Christianity is no longer the automatic or assumed religion of this society, and as Christian ministers we are no longer members of a professional guild which, like law or medicine, can assume that it has a well-respected place in society; we belong, rather, to a community of faith that is in many ways under duress, is frequently misunderstood and suspect within its social context and is itself rather uncertain of its mission and its place in its world. This is especially the case, I would say, with the old Protestant churches of what is called the ‘main-line' — not only, but more particularly, in their North American expressions. Like many other observers of the religious situation today, I am deeply concerned for the Protestant future.
Classical Protestantism is in particular danger today. Especially but not only on this North American continent, it is being displaced by forms of ‘Protestantism', so-called, that have very little in common with the main heritage of the Reformation. The Encyclopaedia of Protestantism calls these newer forms of Protestantism "wider Protestantism", as distinct from ‘classical' or ‘core' Protestantism. This ‘Wider Protestantism', as the Encyclopaedia points out, tends to be ultra-conservative, Biblicist, fundamentalist. And such is the mood of our times that, wherever Protestantism seems to be gaining numbers, both here and in the so-called developing world, it is this Protestantism that is growing.
Frequently, and especially in the United States of America, it is associated with the most right wing of political powers and with unchecked capitalistic economics. It stands for a religious certitude in which there is no room for doubt or questioning; it stands for clear-cut distinctions between believers and non-believers; and it stands for a rigid morality that makes straightforward distinctions between good and evil and excludes, by definition, all who do not adhere to its doctrinal and moral presuppositions. This kind of Protestantism, if it warrants being called such, has no problem at all determining what its mission in the post-Christian society might be: it wants to reverse the trends, to regain the lapsed, to evangelize non-Christians, to reconstitute Christendom.
Classical Protestantism cannot, for instance, rejoice over a biblical literalism that ignores not only modern but also 16th Century Reformation attitudes towards the Holy Scriptures. None of the central reformers would have endorsed such literalism. Nor can classical Protestantism embrace a faith in Jesus as the Christ that excludes dialogue with other faith traditions; to the contrary, the authenticity of our faith in Jesus today is shown by the same kind of openness to others that Jesus himself, according to the scriptures, always demonstrated.
Classical Protestantism also taught its adherents to carry on a dialogue with the world of skepticism and unbelief; for all their enthusiasm for divine revelation, the reformers never meant that human reason and experience should be by-passed or ignored, as so many of the most militant Protestants in the US and elsewhere today want to ignore scientific theory in favour of literalistic interpretations of scripture and rigidity of dogma. It is impossible to study the lives of the reformers without realizing again and again that they worked out their theology through intellectual struggle and never-ending discourse with all the objections and alternatives to faith. They were not ‘true believers' in the contemporary sense; they were persons whose prayer, like that of the biblical father who sought Jesus' help, was ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.'
Yet while we, who are the inheritors of this classical Protestantism, know to a greater or lesser extent what our approach and our mission must not be, we are rather confused, I think, about what it could be and should be. The Protestant traditions that we have inherited were developed, classically, in a world that was still rather monolithically if nominally ‘Christian'. We find it hard to adapt the principles of Reformation Protestantism to a social context that is post-Christian. So again I ask: What is our mission today?
About five years ago, I was part of a remarkable seminar in which precisely this question was the confronting question of our discussion — and not just for an hour or two, but for two entire months. This was the Campbell Seminar, a project of Columbia Presbyterian Seminary in the city of greater Atlanta. Five of us professional theologians from five different parts of the planet met every day for several hours with two well-known American Presbyterian clergy, under the moderatorship of the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann. Our mandate from the seminary was to address precisely the question I am asking here: "What is the mission of the church in the 21st century?" We were told we didn't even have to produce anything; but since we were all Protestant workaholics we did produce, in fact, a great deal. It is collected in a book entitled, Hope for the World.
As the title of that book already suggests, it was the consensus of this group of widely representative Reformed Christians that the mission of the church in our time has primarily to do with the promulgation of hope — hope, not just in a vague and otherworldly sense, but hope that is intended for the life of this difficult and besieged planet and all its creatures. In order to pinpoint our findings, we formulated them in a single proposition or thesis, answering the question ‘What is the mission of the church in the 21st Century?' This is how we answered: ‘The mission of the Christian Movement in the 21st century is to confess hope in action.' Now, that simple sentence contains some very complex thought, and I cannot exegete it fully in this short address.
I will only note the following implications:
- Our Christian mission focused on hope today because what we perceive of the dominant attitude of human beings in the world at large is an attitude of open or covert hopelessness. We lack, as humans, a viable, working hope—in particular hope for our world. Too much religion wants to show us an escape hatch from this world. But this is God's world, God's beloved creation; as Bonhoeffer said, it must not be written off prematurely!
- The hope that we are to confess as Christians is not merely a rhetorical hope, it must be expressed in action and not only in words. It must be translated into an ethic that maximizes life and refuses to give way to death, decay and the demonic. Our hope must be a hope that we confess, not only something that we profess.
This is a very large order, of course. For the unfortunate truth of the matter is that, in these old churches of ours, we are ourselves rather uncertain what a ‘gospel of hope' would mean. Most of our members and adherents are two or three generations removed from the time when Bible study was part of the life of the Christian community. Many Protestants, overawed by the seemingly unquestioning belief of the conservative Christians who dominate the media, feel that there is no room for their doubt in the life of faith — but they have doubts, they do doubt, and at a very fundamental level. There is, in short, a great deal of confusion among the remnants of classical Protestantism in these old denominations of ours. How can we take on a mission of hope in a despairing world when we ourselves are so reluctant to express the extent of our own despair, and so uncertain how the gospel of Jesus Christ can speak to it?
In our Atlanta seminar, we all — from every part of the planet — acknowledged the great seriousness of this question. And therefore we developed a kind of mantra, or a guideline, for dealing with it. "In the church, tell the story; in the world, live the story." This is a time in the history of our faith, we believed, when it is necessary for the church itself to concentrate on understanding what it believes. We must tell the story — the Gospel story — in the church. It does not mean that we should cease acting in the world — certainly not; but it does mean that we must clarify for ourselves, as church, as congregations, what it is that we believe and what should be the ethical consequences of such belief.
For congregations to have such a goal, the principle task of the minister is clear. She or he must become the inspirer and catalyst for a new and vital and disciplined contemplation of scripture and tradition on the part of those who continue to associate with the church. He or she must become the teacher, the theologian of the congregation. His or her own struggle to comprehend and live the gospel must be opened into the life of the congregation as a whole. Together, minister and congregation must become a synagogue of dialogue and the prayerful quest for wisdom. This is of course no new idea, really. It belongs to the very core of the Reformed tradition that the minister is the "teaching elder" of the congregation; and such a concept of ministry reaches way back into the faith of ancient Israel, especially to the rabbinic tradition.
Somehow, I think, this way of understanding ministry was lost in the modern period, especially in the 20th century. We were seduced by the spirit of that age to think that the minister was to be a kind of jack of all trades, the professional Christian, the manager and CEO of the congregation. Sociological and other studies of the actual practice ministry have shown that clergy, over the past decades, have spent very little time indeed in personal study — even in the preparation of their sermonic and other explicit teaching responsibilities. Clergy have been assessed by their congregations and denominations, chiefly, on the basis of their ability as organizers and administrators of their churches. It has been, in fact, a business and professional model of ministry, not a teaching model, that has dominated the mainline denominations of Protestantism throughout the past several decades — most of my lifetime.
This, I am convinced, must change. If what the Reformation of the 16th century and subsequent expressions of classical Protestantism is to survive and grow, it will depend chiefly, if not wholly, on clergy who are ready to leave a great deal of the organizational and other stewardly work to competent laity and take up for themselves new and imaginative expressions of the ‘teaching eldership.' During the past three or more years, you who are graduating tonight have been privileged to spend your hours acquiring a studied grasp of the principle things of this faith. It is now your calling to help others to know and to practice this faith. You are not excused from some manner of participation all the other tasks that befall ministers in the natural course of their service; but you are called to concentrate your energies on this rabbinic calling —to be ‘the teaching elder.' As Paul says, "Not all are teachers." But you are. This is your calling. May you follow it with diligence and with joy!
