A well-meaning business friend of mine sent me a little tidbit on how a corporate culture change guru is effecting change in a car company. He thought it would be applicable to church life.
The line he thought would be edifying for us ecclesiastical types was this: “It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting.”
What a great sound bite. What a delightful little maxim to repeat. The slight problem is that it isn’t true and it is especially untrue where it comes to the Christian and church life.
Both autonomous willing or thinking are not going to take us to anything new if we take the general thrust of the Reformed tradition (and frankly the gospel) seriously on both “will” and “reason.” This is overconfidence in human powers; for apart from the liberating grace of God in Jesus Christ, the will is in bondage to varieties of self-interest, which we try to pass off as our “free” choices. And reason manufactures idols, gods made over again in our image. Nothing “new” here. There is no reference to the renewing and liberating grace of God. This account features human willing and acting apart from what God does.
A lively sense of the agency of God among the baptized and in the world is not fundamental in much of business literature. I know there are analogies between “organizations” but the Spirit is promised to the church and the Spirit is no marginal consideration. Christ is with and among us. And that, in our Reformed and reforming tradition, has always been the basis of our reforming. We are not Reformed and reforming according to Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, Scientific American or Deepak Chopra but according to the Word of God.
Listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth on the relationship between gospel and culture.
Bonhoeffer writes, “The present is not where the present age announces its claim before Christ, but where the present age stands before the claims of Christ.” (No Rusty Swords)
Karl Barth writes, “It is not the case that the exposition of Holy Scripture must finally issue in answering the so-called burning questions of the present day, that if possible it will acquire meaning and force as it is able to give an illuminating answer to the questions of the present generation. We cannot know what the real present is, what are its burning questions, who and what are, ‘our generation,’ ‘the modern man,’ etc. In a very real sense this will not appear until the Bible opens up before us, to give us correct and infallible information concerning ourselves, and our real questions, concerns and needs.” (Dogmatics)
Barth and Bonhoeffer make the same Reformed point: The gospel of Jesus Christ is not raw material to make serviceable to what we or the present age identify as “felt needs.” This move, which we make when we take a survey approach to what we will make of the church, threatens to destroy the integrity of the Christian message. And indeed this is what too often happens. As the theologian Willam Willimon reminds us, how seeker-sensitive do we want to be when what many people are seeking is illegal and immoral?
On the other hand, this does not mean we don’t beg, borrow and steal ideas that might be serviceable to the gospel from outside scripture, from the present day; scripture itself does this. We don’t want to be fundamentalist and sectarian and isolationist. It does mean, however, that borrowing ought to be scrutinized by the gospel the idea serves. It means our borrowings are ad hoc and provisional, not systematic and final.
Listen to Augustine: “If those who are called philosophers … have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use.” (On Christian Doctrine)
There is however a huge proviso: lift and loot, if, and only if, what you seize can be bent, and shaped and accommodated to our faith. Please note the direction of the traffic here. What is borrowed for Christian thought and practice (evangelism, worship, mission and preaching) must yield to the gospel.
Pagan loot must be accommodated to Christ, not Christ to pagan loot.
And so, grab every golden idea you can get — beg, borrow and steal from Harvard Business Review, Newsweek, Harper’s, Scientific American, the Presbyterian Record or even O Magazine (although you should always be suspicious of a magazine that has the same person’s picture on every cover); in any case, borrow from the philosophers, the social scientists, Madison Avenue, too. Collect up intellectual, strategic, critical and constructive loot of every sort.
However, be careful what you borrow. Always remember that the loot Israel lifted on the way to the Promised Land became serviceable to the Egypt that was still in them. The golden ideas they borrowed became an idolatrous calf in the wilderness. We think we modestly borrow and what happens: the revenge of the Egyptians — the Christian gospel gets hijacked by self-indulgence and idolatry. Think prosperity gospel.
In a 2005 Harper’s article entitled The Christian Paradox, Bill McKibben argued that “the Christian gospel has been hijacked by a culture of unrelenting self-obsession … and a series of causes that do not reflect his [Christ’s] teachings.” McKibben makes a powerful case that throughout North America, church has become disturbingly conventional, and that leaders focus relentlessly on “you and your needs.” He says that with the help of clergy Americans have made golden idols of themselves — become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. He concludes with this haunting line: “When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only the love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.”
What if we re-read our time and place through the lens of the gospel? What if instead of riding on the coattails of current cultural movements that give us relevance in the short term, we were actually patient and, yes, pious and disciplined enough to read events and perceived challenges with baptized reason in the light of the gospel? How would we begin to do that?
A Form for Imaginative Formation
With the coming back of John Calvin to Geneva in 1542, he proposed Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which laid out governance and oversight of the churches in Geneva and the surrounding district. The consistory (from which we get presbyteries) and the company of pastors are what he proposed.
The consistory was a mixed body — elders and clergy that oversaw the morality of the people in the city. Elders were elected from regions of the city and watched over neighbourhoods and helped resolve disputes; if they couldn’t do it individually they brought the matter to the consistory as a whole.
The company of pastors met Friday mornings at 7 a.m., and it existed to oversee the doctrine and fellowship of the church at Geneva. All urban ministers and the teachers of the church were expected to attend (and those in outlying areas when they could). When this group met as ‘congregation’ it was really a forum for the continuing education of the clergy, although many others also came. Very often one minister or teacher would lecture/preach on a passage from the Bible and discussion would follow. It was continuing education in the interpretation and application of Holy Scripture under the illumination of the Holy Spirit.
The fellowship of pastors helped to check fanciful interpretation. Preachers learned to read their own lives and their world through the lens of the gospel with the help of their friends. The company of pastors was about proficiency in preaching and spiritual formation; but it was also an exercise in holy friendship where each helped the other in lives pleasing to God. When Calvin was dying, he called for his friends in the company of pastors.
The Presbyterian Church (USA), I discovered just recently, is moving to rehabilitate the venerable company of pastors. Too often we leave this aside for the overwhelming administrative functions of presbytery — for us too often it’s just presbytery as consistory; but listen to the rationale for the rehabilitation of the company of pastors in the PC(USA) and ask, does it make sense for us to try and make a similar retrieval?
“Pastoral ministry is essentially a corporate, rather than an individual calling. This conviction lies at the heart of Reformed pastoral identity, and was exhibited in Calvin’s venerable company of pastors, a direct antecedent of our presbyteries. Calvin convened the pastors of Geneva weekly to study an assigned biblical text, hear a paper from one of the pastors, pray together, consider together the obstacles and opportunities facing the witness of the gospel in their region, and to determine how best to address the pastoral challenges presented by those obstacles and opportunities.”
And then it concludes, “In our time, presbyteries are so often consumed with the urgency of putting out pastoral wildfires and with the constitutional mandates of regulating pastoral ministry that careful, intentional nurture of good ministry (sound biblical interpretation) gets short shrift.”
That sounds pretty accurate to me. What if we began to think again of the venerable company of preachers, learning from each other in ministry?
I am just dying to one day say after a presbytery meeting, “Wow! Now that was inspiring.” I’m not being cynical; I recognize the need to do business and that administrative work is crucial. But what if our business was framed by more intentional learning and spiritual support and imagination formation as it was in Geneva?
Mutual encouragement and love sustains us. And how much more confident, in the very best sense, would we be in the pulpit and behind the lectern, if we made ourselves responsible to each other for what we preach and how we teach? A danger of the ministerial life is how many of its functions are carried out in relative isolation without much accountability and encouragement.
A Formed Imagination at Work
Engaging Biblical Authority, Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, offers an essay — Inhabiting Scripture, Dreaming Bible — on biblical authority that delightfully escapes abstraction. She writes about her own formation in the world of the Bible. The role that the Bible played and still plays in helping her to locate where in the world she is, and how to construe her neighbours and the needs of the world.
“In the ongoing play of my imagination, there is a strong tendency for me to impose on everything I experience some sort of story about sin and redemption. It becomes instinctual, this habit of mental organization. Wearing the eyeglasses of faith, I experience life as constantly following a narrative arc, wherein a problem is identified (something is wrong) and its solution is promised and sometimes delivered (salvation happens) … In the midst of all of life, Jesus is constantly being born, living, confronting sin, being nailed to the cross, and resurrected to life eternal with God.”
She speaks about neighbours and how she imagines them as one shaped by the story of salvation: “I cannot look at anyone without seeing Jesus loving him or her … It is impossible for me to frame humanity in any other way than as Jesus-loved — this is my gut response to people … We are all constantly walking with Jesus, friend or foe. He walks beside us, healing, teaching, challenging, provoking and comforting.
“When I think about the deep habits of mind shaped in me by the scriptural story, I realize that I have learned to glance continually at the border of any story to make sure nothing is excluded from it, and, if it is, to try to pull it into the main frame. I constantly see Jesus looking up at Zacchaeus in the tree or toward lepers living in caves outside the city walls … Call it a penchant for the marginal, a habit of mind that moves toward the edge of what we normally see in search of what we do not …”
Jones goes on to describe how her imaginative formation by the scriptural story through childhood and adult catechesis has made her suspicious of exclusions, of consumptive market capitalism, open to the surprising intrusions of God and delighted at life in a divinely enchanted world full of playful possibility.
I’m worried as a Presbyterian minister and a teacher of the church that we don’t do this much anymore. I worry that often we don’t seem to have the capacity to do this anymore. I sometimes think that in the church, marketing is having its way with us, as though the only way to talk about church is given by the frame it provides. I worry that we talk way too much about sex and conflict and not enough about baptism and Christian formation. I think that we’re way too fussed about reasonable order and not fired by imaginative ardour. I’m anxious that we get co-opted too often in the Christianity and culture relationship because we don’t have the resources to work this relationship critically from our side. “Accommodation is us.” I am mindful of Jeffrey Stout’s criticism of much of modern theology: it gives the impression that it doesn’t have anything to say that an atheist doesn’t already know.
I think that we’ll become interesting to our time and place again when, by means of biblically imaginative misreading of our times, we have something distinct and odd to say to the world. As Flannery O’Connor once said, “You will know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”
Reading the World with New Eyes
Recently, I drove out to Castlegar, B.C. My son attends Selkirk College, where he’s studying wildlife and fisheries management. I drove there alone. We loaded up the car and drove back together through the mountains.
As we were driving along, the whole way back, he was my interpreter. On the way there, I saw trees, mountainsides without trees and various flowers and shrubs and animals. On the way back, he kept telling me the Latin names for the trees. I learned that the Ponderosa Pine — the layperson’s name for the tree — has bark that is fire retardant. He told me that ungulates don’t like corridors; and that the angiosperms are blooming.
Wow! I thought. He’s experiencing the world in more subtle ways now. He inhabits the world differently. He can see what I cannot see. When you move from learning concepts and words to interpreting the world by means of those concepts and words, you’ve been gifted with an educated imagination. I stand in awe of what his instructors have accomplished.
What if we did that at church? What if we so educated the imagination that any baptized and professing Christian could interpret the world with growing subtlety and richness and truth? What if imagination was so stoked with scripture that the Spirit could get Christians to inhabit the world as the place where the promise-keeping God keeps covenant with the world in Christ? What if preaching and church school and sacraments and fellowship and theological education were all geared toward Spirit-enlivened imaginative training? What if instead of preferring to interpret the Christian church in a foreign idiom, we co-opted that language, and brought it into the captivity of the Christ-centered, scriptural narrative of reconciliation?
I think this takes Holy Spirit-inspired guts. I think some people will despise your efforts. I am sure you will be met with the accusation, “come on, be realistic,” right at the door after you preach. I am sure that someone will say, “there’s no pure gospel.” That’s because the imagination of some of your hearers has been so taken hostage by a certain time and place that they would rather believe you are lying than that God is an agent in the world. Modernity and late modernity are hostile to divine agency. My advice: just press on. I think you will begin to offer your prayers for illumination with a new sense of dependence on God. I think if you persist you might even come to appreciate the language of conversion all over again. And I think you will be incredibly weird, as the world measures weirdness, but you will be wonderfully interesting.
