polis, a new people who are given the means to live without the fear that inevitably leads us to violence.
Our politics is truthful because it refuses to base itself on the false gods that make us so prone to violence. Here is power politics, not as the world usually defines it, but power derived from ordinary people who are trying to base their lives on what is true. As the story of the gospel becomes our story, we are given the means to be a people without cynicism or lies.
What we want to say is, We are neither liberal nor conservative. We are hopeful. Of course, American politicians also deny that they are liberal or conservative. They want to please as wide a constituency as possible. We, it should be apparent, are not interested in pleasing. Our project is to recover a sense of adventure by helping the church recover what it means to be a truthful people—a hope American liberals and conservatives have equally abandoned.
By "people” we mean to indicate that the challenge facing the church is political, social, ecclesial—the formation of a visible body of people who know the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay. As far as we can tell, both liberal and conservative Christians have abandoned that task, though they both still speak wistfully of the hope for "community.” We doubt that such hope will be fulfilled through theologies intent on maintaining individual prerogatives and autonomy, ecclesiologies that mirror and are supported by political visions other than those which are biblical.
By "truthful” we mean that the church could become a people capable of facing the hard realities about ourselves without flinching. We rehearse and anticipate such a possibility every time we confess and are absolved in our worship. The world regards as an incredible moral hero anyone who can be honest about himself or herself without flinching. The Christian claim is that such an ability is given to ordinary people through the gift of the gospel. Failing at being truthful, about the best we can expect of ourselves is to live by the least hurtful of our lies.
For example, Jews are currently accusing blacks in America of being antiSemitic. In fact, there may be much truth to that charge, but everyone rushes to deny it, not wanting to make our underclasses bear more of a moral burden than is necessary. We deny it because talk like this frightens us; it reminds us that we have not succeeded in creating the melting pot of minorities for which we hoped, that there are still groups within our society who see themselves as "Jew” or "Black” before they call themselves "American.” Besides, politicians must deny it because they see blacks and Jews only as special interest groups they must please. A people without a story that unites must opt for a "melting pot.” A people without a truthful story who fail at achieving a "melting pot” can do little but lie about their differences.
What cannot be said is the truth that blacks are sometimes anti-Semitic and Jews are sometimes racist, because in a racist, anti-Semitic society, many people from minorities who are allowed to "make it” do so only by buying into the prejudices of the mainstream. White Americans enjoy speeches by Jesse Jackson, in great part, because his voice has come to reassure us that we white Americans really are righteous and non-racist. After all, Jesse has "made it.” Blacks, listening to Jackson no doubt, hear a quite different message.
Deeply ingrained in our own theological development was the Vietnamese war. What if a politician told us the truth about that venture? Lacking the resources to be truthful (that is, confession-forgiveness), about the best we can do is to encourage people to think that the war was a nasty mistake, an aberration brought on by a perverted administration. No wonder we have difficulty honoring the sacrifice of those thousands who conscientiously participated in that war.
Who wants to honor the sacrifice of people who were part of a big mistake?
What has yet to be said is that the Vietnamese war was not just a national goof, an unfortunate mistake, but rather derived from the deepest and most cherished American beliefs about ourselves. We really do want to run the world, to set things right, to spread democracy and freedom everywhere. We really want to believe, and even Jesse Jackson wants to believe, that America is different from other nations—we want to believe we do not act out of self-interest, but out of ideals. There is a close connection between the work of Lyndon B. Johnson, our greatest civil rights president, and our descent into the depths of Vietnam. For Johnson, the two went together. Our grandest illusions about ourselves led to the greatest horrors of our history: We killed the native Americans, we bombed the North Vietnamese for the very best of American reasons. That does not mean that those who served were dishonorable, but it does say that they heroically did their duty for a dishonorable war. Honorable people can be used dishonorably. It happens all the time. Until our society knows how to admit that, it has no chance of being truthful.
Unfortunately, until we are held by a story that is true, we cannot be truthful. Christians claim that we have been given the resources to live without lying because we have been taught a way to confess our sin. That is one reason why, when the United Methodist bishops chose to speak out on the evils of nuclear
armament, they should not have spoken as they did—a rather pontificating gesture to the political left-of-center, which rejected both Christian just-war theory and Christian pacifism. This they did, we suspect, in order to say to the powerful people of the world something they could understand without its being connected to the gospel, something not too unlike what might be said by the New York Times. A better plan would be for the bishops to confess our own complicity in the structures that contribute to war, to repent of the sin that robs the church of its ability to witness faithfully on the question of war. If war preparations are wrong, then do we United Methodists want the offering of our members who work in defense industries? Should United Methodist pastors admit to the Lord’s Table those who make a living from building weapons? Those are interesting, ecclesial questions, appropriate questions for people who feel that there is nothing more important for Christian activism than how the church eats and drinks at the Lord’s Table. Failing at that, all we can do is pontificate to Congress—which is not listening to United Methodist bishops anyway.
The times are too challenging to be wasting time pressing one another into boxes called liberal or conservative. The choice is between truth and lies. Thus the writer of Ephesians speaks for all of us in the church, clergy and lay, when he asks the First Church Ephesus to pray for him, "That utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel . . . that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak” (Eph. 6:19-20).
As we said, we want to empower people for ministry in today’s church. The writer to the Ephesians prayed for empowerment to speak the truth boldly. He wrote in chains. The "chains” that bind us today and render today’s pastors impotent may not be so recognizable as those which held the writer to the Ephesians, but they are no less threatening.
Contemporary pastors are chained because so much current thinking about the church and its ministry is meant to disempower rather than to empower people. What happens when people come to seminary? We teach them courses that disempower them rather than give them the skills to claim their ministries with joy and excitement. For example, what happens when a seminarian takes a course in Old or New Testament? The student is introduced to critical apparatus and historical-critical issues that are determined by and limited to historical-critical skills. The first week is spent analyzing the documentary hypothesis for the composition of the first chapters of the book of Genesis as if the most important questions to be put to scripture are historical, literary, and scientific. Yet what does that have to do with ministry? We have argued that questions related to ministry tend primarily to be social, political, and ecclesial rather than arising out of the modern penchant to reduce all knowledge to the scientific and the historical and all research method to the individual and the private. The tools and the skills tend to be inappropriate to the way the church ought to go about its business of discerning the Word of its Lord.
Worse, the unfortunate seminarian is gradually convinced that he or she will never obtain all of the critical tools and linguistic skills required to extend the interpretive issues posed by the academicians, who live by the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. Knowledge of the original biblical languages is most helpful to pastors as a constant warning that many biblical notions cannot easily be translated into modern thought forms. Unfortunately, biblical languages are often taught in order to advance the debates of the academy rather than to address the needs of the church. A pastor despairs of ever knowing enough to do the sort of historical and linguistic investigation which is commended in seminary as the only way to uncover or recover "what the text meant.” What "the text means for us” is, of course, said to be the theologian and pastor’s task.
The result is that, when the seminarian is out and in his or her first parish, the young pastor throws up the hands, throws in the towel, and decides to preach his or her personal opinions. If I can’t preach biblically, I might as well preach subjectively. Such subjectivity might not be a bad way to preach if, by subjective, we meant conversation with the saints of the church such as Luther, Augustine, and Calvin and what they had to say about biblical passages. Unfortunately, most of the time that is not what we mean by subjectivity. What we usually mean is that we have learned to preach by the seat of our pants.
As pastors, we need to be clear about our source of authority. One way to do that is to preach from scripture, specifically, to preach from the ecumenical lectionary. A pastor wishes to preach, say, on abortion. But the pastor is troubled because she knows that the congregation is deeply divided on this issue. To preach on abortion sounds as if the preacher is simply airing her own opinions. Clerical authority thus becomes expressed as, "We indulge our preacher by giving her the right to speak for fifteen or twenty minutes on her own opinion of what’s right.” The very act of reading and preaching from scripture is a deeply moral act in our age, a reminder of the source of pastoral authority. When the preacher uses the lectionary, the preacher makes clear that he or she preaches what he or she has been told to preach. That is important because it makes clear that the story forms us. This is the church’s way of reminding itself of how it subverts the world.
Tragically, many of us are trying to preach without scripture and to interpret scripture without the church. Fundamentalist biblical interpretation and higher criticism of the Bible are often two sides of the same coin. The fundamentalist interpreter has roots in the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy (fundamentalism is such a modernist heresy), which asserted that propositions are accessible to any thinking, rational person. Any rational person ought to be able to see the common sense of the assertion that God created the heavens and the earth. A Christian preacher merely has to assert these propositions, which, because they are true, are understandable to anybody with common sense.
The historical-critical method denies the fundamentalist claim. Scripture, higher criticism asserts, is the result of a long historical process. One must therefore apply sophisticated rules and tools of historical analysis to a given biblical text, because one cannot understand the text without understanding its true context. Presumably, anybody who applies the correct historical tools will be able to understand the text.
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church.
Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture. Perhaps the recent enthusiasm for so-called inductive preaching—preaching that attempts to communicate the gospel indirectly, inductively through stories rather than through logical, deductive reasoning—is an attempt to understand scripture without being in the church. Inductive preaching presents the gospel in a way that enables everyone to "make up his or her own mind.” But we suspect that scripture wonders if we have a mind worth making up! Minds worth making up are those with critical intelligence, minds trained to judge the true from the false on the basis of something more substantial than their own, personal subjectivism.
So, to a rather embarrassing degree, preaching depends on the recovery of the integrity of the Christian community. Here is a community breaking out of the suffocating tyranny of American individualism in which each of us is made into his or her own tyrant. Here is an alternative people who exist, not because each of us made up his or her own mind but because we were called, called to submit our lives to the authority of the saints.
Not that we are much better off in our seminary courses in theology and ethics. There we are introduced to assorted theories of moral rationality and justification. We debate whether or not a deontological or a teleological ethic is to be preferred; or what is the correct understanding of love and justice. Christian ethics and theology are reduced to intellectual dilemmas, schemes of typology rather than an account of how the church practically discusses what it ought to be. The situation is aggravated as contemporary theologians and ethicists write for other theologians and ethicists rather than for those in ministry. Which helps explain why those in ministry read fewer and fewer books on theology and ethics. It also explains why we have the new discipline of "practical theology,” which is supposed to translate academic theology into something usable. Theology, to be Christian, is by definition practical. Either it serves the formation of the church or it is trivial and inconsequential. Preachers are the acid test of theology that would be Christian. Alas, too much theology today seems to have as its goal the convincing of preachers that they are too dumb to understand real theology. Before preachers buy into that assumption, we would like preachers to ask themselves if the problem lies with theologies which have become inconsequential.
Behind the disempowerment of the ministry through the seminary is the hidden agenda of convincing those in the ministry that they are not smart enough to teach in seminary. That is why those of us who take the trouble to get Ph.D.’s are paid to continue to teach in seminaries, where we then disempower new generations of ministers by bringing them to seminary in order to convince them that their vocation is not to be a professor!
Of course, we are drawing an exaggerated picture. Unfortunately, there is also truth in what we say. It is good to set aside some people to read and to write books in order to teach those who are called into the pastoral ministry. These people are reminders that seminary is not just a place where pastors are trained but also a place where we provide time for some to dedicate their lives to the intellectual love of God. Seminary professors like us rightfully spend much of their lives reading books so that the Christian tradition may not be lost but be a continuing conversation between us and the dead. The dead are not dead insofar as we are bound together in the communion of saints, living and dead, and therefore our conversation cannot be limited to those who now live. As we said earlier, pastors are significant only because of what needs to happen in the church. Now we add that seminary professors like us are significant only because of who pastors need to be.
Which helps explain why we very much hope that what we have written has been a beginning for the kind of empowerment that we believe is possible for today’s church. Pastors fail if they have not evoked an exciting sense of adventure among their parishioners. Seminary professors have failed if we have not helped to empower pastors to evoke the sense of adventure in the laity. As we have said often, the fundamental challenge before us is ecclesial. Clever new theologies may keep seminary professors from being bored, but they will also distract them from their central mission as seminary professors and they will certainly not renew the church. The roller coaster of clever new theologies has subjected clergy to one fad after another and has misled pastors into thinking that their problem was intellectual rather than ecclesial.
Renewal comes, not through isolated, heroic thinkers, but rather in the church through the everyday activity of people such as those in the examples we have drawn on. We believe that renewal comes through an appreciation of the continuing empowerment, by word and sacrament, which, in each age, creates a church worthy to hear the Word and to receive the body and blood of Christ.
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, ... were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the
commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, ... and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.... So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (Eph. 2:11-22)
Earlier we noted how the church is dying a slow death at the hands of pastors who are nice, pastors who are themselves miserable because they are attempting to "help people” with no basis for that help, and no safeguard for themselves, other than their desire to be nice and help people. Indeed, one of us is tempted to think that there is not much wrong with the church that could not be cured by God calling about a hundred really insensitive, uncaring, and offensive people into the ministry!
A better way is for us to be so confident that the gospel is true that we dare not say less to the people we are called to serve.
Power arises from truthfulness. The power of Christian clergy lies, not in their cultural significance, but in their service to the living truth who is Jesus Christ. Although Christianity is not about "liberation” as the world defines it, we are about power, and there is no need for a false humility among Christians about our lack of power. Servanthood is power insofar as it is obedience to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. Clergy must not assume that their disempowerment by the culture means that they have no power. A Christian pastor is a powerful person because only the pastor has been given the authority to serve the eucharist and to preach the Word for the church—to point to the very presence of God among us. That is power.
So the real challenge for clergy is not how to live as powerless persons in a world that recognizes only the power of politics. The challenge is how to be a person who is morally capable of exercising the awesome power of Word and sacrament as bestowed by God and God’s church. Clergy become dangerous when they act as if they are so powerless that they could not hurt people. Imagine a medical student coming to medical school saying, "I want to be a doctor, but I do not want to take any courses in anatomy because I do not enjoy anatomy.” The medical school would say, in effect, "To heck with your personal preferences. We do not want you cutting on people if you do not know anatomy!”
Yet many seminaries allow future pastors to avoid mastery of church history or theology—perhaps because the seminary assumes that, after all, the clergy cannot kill anybody through their ignorance. To the church is given the awesome power to bind and to loose, to convict and to forgive. Look what Peter did to poor Ananias and Sapphira. We must therefore be people who respect the power God has given us and who learn to exercise that power faithfully.
Jonathan Edwards, who never hesitated to speak the truth as it was delivered to him, asked fellow pastors:
Why should we be afraid to let persons that are in an infinitely miserable condition know the truth, or to bring them into the light for fear it should terrify them? It is light that must convert them, if ever they are converted. The more we bring sinners into the light while they are miserable and the light is terrible to them, the more likely it is that by and by the light will be joyful to them. The ease, peace and comfort that natural men enjoy, have their foundation in darkness and blindness; therefore as that darkness vanishes and they are terrified: but that is no good argument why we should endeavor to bring back their darkness that we may promote their present comfort. (Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, 1740 to which is prefixed A Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Northampton, Mass., 1735 [New York: American Tract Society, n. d.], pp. 244-45)
We believe that the pastoral ministry today is being robbed of its vitality and authority by participating in a charade of protecting people from the truth that is the gospel, which is our true empowerment.
For pastors to speak the truth boldly, they must be freed from fear of their congregations. While others may seek to embolden pastors by psychological appeals for the strengthening of clerical ego, we have sought to empower pastors through an appeal to the theological basis of their ministry. We therefore agree with Walter Brueggemann when he says "Pastoral vitality is related to a concrete sense of what God is doing in the world. If one has not made a bold decision about that, then one must keep juggling and vacillating” (Hopeful Imagination [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986], p. 16). In chains, the writer to First Church Ephesus could still claim the power to speak and to minister to his congregation on the basis of God’s vocation:
Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose which he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and confidence. (Eph. 3:7-12)
A pastor finds the guts to speak the truth because he or she has found this biblical basis for pastoral care: Jesus Christ, "in whom we have boldness and confidence.” Lacking such confidence, pastors become fearful creatures. After all, pastors have a front row seat to observe the lies by which people live, the shallowness, the quiet desperation, or raging anger by which people react to a life without significance. Self-protection makes cowards of us all.
We believe that pastoral fear can be overcome because the people Jesus calls to be the church, for all their infidelity, are still capable of hearing the truth. A ministry built on fear of the people can never be a happy one. Undoubtedly, people come to church for a host of wrong reasons. But the pastor is able to help them find the words to acknowledge, sometimes to their own surprise, that they are here because God has willed them to be here, despite all their wrong reasons. People may come to church to get their marriages fixed, or for help in raising chaste, obedient children, or simply to be with a few relatively nice people rather than to be alone. The pastor is essential for helping us cut through our wrong reasons for being at church and helping us to see that God is a relentless, utterly unscrupulous, infinitely resourceful god who is determined to have us, good reasons or bad. And that is why we rejoice; that is why we call our meal “eucharist.”
For everyone who has demanded to know if we are liberal or conservative, someone else has wondered if there is anything “new” in what we say here. We have no stake in saying something new. That is a favorite game of academia and is of little use to a church more interested in saying something true than something new. However, if there is a new emphasis in what we write, it has to be a renewed confidence in the integrity of Christian convictions as embodied in the life and work of the church. Early on we asserted that the challenge facing today’s Christians is not the necessity to translate Christian convictions into a modern idiom, but rather to form a community, a colony of resident aliens which is so shaped by our convictions that no one even has to ask what we mean by confessing belief in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The biggest problem facing Christian theology is not translation but enactment.
No doubt, one of the major reasons for the great modern theologians who strove to translate our language for modernity was that the church had become so inept at enactment. Yet no clever theological moves can be substituted for the necessity of the church being a community of people who embody our language about God, where talk about God is used without apology because our life together does not mock our words. The church is the visible, political enactment of our language of God by a people who can name their sin and accept God’s forgiveness and are thereby enabled to speak the truth in love. Our Sunday worship has a way of reminding us, in the most explicit and ecclesial of ways, of the source of our power, the peculiar nature of our solutions to what ails the world.
God has graciously refused to leave us to our own devices but has come out to meet us in Jesus of Nazareth and his church. So one of the best ways to know God is to take a good look at the lives of those whom God has claimed—the saints.
Of course, that is just the reason many people say they do not believe in God. They look at this collection of "saints” called the church and say that they cannot see anybody who looks much different from somebody who does not believe.
Part of the problem may be that these onlookers have a too limited, or even too paganly extravagant idea of God, which prevents their seeing God when God meets them in the life of Gladys or Paul. More than likely, we Christians have failed to become like the One we adore.
We have confidence in the boldness of pastors and the potential truthfulness of their congregations because we do not believe God has abandoned the world. A great deal is wrong with us as the church today, and who should know that any better than the church’s pastors. Yet, thank God, we are not so unfaithful as to be utterly unable to locate the saints.
So we pray, as does the congregation when it celebrates the eucharist, Remember, Lord,
your one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, redeemed by the blood of Christ.
Reveal its unity, guard its faith, and preserve it in peace.
Remember, Lord, all the servants of your Church: bishops, presbyters, deacons,
and all to whom you have given gifts of ministry.
Remember also all our sisters and brothers who have died in the peace of Christ,
and those whose faith is known to you alone: guide them to the joyful feast prepared for all peoples in your presence, with the blessed Virgin Mary,
with the patriarchs and prophets, the apostles and martyrs ... and all the saints for whom your friendship was life.
With all these we sing your praise and await the happiness of your kingdom where with the whole creation, finally delivered from sin and death, we shall be enabled to glorify you through Christ our Lord.
(The "Liturgy of Lima”)