God of grace and God of glory.
On Thy people pour Thy power;
Crown Thine ancient church's story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower,
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour.
(Harry Emerson Fosdick, Book of Praise, 490)
Two and a half years ago I got a call from a woman who told me she was a life-long member of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. She was crying. She said she had been promoting a mission agency that has no association with the church. And, that she had been told if she continued to promote this agency in the church she would no longer be welcome as a member. I tried to get more information from her: who had told her this? Was it an official statement from Session? Or was it a comment made by somebody at coffee time? She continued crying; telling me she gave generously to the church and to Presbyterian mission works but also liked this other agency.
I think of her often, and she came particularly to mind last October as I spent a week in New York City at a conference at the legendary Riverside Church. By the second day at the Fifth Fosdick Convocation, as the conference was named, I knew the woman who had cried to me on the phone would find some solace there, because in a way the conference was directed to her. Whether she knows it or not, she is caught in some changes that are rumbling in the near distance, close to the already precarious existence of mainline churches. She is, in her own way, thinking of what church means, and means to her.
Her spiritual needs — and her needs for community — exceed those her church can provide; or manages currently to provide. Simultaneously, it is true that her church, in this case our church, does not want to fail her, wants to keep her in the family. But, somehow, their mutual conversation is broken, and her church can no longer rely merely on her denominational loyalty. Since each situation is specific, it is difficult to determine why her church is not meeting her needs, but it is obvious, if nothing else, that her home congregation is not a safe place to share ideas.
“There are a whole bunch of people out there who are looking for different stuff in relationship to their Christian life,” Diana Butler Bass told the assembled at the convocation, in sharing the findings in her book Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighbourhood Church is Transforming the Faith. “They're looking for a safe place in which to ask questions.”
Butler Bass's book is a look at the success secrets of 50 growing neighbourhood churches across the States. (The book is reviewed later in these pages.) The secrets she discovered in her research are all, in a way, self-evident; but also shocking, since they demand what we assume our churches should provide: community and safety. What she calls “an architecture of vitality” is really a simplifying of the Christian experience with a greater emphasis on spiritual development.
She spoke of three pieces of scaffolding that make up this particular architecture: a return to Christian tradition and history; a return to Christian practices like hospitality, healing and forgiveness, and devotional practices like centering prayer and Benedictine hours; and a yearning for wisdom. “We saw that these congregations had a goal; that they were aiming for something; that they were on a quest,” Butler Bass said. “And the quest was for wisdom. Wisdom is a sort of open-ended quality of the Christian intellectual life. A kind of humble knowing of God. Wisdom is not elitist, it is not secret, it is not esoteric and it is not impractical. It also creates open community. If people are on a quest for wisdom, they are going to be able to be their truest selves. There's not going to be a phoniness or a put-on-ness about the church; rather, people simply living into the Christian story, trying to do that with as much honesty and integrity as possible.”
Yes, of course, that is the church; but, that is not necessarily our church, not necessarily our congregation. We may individually strive for, might even collectively reach for, wisdom and community, but we often settle for comfort. Why is that?
The Riverside Church regards itself as, and is often thought of as, the national and international home of liberal or progressive Christianity. Some of the leading liberal preachers of the past century have stood at its pulpit: Hans Kung, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; along with President Clinton, Paul McCartney, Harry Belafonte and the Dalai Lama. William Sloane Coffin was once the senior minister. Harry Emerson Fosdick was the founding minister. (Coffin was ordained a Presbyterian minister; Fosdick served seven years at a Presbyterian church before Riverside.) In many ways the Fifth Fosdick Convocation at the Riverside Church was a gathering of the progressive church leaders and preachers. And, in many ways the one question that hovered throughout the whole conference was: What Happened? What happened to the mainline church; what happened to the liberal — progressive — church?
***
Cure Thy children's warring madness,
Bend our pride to Thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom's goal.
(Harry Emerson Fosdick, Book of Praise, 490)
“We weren't paying any attention to what was happening locally,” said Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell. “The religious right was quietly and doggedly, at the local level, winning local elections, putting people on local school boards, and getting people elected as local precinct committee people [for decades].”
Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches USA and currently director of the department of religion at the Chautauqua Institution, went on: “The progressive movement was very national. We had little and not enough recognition of the meaning and importance of the congregation in the life of the national ecumenical movement. The voice of progressive Christianity then gave only token representation to the local scene.”
The mainline and progressive churches did not develop their congregations or their communities. They didn't need to — their numbers were solid, until suddenly, by the end of the last century, the numbers were small, and in many congregations the quest was diminished. The members were tired, likely aged, and quite content with their status quo.
“I think for us in the [progressive] churches, the one thing that we just couldn't do …” Barbara Lundblad said at the opening plenary. “We couldn't hold together deeply religious, passionately Christian language and social justice in a way that those two had been held together by the civil rights movement, and particularly by Dr. King.” Lundblad is associate professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary, directly across the street from Riverside Church. “In some way we ceded religious language to those who we now might perceive to be on the other side. We left a vacant space that was filled by a language that we now wish we could claim more for ourselves.”
The opening plenary where Lundblad and Campbell spoke live in the church, along with Coffin and Kung via pre-recorded video, was in many ways the most interesting session of the conference. Here were four warriors of the progressive Christian movement whose memories stretched back to the Fifties; to Selma, to Mississippi. I found the session jarring in many ways — the civil rights movement is no longer on my radar. Though I am a late Boomer, King was dead by my teens. Even the seminal events of my youth — Vietnam, Watergate, FLQ, etc. — are ancient history to my generation. Yet, Kung made several references to the era of Camelot and president John F. Kennedy. Others told stories about King. (In the Canadian context we may well speak of Pierre Trudeau and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.)
The great success of the left, of liberal Christians, encouraged and aided by the mainline denominations, was to challenge institutions — governments, laws and even churches. In their stead they built ecumenical and inter-faith coalitions. And, along the way, either chasing secular society or leading it, they affirmed the rights of various minorities, and in the case of women, a long-silenced majority. It was for that reason the civil rights movement was constantly in the memory of the opening speakers: it was an egregious undeniable injustice that was battled in the streets, in restaurants, in homes and in legislatures. And in its wake the participants began to wonder about others who are equally subjected to social, cultural, political and legal injustices. Therefore, even though the passion is no less reduced, the aim no less noble, the methods no less valid, the focus is greatly diffused. The battle for social change still rages on many fronts, but lacks a single leader or issue. (Nelson Mandela may well have been the last coalescing personality, along with Bishop Desmond Tutu.)
“I was thinking over the last week,” Lundblad said, “about the things we didn't know in 1978 [at the first Fosdick Convocation].
“We didn't know about a disease called AIDS. The Berlin Wall was still up. Liberation theology was still very new. And, practically 90 per cent of the books [by feminist scholars] were written since 1978; so those voices were just beginning to be heard.” To the list Joan Campbell added that the inter-faith movement was also just beginning. “Muslim,” she said. “Muslim? No one even talked of Muslims.” And “gay rights, just emerging.”
The kingdom's goal, to use Fosdick's phrase, was never as cleanly defined after the civil rights movement. And, of course, in the opaque foreground of this nostalgia trip hovered the current American president and the war in Iraq. Therefore the conversation constantly shifted — seamlessly — between the global and national movements and the local church. Coffin, in addressing this What Happened question, was true to his life-long ministry, blunt in his response. Interestingly, in answering the big question, he turned his thoughts to the congregation. He highlighted two fears that have kept pastors from developing the local scene. “[Ministers] are so needy that they need the love of the congregation and will not do anything that will jeopardize it. It's supposed to be that our faith comes from God, our support comes from God and we love our congregations, but we're not supposed to depend on their thinking well of us. That's not why we go into the ministry.
“And, then there's fear of confrontation.” Coffin was filmed three weeks prior to his death last May. His speech was slow and tongue-heavy; his words slurred, yet the zeal that made him an important Christian leader for decades was obvious. “Starting as Christian ministers we learn that compassion demands confrontation. Often. Thank you, Jesus. And thank you, Martin Luther King. Thank you, Gandhi. Often, compassion demands confrontation; but, anytime we let a demeaning comment go unchallenged, we are being dishonest. Morally. Intellectually.”
***
Save us from weak resignation,
To the evils we deplore.
Let the search for Thy salvation,
Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee Whom we adore.
“You never know what Tony is going to say,” Barbara Harris told me, referring to Tony Campolo who was to speak later that morning. She and I were standing outside the church on a crisp October morning, sharing our joint addictions for nicotine and caffeine. The grand edifice of the church rose several stories beside us. Occupying a solid city block, there is nothing modest about the Riverside Church. There is also nothing modest about the Rt. Rev. Harris, a diminutive African-American woman in her eighth decade, who was the first female Episcopal bishop in the worldwide Anglican communion. Still, both of these legends — the church and the bishop — presented themselves as average and approachable (that's New York for you). And, as if to prove the point, Harris told me a famous off colour story about Campolo:
He was speaking to a conservative church. From the pulpit he told the austere congregation, “I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a [darn]. Third, what's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said [darn] than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
Tony Campolo is an animated personality, a popular speaker, a Baptist minister and professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University in Pennsylvania. He is also a leading proponent of the Emergent Church movement. He challenges the church — as the story above proves — to return to its biblical roots. Campolo thinks of himself as an evangelical; he comes from that background. So, in developing a new theology for a new age he moves back, through Christian history and tradition and practice, back to the basics, back to the words spoken by Christ.
“I always ask my students a very simple thing,” Campolo spoke from the Riverside pulpit. “Why did Jesus come to earth? If Jesus were to write a mission statement, how would it read? I get all kinds of answers: He came to save the lost; He came to reconcile us to God; He came to reveal God; He came to show us what it means to be an actualized human being. And on and on and on, but I never get the answer. The answer that I know Jesus would have given. Jesus would say I've come to declare that the kingdom of God is at hand. All of His parables were about the kingdom. When He taught His disciples to pray, He said 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done …' Where?
“It's not pie in the sky when you die by and by! But the same Christ who prepares for us a place beyond the sky has come into this world to create a people through whom He wants to change the [physical] world into the kingdom. The last thing He says to His disciples before the Ascension, He tells them again the things concerning the kingdom.”
Brian McLaren, another leading writer in the Emergent movement, also speaks of the kingdom. “There is an entire Christian theology about escaping the earth and abandoning it. The goal is for the earth to be left behind. If this is the case, we really should edit the Lord's Prayer once and for all — not 'Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' Instead He should have taught us to pray, 'May we go to your kingdom in heaven, where, unlike earth, Your will is done.' Theologies that focus on escaping the earth, abandoning the earth, are ways in which we sabotage the kingdom of God.
“We can also miss the goal through a domesticated church. A church of civil religion, a church that submits itself to the powers of this world, a church that is very happy to say prayers and benedictions but never really interjects the Word of the Lord into the world's agenda. This is a way we can miss the kingdom's goal.
“And then there's the intention to celebrate the kingdom, to sing about the kingdom, but we don't actually do anything about it. Sooner or later we have to translate all the singing and talking into real action. Our churches have to be made into communities that create disciples of Jesus. By disciples, we don't just mean converts, we don't just mean believers, we don't just mean churchgoers. We actually mean people who are learning to live in the way of Jesus.
“We desperately need disciples of Jesus and not just adherents to a religion called Christianity.”
In short, to quote the title of a book by Marcus Borg, McLaren is talking about meeting Jesus again for the first time. Though institutions ossify, grow heavy under the weight of their own bureaucracy, Christianity has an incredible capacity to reinvent itself. And in many ways that's all the Emergent movement is, a reinvention of the member as a disciple. (A feature interview with McLaren will appear in next month's Record.) It returns to the prime documents — what Campolo calls “the red letters” — for a fresh motivation.
And those documents say the same thing they always have. “I think we've gotten away from what Jesus was all about,” Campolo told the gathered at the Riverside Church for the Fosdick Convocation. (The majority of those present, incidentally, were clergy, including five from The Presbyterian Church in Canada.) “For instance, the Beatitudes, now there's a revolutionary piece. 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, i.e., blessed are they who empathize with the poor, whose spiritual connectedness with the poor is such that it overwhelms them. In the end, Jesus makes it clear that on Judgment Day we will be judged on how we respond to the poor.”
Tony Campolo is a teacher and a preacher and a good performer — in the best sense — in the pulpit. Barbara Harris told me he doesn't always have a prepared speech or sermon, that he might have notes upon which he improvises. His mind is active, and it is difficult to capture his rhythms on the printed page. But, as I excerpt this portion of his sermon, I want to emphasize how he switches from speaking of the “red letters” — the words spoken by Jesus — to the theological interpretations of those same passages, and back to the words of Christ.
“I wish this were theological, because I'm in if it were theological. Now I can just imagine on Judgment Day St. Peter saying to me, 'Okay, now, Campolo, a couple of questions. Virgin Birth: strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree?' I wish these were the questions. I'm in!
“They're not the questions. Here's the questions: I was hungry, did you feed me? Naked, did you clothe me? Sick, did you care for me? I was a stranger, I was an alien, I came over the border from Mexico, did you take me in? For if you fail to do unto the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you fail to do it unto me.
“St. Francis of Assissi made it clear that the poor and the oppressed of the world are sacramental. That coming through them is the real presence of the living Christ.”
***
Set our feet on lofty places,
Gird our lives that they may be,
Armored with all Christ-like graces,
In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
That we fail not man nor Thee.
Sam Wells is a quiet man, who speaks softly, and with great care, in the pulpit and privately. And perhaps because he was the only non-American to speak at the convocation, and perhaps because he is British (though Canadian by birth), the Canadian Presbyterians immediately glommed on to him. Wells is the dean of Duke Chapel, in North Carolina. A relatively young man to hold such a lofty position, he is thoughtful with his words. He exudes a warm pastoral care that does not negate his obvious intellect. In terms of presentation, he is as different from Campolo as one could get, but he is no less powerful. His message moved many, some to tears.
He spoke of a young couple going through a very difficult period in their lives — anticipating the birth of a seriously ill child — that made them question their own faith and strength. They were at a crossroads in their marriage and their journey of faith — like so many of us in our lives. Wells preached: “And then Jesus said, 'It is I.' I am the new temple, the place of encounter with God. And Ephesians 2 tells us, You, You plural, are the temple, the church. The dwelling place for God. The place of encounter. Not you as individuals. Not you as the state. But you as the church. You as the church of transformed identity. You as the church of unity. You as the church, one body with the Jews. You the church embodying the politics of abundance. You are the place where others will see the glory of God.
“Let's come back to that graduate couple with their nightmare pregnancy. I sense they represent the heart of this convocation. What they need is what we need. What they need for facing the future is what we need for the living of these days. And what we need is the church. They have legislation and technology but it is not helping them. They need a congregation small enough and disciplined enough that a pastor can stand up and say, 'I think God is asking us what we are made of.'
“They need a church that is already in the process of addressing diversity and difference in ways that respect conviction and challenge privilege, that exhibits patience and can't imagine not being one body. They need a church that knows it is called to become a new community. They need a church that is able to receive the gifts of God, even gifts as misshapen and distressing as the Cross, in a spirit of hope that does not underwrite an ideology of scarcity but embodies God's overflowing abundance. And in all these things they will discover true worship because they will have met the true God who promised in the word Emmanuel never to leave us alone.”
***
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee whom we adore,
Serving Thee whom we adore.
We are the church, and the church is both big and small, and it always has to maintain that balance. I haven't heard from that woman since the afternoon she called. Nobody could blame her if she has left her church, of course. But I hope she did stick it out, that she helped her church turn around. From my role as an editorial staff of this publication I daily encounter magnificent stories of local congregations who reach far beyond their boundaries. Who work hard at self-education and then work harder still at applying that reaffirmed faith.
There is one curious thing many of them have in common: they feel alone. They feel alone in their sorrows, like the woman who called me. They feel alone in their joys, as if no other congregation is acting through its mandate.
The one thing I learned, again and for the first time, at the Fifth Fosdick Convocation is that through our highs and our lows we are never alone. And, one thing I can assert through the experience of my day job — which I often think of as the best window on the life and work of our denomination — is that neither are you.
You can watch all the key speakers at the Fifth Fosdick Convocation online at www.theriversidechurchny.org/getinvolved/?fosdick, till 2008.
