Amy Plantinga Pauw

Covenant Network Conference
November 3, 2005

The Christian life is a material life. When we talk about spiritual practices we are not talking about an attempt to put our bodies to the side somehow and concentrate on the inner life of faith. Spiritual practices are about a way of conducting a bodily life. Practices involve gesture, posture, seeing, hearing, touching, speaking. Practices require a habituating of our bodies. When Itzhak Perlman picks up his violin, and you watch it become an extension of himself, you are witnessing a profound bodily habituation. Likewise with Christian spiritual practices. When Christians from Mali gather around a deathbed in the last hours of someone’s life and “sing them out” that is a deep bodily habituation. Practices are spiritual because they catch us up in the life of the Spirit, not because they are disembodied.

Nor are spiritual practices primarily an individual exercise. They are about a pattern of human existence lived out in community—a shared pattern that can be seen by others. This comes through so beautifully in Kathleen Norris’ reflections on spiritual practices. Because spiritual practices are rooted in communities they ineluctably involve issues of tradition, culture, and power. Spiritual practices are not a pious escape from these basic communal issues and struggles. During the time of slavery in our country, some of our Presbyterian forebears spoke about the spirituality of the church as a way to avoid confronting the maldistribution of power in their communities and the cruel and unjust treatment of human bodies. By contrast, I will assume that the spiritual practices of the church are about our material, bodily lives in community, with all the messiness, ambiguity and potential for conflict that bodies and communities involve. The good that God intends for the church has to be worked out in historical communities, and thus there is no way for our spiritual practices to avoid the processes of negotiation, error, confession, risk, and change. 

Spiritual practices involve negotiations of power. For example, no matter how modest its resources, every Christian community has economic power, and makes decisions about how that it to be exercised: stewarding material resources is a spiritual practice. Likewise, every Christian community has polity, that is, political, decisions to make about arranging its common life: shaping communities is a spiritual practice. As Larry Rasmussen has noted, the perennial Christian strategy is to gather the folks, break the bread, and tell the stories. But every Christian community has to figure out how people gather and who gets to break the bread and tell the stories; it’s those kinds of basic communal questions that have brought us here this weekend.

Spiritual practices are an attempt to catch up with and respond to God’s merciful and transforming presence in the world. Christians have been at this for a long time. When we engage in spiritual practices, we affirm our ties to an enormous community of faith that stretches across space and time, far beyond the confines of a single congregation or denomination. Yet the scope of spiritual practices is ultimately even broader. In one of his hymns, Brian Wren revels in “how grandly love intends to work till all creation sings.” Spiritual practices share this grand vision, and so cannot be confined to the inner lives of individuals, or even to the flourishing of one religious community. Spiritual practices are ultimately concerned with God’s intentions for all creation.

Hospitality, forgiveness, reading Scripture, giving and receiving, shaping communities, prayer, discernment, and healing are all examples of the kind of practices I have in mind. This afternoon we will be focusing especially on shaping communities. But spiritual practices are not items on an à la carte menu. They complement and deepen and strengthen each other. Together they form a coherent way of life in the world that God made and loves. Despite their great variety and dynamism, they are not “random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” They are instead intentional, communal ways of responding to God’s mysterious and uninvited initiative in our lives and gateways into deeper knowledge of God.

It is important to preserve both sides of this: practices as responses to God and as gateways to God. Spiritual practices are concrete responses to beliefs and convictions about God’s active presence. For example, we know God as gracious host, the One who welcomes us into a life-giving and life-sustaining network of relations with our fellow creatures and with God’s own self. And we respond by practicing hospitality in the limited confines of our own lives. In our practices we try to glorify God, that is, to reflect back just a little bit of the love, beauty and justice that God is. We do so trusting that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know how to pray, says the apostle Paul, but the Spirit intercedes for us. Likewise, we don’t know how to heal, how to forgive, how to discern God’s will, how to read Scripture. But we trust that in our modest attempts to practice our faith, the Spirit is present. So spiritual practices are a response to God, arising out of our deepest Christian convictions.

Practices are also gateways to knowing God that deepen and sometimes even challenge our Christian beliefs. There are some things you can know only by doing. Jonathan Edwards, one of my theological heroes, liked to say that the devil went to the best divinity schools–a comment, I suppose, on the best divinity schools as well as on the devil. What he meant was that, on one level, the devil’s intellectual grasp of the claims of Christian faith was excellent–but it was what Edwards called a speculative, notional knowledge. What was utterly missing were the practices of faith, and the love of God and neighbor that would unleash the transformative power of that knowledge in life-changing ways. In the same way, there is a distinctive knowledge of a religious tradition that is best attained within the framework of its ongoing practices. Engagement in these communal practices, over time, can give rise to new knowledge, to new capacities for perception, that are not otherwise accessible. Living within the circle of self-understanding of a religious tradition yields a special kind of knowing. While it may seem logical to achieve clarity about our convictions first and then to shape our spiritual practices accordingly, this is not the way it actually works in the life of faith. The theory/application model is inappropriate here. We are always figuring out what we believe in the midst of practicing our faith. Indeed, reflecting on our faith is itself a spiritual practice. A practicing Buddhist knows things about Buddhism that an expert in world religions cannot. Likewise, we may find that we acquire a deeper knowledge of God’s hospitality to all of creation only when we make some fumbling attempts to practice hospitality ourselves.

You’ve noticed by now that the way I’m talking about spiritual practices goes against a popular understanding of what is means to be spiritual. A common way of thinking about the spiritual life roots it in an inward religious experience that transcends words and social traditions. In this way of thinking, most of the time we operate within a socially constructed, ordinary view of reality. But there are those extraordinary moments when that reality collapses and we catch a glimpse of the transcendent, of a reality that is totally other. It is in these moments of private spiritual experience that one’s true religious identity is grounded. These experiences then receive institutional forms in practices and doctrines, but these concrete expressions never capture the vividness or the freedom of the original experience. Communal religious practices, in this view, are always at best domestications, if not distortions, of the original spiritual encounter with God. There is little sense that communal practices and traditions may be vehicles of divine presence, conveying God’s love and presence to us in ways that only social language and bodily actions make possible. So the claim that God meets us in the flesh, in our cultural, communal location in and through our embodied practices, is a bold one. It echoes the bold claim of the incarnation, that in Jesus Christ, God has taken on our flesh and made a home with us.

On the other hand, it is possible to make inflated claims for communal Christian practices as a failsafe means of forming Christian virtues and character and of commending the Christian faith to the world. Theological discussions of Christian practices sometimes paint an idealized picture of exemplary communal practices perfectly aligned with pious intentions and correct theological construals. The concrete history of Christian practices looks very different. It is an ambiguous history, marked by countless examples of good practices done for bad reasons, of once vibrant practices becoming confused and sinful, of communal practices becoming so strong that they dominate the conceptual space, degenerating into an unreflective “but we’ve always done it this way” mentality. The idealized picture of Christian practices glosses over issues of how decisions about communal practices are made, and the complex ways in which spiritual practices both resist and accommodate prevailing cultural norms. When you look at the spiritual practices of real live Christians, you can see why some are tempted to champion private spiritual rapture as the foundation for Christian experience of God. Embodied, communal spiritual practices are a messy and ambiguous business.

Yet it is there in the mess and ambiguity that we meet God’s grace. Hence one of the meanings of my title, Graceful Practices. Spiritual practices are grace-filled because they are places in our ambiguous lives where God meets us, where the most important thing we can do is to show up, open to God’s work in our hearts and our communities. This stress on grace is crucial, because a focus on practices can tempt us to turn our gaze away from God’s grace towards our own spiritual accomplishments. Spiritual practices are not merit badges, something to which we can point to assure ourselves of our exemplary life and our worthiness to stand before God. They are not a proof of our moral integrity by which we convince others of the rightness of our faith. As David Kelsey has recently argued, “living in trust that our lives are justified by what we do in accord with standards of excellence lies at the very heart of sin. What we do sinfully need not even be immoral; even if what we do is morally good, it is sin if we trust the doing of it to show that our lives are worth living.”(1) To call practices graceful is to remind ourselves that practices are like holding out our hand to receive the bread of life at communion. They are a communal act of faith that is at the same time a concrete acknowledgment that we are not whole, that we are not at peace, that we need healing and nourishment that we cannot provide for ourselves. Practices are an acknowledgment of our ongoing need for grace, and at the same time they are structured ways of showing gratitude for the grace God has already bestowed on us.

The title Graceful Practices also implies that we try to step gracefully in practicing our faith. We try to live, as Paul says in Colossians 3, as if we had truly been raised with Christ—clothed “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience” (Col. 3:12). This is particularly important in practices like shaping community and reading Scripture, which have not always been conspicuous showcases for Christian kindness and humility. To practice our faith gracefully, we do not plow down those who stand in our way. We give an honest account of our gospel convictions and practices and stand behind them, but we do this, as I Peter 3:16 counsels, with gentleness and reverence. Since God has justified us by grace, and not on the basis of our exemplary beliefs and practices, we have room to be graceful with those who disagree with us. We can put away our badges of victimhood and progressive farsightedness and acknowledge that all of us still see through a mirror darkly. Graceful practices resist the temptations of strident dismissiveness or smug intolerance. Graceful practices leave room for generosity, even in disappointment and defeat.

Of course, graceful practices do not eliminate disagreement. You might even say that they make genuine disagreement possible, by dismantling the self-protective mechanisms that keep us from really listening to each other. The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre has defined a tradition as an ongoing argument—to those of you who are part of the Presbyterian tradition, this definition will come as no surprise. His point is that conflict in inherent in tradition because of a built-in unpredictability about what the excellence of an ongoing tradition requires. You need both rule-breaking and rule-keeping, MacIntyre insists, for a living tradition to flourish. Rosa Parks, whose life our whole nation has been celebrating this week, is an eloquent example of how rule-breaking was required for the flourishing of the American tradition. But unfortunately, says MacIntyre, we have no rules to tell us whether it is rule-keeping or rule-breaking that is required in a given situation. So we argue.

In the realm of spiritual practices, we are not arguing about whether to preserve foundational Christian practices like breaking the bread and telling the stories. We are not arguing about the necessity of a practice of common prayer, about the need for mutual confession and forgiveness. We’re not arguing over the need for shaping communities by the Word and Spirit. We’re arguing about the rules that contribute to doing all these things decently and in good order. Presbyterianism has argued that these kinds of rules are desperately needed to keep human communities from tumbling into chaos. But the Presbyterian tradition has also insisted that these kinds of rules are subject to pragmatic and prayerful re-evaluation from time to time. We are given no complete set of operating instructions for the Christian life, no infallible Book of Order. And as the missiologist Andrew Walls has noted in another context, God has a tendency to make tender mockery out of all the particular forms of church government to which Christians have earnestly devoted themselves. (2)

Shaping Communities

This afternoon we will be looking at the practices of shaping communities. As a Reformed theologian, sooner or later I find myself reading John Calvin. In particular I have been looking at his letters of Ecclesiastical Advice, where he deals with the challenges of shaping Christian community and in particular with qualifications for ministerial leadership.(3) His sixteenth-century Genevan context is very different from ours, but, I will argue, supplies some provocative analogies. Calvin was a second-generation reformer. The break with the church of Rome, which was not the original intent of sixteenth-century reform movements, was pretty much decided by then. So Calvin’s most pressing concern was to figure out what an alternative church order might look like.

The perception of scandalous failings in the established church significantly shaped Calvin’s ecclesiology from the beginning. He had to accommodate the conviction that dissent from the visible church in his time was a Christian duty because of the corruption of key Christian practices. According to Calvin, God has entrusted the church with the “power of the keys” (Matt. 16:19), but Christian communities can so abuse this trust that in them “Christ lies hidden, half buried, the gospel overthrown, piety scattered, the worship of God nearly wiped out.”(4) Christian practices can become so corrupted that the life and health of the church is imperiled. Thus a Reformed doctrine of the church is rightly marked by a stark recognition of the church’s fallibility.

Calvin’s approach rejects the kind of restorationist wistfulness you sometimes find in appeals to return to established spiritual practices of the church. In Calvin’s view, while the great company of Christian saints deserves our respect and gratitude, they suffered from human infirmity and weakness as much as we do, and provide no perfect blueprint for Christian community. The words of the 1560 Scots Confession reflect Calvin’s realism about the church: “We do not receive uncritically whatever has been declared to men under the name of the general councils, for it is plain that, being human, some of them have manifestly erred, and that in matters of great weight and importance.” Significant elements from the church’s past may deserve retrieval, but no “policy or order of ceremonies can be appointed for all ages, times, and places.”(5) For example, Calvin thought that the structures of church office were relative to particular historical contexts. Whereas in the early church the office of evangelist was vital, he asserted that “in duly constituted churches it has no place.” (6) Contemporary Reformed communities would take issue with Calvin on this point. But they would agree with him that the central Reformed task is not the retrieval or maintenance of a historic rule regarding church office but the prayerful, communal discernment of the present form of ecclesial faithfulness, which may involve significant institutional change.

Calvin was wary of extravagant claims for the holiness of clergy. Even church leaders have countless weaknesses and are justified not by their holiness but by God’s grace. Ministers of the gospel do not necessarily tower over other Christians in wisdom or spiritual maturity. Calvin’s frank appraisal of the ordinariness of pastors bears repeating: “when a puny man risen from the dust speaks in God’s name, at this point we best evidence our piety and obedience toward God if we show ourselves teachable toward his minister, although he excels us in nothing.”(7)American Presbyterianism’s big advance on Calvin’s view of ministers is that in the last fifty years or so we’ve affirmed that God also raises puny women from the dust.

As the body of Christ in the world, the church is a broken and diseased body, mirroring the ills and divisions of the larger society. Yet even when its practices become corrupted, the church remains a mysteriously powerful channel of God’s grace to us. “I would even be in despair,” says Calvin, “if it did not occur to me that the building up of the church is always God’s work, and that he will cause it to prosper by his own virtue even if all supports should fail us.”(8) The church is a nursery of piety, where Christians are schooled by worship, teaching, and discipline into deeper communion with Christ and each other. The earthly community of believers is God’s gracious accommodation to our spiritual weakness. In union with Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the cracked earthen vessel of the church continues to be a means of grace—a locus for worship and for personal and social transformation.

As Presbyterians, we have inherited this understanding of the church: a fallible body of believers led by ordinary people, called to faithful discernment about the appropriate form of their communal practices, and resting on God’s abundant grace not their own holiness. We share Calvin’s conviction that spiritual practices can get corrupted, and that even good practices need reform as the needs of the church change.

Let’s look more closely at Calvin’s ecclesiastical advice. He is writing to a Reformed community to make the argument “that celibacy should not be required in a minister.”(9) He starts his argument on a conciliatory note. There is certainly “a reasonable basis” for advising celibacy. Marriage can be a distraction from the Lord’s work and continence in sexual matters lends “not a little dignity to the holy ministry.” Furthermore, Calvin is very pleased that the church authorities are not using “pressure or tyranny to force celibacy upon those who hold ecclesiastical office.” That would be wrong, Calvin thinks. Instead, the church authorities are trying to convince ministerial candidates of what they “judge to be in the best interests of the church.” Yet Calvin respectfully disagrees with their judgment. “Celibacy has its own disadvantages,” Calvin insists, and “these are considerable and not all of one type.” He clarifies that he is not yet talking about “the difficulty of sexual continence.” “Even if it were agreed that nothing is more liberating than celibacy and nothing more impeding than marriage, it still should not keep us from taking thought for need. It is certain that many who are otherwise suited for the ministry cannot usefully do without marriage.” Calvin’s view is that celibacy and marriage can each present hindrances for ministers, and it is best to assess individual need, rather than making a blanket policy. 

Calvin has another argument. “In the second place, I reply that the Lord has provided, best of all, the gifts that properly adorn his ministry, and we see that celibacy is not among them.” Calvin is worried that the church’s ordination practices have become corrupted. “There was no law requiring celibacy in the early church, but an absurd admiration for it became so strong that marriage was condemned as shameful for bishops. Afterward, the severity of a law gradually crept in and has produced countless forms of evils for us. What good it has brought I cannot judge,” says Calvin. “I always fear that it is dangerous for celibacy to be honored extravagantly, for good men may be frightened away from marriage, even when their need of it is urgent.” So even though the church authorities to whom Calvin is writing are not commanding celibacy “by a definite law,” Calvin is worried that they are “in effect establishing a law” when they “consider married men of less value, as if they have lost some adornment.” If celibacy is not among the gifts that God has provided to adorn the church’s ministry, then it is wrong to consider people who lack this gift as being of less value. In Calvin’s view, the rule of celibacy has produced countless forms of evils in the church, and must be reconsidered.

Calvin has one more argument. Even if the church authorities find that encouraging celibacy is not “an obstacle for [them] at present,” that is not reason enough to continue this practice. “Austerity” about this matter, he says, “can be a great obstacle to future generations, for whom, as you know, we must take thought.” We should take care lest our unduly austere practices exert pressure and tyranny on future generations of Christians who may be living in quite different circumstances.

Calvin is not arguing that celibacy is bad. He is worried that celibacy, while a good in itself, can become an idol, a law which Christians used to justify themselves, to proclaim their own righteousness, and to tyrannize others. He sees all kinds of practical problems with it, does not think that God requires it for ministry, and is worried about setting a bad precedent for future generations.

But in reforming the church’s practices around ministerial leadership, Calvin was not given a blank slate. Pastoral celibacy had been the accepted western rule for centuries by Calvin’s time. Celibacy was exemplified by Jesus himself, advocated by the apostle Paul, and revered as a mark of Christian holiness. It was an established rule in the practice of shaping church communities. So let’s try to imagine the kind of criticism Calvin and other Protestant reformers invited from traditionalists when they challenged this rule of celibacy. “What do you mean that celibacy is not required of all who are called to be ministers? Surely it works the other way around—if you don’t have the ability to live a celibate life, you weren’t called to be a minister in the first place. What gives you the right to lower the church’s standards of holiness? Should anyone with what you call an “urgent need for marriage” be a pastor in the first place? An “urgent need for marriage” is not something we should even be talking about in connection with the pastoral vocation. It points to a moral deficit. It degrades the whole notion of priestly calling. This only confirms our suspicions about you self-appointed “reformers”—you are an undisciplined, immoral lot. Celibacy requirements go against your libertine inclinations and so you want to overturn centuries of church tradition. Look, we welcome undisciplined people with an “urgent need for marriage” to be baptized members of the church. But if you are a self-acknowledged, unrepentant, practicing heterosexual, there is no place for you in the priesthood.”

            As I look around the Presbyterian church today I don’t see much “absurd admiration” for celibacy anymore. If there is anything that is “honored extravagantly” in our church context, it is heterosexual marriage. In fact, I suspect it has become what celibacy was for the church in Calvin’s time. All the research tells us that what Protestant churches now see as the ideal pastoral candidate is a married man.Just as Calvin worried about the rule of celibacy in the sixteenth century, we must be concerned about the way we treat heterosexual marriage. Do we exhibit “absurd admiration” for it as a mark of ministerial fitness? Do we equate honoring heterosexual marriage with upholding sexual morality? Do we consider unmarried people of less value, as if they have lost some adornment? Though we are not tyrannical about requiring heterosexual marriage for ministers, are we letting “the severity of a law” creep in? Is our honoring of heterosexual marriage frightening good people away from pursuing the calling God has given them?

Don’t get me wrong. I am a great supporter of heterosexual marriage. I myself have been happily married for 23 years and I am the mother of three children. I am in agreement with Gene Rogers that a healthy marriage is a great gift, and that the commitment and sacrifice that marriage requires can advance us on our path of sanctification. But just as Calvin worried about celibacy, I worry that the honoring of heterosexual marriage, while a good in itself, can become an idol, a law which Christians use to justify themselves, to proclaim their own righteousness. We see this kind of attitude exemplified in the recent comment to a group of Christians by Indiana Representative John Hostettler: “The picture of marriage is the picture of Christian salvation.”While it’s rare to hear Christians say it that bluntly, I suspect it is not an uncommon assumption. We need to hear Calvin’s caution about extravagantly honoring something that God does not require for ministry and that sets a damaging precedent for the future of the church.

From our vantage point, the preference for celibacy among the church authorities whom Calvin counseled looks like a way of avoiding a frank discussion of ministers’ emotional and physical needs and desires. “We do not know what to do with the relational needs and desires of ministers, so let’s just try to keep those who acknowledge them and do not feel they have received the gift of celibacy out of the ministry altogether. It’s simpler and less awkward all round.” Many church folk today still feel the same way: honest, sober conversation about relational matters is awkward and uncomfortable. The fact that the larger western society is emotionally stunted and sex-saturated makes honest, sober conversation more, rather than less, difficult. And I think that helps explain the strong Protestant bias toward married clergy. The assumption is that with married ministers, none of these delicate questions have to come up. We can just assume that all is well in these sensitive areas and focus on important things like their administrative skills. We of course know better than that. Through painful experience the church has found that neither celibacy nor heterosexual marriage is a guarantee of sexual and emotional health and personal holiness. Questions about relational health and holiness are ones that all Christians must face and wrestle with.

It seems to me that without this kind of conversation, the move to change ordination standards is incoherent. We have to be willing to answer the question the Peace, Unity and Purity taskforce asks: “How does God’s gracious drama of creation, reconciliation, and redemption work itself out in the lives of baptized gay and lesbian persons who are committed to exclusive, covenanted relationships?” As in the case of covenanted heterosexual relationships, we must, in Andrew Sullivan’s words, “avoid glamorizing and idealizing the whole venture,” recognizing that “uniting sexual longing and emotional commitment is a troubling and troublesome mission” for everyone, gay or straight.(10) But just as Calvin was certain that “many who are otherwise suited for the ministry cannot usefully do without marriage,” so we assert that many who are suited for the ministry can usefully do without heterosexual marriage, including those who are single, divorced, or in exclusive, covenanted same-sex relationships.

In reflecting on these matters, we have to preserve Calvin’s insight that both the present needs of the individual and the long term needs of the community must be taken into account. By needs of the individual, Calvin includes what he calls “the needs of nature.” He thinks that in establishing the standards for ministers, the church must be wary of making rules that attempt to abolish the laws of nature. What are these laws of nature? Calvin gives a rather unconvincing example. Appealing to I Corinthians 11, Calvin says that when Paul “teaches that it is shameful and unbecoming for women to go into public places with their heads uncovered, he is telling us to take advice from nature as to whether it is proper for women to be in public with their hair cut short, and finally he concludes that nature does not allow it.”(11)This example is unconvincing because it exposes the fact that our understandings of what “nature allows” are culturally conditioned and so change over time. I daresay that few people on either side of the current ordination debate would agree with the apostle Paul that it goes against nature for women to be in public with their hair cut short. But Calvin is right in that we do need to pay attention to the laws of nature, as best as we can ascertain them. For many of us who advocate a change in ordination standards, a decisive issue has been our acceptance of the evolving scientific and cultural understandings of nature, leading us to conclude that consistent same-sex desires are not “against nature” for some of God’s children.

We should also preserve Calvin’s insight that even rules that have served the church well in the past should not be foisted on future generations as non-negotiable. We have to think with sympathetic imagination about the well-being of the future church. It is possible that tomorrow’s church may require new rules for its flourishing. Our faithfulness is not to a particular configuration of our common life, but to the promise that God’s grace in Jesus Christ will accompany us in the spiritual practice of shaping community.

I see in Calvin an attempt at graceful spiritual practice around the contentious issue of ministerial leadership. He concedes that the weight of church tradition is on his opponents’ side; the proposal to accept married clergy was in a bold and risky one in that context. Calvin does not pretend that he has it all correct or that church order will never have to be rethought. He is doing his best to put together Scripture’s witness and pastoral and personal realities, trusting not in the exemplariness of the church’s practices of shaping community, but in the God who meets Christians in their searching and struggling to be faithful.

Shaping Readers of Scripture

A related question is how we go about shaping graceful communities of readers of Scripture. One of the most heartening things for me about the deliberations of the Peace, Unity and Purity taskforce was their insistence on studying Scripture together. They found that Bible study in diverse groups “enriches our understandings and corrects our misunderstandings and helps us wrestle with God’s word more deeply and honestly.” When those who disagree agree at least to stay in the same room, studying the same Scripture, then the way is open for a deeper and more honest wrestling with God’s word. Bible study in communities of the like-minded has its place. But it does not bear the same gracious promise of enriching our understandings and correcting our misunderstandings. The truth about contentious matters seems so clear when you can just get those who disagree with you to go away! But that is not a shortcut to becoming a graceful community of readers.

Reading Scripture is a communal practice. The sensus fidei, the mind of the faithful, deserves a respectful hearing, even when its opinions fall short of moral unanimity. Respecting the mind of the faithful requires listening to the voices of GLBT people and their allies. But it also involves listening to those who out of scriptural convictions oppose a change in ordination standards. For example, are we willing to listen to our Christian brothers and sisters in the global south on this issue? Are we willing to read Scripture with them? If not, doesn’t our push to change ordination standards risk being perceived as a unilateral maneuver all too reminiscent of American foreign policy? Won’t it risk looking like an American pursuit of their own ecclesial interests without much worry about their impact on the rest of the world? What does graceful practice require here?

We need the help of the Spirit in reading Scripture gracefully. Our confidence in holding “the biblical view” has been shaken so many times across church history. Is the earth the center of the universe? Is the pope the antichrist? Is slavery in accordance with God’s will? Is divorce ever permissible for Christians? On these and many other subjects Christians in different time and places have changed their minds on what “the biblical view” is. This change of mind is usually brought about through the web of spiritual practices, rather than feats of exegetical brilliance. It happens through prayer, repentance, efforts at reconciliation, largehearted attention to the spiritual gifts and discernments of others. Christian history has shown us again and again that one of the most spiritually dangerous questions we can ask is: “What does the Bible say about them?” Whether it’s Christians asking that question about Jews, men asking that question about women, slaveowners asking that question about slaves, Protestants asking that question about Catholics, straight people asking that question about GLBT people, church history has shown us that when we ask that question—what does the Bible say about them—we often hear a self-justifying answer. As we gather here in support of the goals of the Covenant Network, we too have to be on guard against this. How easy—and how alienating—it is to compare those who disagree with us to the Pharisees, to the circumcision party, to those who are tone deaf to the new thing God is doing. When we are surrounded only by our like-minded friends, it is tempting to read the Bible in graceless ways, ways that reinforce rather than challenge our comfortable perceptions of ourselves and others.

We’re on much firmer spiritual ground in our practice of shaping readers of Scripture when our question is, “what does the Bible say about us?” That question presupposes a community, a community not always in internal agreement, but willing to place its life before the witness of Scripture and to ask for discernment. Our aim in the communal reading of Scripture, as the Catholic priest James Alison has said, is to give glory to God and to create “merciful meaning for our sisters and brothers as we come to be possessed by the Spirit” of the crucified and risen Jesus. A graceful practice of shaping a community of Scripture readers will aim at “undoing our violent and evil ways of relating to each other,” and show us “how together to enter into the way of penitence and peace.”(12)

Within a Reformed theological framework, this Christian purification and transformation are understood to extend over lifetimes. That is why we need the church. God’s grace works by creating this communal space where sin can be repented of and forgiven, where brokenness can be healed. Spiritual practices within the community of the church are not badges of spiritual accomplishment but means by which we are opened to God’s transforming grace. “We take great pains,” says Calvin, “to prevent anyone from deceiving himself by boasting of his works, and we openly teach that we can do nothing good without the guidance of God’s Spirit. We have countless weaknesses, and nothing in us is strong of itself or of any consequence in proving our worthiness before God. The only foundation for that holy living which constitutes genuine righteousness is to cast everything else behind us and embrace the cross and death of Christ with both hands.”(13) God’s grace is the only foundation for holy living: let us practice our faith gracefully.

1- David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 57.

2 – Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004), 246.

3 – John Calvin, Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Advice, trans. Mary Beaty and Benjamin Farley (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991).

4 – John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster,1960), 4.2.12.

5 – PCUSA Book of Confessions, 3:20.

6 – Calvin, Institutes, 4.3.4.

7 – Calvin, Institutes, 4.3.1.

8 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 114.

9 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 112-116. The quotations from Calvin in the next three paragraphs are all taken from these pages. See also Paul E. Capetz, “Binding and Unbinding the Conscience: Luther’s Significance for the Plight of a Gay Protestant,” Theology and Sexuality 16 (March 2002): 67-96.

10 – Andrew Sullivan, “Alone Again, Naturally,” in Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Reading, ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 287.

11 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 128.

12 – James Alison, “‘But the Bible says…’? A Catholic Reading of Romans 1,” xiv-xv.

13 – Calvin, Ecclesiastical Advice, 56

Luke Timothy Johnson

Woodruff Professor of
New Testament and Christian Origins

Candler School of Theology, Emory University

November 6, 2004

Thank you very much for asking me to be here with you. I am honored to be with you this morning, although as I stand before you to talk on the subject of Sexuality and Holiness in the Church, I don’t know whether this is an act of stupidity or valor. These are three of the most important and difficult subjects imaginable.

The issue of sexuality doesn’t need to be advertised in order for us to regard it as important. That is one of the reasons we have come together. It is in the headlines. It is in the elections. It is in our church controversies. And it is just interesting!

But sexuality is of importance for us right now, I think, because it intersects these other two realities, namely Holiness and the Church. And whether or not sex was on our minds, the Church and its holiness remain the most important, disputed questions facing Christians today, as they have faced earlier generations of Christians; and we are obliged to grapple with them as were previous generations of Christians.

I want to begin with the difficulties of each of these subjects, taking them in turn – not that you are unaware of them, but so that we can have a kind of a shared framework as we move forward in our conversation, which I hope it will eventually turn out to be, and to keep our expectations realistically low.

To begin then with Sexuality, it seems to me that we have five kinds of issues here. The first is (and I think we always need to begin here) that our emotions are involved. And I’m not simply talking about our sexual feelings and our sexual passions and the unexpected leanings and longings of our hearts and our bodies, but I’m talking about powerful emotions of fear and of anger, of guilt and shame, whether imposed on us or interjected by us, and a widely pervasive distrust. I think that we need to begin and acknowledge the fact that none of us are free from emotion as we approach the subject of sexuality today.

The second issue is that each of us is subjective. Each of us brings a story to this topic. No one comes to the subject of sexuality in the church either neutral or innocent. We are all implicated. Some of us have abused. Some of us have been abused. Some of us have used. Some of us have been used. Some of us should be ashamed, and some of us have had shame put upon us. We all bring these tangled stories. Each of us has a tangled story to tell with regard to sexuality, which is, by the way, not entirely perspicuous even to the person whose story it is. None of us, I think, knows ourselves that well. If we were as honest with each other as we would like to be, I think that many of us would want to say that sexual identity is not a fixed point but rather a sliding scale of sexual expression, feeling, and desire that never stands still until we die.

The third problem with sexuality is that it is not a problem. It is a mystery. Here I mean that human sexuality is a matter of embodiedness. It is not, therefore, as Gabriel Marcel has reminded us about all things in which body and spirit touch, a problem to be fixed like a broken carburetor. It is, rather, a mystery which is to be at once celebrated and suffered. We cannot detach ourselves from our own sexual embodiedness without distorting the subject. We are implicated in our sexual bodies. In this respect, sexuality is very much like our relationship to our bodies with regard to being and having possessions, only more so. We are at that delicate place in human reality where bodies express Spirit, and Spirit needs a body in order to express itself, and the spirit is implicated in the dispositions of the body.

The fourth reason why sexuality is complicated today is that all of us have a sense of disordered forms of sexuality in our culture. We would be fools to deny this: pervasive voyeurism, pornography, prostitution, the sexualization of the media, of advertising. The victims are above all among our children and among the youth of this country, and we are quite rightly deeply anxious about the way in which the distinction between “selling sex” and “sex sells” is almost indistinguishable.

And finally, fifthly, all of us certainly in this place recognize and are angry at the phenomenon of scape-goating — the focusing in the church and in the culture on homosexuality, that wonderfully abstract term, as a form of disorder that can be othered, and therefore can be considered outside the pale and allow the church and society not to look at the pervasive disorderedness of sexuality across the board. It is a massive form of deflection from what needs paying attention to. I find it fascinating, for example, that we have all of this stuff about homosexuality, and churches meeting in conferences and convocations and gatherings and so forth, while the church seems utterly silent in its inability to speak about the reality of a multi-billion dollar pornographic industry. Yet by the simple process of deduction, the promoters of that industry are male Christians, presumably mostly heterosexual.

Our thinking about the Church is equally complex and conflicted. Here also we have individual stories and attendant emotions. Some of us have a sense of grief at the loss of a church that we once had, or fear of a threat of change in the church, or anger at the church’s refusal to change. Some of us come as immigrants from other traditions seeking a saner place here in this communion, and others of us have been made to feel as strangers within their own place — I think the technical word is “alienation”

But beyond those emotional reactions and those multiple stories is the plain fact that we don’t share an understanding of Church. That’s the real difficulty. We are not on the same page in our understanding of what Church is.

Here some of the elements that are up for grabs. Where is the church? Is the church in the local assembly, primarily, where two or three are gathered, and the Spirit moves in acts of worship and of healing; or is the church more powerfully present in the denomination and its organizational mechanisms; or is it, perhaps more importantly, found ecumenically? That is a matter of place.

But what about our sense of the church? Here, I think, we have really widely differing views. Do we regard the church, as so many Christians in America today do, as a voluntary association, a place of services that are offered, a place that we join because of its market niche, or because it agrees with us, or because it offers us services that we can’t find somewhere else? With that understanding of the church as a voluntary association, we can expect the church to ask very little of us. We can just go down the street to the other club that will accept us on our own terms. Or is our church more properly Reformed in character? Do we understand the church in strongly covenantal terms, that we have been called by God into covenant, and that covenant places upon us real and deep obligations to God and to our neighbors, and that therefore we can, both in private and public, expect our neighbors to support us and to challenge us when we fail to keep covenant as we also are obliged to challenge and question our neighbors when they do not meet the covenant? Or do we have a sense of the church which is ontological: the mystical body of Christ, the place where the resurrected Jesus is powerfully present among us?

Those are three very different visions of what we are about in the church. We don’t agree, I expect, in this room, on the marks of the church and how important they are: One, Catholic, Apostolic, and Holy. Above all, I don’t think, we agree on what the politics of those four marks of the church should be. Is the church One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic in terms of an eschatological hope only; or is there a manner in which holiness, oneness, Catholicity, and apostolicity can be expressed politically and visibly within the communion?

This brings us, finally, to the subject of holiness, which is, perhaps, the hardest of all. Again, here are individual stories, and our emotions are frequently running in opposite directions. People of my age tend to be running in fear and some relief from a heritage of holiness which can roughly be identified with the Puritan or Jansenistic past, in which holiness was set against witchcraft and godlessness of all sorts. But as we are running (my folks) in one direction, we are meeting our children running in the opposite direction from the moral relativism of the Sixty’s and all that represents — namely us. I am not sure, especially within the Reformed tradition, how much it’s allowed to talk about holiness. There are some very substantial kinds of issues, it seems to me. One is a connection between the religious reality in which we find ourselves and moral behavior. How do faith and virtue connect? Secondly, once more, is it personal and individual, or is it public and political?

Now, on the personal side, it seems to me that one of the reasons why “practices” is now such a buzz word in Protestant theology — that is the practicing of our faith, the practice of prayer, the practice of hospitality, the practice of fasting, the practice of alms-giving, the practices of chastity and modesty, even of the custody of the senses — the reason why Protestant theologians far and wide are beginning to try to think about practices and shared practices is that we don’t do them. That’s why Protestant theologians have been looking to us Catholics and saying, “Teach us about these things.” That would have been great if we had not given them up just a couple of decades ago, too. I think it is safe to say that most of us do not have a highly structured notion of what personal holiness looks like in terms of the practices of faith.

We also have a difficulty with regard to the public dimension. I think all of us will sort of acknowledge that the Eisenhower era was the one of very clear private virtue which was comfortable with various forms of public vice, and the Clinton era, in opposition, was one that was very deeply committed to public virtue (this was the generation of the Sixties), but was also equally comfortable with private vice; and in each case, you see, sex was a player. For the Eisenhower era, private, domestic sexual morality counted entirely. Issues of gender didn’t matter. Issues of segregation, issues of repression didn’t matter. Certainly those of us who came from the Sixties were all about non-discrimination, were all about gender issues, power issues, and egalitarianism. But it is not quite clear how we connect that with things that are going on with our bodies, that is to say in private (if anything is private). And none of us have a very clear sense of what should be regulated and observed and open and is anybody else’s business! So we exist in a society in which it is possible for abortion not to be a criminal action, but in which a mother who brings a child to term but has taken cocaine or is drunk and bears a damaged child can be subject to criminal charges. None of us want to be regulated, but all of us want to regulate — at least on the issue of carcinogens, and so forth. This is a very confused time in which we’ve got all of this stuff going on.

So, what do we make of the fact that holiness is a mark of the church? What do you and I understand by that? That’s our challenge, and once we understand something about it, what are we going to do about it?

Another very difficult issue is, how we bring Scripture to bear on these questions, as a resource for trying to think together as church — about church, about holiness, and about sexuality. And once more we find ourselves in disputed and troubled waters. Let me say immediately that I simply reject the usefulness of two forms of modernity with regard to Scripture, named Fundamentalism and Historical Criticism. Fundamentalism distorts the witness of Scripture by paying no attention to the context of language, either in the past or in the present, and assuming that the past can speak directly to the present without remainder, and the traffic moves only in one direction. Fundamentalism is, in effect, a denial of the Living God. But so is Historical Criticism. Historical Criticism distorts the witness of Scripture because it keeps the text simply in the past and deprives Scripture of its prophetic force, and so equally denies the Living God.

We need a more complex form of conversation with Scripture. Let me recommend two things for our consideration. The first is that we need to work hard to cultivate theological imagination. One of the worst things that happened in the Enlightenment is that the imagination was banished to the epistemological attic. The only thing that counted was the empirically verifiable. We all became Positivists. We all became, in Brooks Holifield’s wonderful phrase, “Baconian evidentialists.” (We did, but you may not have noticed!)

We need to recover and embrace a Scriptural imagination, to imagine the world as Scripture imagines it, not looking for proof texts, not trying to do an archeological dig, but trying to recover the sense of Scripture as a living city in which we are citizens and whose language we know and whose byways we know, because we live there.

The second thing we need to cultivate is a loyal and critical engagement with the imaginative world of Scripture. I emphasize both things because they go together. You can only be critical if you are loyal; and the deepest form of loyalty is criticism: the criticism which doesn’t simply question the ancient text but questions the ones who approach this text. And that means listening to Scripture together with the other formative sources of our life — tradition, reason, and the experience of God and the world, above all the experience of God as discerned in real human lives today. Theology is an inductive art. Its business is trying to catch up with what the Living God is doing in the world. We begin there; and then we try to figure out how Scripture can speak prophetically to it.

So, what I want to do this morning with you is to recommend that we engage Paul in a conversation about Church, Holiness, and Sexuality, briefly, to be sure. This is a conversation opener, not a closer.

Paul is a good place to begin to prompt our thinking on these subjects, for three reasons. First, Paul has the most powerful understanding of this new thing that has happened in Jesus. For Paul the resurrection is not a historical event of the past that is adequately understood as the resuscitation of Jesus. For Paul, the resurrection affects all of us. Jesus, the last Adam, has become life-giving Spirit. The resurrection reality is the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh, and therefore the reality of Jesus as Lord, not in the past but in the present, in whose name we have gathered today, affects and determines all other relationships through time and space, and all other bodies through time and space. For Paul the resurrection is not simply a new covenant, it is a new creation. “If anybody is in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) kaine ktisis, it is a new creation. Ta archaia parelthen. The old things have gone away. Idou gegonen kaina. Behold, all things are new.”

But second, Paul is important because he understands that these new and eschatological and creation-renewing experiences of the living God find embodiment, have to be worked out, in bodies of the first creation, and that we are not in the end time totally yet. And therefore there is always going to be stress and tension between the first creation and the new creation, between the new human and the old human, between flesh and spirit. To make matters more complicated for Paul, he knew that these forms of embodiment had to be worked out among urban Christians of the first century who were multi-cultural and came from very different understandings of how bodies should mean in the world, whether coming from the side of Judaism or coming from the side of Greco-Roman culture. Different cultures, different traditions, different perceptions.

And Paul had to try to figure out what these new realities meant in terms of an ecclesia, a church, which met in a household, and so we always find a stress and a tension in Paul between the utopian ideals — in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek — and the social realities of the household, in which gender and social status meant a great deal indeed. The reason why Paul is so valuable to us is that he shows us both poles of that tension without reducing them. That is his great gift to us, because the same tensions exist today. No matter how profoundly egalitarian our ideals, we must always come up against the hard intractable elements of bodies and cultures and different perceptions of how societies should work.

Thirdly, Paul is important for us to engage because his characteristic demand of his communities is that they think. [A pause for reflection.] Let’s face it. It’s why we don’t like Paul. It’s not his personality. It’s the fact that he’s a thinker, and he asks us to think. We don’t want to think. It doesn’t matter what side of the debates you are on. Most of us (let’s be honest) would rather put it on a bumper sticker and drive off. Thinking is hard. Thinking demands stuff of us. So Paul asks them to discern, to think about the connections between the power of the resurrected Lord poured out on this community, and specific ways of being embodied, specific ways of acting in the world. And he provides for them a measure for that thinking that he calls “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16) or the pattern of the Messiah (Galatians 6:2). That ought to be, as well, the measure of our thinking.

Paul, then, is most important not because he solves or creates our problems, but because he gives us exactly what we need to struggle with. And so the point is not learning Paul, and the point is not dictating to Paul. The point is thinking with Paul.

Now very quickly let me touch on the three topics here that we have selected for today: Paul’s view of the Church; Paul’s view of holiness; and finally Paul’s understanding of sexuality. On one side Paul’s view of the church as you know is extraordinarily strong and high. He falls into that Body-of-Christ ontological understanding of the church. We have all drunk the one Spirit, he says, and therefore we are the one body of Christ. If you were to ask Paul, “Where is the resurrected body of Jesus?” he would say, “Look around.” The church is the body of the resurrected One. We are “in the Lord.” We are “in Christ,” that characteristic Pauline language of the deepest kind of intimacy between the risen Lord who, because he shares the life of God can be more intimately present to our body than we can be to each other’s body. So that all relationships are defined by this relationship to the Lord.

At the same time, Paul recognizes how astonishing fragile his actual communities are, so we have this ideal of the church as the body of Christ; and yet he recognizes sociologically his communities are these fragile, intentional communities that are parasitic on Jewish and Graeco-Roman cultures but don’t belong to either one. They are sort of free-floating household churches that have absolutely no basis for continuation in the world except their shared collusion in understanding that they have been called out from the world to be together in the power of the Lord. So, for Paul, one of the most important elements in the life of the church is what he calls oikodome, edification, building the community. Over and over again when Paul asks what should be done in the community, his answer is, “Does it build the community in its own distinctive identity?” This is going to be so characteristic of Paul. “It’s not about me, it’s about the community.” Interesting, you see, that for Paul, even gifts of the Holy Spirit might not build the community. This is the case of glossalalia or tongues. Speaking in tongues is perfectly fine. You can pray it, you can sing it, you can do all this stuff; but unless it is translated and can build the community, it has got to be kept under control. The test is not spirituality but church. What builds the church in its distinctive identity? The point is not, what makes me feel good? The point is what supports and strengthens God’s presence in the world?

Again, on the subject of holiness, Paul’s view is, first, amazingly strong. They have been sanctified. They are the saints. They have been given the Holy Spirit. They are the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The church is holy in its very identity. Holiness is a gift to the church because the church lives and breathes by the Holy Spirit of God.

But, Paul says, holiness is also a mandate. You have been called to holiness. This is God’s will, he says to the Thessalonians, your sanctification or your holiness, so the gift bears within it a mandate. I think Paul shared the Jewish understanding of holiness as being other in the world, of being different in the world. The Holy Spirit is holy because we can’t generate it. It’s God’s, and God is utterly other than us. When God said to the Israelites, “Be ye holy as I am holy,” what this meant is that they were to be different in the world as God is utterly different from the world. So, the way they signaled the holiness of God was through the various ritual and moral commandments they kept. Paul retains this sense that to be in the church, to be the holy ones, to be saints, means to be other than world. There is a very real question as to whether the church can authentically be church if it is not counter-cultural, if it is not in some way other than world.

For Paul, such holiness is a matter of behavior. In this he agrees with the Pharisees. Paul does not think that the church can maintain its holiness by having a completely separate existence as monks. You cannot go out of the world. So holiness doesn’t consist of having a Christian education system, Christian poetry, Christian literature, Christian rock music, Christian cocaine, whatever! It is a matter of being in the world as a community and yet somehow being markedly different within that community. That’s very much Paul the Pharisee.

But unlike the Pharisees, Paul does not regard this as a matter of ritual, but a matter of moral behavior; and here is where it become complicated for Paul. At one level Paul is able to quite blithely identify the difference between the world and the saints in terms of virtues and vices. So, in 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11, he says – Y’all used to be, you know, all these things in the past, and now y’all are this way; and he gives a list of virtues and vices as understood by ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish culture. So to be holy appears to mean simply being good.

And yet there are two complications of this in Paul. The first is this. Paul is able to call a pagan vice a Christian virtue. In pagan thought, tapeinophrosynen was regarded as a vice. It was the mark, not of a good and virtuous person, but of somebody who was craven. In fact it was identified with slaves (there’s your class issue), because it was lowly-mindedness. So, the only way Paul could get from a pagan vice to a Christian virtue called humility or lowly-mindedness was through the crucified Messiah. So holiness in the church is not simply a matter of being good by the world’s measure of being good or philosophy’s measure of being good. It also means something about being marked with Christ.

And then there is this other thing. When Paul says that in Christ is neither male nor female, slave nor freed Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28), everybody recognizes that Paul has here relativised the three great status markers of antiquity — namely ethnicity, social location, and gender — and has said that in this Christian community, these distinctions are not to separate and divide and put one over the other, but they are to become opportunities for gift giving. That also is part of the holiness of the church, the otherness of the church for Paul, because the world doesn’t operate that way. In the world, status is what matters. So this business of egalitarianism in the community is not a matter of political correctness. It is a matter of theological correctness. It is a matter of gospel.

But then you’ve got the problems of sex. Here we come, finally, to Paul’s understanding of sexuality. Paul’s understanding of sexuality, I think we have to understand, is both strong and subtle, extraordinarily subtle, and extraordinarily strong. Paul does not view sex the way that Graeco-Roman philosophers viewed it, as a matter either of self-care, as Foucault has pointed out, or as a matter of self-control and anxiety. Nor does he view sex simply in terms of marrying the right girl and maintaining ethnicity, as in Judaism. Paul regards sexuality as personal engagement. This is quite distinctive in antiquity – it’s really unparalleled. It’s not that Paul diminishes the significance of sex. Paul heightens the significance of sex. Why? Because he heightens the significance of bodies, as communicators of spirit. So, sexuality is personal and relational, and if we want to treasure those aspects of sexuality we have Paul to thank, because that is where it comes from.

Now, in terms of how to act sexually, Paul doesn’t tell us a great deal in detail. He has a very definite boundary. Sex cannot be involved in porneia, which is broadly and correctly translated as sexual immorality. Now what Paul understood by sexual immorality, I think, is fairly clear. He did not think that men should sleep with men or women should sleep with women. He did not think that people should engage in prostitution. He certainly did not think that people should commit incest. He did not think that people should be violent in their sexual acts or that they should be adulterers or that they should be fornicators. All of these things for Paul fall under the sort of boundary line of sexual expression called porneia, and for him all of these modes of sexuality, in one way or another, did not adequately reflect the body and our bodies’ relationship to the Lord.

Two things must be said about the positive expressions of sexuality, for Paul. First, they are multiple, so that one can marry, one can be a virgin, one can be a widow. And, more importantly, one’s sexual status does not determine one’s standing before the Lord. How one is sexually at one level is among the adiaphora,

But everywhere in Paul, agape trumps eros. Generally the New Testament is the world’s least erotic literature, you will agree? I don’t mean by that it simply doesn’t have many good stories. It’s simply that eros does not register. We have to go somewhere else besides the New Testament to find eros. But agape trumps eros. Alterity trumps egoism. Adulthood trumps childhood.

Okay, final stage of this presentation. Once we have imagined the world that Paul imagines, we must also engage it with loyal criticism, taking into account the continuing work of God in our world. Here is my basic premise: The Living God continues to disclose Godself in the world, and Scripture does not contain everything that we need to learn about God, the world, our bodies, our sexuality. So our loyal criticism is one that must take as an equally important voice our discernment of what God is up to. So we have to read Paul through the lens of the new creation as it has continued to unfold and disclose itself in human life, in the world that God brings into being at every moment.

So I think we need to ask, not whether we are fitting Paul’s understanding of church, but how do we understand church? I am putting down these challenges to you as conversation points. How do we understand church? — because holiness will mean something very different if we are a voluntary association to meet my spiritual needs, or if we are the body of the resurrected Christ in which the relationship to the risen Lord deeply affects every other relationship. How do we understand edification? Which means that we have to come to grips with what we consider private and public.

So before we can talk coherently about holiness or sexuality, we need to talk about church. But whatever we decide about church, I want to propose to you, it must include holiness, and not simply the holiness of the individual but the holiness of the church corporately. We must not diminish holiness to sex, as though that were all of it. Holiness involves every dimension of life, and as many folks have pointed out, another wonderful form of deflection represented by the scape-goating of homosexuality has been our willingness to ignore the way in which Christianity has colluded in a view of the economic world in which no scrap of the Gospel is detectable.

So, what for us are the implications of the resurrection of Jesus, of the lordship of Jesus, of the new creation, of our bodies being Christ’s Body? You see, here is a fundamental difference for us. I don’t think we can be Enlightenment people with regard to the body and still be Christians. I don’t see how we can do it. I don’t see how we can think of the body simply as an assembly of eyeless monads who happen to be colliding together here or gathered here or agreed to meet this morning. If we don’t have an understanding of church and of holiness which somehow involves the presence of the resurrected Lord, then why should we bother? Why should we bother with what we do individually and privately with our bodies? We could fool everybody, including ourselves, if we are not answerable to the Lord. It is a big issue. I want to add, how are we corporately other than the world? And is personal holiness to be defined totally by conventional virtue, or can it mean a witness to a life outside the bounds of social acceptability? If it does, how do we discern that witness?

Finally, our understanding of holiness cannot be reduced to sexuality, but must include sexuality. I will conclude with four points here, which I offer to you as my best offering at this particular point.

First, I think we have to level the playing field. I don’t see how the church can make any distinction between these two terms, heterosexual and homosexual, with regard to sexual morality. First of all, I don’t believe in the terms. I have already suggested that. Obviously we hook up with different kinds of bodies, but in sexuality, there really is a very sliding scale, and I think using terms like homosexual, even if we multiply gay/lesbian/transgender and do all that, break it up into eighty kinds of different things, then we have to do the same thing on the hetero side as well, because it is not just A and B. Therefore, if we want to think about chastity, we have to think about chastity on the heterosexual side, and we have to think about chastity on the homosexual side. If we are going to think about porneia, we can’t put it all over on the homosexual side. We have to really come to grips with porneia on the heterosexual side, and I would argue, statistically, there is a lot more of it, and it goes a lot more unattended. So, we cannot obsess about “Gay people aren’t faithful like us heterosexuals.” Look at the statistics! How much fidelity is there on the heterosexual side? Level play field, I think, must be our task in terms of thinking about this. In other words, this is my rendering of Galatians 3:28: “In Christ there is neither homosexual nor heterosexual.”

Secondly, we are obliged, mightily obliged, to rediscover the dimensions of porneia. What does it mean? We can no longer afford simply to work with the biblical understandings of porneia. We need to think through the ways in which our sexuality is disordered — again, on the level playing field, on both sides: the ways in which manipulation, violence, abuse, coercion, promiscuity are on both sides of the plain, and I would argue represent porneia on both sides. I don’t think the church can ever say yes to porneia. If the church is asked to accept, let us say, a gay bathhouse style of promiscuity — the church can’t; but neither can it say yes to a Playboy or Penthouse style of promiscuity.

Thirdly, I think we need to try to begin to think creatively, again with a level playing field, about the expressions of sexuality that are holy. I would like to offer three dimensions of holiness as I see it in sexual life.

It seems to me that holy sexual activity is relational. Here I think Paul is right. Sex can’t simply be recreational. It simply can’t be like eating peanuts — food for the belly, the belly for food. It can’t simply be reduced to bodily fluids, relief of tension. Of course we all know it is. We are not entirely in the new creation. I am very serious about that! I don’t think that we should pretend to theologize our existence – I mean, sex is always going to be out of our control to a large extent. Let’s be honest! But in its highest expression, what the church wants to affirm as holy is not going to be recreational sex but rather relational sex, because it is in relational sex that body expresses spirit.

Secondly, I think the church wants to affirm, on both sides — fidelity, covenantal sexual life. Now, does fidelity fail on the heterosexual side? Yes. Should the church stop affirming it because of that? No! We are not holy. The church is holy. The Spirit is holy. We are drawn into a holy community to be lifted up, not to reduce the community to our lowest common denominator. So, I think the notion of covenantal sexual love is extremely important, bearing in mind the level playing field.

Thirdly, I would like to offer as a test of sexual relations the generation of new life. But I want to do it on a level playing field. Don’t jump to children. That is obviously one way in which sexual love can be generative; but I think if we read Paul in terms of egoism giving way to alterity, of eros being trumped by agape, by childhood giving way to adulthood, I think we are called in the church to have our sexual love embrace others and give life to them. It can involve begetting children or adopting children or caring for others or fostering others or reaching out to our neighbors — there are all kinds of ways that we can do this. But I think it is a test of holiness whether our sexual love is just about me, and just about me and you, or whether it is a good thing for others as well that we embrace each other and bring others into our embrace.

Fourth, how do we find a way of restoring those ancient Christian values without which we are all going to end up in a ditch somewhere? — chastity, modesty, custody of the senses, these practices that help us move away from a pan-sexualization of identity which surely is ruinous. The notion of being disciplined in our sexuality, it seems to me, is an important place to go.

I really do think this is not a problem that we will or can solve. It is a mystery in which we both suffer and celebrate. And I would simply ask of us that we be gentle with each other and with those who cannot see or speak or hear as we do or, rather, as we would like to think that we do.

Thank you for your attention.

“I wish that I had been one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.” These, alas, are not my words. They are the opening sentence of The Making of Late Antiquity by the great historian Peter Brown, and they begin a paragraph that, of all the paragraphs I have not written, is the one I most wish I had. Brown continues: “These Christian brothers had been walled up in a cave in the middle of the third century, during the pagan persecution of the Emperor Decius (249-51). They were awakened in the early fifth century, in the reign of Decius’ direct successor, the Emperor Theodosius II (408-50), in order to enlighten that most Christian monarch on a point concerning the resurrection of the dead. Imagine their surprise when, on entering the city, they saw the Cross placed above the main gate, heard men freely swearing by the name of Christ, saw a great church and the Christian clergy busy with repairing the walls of the city, and found that the solid silver coins of a pagan emperor caused amazement in the market place. This book is an attempt to enter into their surprise.” (1)

A meditation on surprise is what you get when you ask someone trained in history, as I am, to talk about what anything, including the church, is called to be and to become. Peter Brown and Yogi Berra have probably never appeared quite this close together before, but there is clear resonance between the historian’s attempt to enter into the surprise of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the baseball catcher’s observation that “the future ain’t what it used to be.” I do not go as far in support of Yogi as the radical critic Alfred Loisy, who one hundred and one years ago famously wrote that Jesus announced the kingdom and what we got was the church(2). But I think there are more theological puzzles than solutions lurking in the theme of this conference. The theme is not generic—What is the church to be and to become?—but personal and specific—The church we are called to be and to become. Is it presumptuous of us to think it’s we who are thus called? How do we recognize a call? There are people who hear God calling in very different tones from those I am familiar with. What is the connection between what the church is and what it is to become?

For starters, do we have any warrant for saying that our account of what the church currently is bears much resemblance to its actual state? It’s a pity that the question about what the meaning of is is will forever be associated with President Clinton’s evasiveness, because it is really a very good question, especially for churches. Can we make productive, non-defensive use of the perspective that outsiders have on us? I was both amused and abashed by a recent Washington Post story about the banning of a United Methodist Church advertisement from the electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square. Because Reuters wants to preserve its reputation as an unbiased source of information, a spokesperson said, the billboard does not carry ads that are “pornographic, political, religious, libelous, misleading, or deceptive.”(3) It is instructive, if unnerving, to learn what rhetorical company we keep in the popular mind. We have some perceived entangling alliances to extricate ourselves from. Actually, the extrication has already begun. I am pleased to report a bit of late-breaking news. The National Council of Churches web site says that the CEO of Reuters has reversed the company’s decision. The head of the United Methodist Communications Office sums up the story: “They took us seriously and have responded in a reasonable and balanced manner.” (4)

I am 10% of the way into my talk, and already I have confused issues more than I have clarified them, and compiled a catalogue of questions that could constitute a semester’s syllabus. At this point we, or at least I, need to take a deep breath and clear the mind. I will say three things that I hope will dispel some fog, then we can proceed.

First, I am more agnostic than many theologians about history’s direction. For me, the jury is out on whether history is a decline from a golden age, a story of progress, a circle, a spiral, or just one damn thing after another. A friend of mine says the bottom line of her faith is that God knows what God is doing whether she believes in it, approves of it, agrees with, or likes it. Calvin would not have put it quite this way, but there are parallels with his conviction about God’s sovereignty. Moreover, even if time’s arrow is moving in a particular, divinely ordained direction, I am suspicious of my, or anyone else’s, claim to be able to trace it definitively. The eschatological tension between “the already” and “the not yet” doesn’t solve anything, because there is such dispute about what that’s going on right now is “already” and what that’s going on right now is “not yet.” I, and many of you in this room, believe that the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson last Sunday is encouraging evidence of an eschatological “already,” but there are many Christians, probably more than there are of us, for whom that event is a sacrilege, definitive evidence of an eschatological “not yet.” Here we have two competing convictions about what the future will be if it ain’t what it used to be. I’m certainly willing to fight hard for my convictions, but my convictions on many things have changed over time (for instance, I am appalled to remember what I used to think God’s opinion of Pentecostals was), and I see no reason to suppose that what I know about God is going to stay put.

So, first, I’m agnostic about history’s direction. Second, I am agnostic about its goal. I certainly find the Messianic Banquet more appealing than the Battle of Armageddon, but I know that the movie Babette’s Feast has a lot less cultural clout these days than the Left Behind novels by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with their sales in the dozens of millions of copies. I remember somebody once telling me that for a long time she missed the point of the Last Judgment image of separating sheep from goats because she thought goats much nicer animals than sheep. And even if there is a fixed goal, I have the same problem as with the “already” and the “not yet”—I’m suspicious of claims, my own or anyone else’s, to know for sure what it is.

Theology can learn something from the discipline of science. Cosmologist Brian Greene recently said this about how science advances: “I like to say things more than one way. I just think that when it comes to abstract ideas, you need many roads into them. From the scientific point of view, if you stick with one road, I think you really compromise your ability to make breakthroughs. I think that’s really what breakthroughs are about. Everybody’s looking at a problem one way, and you come at it from the back. That different way of getting there somehow reveals things that the other approach didn’t.”(5) Breakthrough by indirection is a better way to a goal than “damn the torpedoes full speed ahead,” especially if you think your chances of being initially mistaken about the goal are good. And maybe the goal is fixed, maybe it isn’t, and if it is, it might not be our responsibility to decide, or even guess, what it is. It could be that the last scene of the historical show will be some sitting on a hilltop enjoying the Messianic Banquet while others engage in the Battle of Armageddon on the field below, like the picknickers who went out to Bull Run to watch the Union and the Confederacy tear into each other.

I don’t want to be taken to be quite so skeptical as I might sound, however. I believe the goal is God, and God is love—but love is really mysterious as well as patient and kind. I believe God can be trusted but not taken for granted. Brian Greene is once again instructive: “The universe,” he says, “in a sense guides us toward truths, because those truths are the things that govern what we see. If we’re all being governed by what we see, we’re all being steered in the same direction. Therefore, the difference between making a breakthrough and not often can be just a small element of perception . . . that puts things together in a different way.”

So, first I’m agnostic about history’s direction; second I’m agnostic about its goal. My third agnosticism is perhaps the most heretical of all, but I have to inform you about it to complete the context for my further reflections. I’m agnostic about the indefectibility of the church. That’s a fancy word you don’t hear every day. To believe in the indefectibility of the church is to believe that God won’t let the church finally go entirely off the rails; it is to take literally Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. But even if the gates of hell won’t prevail, the church could decay from within. I suspect the church could really lose it—and a seminary president friend tells me that Presbyterians have no trouble believing that the church is thoroughly defectible! But even if I were to believe in the church’s indefectibility (which maybe I do; remember, I said agnostic, which means simply that I don’t know), it doesn’t follow that I know for sure where the church God is protecting is—there are places where two or three or two or three hundred or two or three thousand are gathered together in Jesus’ name and I have serious doubts about whether Jesus is there in the midst of them, and there are places where Jesus’ name isn’t spoken at all that I suspect he is. Remember that Jesus warned us (Matthew 25): Our saying “Lord, Lord” doesn’t mean he’ll come running, and chances are good that we won’t recognize him when he shows up.

At this point I imagine you understand why Yogi Berra’s aphorism is so attractive to me; “the future ain’t what it used to be” captures both my agnosticism about the future and my hopes for it. We’re not stuck, but we have no guarantees. We’re in a state where we can take to heart the most ecumenically fruitful words I know, some advice given by Folly in Erasmus’s great encomium to her: She proposes for the smooth functioning of human communities that we “make mistakes together or individually, . . . [and] wisely overlook things.”(6) If the future ain’t what it used to be, then we need not be paralyzed by fear that we might not get it right. We can make mistakes and wisely overlook things without automatically being branded as wishy-washy hypocrites. Maybe history is like what film director Jean-Luc Godard replied when someone said to him, by way of implied rebuke, “Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end”—“Certainly, but not necessarily in that order.” (7)

The next rhetorical move I make may give you mental or even spiritual whiplash, but even if I don’t know where history is going, I know where this talk is going, so bear with me despite what may seem a derailment.

A few weeks ago I read about a new publication called Revolve. It offers the complete New Testament in a fashion-magazine format, replete with images of stylish, smiling young women, quizzes, and celebrity birthdays, designed to appeal to girls between the ages of 12 and 17. A Nashville 15-year-old voiced a marketer’s dream: “My friends, they don’t like to read the Bible, but once they saw it they were like, ‘I’m going to have to get me one of those.’”

It might seem a stretch from Revolve to pondering the church we are called to be and to become, but the connection was suggested to me in praise the managing editor gave the firm that created the layout: “They’re great because they don’t make things look churchy or Christiany. They have a real fresh perspective on Christian products.”(8)

I wince, as I suspect you do too, at the notion of “Christian products,” but my purpose is not to criticize the merchandising of the gospel. The editor’s distaste for things “churchy” and “Christiany” is instructive, even bracing, and I want to make the case that we are called to be and to become church and Christian, but on the way we should avoid being either “churchy” or “Christiany.”

A friend of mine in her early 20s, when I told her about the editor’s remark, immediately said that when she’s in her car scanning the dial she can tell within the first couple of seconds, just from the quality of the sound, whether it’s a “Christian” station. There’s a cloying earnestness, optimism that pretends to be hope but is really warmed-over American triumphalism, a Jesus-as-cheerleader boosterism that has little resonance in the Bible and most of Christian tradition. Things that are “Christiany” offer us saccharin when we need sugar, and things that are “churchy” make us drag though we’re designed to dance. “Churchy” and “Christiany” certainly don’t inhabit the same rhetorical stable as “pornographic, libelous, misleading, or deceptive”; maybe they don’t even cohabit with Reuters’s other allergy, “political.” But I would not consider myself complimented if someone called me “Christiany” or “churchy.”

I have been privileged through much of my life to hear preaching of the highest order. My father, who was pastor of the same Disciples of Christ congregation in Dallas for 41 years, was among the best-read people I’ve ever known—more novels and poetry than biblical commentary, although he had plenty of that too. My preacher when I was in college was George Buttrick, in graduate school Bill Coffin. And for much of my teaching career, Barrie Shepherd was my pastor. I’m not a preacher, this is not a sermon, but what I have learned from all these mentors is an appreciation for the surprises in the Bible, the places where the word skewers us or comforts us though at first glance it appears to have little or nothing to do with us at all.

And I find much light cast on the question, What is the church we are called to be and to become? by two unlikely passages of Scripture, ones that provide a compelling alternative to a life that is either churchy or Christiany or, God help us, both, and ones that remind us the future ain’t what it used to be. The first, from 1 Samuel, is the story of the last night of the life of King Saul (1 Samuel 28:20-25), before he is killed in battle with the Philistines the next day. The second, from Mark, is about dogs eating crumbs that fall from the table (Mark 7:24-30).

The story of Saul and the woman of Endor is neither Christiany nor churchy, but is a clue to the Christian gospel and to the nature of church. It’s all about hospitality, which is not, I suppose, a sufficient condition for church, but is certainly a necessary one—and I’d say there are times when it in fact suffices. Saul is desperate. The standard ways of consulting God are giving an “unexpected error” message, and there seems to be no way to reboot. Saul asks his aides to find a soothsayer. Imagine the bind this puts them in: Previously they have been ordered by the king to eliminate all such practitioners from the realm, so if they find one, they are admitting they did not do their job. Erasmus’s Folly says “Let’s make mistakes together”; Saul’s aides must wonder whether the boss will see it that way. Saul persists, they take him to the woman, she calls up the shade of Samuel—and then she is terrified, for the masks are down, and she realizes it is the king who is consulting her. She has to think it’s a trap, a sting operation. But Saul grants her immunity.

Then comes a reversal, an upending, an episode of last-shall-be-first and first-last that is resonant with the heart of the gospel. Saul hasn’t eaten all day, and the woman says to him, “I’ve risked my life in speaking to you, now you listen to me”—remember, she’s an outlaw speaking to the king—“I’m going to give you some food and you need to eat it.” He refuses, but the woman and his servants prevail on him, “and,” the text tells us, “they ate. Then they rose and went away that night.” The next day was grim indeed.

The church we are called to be and to become is about this sort of welcome, where rank and status blur, where motives mix and don’t all have to be noble, where happy faces aren’t required, where the tragic is not denied and the comic is appreciated (the scene is actually pretty funny; I can imagine Woody Allen having a field day with it). The bread and wine at the communion table are for those who are really hungry—in any time zone, at any latitude. We have betrayed Christ over and over again—as Peter did when he denied Jesus, as the disciples did when they all forsook him and fled. Still, Christ makes a place for us at the table, for all of us, and says “Eat, that you may have strength when you go on your way.” The woman of Endor is a type of Christ—and she is neither churchy nor Christiany. And Saul’s future ain’t what it used to be. In outline, to be sure, it is; Samuel told him that God had withdrawn favor, and Saul died as the prophet said he would. But in those last few hours of his life Saul knew the warmth of welcome and the liberation of giving up control—“Now you listen to me,” the woman said, and he listened.

The story from Mark’s Gospel of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman has features similar to those of Saul’s encounter with the woman of Endor. There’s something clandestine. Just as Saul’s cover is blown when he asks the woman to summon up the shade of the prophet Samuel, Jesus enters a house, doesn’t want anyone to know he is there, and “yet,” as Mark tells us, “he could not escape notice.” The Syrophoenician woman hears where he is, comes immediately, and begs Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus says No, as Saul had initially said to the woman of Endor when she urged him to eat something.

Actually, Jesus’ response is quite harsh, certainly neither churchy nor Christiany: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Those of us who cut bits off our steak to give to our dogs even before we sit down to dinner may not fully appreciate the imagery of “throwing food to the dogs,” but in first-century Palestine the words of Jesus would have had a hard edge, and the woman could have gone off raging, or at least sullen. What she does, though, is beat Jesus at his own game, turning an image of exclusion into one of inclusion: “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

I wish people who ask “What Would Jesus Do?” would pay more attention to this sort of interaction between Jesus and others. He acknowledges the challenge and praises the woman for it: “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” There is no better evidence of the Jewishness of Jesus than this kind of repartee, which is neither churchy nor Christiany. The Jesus we think keeps others out is teasing us to invite them to the table. The breakthrough to true ecumenism is made by this Gentile woman, whose riposte to Jesus is a hinge on which history turns and the future certainly ain’t what it used to be—we might even say that this day of our conference on the church we are called to be and to become is her feast day and that of the woman of Endor.

Here we are at another fork in the road, and I will follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” We move from Endor and the region of Tyre to Los Angeles and the Academy Awards ceremony.

There is much about that event that is easily forgettable, but I will long remember the story Bill Cosby told when accepting the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award. Cosby characteristically deflected attention from himself, and paid homage to Fred Rogers. On January 1, Cosby recalled, Art Linkletter, Rogers, and he rode as marshals at the head of the Rose Parade: “The one thing that I still remember is people waving and saying, ‘Mr. Rogers, welcome to the neighborhood.’” (9)

I consider today the feast day not only of the woman of Endor and the Syrophoenician woman, but also of Fred Rogers, arguably the most influential Presbyterian minister of the 20th century. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is a place where all are welcome, and where fears are acknowledged and not belittled. In 2003, a year full of cultural and political discouragements, the most heartening thing I’ve seen is the overwhelming sense of loss our country felt when Fred Rogers died in late February. People who had probably made fun of him because he was so un-hip, so low-key, so utterly unlike the celebrities who get all the attention, came out of the woodwork in magazines and newspapers and on radio and television to wonder, without apology and without shame, how we are going to get along without him.

Carol Zaleski of Smith College, a regular columnist for The Christian Century, sums up the significance of Fred Rogers in a way that puts him right in the middle of what we are talking about today: “It’s clear,” she writes, “that this gentle and canny minister saw himself as offering through television the biblical hospitality that makes pilgrims and strangers welcome.”(10) And his hospitality is like that of the woman of Endor for Saul, like that of Jesus for the Syrophoenician woman. Zaleski again: “The disciplined, courteous, loving attention which he gave to each person, as a marvel of supreme worth, was what made Fred Rogers a source of endless comfort for his young viewers.” And, we might add, for all of us, young or not. I’m sure it wasn’t just kids shouting “Mr. Rogers, welcome to the neighborhood” on the streets of Pasadena. Fred Rogers was Christian and he loved the church, but he was neither churchy nor Christiany, and I suspect that because he lived among us, the future ain’t what it used to be.

You might appreciate a brief interlude here, to connect the dots. We began 17_ centuries ago, with the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus who woke up 150 years later to find that the future most definitely wasn’t what it used to be. That surprising future was partly good—Christians could practice their faith openly—and partly bad—to keep a shaky empire together, Christian emperors were treating heretics the way pagan emperors had previously treated Christians. I outlined my three agnosticisms that follow from the Sleepers’ surprise and Yogi Berra’s aphorism: history’s direction, history’s goal, and the indefectibility of the church. In face of these agnosticisms, I called to witness Erasmus’s Folly, who says we “must make mistakes together or individually . . . [and] wisely overlook things,” and Jean-Luc Godard, who says a movie “should have a beginning, a middle and an end—but not necessarily in that order.”

I then turned to what, with all my agnosticisms, I am quite sure the church is not called to be and become—that is, churchy and Christiany. To illustrate non-churchy and non-Christiany ways of being and becoming church, we heard the stories of Saul and the woman of Endor, Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, and Fred Rogers and the neighborhood.

Now I want to make a point that you may find initially weird, but I hope to persuade you that it makes sense. In fact, I want to take back something I said near the beginning—that “there are more theological puzzles than solutions lurking in the theme of this conference.” Often when people reveal their agnosticisms, they then tell you how they get around them so as to maintain some semblance of belief, some connection to the tradition, if only hanging on by fingernails. But my agnosticisms are not something I need to circumvent or subvert; I go right into them, in fact, and they are my clue to the church we are called to be and to become—the puzzle is the solution.

I second the motion of Justin Martyr, who in the middle of the second century said that Socrates was a Christian, because I want to claim as a Christian theological principle Socrates’s admission, “The one thing I know is that I know nothing.”(11) If, thank God, the future ain’t what it used to be, then my uncertainty about history’s direction and goal, and my sneaking suspicion that the church could go wrong, provide a resilient grounding for confidence, for hope, and for hospitality. Most important, Socrates helps spring open the box in which we would try to lock the God of surprises. To some observers of the church it might appear that a robust, unquestioning faith—“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it”—is the ideal toward which Christians should strive, and my effort to justify my less sure faith could seem a desperate rearguard action by a spiritual weakling who just can’t manage a no-loose-ends conviction and a no-second-thoughts commitment. But I am not talking about a second-best way of being and becoming church. To borrow a phrase that the Apostle Paul uses in another context, I think it is actually a more excellent way.

A few paragraphs back I quoted cosmologist Brian Greene, and I want to reiterate what he said about the way science moves forward by indirection: “From the scientific point of view, if you stick with one road, I think you really compromise your ability to make breakthroughs.” Notice that you don’t go outside the system to survey it from some detached distance. Greene’s prescription for scientific advance implicitly acknowledges the fundamental truth of Gödel’s theorem, that any logical system contains propositions that cannot be proven true or false by the axioms of that system. In other words, you have to try out different roads and see where you go; there is no complete map to guide you. We’re like Lewis and Clark; we can’t click on Mapquest.

The Christian tradition is full of stories of people trying what Greene calls “different ways of getting there.” Narrow “faithfulness” of the “I have a hammerlock on the truth and to hell with you” sort is out of phase with the tradition through time—the tradition that includes Peter and Paul, Justin and Tertullian, Origen and Augustine, Bernard and Abelard, Luther and Erasmus, Tillich and Barth, and of course all the women, both those dead and those alive, whose voices we are now hearing as never before. And faithfulness through time, through the past that is in fact many futures that weren’t what they used to be, has implications, one theological and one both ecclesiological and anthropological.

First, the theological implication of faithfulness. God is out ahead of the church—that is, God is already at work in the world, and one of the church’s responsibilities is to discover where God is acting. The Bible is not a blueprint for the world, but a set of clues suggesting where to look, and the clues can go out of date. The church is as susceptible as is the academy to what F. M. Cornford a century ago called “The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent”: “Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”(12) The church is not a fortress, from which Christians who have God all figured out take God to the world that doesn’t know God. Every theology is of a particular kind: There’s not some generic “theology” over against which particular theologies, for example feminist or liberation or narrative, are judged. Theology really is the search for God, not the delivery of God. The Spirit that we are promised will lead us into the truth operates within a historical indeterminacy like that of Gödel’s theorem in mathematics—we can find the truth, the future that ain’t what it used to be, only by exploration, by trying things out, by taking roads less traveled, by making mistakes individually and together and wisely overlooking things.

The ecclesiological and anthropological implication of faithfulness is grounded in the conviction that the communal body of Christ is real, and even primary for Christian identity. From this it follows that none of us is entirely responsible for the whole faith. The church is a place where my own ups and downs—some days my faith is hot, some days cold, and usually it’s somewhere in between warm and cool—are understood to be perfectly natural and faithful. Dark nights of the soul are of the soul. The church, recognizing that we are all moving targets, has a place for Peter who denied Jesus and became the first pope, for all the disciples who forsook Jesus and fled and then turned the world upside down, for the father who cried to Jesus “I believe, help my unbelief,” for those who on the mount of the Ascension, according to Matthew 28:17, doubted what they were seeing with their own eyes. The church we are called to be and to become remembers that Job’s “comforters,” who mouthed all the conventional theological platitudes, provoked God’s wrath.

There may be people for whom the faith once delivered to them has remained unchanged and unchanging, but I am pretty sure that such strict adherence to the principle of the dangerous precedent is not characteristic of the church we are called to be and to become. A grand old hymn says we’re standing on the promises of God, but I don’t think that gets the image right. The promises of God are more like a springboard, or like the wardrobe through which the Pevensy children enter Narnia. Some Christians say that Jesus’ claim to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life shuts doors. The chorus at the end of W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being comes at it, as Brian Greene would say, “from the back” and sees it differently—indeed, opens the door:

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy. (13)

The church we are called to be and to become is, I believe, a place where we will see rare beasts and have unique adventures. And it is a place where we will do these things together. I come, finally, to what I consider the most persuasive answer to the question posed by this conference. The church we are called to be and to become is a place where we tell our stories and listen carefully to those of others, where we all, as Carol Zaleski says Fred Rogers did, give “disciplined, courteous, loving attention to each person, as a marvel of supreme worth.”

When I was first studying the Bible, more than forty years ago, Martin Noth’s theory about the organization of ancient Israel, and hence about the formation of the Pentateuch, was all the rage. As with most scholarly fashions, its fifteen minutes of fame is long past, but his speculation is useful as a model for the church. According to Noth, the various pieces of the story of Israel’s formation—the promise to the patriarchs, the slavery in Egypt, the Exodus, the wilderness wandering, the conquest of Canaan—were not originally all experienced by the same groups. But when, in a variety of ways and over a stretch of time, the tribes found their way into Canaan, they formed a league of a sort known at Delphi in Greece, called an amphictyony (“those who dwell around”), and gathered annually to recite their various stories to each other. Eventually the narratives wove together in such a way that members of a tribe who had not taken part in the Exodus could say, with conviction, “we were there when the waters parted.” Everybody’s story became part of everybody’s story.

Two recent documents offer most persuasive accounts of storytelling as a way for the church to be what it is called to become. Last month Jack Rogers spoke to the Covenant Network Northwest Regional Conference on “How I Changed My Mind on Homosexuality.”  Everyone who knows Jack knows how careful a thinker he is, so there can be no suspicion that his movement is quixotic or a bending to some shifting cultural wind. And the first influence he points to is getting to know people: “I have known many homosexual people as colleagues and friends. In every instance these were people who did not fit any of the stereotypes of gays as lustful, idolatrous trouble makers. They were uniformly normal, deeply Christian, and desirous of helping the church to be its best self.”(14)

And Barbara Brown Taylor, in a stunning essay in The Christian Century called “Where the Bible leads me,” makes the same point. “I do not have a position on homosexuality. What I have, instead, is a life. I have a history, in which many people have played vital parts. When I am presented with the issue of homosexuality, I experience temporary blindness. Something like scales fall over my eyes, because I cannot visualize an issue. Instead, I visualize the homeroom teacher who seemed actually to care whether I showed up at school or not. I see the priest who taught me everything I know about priesthood, and the professor who roasted whole chickens for me when my food money ran out before the end of the month. I see the faces of dozens of young men who died of AIDS, but not before they had shown me how brightly they could burn with nothing left but the love of God to live on. . . . Other people have other stories, I know, but these are the stories that have given me my sight. To reduce them to a position seems irreverent somehow, like operating on someone’s body without looking him in the face.”(15)

That’s the key: Looking people in the face. And when you see the image of God there, you then carry what you now know back to your reading of the Bible—that is, you come at the Bible from the back, as it were, and things are revealed that your earlier approach blinded you to. Both Jack Rogers and Barbara Brown Taylor testify to the way the Bible itself becomes an agent of a future that ain’t what it used to be. Here is Rogers: “I often said that I could not change my negative attitude toward homosexuality unless I was convinced by Scripture. I have now been convinced. I had to learn to be consistent in a gracious interpretation of Scripture, not just for myself, but for all people. I should not treat individual verses as universal laws, but understand them, as Calvin recommended, in their historical and cultural context. I had to learn to apply the perspective of Jesus’ life and ministry in interpreting Scripture.”

And here is Taylor: “I love the Bible. I have spent more than half of my life reading it, studying it, teaching and preaching it. While I do not find every word of it as inspiring (or inspired) as some of my fellow Christians do, I encounter God in it reliably enough to commit myself on a daily basis to practicing the core teachings of both testaments. When I do this, however, a peculiar thing happens. As I practice what I learn in the Bible, the Bible turns its back on me. Like some parent intent on my getting my own place, the Bible won’t let me set up house in its pages. It gives me a kiss and boots me into the world, promising me that I have everything I need to find God not only on the page but also in the flesh. Whether I am reading Torah or the Gospels, the written word keeps evicting me, to go embody the word by living in peace and justice with my neighbors on this earth, whatever amount of confrontation, struggle, recognition and surrender that may involve.”

What Jack Rogers and Barbara Brown Taylor have learned is that the Bible is neither a Cliff’s Notes for life’s syllabus nor a crib sheet for life’s exam. If the Word of God is living, it’s alive, which means its future ain’t what it used to be. As Cardinal Newman used to say, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”(16) Thank God the Word is alive; otherwise we’d still be justifying slavery, we’d still be requiring women to be silent in church — I could not respect, much less worship, a God who would not want us to hear Jana Childers [professor of homiletics at San Francisco Theological Seminary, preacher at the previous evening’s worship service in the Covenant Conference] — we’d still be declaring suicides like my father eternally lost, divorced and remarried people like me adulterers. Jack Rogers, taking his cue from the history of futures that weren’t what they used to be, declares, “When we finally accept Christian homosexual persons as full members of the church, as we will, we will be wonderfully blessed.” I, too, believe that we will, but we are called to be that church if we are to become that church. A dear lesbian friend of mine, at whose party celebrating her and her partner’s twenty years together I was privileged to pray, wrote to me recently: “It’s true that many of us are willing to risk our lives on our loves. I do too I guess. Today, I have come to a crossroads where I feel my faith is very deep but the practice of it is almost annoying. That may sound very conceited, and I would only dare to whisper those words to you. Still, I love the music, and I love the ceremony . . . but not necessarily the coffee. Today, I find that I am all faith, no religion.” The church we are called to be and to become includes the coffee, and is a place where Robyn and Ann can find resonance between their faith and religion, for their sake and that of their daughters, and for the sake of all of us.

Being the church and becoming the church takes practice. Some Christians at one extreme think the church’s job is to follow the score note for note, adhering meticulously to all the dynamic marks. Some Christians at the other extreme think the church’s assignment is to play aleatory music, “in which elements traditionally determined by the composer are determined either by a process of random selection chosen by the composer [e.g., throwing dice] or by the exercise of choice by the performer.” (17) Those of us in the middle, where the Covenant Network lives, are devotees of theological jazz, where you have to know everything you can, and practice tirelessly, in order to go, together, where no one has gone before. The church we are called to be and to become is a jam session. Indeed, while Covenant Network is a good descriptive name, it lacks a certain zing. Maybe you should reconstitute as a jazz combo and call yourselves “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.”

A friend told me that the best homily he ever heard was a single sentence, following a set of readings about God’s care for all that God has made. The homily was this question, nothing more: “And what part of all don’t you understand?” At a bare minimum, the church we are called to be and to become is one in which we understand all parts of all, where we are church and Christian, not Christiany and churchy, but hospitable, attentive to one another’s stories, and willing to make mistakes and allow others to make them too. Invoking saints is not traditional Presbyterian doctrine, but I conclude by asking the woman of Endor, the Syrophoenician woman, and Fred Rogers to pray for all of us and for all God’s children, everywhere and always, that we will see rare beasts and have unique adventures, and that we will all come, together, to a great city that has expected our return for years. The future ain’t what it used to be:

Thanks be to God.

Patrick Henry is author of The Ironic Christian’s Companion: Finding the Marks of God’s Grace in the World (1999; paper 2000) and editor of Benedict’s Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict (2001; paper 2002), both published by Riverhead Books.

Footnotes

1. Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1.
2. “Jésus annonçait le royaume, et c’est l’Église qui est venue,” L’évangile et l’église (1902 ; 2nd revised and augmented edition, self-published : Bellevue, France, 1903), p. 155. In context, Loisy is actually making an unexceptionable point (though he was excommunicated for it)—that no historical institution could pass the test of remaining in its original state.
3. Story printed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 26, 2003, A7.
4 . http://www.ncccusa.org/news/03reutersbillboard2.html.
5. “The Future of String Theory—A Conversation with Brian Greene,” Scientific American, November 2003, pp. 68-73.
6. The Praise of Folly, trans. John P. Dolan, in The Essential Erasmus (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 113.
7. Cited by Richard Corliss in Cinema section of Time, September 14, 1981, 90.
8. Religion News Service article, “Bible given fashion makeover to lure teen girls,” by Alexandra Alter, Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 30, 2003. 
9. Associated Press story, at http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=134866. 
10. “Mister Rogers,” The Christian Century, April 19, 2003, p. 35.
11. Apology 1.46, in J. Stevenson, A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to A.D. 337 (London: SPCK, 1960), p. 63.
12. Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1908), p. 15.
13. For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, “The Flight into Egypt, IV,” in Marvin Halverson, ed., Religious Drama 1 (New York: Living Age Books, 19578), p. 68.
14. Address delivered October 11, 2003
15. The Christian Century, October 18, 2003, p. 59.
16. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1.1.7 (1845; New York: Image Books, 1960), p. 63.
17. http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0803173.html.

COVENANT NETWORK CONFERENCE 2003
New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, DC
Address – Friday Afternoon, November 7, 2003

THE CHURCH WE ARE CALLED TO BE AND BECOME

Susan Andrews
Moderator of the 215th General Assembly
Presbyterian Church (USA)

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And greetings from your brothers and sisters around the nation and around the world – 173 presbyteries, 16 synods, ten theological institutions, 11,142 congregations, and over 200 global partners. At this conference, we have been exploring God’s vision for the church, who God is calling us to be and become as the resurrected body of Christ in the world. I would like to offer you my perspective, mid-year, on where God is leading us as a reformed and always reforming church. And give you some more glimpses of what such a church already looks like tucked away in various corners of our PCUSA family.

The church that God is calling us to be and become is first of all a church that is joyfully evangelical. One of my fondest dreams as a pastor, as a Moderator, as a Christian would be for all of us to recapture the language of evangelical faith. Evangel – we all know – simply means Good News. And the Good News of Jesus Christ is for all people – not as a talisman of holiness that separates us from those not quite worthy, but as the extravagant gift of grace that pours out abundant life for all. And because it is good news, because it is great news, the Good News of Jesus Christ can only be shared effectively if we are enthusiastic and joyful and generous and transparent in sharing and showing the world what it means to be God’s person.

As Presbyterians, as those steeped in the reformed tradition, we are called to be Good News tellers – evangelists in some very particular ways. First of all our Good News is Trinitarian. It is complex, and it is personal. We can show and tell the world that submitting body and soul to the sovereign love of God is the most liberating way to find meaning in this world. We can show and tell the world that submitting body and soul to the Lordship of Jesus Christ means to give up all pretense of privilege or power, and that walking with Jesus means to walk with the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, the lonely, the anxious, the grieving, the sick, and the young, that walking with Jesus means to find an intimacy with love and hope that makes all things new. And then we can show and tell the world that submitting body and soul to the always fresh power of the Holy Spirit means to be reformed and always reforming – never able to imprison God within doctrine or category.

And because our Good News is Trinitarian, it is also incarnational. It is best told in the flesh and blood of the world – at the intersection of faith and life – in the systems and the programs, the marches and the rituals that underline the words of the gospel with the breath and the sweat and the labor of everyday life. Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church in San Francisco is an 82 member congregation with the heart and the energy of an army of angels. Located near the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, its membership is one-third gay and lesbian. But its identity as a community of healing is as wide as God’s mercy. The life of the community flows from rich worship steeped in prayer and light and eucharist – yes it flows and then overflows into dozens of 12 step programs, a day care center, a senior housing complex, and a special focus on spiritual direction and wholeness.

And so, in the beginning of the 21st century, God is calling our Presbyterian part of the Body of Christ to be and become joyfully evangelical – visibly Trinitarian, and passionately incarnational.

But God is also calling the church to be and become intentionally multi-cultural. One of the best General Assembly decisions made in recent years was the decision to increase our racial-ethnic and immigrant membership from its current 7% to 20% by the year 2010. And even then, we will be far short of the current 35% non-Caucasion population of this country. I can attest to the vitality of cultural diversity already stirring up many of our urban presbyteries with new church developments and immigrant fellowships – 8 here in National Capital, 11 in Atlanta Presbytery, 14 in New York City Presbytery – new Presbyterian communities embracing Burmese, Arab, Sudanese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Hispanic, and African communities.

But as Jin S. Kim, the new Moderator of Presbyterians for Renewal has made clear, multi-cultural is not the same as multi-racial. Just putting a variety of different people together – and then continuing to do things the way they have always been done – this is not multi-cultural. Multi-cultural means honoring the traditions, the language, the music, the process, the timing, the rhythms, the rituals of all the cultures involved – and such re -creation takes time and patience and understanding and compromise. In January Jin will be come the pastor of a new church development in Minneapolis that will include English speaking Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, African, African-American, and Caucasian families, many with adopted international children. The new Church of All Nations, as this congregation is being called, will be intentionally multi-cultural.

But, brothers and sisters, multi-cultural doesn’t just mean racial or ethnic identity. Multi-cultural also means theological perspective and community dynamics. Multi-cultural also means contextual. For the Seventh Avenue and Old First and Calvary congregations in San Francisco, to be multi-cultural means – among other things – to serve, honor, and welcome the gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gendered residents of their neighborhoods. For the Madison Avenue and Brick and Fifth Avenue and First congregations in upper Manhattan and Wall Street, being multi-cultural means – among other things – to serve and welcome and challenge the culture of money and power that runs America. To be multi-cultural in the community of Bethesda where Scott Winnette and I serve means to honor and welcome a NIH scientific curiosity and a population that is 35% Jewish and a multi-faith pluralistic world view that demands a theological perspective that is open-minded and complex.

I want to say to you what I said to the Coalition Gathering last month in Portland. I want a church big enough and multi-cultural enough and diverse enough to include all of us – conservative, liberal, and every point in between – agnostic, evangelical and members of peace and sanctuary churches -Asians and Latinos and Native Americans and African- Americans and Euro-Americans – gays and straights, single and partnered, young and old, certain believers and confused seekers, literal biblicists and metaphorical biblicists – all the varied children of God who can help us change and grow and become more together than we can ever be apart. But, in order to be and become this multi-cultural church in every sense of the word, we must refrain from making decisions or rushing through conflict in ways that will encourage anyone to leave.

So God is calling us to be and become joyfully evangelical and intentionally multi-cultural. Which means we are also being called to be purposely paradoxical. I have shared before with this group my delight in the dilemma that John gives us when he proclaims that Jesus, as the Word Become Flesh, is full of both Grace and Truth. This stands as one of the great paradoxes of our paradoxical God. Grace is utterly free and utterly welcoming. But Truth sets limits and demands accountability. And God calls us to live and breathe and honor this tension in our lives. Jesus loves children and touches bleeding women and eats with sinners and weeps when he sees the broken-ness of Jerusalem. But he also turns over tables of materialism, rails at liars and hypocrites and calls us a brood of vipers when we fail to honor covenant God. forgives the prodigal unconditionally, but then separates the selfless sheep from the greedy goats at the moment of judgment. Yes, graceful truth and truthful grace is the great paradox of our faith – a faith that is both radically free and rigorously accountable.

The authors of our form of government were either brilliant or diabolical when they put together the seventh ordination question in chapter 14. For this question is not just paradoxical – it is, to coin a phrase, tri-doxical. “Do you promise to further the peace, unity, and purity of the church?” As the Theological Task Force is discovering, balancing this triad is only possible through the wily wisdom of God. All too many of us put purity before peace and unity. And this what I am hearing. On one side, there is the purity of holiness – based on heartfelt understandings of scripture and powerful personal conviction. And on the other side is the purity of justice – based on heartfelt understandings of scripture and powerful personal experience. But, in some ways, both sides are saying the same thing. We are right. You are wrong. And if our commitment to purity splits the church, so be it. I have heard this all too often during these past few months. But my friends, I believe that purity apart from peace and unity – is not what God or the Book of Order calls us to be and become.

On the other hand, there are plenty of folks who go the other way. Let’s just not talk about it and maybe it will go away. Let’s just pretend that G6.0106b is not in the book and that thousands of Presbyterians are not being excluded from office and that new members for the Presbyterian Church are not staying away because we can’t get our act together. Some people have said to me “Let’s just keep it in the book – and ignore it – just so we can have some peace.” But that is not true peace – for peace with out justice is a sham. And peace for the sake of avoiding conflict is unhealthy. And so we have purity purists on both ends of the perspective. And we have “peace” panderers hoping all of this will just go away.. And somehow unity gets lost in the shuffle.

As I read the letters of the Apostle Paul, as I read Jesus’ great prayer in the 17th chapter of John’s gospel, unity trumps both peace and purity as the intention of God for the church. Or at least, unity is offered as the bridge to help purity and peace hold together in holy, healthy tension. You know, brothers and sisters, as special as the PCUSA is, we are only a drop in the bucket of God’s vast global community. And if we, in our relatively small community cannot figure out how to live together and love together in the name of Jesus, how will this woeful, weary, wrangling world ever be able to survive? How will this tumultuous world be able to pull back from the brink of terrorist destruction and hatred and inequality? The Book Of Order, in my favorite sentence of all, says quite simply that the church is called to be the provisional demonstration of what God intends for all of humanity. Dear friends, what kind of provisional demonstration are we currently demonstrating? And how instructive is that image for the rest of the world?

God is calling the church of the 21st century to be joyfully evangelical, intentionally multi-cultural, and purposely paradoxical. God is calling the church of the 21st century to model the dynamic tension of peace, unity, and purity as a provisional demonstration of what God intends for all of humanity. Which, if we respond, will incarnate us into the passionate missional community that God has created us all to be together. What we have in common – conservative, liberal, or somewhere in between – is mission – our baptismal vocation of discipleship – our calling to be those sent to be the just and generous presence of God in the world.

At the Presbyterian Youth Connection Assembly this past July in Louisville, a young man named Nathan was elected as one of the new Co-Moderators of the NPYC for the next two years. In his campaign speech, Nate shared a story about his own faith journey. He traveled to Africa as part of a mission team, and was confronted by both the beauty and the pain of our African brothers and sisters. At one point a little boy skipped up to Nate and offered him his hand as a gesture of friendship and play. But the hand was dirty and the clothing was tattered and the hunger was palpable. And so, out of fear, Nate backed away. But then the mission tour group studied the story of the Good Samaritan, and realized that he was being like the Levite and the priest – too scared and too busy to reach out to a stranger in need.. And so, he went and found that little boy and he took his hand and he walked with him on our common human journey of faith. That was the day that Nathan decided that he – and we – need to get our hands dirty – eagerly engaging ourselves in the incarnational love of God. Brothers and sisters, as joyful evangelists, as passionate missionaries, as those who embrace the paradoxical and multi-cultural beauty of God’s creation, let us recommit ourselves to be and become the recreated, resurrected Body of Christ on earth.

May it be so. Amen.

Hold On and Let Go: Being Faithful in a Post-Modern, Culturally Creative World

Bruce Reyes-Chow
Organizing pastor, Mission Bay Community Church NCD, San Francisco

Presentation to the 2003 Covenant Conference
November 7, 2003
Washington, DC

(This presentation included slides and videoclips that are not shown here.)

Today we are going to talk about the church we are going to be and become in a broad way and looking at society and this whole idea of what it means to look at the post-modern world and our churches.

I ask you to think, what is the church that you dream about? What does it look like? Who is in this church? Who gets to decide who is in the church? This conference has been a really exciting time, because it has been a reaffirmation of what many of us believe. In some ways, though, I think we need to think about who we are. As I think about the church and what I hope it is to be, I think about my children. I have three wonderful, perfect girls who are the joy of my life. When I think about the church, I think about a church that they will have when they grow up. I hope that church is an exciting place to be, spiritually, physically, emotionally. I hope it is a place where they understand and experience God. When I look at our church today, when I look out here today, this is not the church that I dream about.

It is not very often that I can be in an entire conference and count the number of Asian-Americans on one hand. This place has some work to do. I go to conferences that maybe are a little more evangelical or conservative, and I bond with my Asian-American brothers and sisters, because they are there. Is it purely theology? I don’t think so. It is about approach, attitude, and posture. When I look at this group, and you hear that quote over and over again, “The Christian Church is one generation away from extinction,” that ain’t far from the truth.

Many of you have been faithful servants. Thank God for the roads you have paved for many of us. But look twenty years down the road, and many of us will not be here. This is not the church that I dream about for our children. I dream about a church that is whole as many of you do, but what that means for us in a larger picture. The Christian church has to be really bold, not just bold in the places that we are comfortable talking about and fighting about, but bold beyond all of it, because God has said to us, “All God’s children are God’s children.”

Let us pray. Holy and gracious God, may your spirit be with us this afternoon. May it be able to lift our hearts, our souls, and our spirits to you so that we may be open to all that you have gifted us with.

With all that wonderful introduction of why this church isn’t any good for you, let me begin by telling you a little about my background and why I feel like I can talk bad about the church.

I am your fault! So, you have no one else to blame but yourselves. I am born, raised, baptized Presbyterian. I come out of a small, multi-ethnic congregation in Stockton, California, a historically Philippino-American church founded out of the Central Valley farm workers strike — always a very social justice-minded church. It was very clear that my faith was about being active in the community, being connected to somebody, treating my neighbor as I would want to be treated. It was about being kind. It was about justice. It was about compassion. I was raised by the progressive part of our church — although I am finding out I am not as progressive as I used to think I was.

Now, as I look at our church and the way our church is moving, it is not lining up with the way the world is. Most of the time we would say, “Good!” but now it is to the detriment of our church. The world has gotten more progressive than us, and that scares me.

I think about that because I am in a church that is brand new. We are two years old, Mission Bay Community Church, and yes it doesn’t say Presbyterian, and no we are not tricking them into coming into the denomination. Many people say that we should put Presbyterian in the name, and I respond “Why?” It’s not like we hide it. We are a congregation that is hard to describe. I am one of the oldest people there every Sunday. I am 34 years old. Sixty people come on Sunday. There are about five people older than me. We have to do church differently. I cannot be the same kind of pastor I was when I was at a church that was predominantly 60- and 70-year-olds.

The church that I am in is focused on evangelism, the great E word of our church! David Bailey has the best way of talking about progressive evangelism. He says that in most churches it’s like, you are welcome to be in our church, but you have to cerebrally know that you are welcome. The congregation that I serve doesn’t let us get away with that. The congregation I serve is unapologetically about sharing the Good News of Christ in a variety of ways. This has been my struggle with evangelism in the more progressive part of our church. The most support I got for doing new church development in San Francisco Presbytery was not from the progressive churches. They are supportive in “Hope it goes well”; but when it came right down to it, our four biggest funders from our presbytery were all the most conservative churches. Funding a well-known progressive pastor. Would progressive churches fund an NCD for a well-known conservative evangelical church development? Probably not. 

For me, evangelism has been one of the most difficult things because we don’t always know what it is. For Presbyterians it has been even worse. There is this old story about the evangelism conference where the pastor is standing up front and asks the question, “What have Presbyterians contributed to the cause of evangelism?” and the whole conference is silent. Asked again, “What have Presbyterians offered to the cause of evangelism?” Nothing. Finally a gentleman in the back stands up and says, “Restraint!”

I grew up with a strong sense of my community. The communal aspect of my faith was ingrained in me. Every service ended in a circle; at every major event in anybody’s life the community gathered. But never once in my upbringing in the church did I talk in real language about my personal relationship with Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. We in the church have forced ourselves to choose between community and evangelism. We must be able to do both.

Some of you have heard this whole phrase about post-modernism. What the heck is that? Well, post-modernism in its essence is indefinable, but we are going to try. Post-modernism is that whole movement from a modern society of mechanics, of black and white, of structure, to a post-modern society which is generally a younger society that is into collaboration, that is about fluidity, that is about a life of chaos.

If you look at the dot.com industry where I pastor, that whole area, everybody would say the dot.coms don’t contribute to society. But those dot.coms, most of them, had a kind of family care within their company. They had all these things that had been fought for, but they weren’t talked about in the same way. That is from our Sixty’s parents’ upbringing. We are the generation of the divorced parents. Lives are unstable. Relationships are no longer set in stone. Vows of commitment are treated differently.
There was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a year ago that said dating is just practice for divorce. Sadly that rings true. The generation has a hard time looking for anything long-term. When I talk about being in the ministry for eight years, congregation members’ jaws drop. “Like, the same industry?” Yeah! “Not the same job, though, right?” Well, no.

Our young pastors are part of this post-modern generation that is unstable. It is a stressful time, but very exciting because it is a spiritual community. It is holistic. One of the wonderful things about post-modernism is this going away from rigid organizational hierarchy toward something closer to ordered chaos. If you look at the commercials, if you read business books, you see that marketing is going towards a post-modern culture. It’s addressing the rise of what they are calling the cultural creatives, 50 million people supposedly in the United States. It is a generation to which our churches will either say, “You are welcome and this is how we show it,” or “Really, you are not.” In the congregation that I serve, we try to do that.

Today I want to talk about a few ways that we as a church may do that. My first interest is about how we go about connecting people to God through our congregations. How do we live out this faith and worship in a way that may or may not bring folks into involvement? I want to talk about a few of those things, and they are not tools.

Post-modern ministry is not about what kind of music you do. It is not about whether you have coffee in the sanctuary or not. It is not about how tall your pulpit is. It is not about specifics at all. Our church in our modern way of thinking says, One plus one equals two, so we do this to reach this group. A post-modern way of thinking says, Well, this plus this over here might mean this, but on this end might mean this over here, so anytime we try to put something down you’re going to miss. We don’t talk about tools and skills. We talk about posture, approach, and being. What are the ways we are so that folks know that we are welcoming?

Two of the churches in San Francisco that I believe reach the highest number of people under 35 — what kind of worship do you think they have? Traditional! High church! Calvary Presbyterian Church, Laird Stuart’s church — Laird is a wonderful pastor, a great preacher — his church is high church, and they have a great number of young adults there. And post-modern! Our church probably has the second number. We’ve been around for two years. There are 18 Presbyterian churches in San Francisco, so that’s not so good. I offer to you these things not because I think I am any kind of expert, because in our denomination it doesn’t take a lot to be an expert on this.

When we talk about the struggles of the church, it is not about me saying here is how we need to change or here is how we are doing it, so you need to copy it. Nothing like that; it’s about us engaging in God’s journey together, and how in these brief moments we see glimpses of this amazing Kingdom of God that we will experience at the end of time. I offer you these things not as a way to say how bad your churches are or how great the one I serve is. It’s actually kind of sad that we have probably been one of the most successful in our denomination at reaching in any kind of big number — which is 60 — this generation of folks in a new way. These are not recycled Presbyterians. These are not folks who are transferring cities and looking for the nearest church. These are folks who as adults are experiencing Christianity for the first time. So I say to you, Gosh, this is really exciting for us. Maybe you can figure out a way to bring this excitement and amazing gift to your places of ministry.

I. The first thing is this. Be confident in Christ, confident in the saving power of Christ in our lives both physically and spiritually. One of the biggest deals for our folks is the instability of their lives. Every Sunday we pray for five or six people who don’t know if they are going to have a job. These aren’t folks in low-income industries. These are folks who have money for six months – but then what? These are folks whose parents are probably divorced. They themselves might have been divorced ,or are struggling with what it means to be in relationship these days. They’re struggling with theological issues, struggling with so much stuff, and we have to be able to offer Christ as a calming presence in the chaos. The reason I believe my brothers and sisters in a more evangelical setting are growing so well is that they are adjusting to this far better than we are. It is easier when our theology is black or white.

But the gift of the progressive part of our church is that we value and celebrate the gray. We look at our faith as a struggle. I never grew up seeing that as a gift. When we offer it to people we say, “You know what? Take comfort knowing that Christ is with you as you wander around.”

“Pastor, I’ve always thought about this. I’ve always questioned this. My last church didn’t let ask me this.”
I respond, “Alright! That’s cool! Let’s talk!”
“Really?
“Really!”

For us it is about finding this common presence in the midst of a world that is stormy. If you approach Christ in a way that we have been taught, our strength can be that calming presence for a whole generation that is experiencing nothing but chaos in their life. It saddens me that people are amazed that I’ve been married 13 years. It’s the best 25 years of my life I tell my wife, and she laughs — most of the time. It is amazing because in their lives, in their experience that seems like a really long time. Yes it is, and the journey is hard; but there is stability in the midst of that relationship just as there is stability in your relationship with Jesus Christ. Claim it! Own it!

I used to forget that. When people come to the Presbyterian Church for the first time, believe it or not, they are really not looking for community in a sense that we offer it. Most of the time they want to know if we actually talk about Jesus Christ. In San Francisco, as you can imagine, our greatest strength is the diversity of our spirituality, but it is also our greatest struggle. I have people coming to our church all the time saying they came here because you actually said God in your mission statement, and there are Christian churches that don’t. We could go to the Church of John Coltrane. We could go to the Wiccan thing down here. We could go to the Unitarian thing over here. We could go to the Methodist thing over here. 

I used to be in that whole Seeker movement. Take all that out! The new generation of folks are saying, Tell us what you believe. Claim it! Our weakness as progressives is that we often haven’t done that well. Folks come to the church looking for a connection to Christ, looking for a definitive understanding of how we live that faith out.

I was taught that by a lady at my first church, Covenant Presbyterian. It was an older church, and it combined with this younger group from the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown. They wanted to grow in this area that was growing with mixed ethnicity.

I was 26 years old when I was ordained. The vibrancy we bring as young pastors is a gift. The vibrancy combined with the arrogance of some of us that come out of seminary is not so much. I remember one Monday, there was a knock on the office door. Martha walks in, and she folds her arms. I know I’m in trouble. “Bruce,” she said (and I wanted to say, “That’s Pastor Bruce,” but she didn’t go for that), “do you know what happened Sunday?” I said “No, what happened Sunday?” — I’m thinking, oh no, did I swear in my sermon? Did I put the coffee on the piano again? “Bruce, the flowers were in the wrong place on Sunday!” I’m sitting there. Here’s what not to say. “Martha, I don’t care.” You know, it is one of those things where you say it (Oh God, bring it back!), and you can imagine her face if you watch cartoons – you can cook eggs on her head it was so hot.

I turned to my computer. “Dear Session. I quit.” I erased that and said instead that I have discerned God’s calling in my life. As Christ has guided my spirit…, and I called up my mentor, Cal Chinn, and I say to him, “Cal, I’m quitting.”

“Don’t quit,” said Cal.
“No, Cal, this is it. I’m done here. I can’t take it anymore.”
“Bruce, don’t quit. Let’s talk.”
“No, Cal. The letter is written. I’m going to print it.”
“Let’s go have lunch.”
“No. I’m set.”
“I’ll pay.”
“OK!”

So, we go to lunch, and Cal asks what’s going on? He then says to put out my hands. So I put out my hands like this, and he says, “OK, in this hand put all the cruddy stuff they’ve done to you. Put it in that hand and tell me what it is.”

“Well, Martha came and yelled at me today, and they’re making fun of this, and they don’t like the way I do this.”

Cal then said I should put all the good stuff in the other hand. “Tuesday I went to visit Barrie who is 104, and she served me tea in little tea cups which is kind of cool, and then the other day Raina was born, so I got to go see her in the hospital, and that was pretty cool. We have a baptism coming up!”

Cal said, “See? It’s a scale!” Then I went, “Mentors suck! I hate them!” — Did I just say that from the pulpit? I’m sorry! — It was one of those times where God says to you to suck it up, man! It was that gentle reminder for me.

We began to talk more and more, and he said, “You know what? You are right! The flowers don’t matter. You don’t care, but Martha does. Don’t mess with the way Martha really loves God.” He reminded me that that was how Martha connected with God. She went to church to connect with Christ. Those flowers were important for her, because that was some stability for her. There were parts of her life that were unstable. You come into that church, you start messing with the flowers, you start messing with the worship experience and the way that they experience God. You may not care, Bruce, but they do.

When we approach the post-modern world we have to give the same value to the way people want to experience God. People don’t come to the church expecting to leave. They come to the church hoping there is a reason to stay. When we are open with our understanding of Christ and say this is what Christ means for us, despite the instability of the world, the grayness can be a comfort, then we have said to a world that is so chaotic, there is calm. There is peace of mind and spirit, and this is a place you can find it. We cannot forget to be confident in Christ..

II. This is about not just confidence in Christ but humility of the spirit. One of the hallmarks of the post-modern generation is there is no absolute truth in anything. As soon as people begin to hear absolutism they run. We cannot be so absolute in things that we ourselves begin to say the transformative power of the Holy Spirit cannot infiltrate that which we are so sure of.

I think about all the positions I have ever held about anything, and what I have become and where I have been. My mother is an extremely liberal democrat and a Presbyterian pastor. She was this incredibly liberal democrat and worked for the legislature in Sacramento, California for about 25 years, and when I was in sixth grade I wrote two papers. One was on my favorite President which was Nixon. My mother just about had a coronary when I brought this home, and in her gentleness said “What the __ is this?????” — “Err, I liked the dog.” The second paper I wrote was on capital punishment. At that point I thought it was more humane to kill off the prisoners than to overcrowd our prisons. Liberal democrat mom was happy about that paper, too! At that point in my life I was so sure about where I was. My mom was so sure that she had just messed up.

Just as I have changed, we have to be open to all the things we believe God is leading us to. I say to folks in our congregation we are very mixed theologically. All of our clergy is fairly progressive, but our congregation is very mixed theologically. We have two committed gay couples in our church, and we have many folks who just believe it is wrong. It is amazing, I think, how a post-modern generation is ready to be in the same congregation, let alone same denomination I say to them that this is where I am, and I am 99% sure I am right. There are three pastors who work with that multi-ethnic congregation — one Asian-American, one Korean-American, one African-American. We’re the only denominational church, I am sure, that has three racial-ethnic pastors in a church that is not deemed racial-ethnic. Every year I go to racial-ethnic events. Well ,why? We are not a racial-ethnic church. Well, because it is important to me, because the justice in our denomination still needs work, the justice and the racism in our world still need work. And I say to the congregation (I hope I’m right), when I talk about my own struggles around race and how that informs me, and how I raise my children, and what that means about what we need to do as a denomination and as a church, I hope I’m right. I hope that when I read scripture, whatever God’s Spirit tells me that I need to say that Sunday morning, gosh I hope I’m right.

But I never say to them I am 100% sure, because when we take a 100%-sure stance on anything, we leave out that thing called faith. We leave out that possibility that God may say to us, “You know what? Change your heart.” We ask the other parts of our church to do that. We are in the business in this place of figuring out ways to change the hearts of these other folks. My challenge is not just around particular issues that we deal with here, but other issues in our church around who you see, who walks in, who is not there. Can our hearts be changed as well? Are we so sure of how we are to be as a church that we have left out and forgotten the transformative power of the Holy Spirit? Can we be humble enough to say, I may be wrong, but I have faithfully discerned that this is where God has told me to stand in this place and in this time? Can we be Esther in that moment? Can we also be the Pharisees who may change? Those who are converted? Can our experience of God also say to us sometimes that we may not always be right? We have to be humble in the Spirit.

Oftentimes we as a church, as a people, can be so stubborn, so sure of ourselves, that we allow ourselves to go on without any kind of experience of reconciliation. We are so unwilling to change in real ways. We never really say to God, “Change my heart, God. The transformative power that you carry is real for me, and I will live it out.” We have to be honest with the Spirit. When people come in, they want to know that we are not always so sure in our claims that there is no room for faith. Every time I say, I am here, and I am never budging, what does that leave out of my life and my faith and my experience of God’s amazing community? We have to be humble in the Spirit.

III. The last thing that I offer to you, in trying to make this church open to the community in which many of us live, is to trust in God. This is so simple yet something that I think we often fail to do and to show. Trusting God means to me that I hang in.

So often, my friends in ministry will come, and we will talk about the struggles they are experiencing, because the culture is one that says it is okay to move on after three or four years. In fact, if you are not moving on after three or four years, you are currently not wanted anywhere else. But the reality is that our churches will not thrive unless pastors stay. But my colleagues are leaving, and I remember going through that struggle with my first congregation. The Sunday I was going preach my last sermon, and trying to find some grace in the midst of it, my wife said to me — I’ll never forget it — Robin put her arms around me, and she said, “Bruce, just trust God.”

From that point on my ministry was never about how long I am going to be here. It was what am I going to do with the amount of time that God has given me to serve. There were no more risks in ministry because I trusted God. When we started this new church, with no people, no building, no money, folks would say to me it was such a risk. I said no, you know what? I trusted God has guided somewhere, so I’m not really worried about that! We have to be able to trust God. We have to be able to tell people in the same way they, too, must trust God. One of the worst characteristics of the generation and of the culture is this tendency to move on quickly. There is huge angst in the midst of any transition our young folks are making these days — job, family, church, relationships. We need to say to them to just trust in God: trust that there is something greater than you may even know right now.

The world is looking for us to say to them, Jesus Christ is real. The world is looking for us to say, we are really sure about this, but we are always faithful to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. And the world is looking for us to say, God is real, and you can rely on God. When we begin to approach this new generation of people who are all around us, some sitting in these very pews, when we really begin to live that out, that church that I told you about, that dream, then in twenty years, when my daughters are sitting in the chairs or the pews, or in the coffee house, wherever they may be sitting to have church, I will be able to sit back and say, “Ah! This is the church that I dreamed about.” When you all who will go on before some of us are watching over us, sitting with God, you can say, “Ah, I had a hand in the plan that brought about this church that we dreamed about.” When my children experience a church like this they, too, will be part of a church that says, in the future for them, this is the church that their children will be part of. When we do that, we are faithful to God. Be faithful to Christ. Be faithful to the transforming power of the Spirit. And trust in God. When we do that as a community faithfully, we are being faithful to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Let us pray:

Holy and gracious God, for the amazing spirit that comes upon each and every one of us, in the glimpses of grace, in the smallness of a child’s grin, the enormity of a thunderstorm, the wonder of a handshake from an enemy, the power of our own hearts being transformed, help us to see you, O God, in our lives this day so that we may live forth differently, that this amazing day you give us we do something faithfully. We do something joyously. We do something that transforms the world. We pray all of this in the name of Christ.  Amen.

COVENANT NETWORK CONFERENCE 2003
New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, DC
Keynote Address- Friday Afternoon, November 7, 2003

Strangers: a Dialogue about the Church

Richard J. Mouw
President, Fuller Theological Seminary

(Barbara Wheeler and Richard Mouw presented prepared remarks and then responded to each other’s remarks and questions from the audience.)

I accepted the assignment to be here today because of the urgings of my good friend Barbara Wheeler. But when I saw the program, I was pleased to see that another good friend, Patrick Henry, was also going to be speaking here. I have spent many weeks during many summers at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, where Patrick has provided such excellent leadership. I co-chaired a variety of ecumenical discussions in Collegeville, and I also served for a number of years on the Institute Board. Since the Institute is a place where I have learned many important lessons about how strangers can draw closer together in the Body of Jesus Christ, let me begin with a Collegeville story.

My first visit to Collegeville occurred when I was on the faculty at Calvin College and also very active in Christian Reformed denominational functions. One of my assignments had been to serve for five years on the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches, as one of the representatives of non-member denominations. I approached that involvement with some cynicism, and my experience on the Commission did not completely cure me of that attitude. So it was with some trepidation that I journeyed to Collegeville for a weeklong discussion of “The Meaning of Ecumenism.”

I was pleasantly surprised by the tone of the Collegeville discussion, but I also experienced some initial discomfort. Two people in particular frustrated me. One was a very serious Catholic theologian who regularly expressed her amazement—even her shock—at some of my theological formulations. The other was a Russian Orthodox layman, later to become a priest, who seemed to be coming from a totally different religious universe than the one that I inhabited. I can still remember feeling eager to get back to Grand Rapids where I could tell my fellow Dutch Calvinists about all of the strange things I had heard from these two individuals.

A funny thing happened to me over the next several months, however. From time to time, one of my fellow Calvinists—a faculty colleague, or a preacher—would refer to something related to either Catholicism or Orthodoxy that I knew was not a fair representation of the views I had heard from these two individuals in Collegeville. When I agreed to return to the Institute the next summer for another round of discussions, it was with a new kind of eagerness: I could not wait to tell my two new-found friends about the misinformed things I had heard some Grand Rapids people say about their two traditions. Those two Collegeville participants, Margaret O’Gara and Anthony Ugolnik, were to become, along with Patrick Henry, close Christian friends from whom I have learned much. No longer strangers, but fellow citizens together in God’s household. Over the years I have been able to build on this and other Collegeville experiences, engaging very freely and extensively in both intra-Christian and inter-religious dialogues.

All of which has caused me to puzzle much about the fact that I have been unusually apprehensive about the invitation to speak to you today. Barbara and I have done this kind of dialogue before, on Fuller’s campus, in front of fairly large groups of Presbyterians, and our discussions together have been well-received. Indeed, she has made more than a few friends among evangelicals as a result of those presentations. I have searched diligently for a way of capturing the quality that Barbara exhibits in those settings that I worried that I would be lacking here. I have not yet found what I have been looking for, although I have ruled out a few characteristics. I think it is fair to say, for example, that among all of Barbara’s many virtues, charm is not one with which she has been especially gifted by her Creator.

Seriously, though, I have wondered a lot about my apprehension over this particular assignment. I have spent a number of years now actively engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue, and more recently in extensive exchanges with Muslim scholars, even hosting a dozen Koran experts from as many nations on our campus for a week last year. I regularly visit Utah for off-the-record discussions with LDS leaders about deep disagreements between Mormons and evangelicals. And just last week I spent several hours with government officials in China, talking about sensitive church-state matters. I go at all of these things with great enthusiasm. And yet I have found myself regularly breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of engaging in dialogue with fellow Presbyterians here about some important topics being debated presently in our denomination. Why the anxiety in this particular case?—this is a question I have asked myself many times over the past several weeks as I have tried to prepare for this occasion.

The basic problem, I think, is that there is so little room for genuine give-and-take in our Presbyterian discussions these days, while at the same time so much hangs on how our conversations go. It is increasingly apparent that the issues that we are discussing are not simply topics about which we happen to disagree. They are matters that are vitally connected to the question of whether we can stay together as a denomination. In that sense, our present Presbyterian debates do not feel like friendly arguments over the breakfast table, or even the more heated kinds of exchanges that might take place in the presence of a marriage counselor. Rather, it often feels like we are already getting ready for the divorce court, under pressure to measure every word that we say with an eye toward the briefs that our lawyers will be presenting as we move toward a final settlement.

Those are not the kinds of exchanges that I relish. More importantly, I hope with all my heart that we can avoid the divorce court. I want us to stay together. Barbara Wheeler and I have argued much about the issues that threaten to divide us. I presently do not have a clear sense of what it would take to avoid what many of our fellow Presbyterians apparently are convinced is an inevitable separation. I do sense, however,—as I know Barbara does—a strong need to keep talking. It helps much that she and I are friends, and that we know how to talk with each other. But we both know that many of her friends do not like to talk to many of my friends, and vice versa. And I am not sure how we can remedy that problem. All I can do today, then, is to talk—in the hope that some of you will also be willing to continue the conversation with people like me.

Barbara regularly makes her case by appealing to a high ecclesiology. The church, she insists, is not some mere voluntary arrangement that we can abandon just because we do not happen to like some of the other people in the group. God calls us to the church, and that means that God requires that we hang in there with each other, even if that goes against our natural inclinations. I agree with that formulation. And I sense that many of my fellow evangelicals in the PCUSA would also endorse it. The question that many evangelicals are asking these days, though, is whether we are expected by God to hang in there at all costs. I think that this is an important question. So in my own efforts to make the case for sticking together, I feel the need to explore additional considerations.

One such consideration, for me at least, has to do with the history of the seminary over which I preside. Let me explain that by reviewing briefly a little Fuller Seminary history with you. In the fall of 1949 Dr. Bela Vassady joined the Fuller faculty as Professor of Biblical Theology and Ecumenics. Vassady was a distinguished Hungarian Reformed theologian who had been instrumental in introducing the theology of Karl Barth to his homeland,. He had only recently completed an American lecture tour under the sponsorship of the World Council of Churches—he had been one of the founders of the WCC. Upon his arrival in Pasadena, Vassady met with a committee of the local presbytery of what was then the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in order to facilitate the process of transferring his ministerial credentials from the Hungarian Reformed Church to the Los Angeles Presbytery. Vassady assumed that the process would be virtually automatic—an assumption that had been reinforced by the encouragement of his good friend Eugene Carson Blake, the pastor of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church.

Much to Vassady’s shock, his request was denied. In informal discussions with the committee that had made the decision, he was told that while the presbytery would indeed be honored to have him as a member, they did not want to establish a precedent for admitting other members of the Fuller faculty, several of whom had already expressed an interest in being admitted to the presbytery.

While the earliest generation of Fuller Presbyterians were obviously strong proponents of a conservative Calvinist theology, they had refused to identify with the separatism of J. Gresham Machen and his followers. In fact, one of them, the Old Testament professor William LaSor, had previously served in the Presbytery of West Jersey as a member of the commission of that had suspended Carl McIntyre from the denomination’s ministry. He and several other early leaders at Fuller were deeply distressed by the divisive spirit of much of the evangelicalism of their day, and they placed a commitment to working within the structures of mainline denominations high among their priorities for the kind of theological education they meant to be fostering.

Eventually, of course, many Fuller faculty members were welcomed by local presbyteries. And as things developed, Fuller attracted many women and men who desired to study for Presbyterian ministries. Jack Rogers has taken much heat from our evangelical ranks in the past for years for the positions he has come to defend in our denominational debates—and understandably so. But I want to say here that Fuller is deeply indebted to Jack for his marvelous role for many years in serving as an important mentor to several generations of Presbyterian students at Fuller. Our strong relationship to the PCUSA would not be what it is today without his pioneering efforts. I greatly admire those earlier generations of evangelicals who worked patiently to provide an alternative to the more divisive patterns within their own ranks, and I have a strong desire to honor their labors. 

But my reasons for wanting to see us all stick together in the PCUSA have to do with more than a mere streak of institutional nostalgia. I genuinely believe that a Presbyterian split would be a serious setback for the cause that I care deeply about, namely, the cause of Reformed orthodoxy. I spend a lot of time thinking about how people with my kind of theology have acted in the past, and I am convinced that splits inevitably diminish the influence of the kind of orthodoxy that I cherish, for at least two reasons—ones that I set forth in an Outlook article a year or so ago.

First, the denomination from which the dissidents depart is typically left without strong voices who are defending their understanding of orthodoxy. This is what happened in the early decades of the twentieth century when J. Gresham Machen and his colleagues broke away from the Northern church. I know that this is not a very popular thing to say in this setting, but I happen to be a strong admirer of Machen. I think that he pretty much had things right on questions of biblical authority, the nature of Christ’s atoning work, and other key items on the theological agenda. But I have strong reservations about his ecclesiology, and I regret that his views about the unity of the church led him to abandon mainline Presbyterianism. As long as he remained within the Northern church, he had a forum for demonstrating to the denomination’s liberals that Calvinist orthodoxy could be articulated with intellectual rigor. When he and his friends departed, this kind of witness departed with them. The evangelicals who stayed on in the northern church generally did so because they were not as polemical as the Machen group; they were not nearly as inclined as the Machenites to engage in sustained theological discussion. This meant that the quality of theological argumentation suffered for several decades—some would even say up to our present time—in mainline Presbyterianism.

The second way in which the cause of Reformed orthodoxy was diminished has to do with what happened to the conservatives themselves after they left the mainline denomination. They quickly began to argue among themselves, and it was not long before new splits occurred in their ranks. The result was that conservative Calvinism itself increasingly became a fractured movement.

I worry much about what would happen to Presbyterian evangelicals ourselves if we were to leave the PCUSA. When we evangelical types don’t have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other. And I can testify to the fact that intra-evangelical theological arguments are not always pleasant affairs. I would much rather see us continue to focus on the major issues of Reformed thought in an admittedly pluralistic denomination than to deal with the tensions that often arise among ourselves when evangelicals get into the debates that seem inevitably to arise when we have established their own “pure” denominations.

I believe that it is a good thing for Presbyterians to engage in passionate theological debates about important theological topics. These are exciting times to be discussing together the relevance of the great themes of the Reformation for our present situation. Like other evangelicals, I find it discouraging when prominent folks in our denomination seem bent on denying these important teachings. But at least it is possible to have a good theological argument with people who take seriously their departures from Reformation distinctives. I worry much more about those in our denomination who don’t seem to have strong views about these matters. They have not been convinced of the importance of theology as such, to say nothing of a theology grounded in Reformed orthodoxy. In their voting patterns on major issues, sometimes they lean one way and sometimes another way. I would hate to think that they would no longer have to listen to strong Reformed voices when mainline Presbyterians debate crucial topics.

In the 1970s and 1980s I spent considerable time in dialogue with Mennonite scholars about the differences between the Reformed and Anabaptist traditions on political and ethical questions. One of the most interesting encounters of this sort happened one Sunday evening in 1980, at the Mount Joy Mennonite Church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Myron Augsburger and I debated the issues of just war doctrine and pacifism in the presence of a large Mennonite audience. I had come prepared to launch immediately into a critic of pacifism from my Calvinist perspective, but when Augsburger and I met in the afternoon to talk over the format for the evening, he proposed a somewhat different approach. He recalled how the Calvinist-versus-Anabaptist public disputations of the 16th century were typically angry exchanges in which each side spoke harshly about the other’s positions. “Let’s do it differently tonight,” he urged. “Let’s each of us begin by talking in very personal terms about the things we respect in the other person’s position.”

That is what we did, and it was a profoundly moving experience for me—setting a very different tone for the airing of our disagreements than I had experienced in previous dialogues. I thought about that encounter as I was preparing for this discussion here, and it occurred to me that this is the approach that Barbara Wheeler has taken on her several visits to Fuller Seminary. She has typically prefaced her explanation of any serious differences she has with evangelicals with some comments about what she has come to appreciate in our perspective. I want now to follow that pattern.

I have learned much in my life from people who my fellow evangelicals are quick to label as liberal Protestants. For example, in the environs in which I was nurtured spiritually and theologically Harry Emerson Fosdick was considered an arch-villain. As a college student I decided to form my own assessment of Fosdick’s thought, and I read extensively in his writings. There was much in his theology that I found disturbing. But I also was deeply moved by many of his sermons. His articulate address to issues of war and peace, and his profound commitment to the betterment of the human condition, left a strong impression on me.

Indeed it was Fosdick’s influence, along with that of Walter Rauschenbusch and other “social Gospel” advocates, that led me to experience considerable alienation from the evangelical community during my years of graduate study on secular campuses in the 1960s, as I joined protests against racial injustice, and marched against the Vietnam war. And even though I continued to search for a more traditionally orthodox basis for my political commitments, I drew much inspiration and solace from the witness of Christian people of more liberal theological convictions who modeled for me a courageous commitment to the biblical vision of justice and peace. I was—and I continue to be—ashamed of the failure of evangelicals to take up these causes in the 1960s. And I was—and I continue to be—deeply grateful to God for the social witness of liberal Protestantism during those days.

I take my common history and shared commitments with folks like you very seriously. And it is precisely because of this that I want so much to stay together in our denomination. A friend of mine, also a Presbyterian evangelical with a similar history to my own, put it well to me recently. “It hurts like heck to be labeled a homophobe by the folks we are presently arguing with,” he said. “When it was the issues of race and militarism and gender, we were all in it together. and folks like us were out of step with much of the rest of evangelicalism. The homosexuality questions, though, are different ones for us. Here we feel we have no other choice but to draw the line and stay with what we take to be the clear teachings of the Bible. We simply have to live with the accusations of being the mean-spirited ones. I do wish, though, they would give us a little bit of credit for having some integrity on this matter! I would like to get beyond the name-calling and really wrestle together with the underlying theological issues.”

That is my wish also. I believe the real issues have to do with the great themes of the Reformation. Indeed, these are the themes that I kept returning to in the earlier debates, within evangelicalism, on matters of justice and peace. I first got an inkling about the connection between historic Calvinism and social justice issuest when in 1962, as a student at Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan, I was sent on a weekend preaching assignment to a congregation in a Dutch-American community in a neighboring state. I arrived on Saturday, and was an overnight guest in the home of a church elder and his wife. At the dinner table after the evening meal, the husband read a chapter from the Scriptures —as was the custom in that subculture. I don’t remember the passage, but I do know that when he finished reading he told me that the verses reminded him of Heidelberg One, adding that it is wonderful for a person to be able to say, “My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own.”

We soon left the table and sat in the living room, where he turned on the evening news. The main news story that day was about Martin Luther King leading a march against housing discrimination. My host grew agitated and he walked over to turn off the TV set, telling me that he could not stand to hear “all of this stuff about the colored people and their complaints.” I immediately let him know that my sympathies were with Dr. King, and we soon were engaged in a heated argument. At one point he pounded his fist on the coffee table and shouted: “I don’t want those people moving into my neighborhood! What I have I got on my own, and no one is going to take it away from me!”

I realized that it was pointless to keep the argument going, and things soon calmed down. Later, when I lay in bed, the irony hit me: the person who had shouted that what he possessed he had gotten on his own and no one could take it away from him had only minutes before told me that his only comfort in life and in death was that he was not his own, but that he belonged to a faithful Savior. That lesson stayed with me. The more I thought about this, the more I came to realize that the concluding words of the answer to Question One contains all the basics necessary for a Calvinist activism: God’s Spirit “makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live unto him.” As sinners who cannot save ourselves from our depraved condition, our only hope is the sovereign grace made available to us by the sacrificial death of the heaven-sent Savior. To know the wonders of those saving mercies is to be called to participate in the life of a covenant community whose mission it is to demonstrate to the larger world what it means to glorify God and to enjoy God forever—calling others to join us in doing the will of the Savior who is also a Lord who alone is worthy of our full obedience.

I have spoken often to evangelical audiences about sexuality issues. And I have always made it very clear to them—and I must to you today—that my views on same-sex relations are very traditional. I am convinced that genital intimacy between persons of the same gender is not compatible with God’s creating or redeeming purposes. But that kind of clarification of my understanding of biblical teaching for evangelical groups has usually been a preface to a plea for sexual humility. I have often told the story of hearing a conservative spokesman express his views in this way: “We normal people should tell these homosexuals that what they are doing is simply an abomination in the eyes of God.” When I heard that, I tell my audiences, I wanted to get up a cry out, “Normal? You are normal? Let’s all applaud for the one sexually normal person in the room!”

The fact is that none of us—or at least very few of us—can honestly claim to be normal sexual beings in the eyes of God. The truth of the matter is that the labels we typically use in describing sexual orientation are blatant examples of false advertising. My homosexual friends are not very “gay.” They have experienced much pain and loss in their lives. And the rest of us are not very “straight.” We are crooked people, often bruised and confused in our sexuality.

None of this should be shocking to Calvinists We are living in the time of our abnormality. We are all sinners who have been deeply wounded by the stain of our depravity, and we are nowhere more vulnerable and given to temptation than in the sexual dimensions of our being. In our sexual lives, as in all others areas, we know that while we may be on a journey toward wholeness, we are a long way from our destination. We are already the redeemed sons and daughters of God, but“it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” So in our brokeness we journey on, knowing that “when he shall appear”—and only then—“we will be like him, and we will see him as he is” (I John 3: 2).

This is an important time for each of us to be honest about our sexual condition. We evangelicals have nothing to brag about in this area. It is not enough for us to tell those of you with whom we disagree strongly about sexual orientation questions how wrong we think you are. Nor is it very helpful for you folks to keep insisting that we can solve most of our theological problems in this area by focusing on a Jesus who cares deeply about a generic, unnuanced “inclusivity.” If that is all we have to say to each other, there is no hope for the continuing unity of our denomination.

When I was on the faculty of Calvin College, I helped to arrange a special evening lecture on campus by my friend Virginia Mollenkott, who had recently come out publicly about her lesbian orientation. Many of the things she said to a packed auditorium that evening were off the theological charts for most of us, including myself. But I will never forget how she concluded her talk. This is how I remember her words: “You may disagree with everything I have said thus far, but I hope we can at least agree on this,” she said. “Whatever your sexual orientation, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that you have to do or agree to before coming to the foot of the Cross of Jesus. The only thing any of us has to say as we come to Calvary is this:

Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me,
and that thou bidst me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come.”

I believe that in that plea she was expressing good Reformed doctrine. We do not have to have either our theology or our ethics well worked out before we can come together to Calvary. All we need to know is that we are lost apart from the sovereign grace that was made available to us though the atoning work of Jesus Christ.

Lloyd Ogilvie told me a month ago about a recent visit he paid, while in Scotland, to his theological mentor, Thomas Torrance. Lloyd went to the theologian’s bedside, knowing that Torrance does not have long to live. Just before they bade each other farewell, Professor Torrance gave him a parting word of advice: “Lloyd,” he said, “never tiptoe around Golgotha.”

I am convinced that that is a good word from the Lord for us Presbyterians today. It has never been more important for us not to tiptoe around Golgotha. Indeed, our only hope for moving on together as partners in the cause of the Gospel is to bow together at the Cross of Calvary, aknowledging to each other and to our Lord that we all need to plead for mercy to the One who is, in the Heidelberger’s wonderful words, our “only comfort in life and in death,” and who “at the cost of his own blood… fully paid for all [our] sins” at Calvary. And then, having experienced together the healing mercy that comes from the one who alone is mighty to save, we can journey on as friends—no long strangers to each other—who are eager to talk to each other, and even to argue passionately with each other about crucial issues of Christology, atonement and discipleship, as servants who are “wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

I want with all my heart for this to happen to us in the Presbyterian church—that we take up our arguments about the issues that divide only after we have knelt and laid our individual and collective burdens of sin at the foot of the Cross. Needless to say, if it did happen, I would be surprised. But then, the God whom we worship and serve is nothing if not a God of surprises.

I am acutely uncomfortable—standing here, giving this talk. Partly, it’s the assignment, to speak about the church as it ought to be. The church is the theological topic about which I care most. I know that it is way down the list of what Calvin liked to call the heads of Reformed doctrine. He got to it in the fourth of four books of the Institutes, and it hasn’t advanced much in most people’s theological systems since. Indeed, many contemporary Christians think the church is dispensable, that God is more easily accessed outside the limits and constraints of church structures.

In my own salvation history, however, the church is central. My conversion experience occurred, not incidentally, in a church building. (Happily, I’m a liberal Presbyterian, so I don’t need to tell you anything more about that.) I was introduced to Jesus Christ by the actions as well as the words of his followers. I have grown in the faith because others have taken the time to teach it to me. Tom Torrance says that there isn’t any other way: in a tradition in which “the Truth is an historical person…, it must be communicated by other persons, in time. It is not something we can tell to ourselves.”(1)  And when my faith has flagged, as it does all the time, I depend on others—including some in this sanctuary and on this platform—to keep it for me. Perhaps God arranges exclusive assignations with some people, but not with me. In my case, it’s always been a group date. Given what I owe the church—in it and through it my life was saved—it seems cheeky of me to tell it what it should be like. It might be more fitting for the church to set the standard for me.

It’s not only the topic that daunts me this morning; it’s also the audience. Present in this room are two groups that have ministered to me in powerful ways in recent years. One is gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Presbyterians. The church has developed the bad habit of talking about this group as if it is a problem for the denomination. Let me address you directly. You have not been a problem for me. Quite the opposite: you have provided me with luminous examples of how to live a Christian life under adverse conditions—very adverse conditions. This denomination’s policies toward its GLBT members are restrictive to the point of cruelty. We tell many of you who want to offer sacrifices for the good of the church—countless hours of volunteer service as elders and deacons or a lifetime in demanding and low paid pastoral ministries—that your life choices are so much more sinful than the rest of ours that we’ve had to erect special barriers to keep you from laying your gifts at the altar. Our church’s teaching that all same-sex acts are wrong, no distinctions, has downright perverse effects. The more you conform to the practices the church blesses and honors for heterosexuals—public pledges of fidelity to another person, family commitment to the nurture of children—the less likely that you can be ordained and that you will be welcomed to work out your discipleship in most Presbyterian congregations.

Yet here you are, in this room, in this denomination, or eager to be, if only we had a place for you. You keep on witnessing to the truth of Christ in your lives. You keep on offering help that the church desperately needs but is too proud and stubborn to accept. You show us your anger—I take that as a compliment, a sign of trust. You keep on ministering, with tender compassion, to me and to many, many others who have the approval and privileges that have been denied to you. Your unselfishness lifts my sights. It makes it difficult, however, for me to lecture you about the future, because many of you live your lives better in the present, under far more difficult conditions, than I do.

The other group that makes me feel awkward and shy this morning is evangelical and conservative Presbyterians. Richard Mouw is here as their chief proxy, but others are present as well. I stumbled into the evangelical world by a kind of academic accident. Fifteen years ago, I decided to do some research in an evangelical seminary, not because I had any interest in conservative Christianity, but because some colleagues and I wanted to understand how the culture of a seminary shapes the ministers who are formed there, and culture is best studied from the outside. I could not have been more of an outsider if I had gone to do my research in Bali. I grew up in a home so liberal that when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, I couldn’t believe it. In all my eight years, I’d never met a self-identified Republican—how could a party with no members elect a president? My liberal Catholic girlhood and liberal Protestant adult life were similarly sheltered. When I arrived on the campus of that seminary fifteen years ago, I knew very few evangelicals.

But I did have definite expectations for what I would find. They had been set by the liberal culture of which I had always been a part. I believed—I think this is standard on our side of the aisle—that the only reason anyone would choose to become or remain a religious conservative is lack of the psychological strength to confront the ambiguity and uncertainty of the world as it is. (I have since learned that evangelicals harbor a corresponding theory about liberals, that we are liberals because we lack the moral fortitude to confront the truth and live by it.) I also expected the evangelical conservatives with whom I would be more or less living for the next three years to be theological dinosaurs, mired in pre-critical questions long ago settled and forgotten by the rest of us. I had expectations, too, of what I would not find. I did not think that evangelicals would be either funny or fun. More seriously, I did not expect my faith to be enriched by what I saw and heard at the seminary I was studying. Indeed, I thought it would be severely tested by the things that were said and done there in the name of Christian faith.(2)

Now it’s true, Richard, that you, the one evangelical I knew fairly well when I started my project, didn’t fit this description. A guy who can drive a Dodge Dart without damage to his self-esteem has a lot of psychological strength. You know hundreds of funny stories, and you’ve got a searching, well-furnished mind. I assumed that you were the exception. I found out that you are not. Exceptional, yes: your intelligence, integrity and depth would be in any religious culture. But many evangelicals, in my experience, don’t fit those liberal stereotypes. In other settings, I have talked at length about what I have learned about evangelicals. I don’t have time to do that today, so let me summarize my findings in a few sentences.

I have discovered that you evangelicals (I’ll talk to you directly, too) are not, as a class, fearful and unstable, at least, no more than the rest of us. You do have some rather ruthless colleagues, and I confess I still find myself wondering what happened to them early on to make them that way. But I have met some of you who are much better than I am at looking at yourselves and the world with unsparing honesty and at changing your minds and behavior when that is warranted. Thanks to you, I’ve had to begin work on an alternate theory of why people become religious conservatives and stay that way. I’ve also learned that theology in your world is a mixed bag. The range is vast. Some of it is, indeed, fossilized debates that most Christians, even many evangelicals, don’t care about any more. But there is also lively theological conversation in the evangelical world that has reminded me how much gold there is in classic Christian tradition and how it still enriches all of us, including liberals. I have to admit, too, that I’ve had a good time, Richard, with you and your ilk. Among other things, I’ve learned a slew of good jokes about evangelicals.

But the biggest surprise for me has been that my experience in what is still for me a very strange religious culture has not shaken my faith; it has strengthened it. This is the doing of particular Presbyterians, first you, Richard, then others. Despite your best efforts, you have not changed my opinions. But early in each of the relationships that have become important to me, there was a moment–a sort of spiritual ka-ching–when we both knew, and knew that the other knew, that we were hearing the same gospel, loud and clear. I am not proud of the fact that, in every case, my evangelical friends spoke first, affirming my faith before I affirmed theirs. I’m not proud that I failed to take the initiative, but I’m grateful that they did.

I’m grateful, too, that a number of you have publicly affirmed the faith and sincerity of the liberals you know and respect, a risky act in your party, where some leaders like to stir up the troops by claiming that our party practices a different religion. One such public affirmative statement that I treasure personally is a nominating speech by Price Gwynn, a card-carrying conservative. He wrote it on my behalf when I faced conservative opposition in an election for a slot on a General Assembly committee. “Barbara Wheeler is a faithful follower of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” Price said. “That doesn’t keep her from being wrong most of the time.” Just the point: the capacity to recognize each other as Christ’s own despite how wrong we are, about so many things, is proof that the gospel is true—it really does cut through our wrongness and other people’s. The fact that that happens strengthens faith. Because some of you evangelicals recognized me as a Christian first, however, or first had the courage to say so, I am reluctant to instruct you about how to be the church. You know how. You’ve shown me.

There is one more item in the catalog of factors that complicate any attempt to think together here about the church. Not to put too fine a point on it: the two groups I have named that have been the church so powerfully to me in recent years can’t stand each other. Of course there are exceptions. I am far from the only Presbyterian who has found faith and friendship in unexpected places. Generally, though, these two groups avoid and terrify each other. Each is deeply fearful that it and the wider church will suffer if the other gains any more power or prominence than it has already. What can I possibly say about the church in the presence of groups—many groups, for the alienation I have named is by no means the only one dividing this denomination—how to talk about the church when we are so deeply estranged from each other?

How about this? They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth. What if we not only acknowledge the fact that we are strangers to others in our own denomination (according to my Greek lexicon that is the first sense of “confess” here, “admit”); but also affirm it—the second sense, declare it; and even praise the fact, give thanks for it—the third connotation of confess (Let us praise God…, confess God’s name [Heb 13:15])? Instead of denying our estrangement, or bemoaning it, or whining in good 21st-century fashion that it makes us tired, why not embrace it as a gift from God? How’s this for a model of the church that we are called to become: A company of strangers, who like Abraham and Sarah set out for a new place, because from a distance all of us, in our own weird ways, [have glimpsed the promises of God] and greeted them?

This image of the church as a band of strangers who accept our discomfort with each other as God’s way of moving us forward may seem grimly Calvinistic, the sort of thing that Garrison Keillor had in mind when he said that Presbyterians are those folks who think that having a good time with nice people in a pleasant place makes you stupid. The image certainly flies in the face of the best marketing advice about how to grow your church or denomination: create a warm, friendly enclave where like-minded people can find refuge from the tensions of contemporary life. A church something like that—or churches—is what the proponents of a cool, clean division of the denomination claim to have in view. (They are dreaming. Having just studied the bloody split of the Presbyterian Church in the USA in 1837 under circumstances not all that different from our own, I am certain that peaceful or gracious schisms are not possible.) But I suspect that even those of us who hate the idea of an outright split have a secret hankering for a church in which they, or at least the most irritating of them, won’t be around to make our lives miserable. If we hammer each other long enough with whatever weapon our side has at its disposal at the moment, maybe the other side will eventually be cowed into silence, give up or go away, and we will have an improved if not completely purified church that is much more fun to be part of.

I want to advocate an alternative: a tense, edgy, difficult church made up of zenoi, strangers, who cling to each other for dear life in the same chilly, rocky baptismal boat because we are headed to the same destination: a better country. If I had time, I think that I could make the full-blown ecclesiological case for a church of strangers; but for this conversation I’ll stay with three practical advantages: strangeness is better for us, better for the church, and better for the world than the warmer and cuddlier options. I will try quickly to convince you that these claims are true.

Claim one: A church that contains members who we think strange, even barbaric, is a healthier setting for us, for our formation as Christians. We like to think that a church of our kind, one that excludes those who believe incorrectly and behave badly by our lights, would be a better school for goodness than the mixed church we’ve got. It is not necessarily so. Familiarity and affinity breed bad habits as well as virtues. Richard has already confessed an unhealthy family pattern of conservatives: contentiousness. I have seen it with my own eyes. When I arrived on the campus of that evangelical seminary I studied, I had steeled myself for a lot of liberal-bashing that I would not be able to counter because ethnographic researchers are supposed to keep their personal views to themselves. I was surprised, and I have to say a little hurt, that the faculty and students in that school rarely mentioned liberals. There was a good deal of hostile theological rhetoric, but almost all of it was directed at other evangelicals. As Richard has written in The Presbyterian Outlook, if this denomination split, within minutes the new conservative church would be organized into warring factions. Aggressiveness is part of conservative religious culture; it’s both the secret of its effectiveness and its downfall. When other targets are not available, evangelicals tend to turn their aggressiveness on themselves with special vehemence. In one of our exchanges at Fuller, Richard pointed this out and told the audience that he hoped the church wouldn’t divide, because far more good could be done by him contending with people like me than by him beating up on them.

And what about us so-called liberals? What are our bad family habits? It’s not easy to generalize about “us.” The very fact that there is no one name we all want to be called on the non-conservative side of the church signals that we are a loose association more than a party with a platform or community with a culture. But we do hang out together, without those Other Presbyterians, and when we do we can be, in fact often are, smug. We tend to look down on our opponents. We are pretty sure that we are advanced and others outmoded. When everyone else grows up, we believe, they will look and think like us. You could say that our progressive openness to the world, which is where this sense of being ahead of the curve comes from, is the secret of our effectiveness and also our downfall. In my experience, we are less likely to slide over into snobbishness, when “they”—those we have defined as inferior—are in the room, some of them thinking as clearly and acting as maturely as some of us.

So if one reason for joining a church is to get help for living more faithfully, the strange members are important. They make us self-conscious, maybe less likely to display some of the uglier traits of our sub-group and perhaps more aware that if we want more righteousness for the church and all of us in it, we may have to fix ourselves as well as those others

Claim two: the Presbyterian Church will be better off—more productive and more faithful—if we strangers in it hold on to each other. This denomination has a lot of important work to do; and though we would like to see all of it accomplished our way, the fact is that none of the factions, including our own, has the capacity or the skills to do it all alone. Richard has named two of the projects that estranged groups in the church could profitably work on together. One is Christology, which is high on the agenda not, I think, because we Covenant Network types have stepped over an orthodoxy line that is clear and easy to draw, but because none of us is able yet to say clearly or powerfully enough who Jesus Christ is in this religious situation and this world. The version of the Christological debate that is most audible inside the church and beyond takes place at the level of bumper stickers: “Jesus the Only Sole Singular Way” on their vehicles; “Many, Many Paths to God” on ours. We can do better than that. Our various parties and caucuses have different kinds of specialized knowledge: liberals are practiced in learning as Christians from other faith traditions; evangelicals have expertise in nurturing and sustaining intense personal relationships with Jesus Christ. There are some in the church—women, gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities—who have experienced what it is like to suffer at the hands of the civic and religious establishment. That is valuable insight into what it means to be the body of Christ, who had similar experiences. Instead of battering each other with our different perspectives on Jesus Christ, we might listen for what complements and corrects our own view in what others have to say about their knowledge and love of him. Perhaps, if we did that, we could represent him more fully and accurately to a world that doesn’t know him very well. I think that he would be honored if we pooled our efforts in his behalf

And what about the issue that brings us to a Covenant Network conference? Is there anything to be gained by working together to resolve it? Richard and I know from experience how difficult this is. We do agree about two preliminary but critical matters: we agree that the question of homosexuality is important—the church has to face it. We also agree that important as it is, it is not a faith-breaker. Each of us—correct me if I’m wrong, Richard—thinks that the other, seriously mistaken as the other is, is a Christian, and a Reformed one at that. But beyond that, we do not agree even about how to define the challenge God has placed before the church. You, Richard, think that God wants us to hold the line, to keep traditional—you would say, Biblical—rules of sexual conduct firmly in place. I think that God is doing something different: expanding the church’s understanding, not of sex in the first instance, but of a deep and pervasive Biblical theme, hesed, loyal love. I think that God is teaching this church, chiefly through the impressive testimony of GLBT Presbyterians, that to love another person with one’s whole being and to pledge one’s life for that person’s welfare is not a sin. Far from it: such acts of self-giving love are channels through which grace can and regularly does flow—no way they should disqualify people for church leadership. Over the last two decades, many Presbyterians, most of them theologically and temperamentally moderate and some of them conservative, have come to recognize that God’s blessing is available to all who commit themselves to love God more fully by loving another person truly. Richard, this is not capitulation to a libertine culture. This expanding understanding makes the church and us in it more, not less holy. This is, I am deeply convinced, the work of the Holy Spirit.

On this issue, Richard, we really are strangers, far apart and mystified about each other’s outlook and convictions. Shall we stick with each other as we, and the whole church, continue to struggle about these things? You have implied that we should. You’ve candidly admitted that conservatives often don’t speak fairly or respectfully of homosexuals, especially when they are not around. From that I conclude that you think you can make a more faithful case if you are engaged with them and their allies.

I think the reciprocal is true for us. We make a strong case: God invites GLBT persons into full membership, committed partnerships and church leadership on the same basis as everyone else. But we tend to leave it at that, to give the impression that inclusion is the end of the story. Of course it is not. God incorporates us into Christ’s body for a reason: transformation. Evangelical theology and culture place heavy emphasis on that next step. Our side doesn’t have to agree with conservatives about what God is seeking to change or redirect or squelch—namely, all same-sex impulses—or about who is first in line for change. (I suspect that God’s priority is the privileged and powerful, including in the present instance we self-indulgent heterosexuals who have full church and society support for the promises we make, yet still don’t keep very well.) But we can stand our ground on these points and still let the evangelicals help us balance our word to the church: inclusion and acceptance, but also metanoia and new life. Who knows? If evangelicals listen intently to the testimony of faithful GLBT persons, and if our side accepts evangelicals’ prompting to admit our need and desire to be renewed, maybe we can strive together for a church as just and generous—and holy—as God’s grace.

The last and most critical reason for all of us Presbyterian strangers to struggle through our disagreements is to show the world that there are alternatives to killing each other over differences. As long as we continue to club the other Presbyterians into submission with constitutional amendments, judicial cases and economic boycotts, we have no word for a world full of murderous divisions, most of them cloaked in religion.

In 1869, the two Presbyterian denominations formed in the bitter split forty years before came back together. Seeking, said their reunion plan, to create a church marked by “diversity and harmony, liberty and love,” both assemblies met in Pittsburgh, in separate halls from which their members marched to opposite sides of a broad avenue.(3) Their moderators and clerks then stepped into the street and met in the middle. They “clasped hands,” according to a contemporary account, “and amidst welcomes, thanksgivings, and tears, they locked arms and stood together in their reformed relations.” (4)

The last and most critical reason for all of us Presbyterian strangers to struggle through our disagreements is to show the world that there are alternatives to killing each other over differences. As long as we continue to club the other Presbyterians into submission with constitutional amendments, judicial cases and economic boycotts, we have no word for a world full of murderous divisions, most of them cloaked in religion.

In 1869, the two Presbyterian denominations formed in the bitter split forty years before came back together. Seeking, said their reunion plan, to create a church marked by “diversity and harmony, liberty and love,” both assemblies met in Pittsburgh, in separate halls from which their members marched to opposite sides of a broad avenue.(3) Their moderators and clerks then stepped into the street and met in the middle. They “clasped hands,” according to a contemporary account, “and amidst welcomes, thanksgivings, and tears, they locked arms and stood together in their reformed relations.” (4)

1) Thomas F. Torrance, The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), xxxiii.

(2) The results of this study are reported in Jackson Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, Penny Long Marler, Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

(3) Minutes of the General Assembly, N.S. 1868, 508.

(4) Presbyterian Reunion: A Memorial Volume, 1837-1871 (New York, 1870), 275, 380; cited in Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, Charles A. Anderson, The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), 221.

Litany for the Church

 John Wilkinson
Pastor, Third Presbyterian Church
Rochester, NY

2002 Covenant Conference
Opening Worship, November 7, 2002

One: We confess and acknowledge one God alone, to whom alone we must cleave, whom alone we must serve, whom alone we must worship, and in whom alone we put our trust. (Scots Confession, 1560)

All: Let us seek, in all that we say and do and are, to cleave to God and to trust God’s promises.

One: Our only comfort in life and in death is that we belong — body and soul — not to ourselves, but to our faithful savior Jesus Christ. (Heidelberg Catechism, 1562)

All: Let us seek to live in the sure promise that in life and in death we belong to God.

One: The church is the assembly of the faithful, a communion of all saints, citizens of the one commonwealth, the one city, in the fellowship of all good things. (Second Helvetic Confession, 1561)

All: Let us seek to live together as citizens and to build a city of reconciliation and joy.

One: As the saints of God, we are united to one another in love and have communion in each other’s gifts and graces. (Westminster Confession, 1647)

All: Let us seek to use our gifts with integrity and to dwell in perfect unity.

One: The church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work. (Barmen Declaration, 1934)

All: Let us seek to be bold witnesses to Christ’s grace, proclaiming to cities and nations the living Word among us.

One: Life is a gift to be received with gratitude and a task to be pursued with courage. (Confession of 1967)

All: In a broken and fearful world, the Spirit gives us courage to pray without ceasing. (A Brief Statement of Faith, 1991)

One: With an urgency born of this hope, the church applies itself to present tasks and strives for a better world. (Confession of 1967)

All: May we, the church of Jesus Christ, be joyful in our worship, be generous in our giving, be abundant in our caring, be courageous in our proclaiming, for the sake of the world God loves so much and for the sake of the church entrusted to our care. Amen.

The Church We Are Called to Be

Jack Rogers
Moderator, 213th General Assembly
Professor of Theology Emeritus, San Francisco Theological Seminary

 Address delivered to the 2001 Covenant Conference
November 2, 2001

I was in Louisville, at the Presbyterian Center on September 11. If I had to be anywhere at that time of tragedy, except at home, I was glad I was there. I want to tell you how very, very proud I was of the national staff and the volunteers in the building on that day of crisis. They immediately went to work to provide resources for our congregations and governing bodies. I became a spokesperson for the church in a way that I would not have been had I not been there.

Within minutes, the media people asked me to write a prayer which they put out on the internet. The Theology and Worship staff put together a service of hymns, prayers, and Scripture readings. I was there with two former Moderators working on the Task Force on the peace, unity, and purity of the church that has recently been announced. Together, the three of us, with others, led a service of worship in the Chapel at the Presbyterian Center. It was full. Wall to wall people, and spilling out into the hall. When Freda Gardner began to read the 23rd Psalm, everyone began to recite it aloud from memory. There was a sense of solidarity.

Afterwards I met the TV and print media who were there. An AP reporter asked me: “Why did you do this?” I replied that two things seemed clear: “We knew we needed God. And we needed each other.” It seemed the most natural thing to want to be together to share our shock and grief. We worshipped and witnessed. Then everyone went back to work. People were on the phones, and email, and fax, contacting the congregations in the hardest hit areas, offering assistance. Presbyterian Disaster Assistance was immediately brought into action. World Wide Ministries was in touch with our mission personnel overseas. Theology and Worship was responding to requests from pastors about how to interpret these events to their congregations and to parents about how to interpret them to their children. Before the day was over, Cliff Kirkpatrick, who was in Geneva, Switzerland, and John Detterick, and I, had issued a pastoral letter that went out to all of our presbyteries to be distributed to our congregations.

In a time of crisis we reach down deep inside ourselves to find the resources to meet the challenge. For me, and for many in our church, those resources are found in the wisdom of our Confessions. The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” Answer: “That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself, but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” We drew on that resource when we wrote A Brief Statement of Faith, the newest statement in our Book of Confessions, “In life and in death we belong to God.”

We have a strong, vital denomination, with committed and compassionate leaders. The first lesson of September 11 is that we must stand united. I preached for Joanna Adams at Trinity Presbyterian in Atlanta. She told that in those first days when we were all transfixed in front of our TV sets, there was a strip of announcements of canceled events running across the bottom of the screen. One from the law courts said: “Arguments canceled, today and tomorrow.” Would that it applied to the church as well.

I don’t know how the vote on Amendment A will come out. I have seen no running tallies of early votes in presbyteries. I wish that we would all take a September 11 pledge — not to put forth any more legislation nor initiate any more judicial action regarding ordination standards until the Task Force on the peace, unity, and purity of the church presents its final report in 2005. We need to give this representative group time to consult with the church and to help us understand the way forward into the 21st century. We need more education, not legislation.

I couldn’t leave Louisville, as planned, on September 11. I was there until Friday, the 15th when planes started flying again. I couldn’t get to Spokane, Washington, where I was supposed to be preaching. I couldn’t get back home to Los Angeles. But I could get to Omaha. I was to be there the following week, meeting with three presbyteries. My wife Sharon’s mother lives in the village of Bennington, just outside of Omaha, and she took me in. She is the matriarch of that town. At 93, she still drives her car and goes to two or three events a day. In Bennington, Nebraska, ecumenism is having the option to choose between being Evangelical Lutheran and Missouri Synod Lutheran. In deference to my limitations we went to Fremont to the first Presbyterian Church where I brought greetings. Then we attended a family gathering. When we got home, a neighbor was standing on the doorstep. She said: “Come over for pie and coffee.”

There were three couples, and Gretchen and I. We were talking about the tragic events of September 11. One of the women said: “What I don’t understand is how some of those terrorists could have been in this country four or five years and not realized that our way of life is better and changed their minds.” That is the second, painful lesson of September 11. There are people in every country and every religion that only see the dark side. America has many faults, and we have made many mistakes in our foreign policy. We know these things and we try to correct them, but we move on knowing the positive as well. When people only see the negative about others and then cast their attitude in religious term, they are called “fundamentalists.”

About 10 years ago Martin Marty, now retired Professor of Church History at the University of Chicago, got the American Academy of Sciences to authorize a “Fundamentalism Project.” Most people thought it was a waste of time. Who cares about fundamentalists? Now Marty looks like a genius! His team has compiled about 10 volumes of research on fundamentalisms worldwide. Recently in an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Marty listed four common characteristics of all fundamentalisms. First, they grow on soil that has been conservative, traditional, orthodox. Second, they imagine that there was once an ideal community in the past and that the modern world is a defection, a falling away, a perversion of that ideal community. Many conservative people might share those first two attitudes of fundamentalism.

To be evangelical, or conservative, is not to be a fundamentalist. What distinguishes a fundamentalist is militancy. George Marsden, in his book, Fundamentalism in American Culture, defines fundamentalism as “militant anti-modernism.” Fundamentalists believe that they must react. They must fight a holy war against change. Those, of their own community, who do not support this holy war are called apostate. Their opponents are described as minions of Satan. Fourth, these militant fundamentalists usually select a few features of their imagined perfect past and make them absolute. This often is set forth as the necessity to believe a few precisely worded doctrinal statements.

What is most painful to say is that we have a militant fundamentalist group within the Presbyterian Church. The common fundamentalist themes can be found in the attitudes of the Presbyterian Lay Committee. It was founded 36 years ago to try to change the Presbyterian Church into a body that would not deal with social issues and that would interpret the Bible with a surface literalism. Growing on the soil of a denomination that is conservative and theologically orthodox, the Lay Committee idealizes the era in the 1920s when a fundamentalist party ruled the church. In that period, candidates for ministry were forced to conform to five precisely worded doctrines called the five essential and necessary articles. The Lay Committee has 3 doctrines to which everyone must adhere in their particular wording. They want their statements to become the basis for hiring and firing people in the church. They declared our 213th General Assembly “apostate,” unchristian.

Many other Moderators have had to struggle with issues that the Layman have blown out of all proportion to reality. Moderators have tried to bring about reconciliation with the Lay Committee. General Assembly committees have held hearings and issued reports indicating that the Layman is unwilling to work constructively within the denominational structures. This year the Lay Committee has gone further in their destructive course than ever before.

I went to Orlando, Florida, for the last day of a three-day meeting sponsored by the Coalition, an umbrella organization encompassing about 15 conservative groups in the denomination. The last morning session was to be an “open mike” at which anyone could say anything they wanted to. Without announcement, suddenly, the Chairman of The Lay Committee, Bob Howard, appeared on the platform and gave a half-hour power-point presentation on a strategy for making war on the denomination. “War” was his word, and he asserted that it was appropriate.

He outlined the strategy by which the Lay Committee plans to take over the Presbyterian Church. First, Howard announced that the Confessing Church Movement, a group of churches that have pledged adherence to the 3 statements of the Layman’s creed, is now the agency of connectionalism in the denomination. Howard described the Confessing Church Movement as a “shadow church.” The Lay Committee wants to radically downsize the denominational agencies. They hope to take the vote away from retired persons like me, anyone who is not an active pastor in a congregation, or elder. If they got control of the denomination, they would invite churches that do not agree with their version of “biblical ordination standards” to leave the denomination with their property. If these churches will not leave, the Lay Committee would threaten them with being disciplined. Howard encouraged congregations to withhold both per capita and mission funds and divert them to causes more to their liking.

Just as we must be very careful not to stereotype all Arabs, or all Muslims, as terrorists, so we must not characterize all conservatives, or evangelicals, as militant fundamentalists. There is a significant difference between evangelicals who want to change the church in a more conservative direction, and fundamentalists who want to tear down the church and refuse to work within it. I believe that most evangelicals and members of the Confessing Church movement want to affirm their faith and remain within the denomination. Why then align themselves with a potentially schismatic group?

What does the Confessing Church Movement have to offer? A hastily drawn up, rigidly worded, 3-point creed tied to a political agenda. We have as a denomination something far better: A Book of Confessions, representing centuries of wisdom from our forbears in the faith who have lived and died for the faith that they have bequeathed to us. We have something more: A democratic process, involving the whole church, by which we prepare and choose the creeds by which we will live. I had the privilege of serving on the Committee that prepared A Brief Statement of Faith. A representative committee, chaired by Jack Stotts, took six years developing a draft. Then 3 General Assemblies and a special revision committee had a part in shaping it. The whole church was given opportunity for input which the committees took very seriously. The result is a creed for our time that was approved by almost all of our presbyteries. Do we want to toss aside the wisdom of the church, and a democratic process, for the dictatorship of a special interest group with a self-serving political agenda?

People signing on to the Confessing Church Movement say that Jesus Christ alone is Lord of all and the way of salvation. The statement about Jesus Christ, “fully human, fully God,” is much richer in “A Brief Statement.” Jesus “proclaimed the reign of God,” followed by those wonderful gospel verbs– preaching, teaching, healing, eating with outcasts, forgiving sinners, and calling all to repent and believe the gospel. “Jesus was crucified, suffering the depths of human pain and giving his life for the sins of the world. God raised this Jesus from the dead, delivering us from death to life eternal.” Contrast that gracious statement with one whose primary purpose is to say that some people are excluded from God’s grace. Scripture says that “God our Savior desires everyone to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Tim. 2:4). The Theology and Worship paper, and the Assembly, wisely say that “we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith.” We are not God and should not play God. Our task is to introduce people to the gracious Jesus of the Bible and the Confessions so that their lives will be transformed as they come into relationship to God.

The second article of faith proposed by the Confessing Church Movement is “That Holy Scripture is the triune God’s revealed Word, the Church’s only infallible rule of faith and life.” That only tells part of the story. A Brief statement draws on the language of many confessions in our Book of Confessions saying, “The same Spirit who inspired the prophets and apostles rules our faith and life in Christ through Scripture, engages us through the Word proclaimed.”

I’ve been reading the Bible every day since I was a small boy. Most of my study and writing during my adult life has been regarding biblical and confessional interpretation. I even wrote a five hundred printed page dissertation on the first chapter of the Westminster Confession on Holy Scripture. I can tell you with complete confidence that the real Bible is much deeper and richer and more challenging than the superficial literalism that passes for believing in Scripture in some quarters.

I try to read some of the Gospels every day, along with other Old and New Testament passages. I find no evidence that Jesus spent his time leading a moral crusade to support the status quo in society. I find no evidence that he was busy seeking out people who should be excluded from the church because they were different from the majority. The only people that Jesus continually was in conflict with were the people who were determined to uphold the law, as their culture defined the law. Jesus continually defied the norms of his culture. He interpreted the Old Testament to accept and include those who the religious leaders rejected as unclean — Samaritans, women, tax collectors, people with leprosy. The list goes on and on. That accepting Jesus is the Jesus of the Bible. We need to read it, and preach it, and share it with everyone that feels excluded by our self-righteous, religious culture.

Ah, yes. The 3rd and final point in this new abbreviated creed: “That God’s people are called to holiness in all aspects of life. This includes honoring the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, the only relationship within which sexual activity is appropriate.” I care about holiness. I believe that every person in this room does. If we didn’t believe that being a Christian made a difference in people’s lives, we wouldn’t be here. You know that line in A Brief Statement of Faith, “we strive to serve Christ in our daily tasks and to live holy and joyful lives.” “Holy” That’s my word. I suggested it late one hot August afternoon and the Brief Statement committee gladly accepted it. The church is called to holiness. It is not the private property of just people who use it to exclude others as unholy.

I care a lot about marriage. I’ve been married to the same wonderful woman for 44 years. We all ought to care deeply about marriage. Marriage is in trouble in this country. In the last one hundred years, the United States has gone from being the most marrying society in the world to the one with the most divorces and unwed mothers. The divorce rate has risen from 7% in the 1860s to 50% today. As recently as the 1960s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 5%. Today the overall rate of out-of-wedlock births is near 30%. Cohabiting, living together without being married, rose from 430,000 couples in 1960 to 4.1 million couples in 1997. We live in an era of family disruption that leads to talk of an emerging culture of “‘serial marriage’ and ‘nonmarriage.’”

None of these alarming trends has been caused by homosexuals who want to marry. None of these trends will be solved by denying same-sex couples the right to legal and church sanction for publicly committing to a life-long relationship. In a culture of non-marriage, it is very ironic that we are spending great amounts of money and energy in trying to prevent people from marrying who want to do so in a way that would contribute to the stability of society and the enrichment of the church.

Why are the sides so far apart on matters of human sexuality? We are still talking past one another. Everyone thinks that we are debating matters of principle, but underneath all the arguments from Scripture and tradition we are really differing on matters of fact. A recent book, being touted as the definitive study of what the Bible says on homosexuality, is actually not based on revelation, but on natural law. The author declares that we don’t need biblical revelation because the Old Testament writers and Paul said what they did because they could see that women and men were “anatomically complementary sexual beings.” So we are making assumptions based on our human evaluation. Another prevailing assumption among those opposed to full inclusion of homosexuals is that all persons are born heterosexual. To be homosexual is to have had bad childhood experiences. But to behave as a homosexual is to willfully, sinfully act against ones God-given nature. The cure is to repent and to submit one life to Jesus and thus to be changed. Persons supporting full inclusion of gay and lesbians people predominantly believe that affection for persons of ones own sex is for some people a given of their nature. Many homosexual people are deeply devout Christians who cannot and should not change to be heterosexuals but are living their lives in a faithful committed relationship to a partner just as heterosexuals are called to do. We are not really arguing about the Bible or the Confessions, but about prevailing assumptions in contemporary culture. How can we get past this impasse?

Sharon told me that she had read that in the week after September 11, in Houston, Texas, 400 couples that had applied for divorce, withdrew their petitions and decided to try again. If that was just to grin and bear it in a loveless marriage, that would not be a good model. But, if those couples try to discover again the love that brought them together in the first place, it holds great promise and hope. That is our task as the church. We need to remember that it was the love of Jesus Christ that brought us together in the first place. We didn’t chose each other because we agreed on every issue. God chose us and made us a part of God’s family, the body of Christ. Let us acknowledge and rejoice in our common commitment to Jesus Christ and find therein a basis for continued relationship.

You see, there is another, related, doctrine that the Layman’s creed doesn’t mention. I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. That is a doctrine we need to believe, and preach, and teach. There is a genuine danger of schism if the Layman cannot achieve its objective of tearing down the present church and putting its own fundamentalist church in its place. Calvin wrote: “There could not be two or three churches unless Christ be torn asunder.” My favorite seminary professor used to ask us, “If Christ is divided, who bleeds?”

I called my friend, Bill Pannell, one night from Atlanta. Bill and I taught together at Fuller, where he was professor of evangelism and preaching. His wife, Hazel, had had a back operation and I wanted to see how she was doing. Bill came on the phone and said: “Jack, people want to get back to normal. It is your job to tell them what is normal in the church.” What a good insight. Normal doesn’t mean the way we’ve always done it. A norm is a standard. I always told my students that the norm in our class was A+. The average was usually something less, but the norm was what we all had to work toward.

What is the Church that we are called to be? John Calvin had two marks of the church — where the word is truly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. I see that happening all over the country in Presbyterian churches large and small. John Knox was a kind of radical student of Calvin, who went back to Scotland and added a third mark to the authentic church, “discipline.” We would call it spiritual nurture. It meant that during the week before communion, the pastor and/or elders went to the homes of members of the congregation to inquire about the health of their souls. If they were deemed in spiritual health, they got a token, wood or metal, the size of a nickel or quarter, that admitted them to communion. I see spiritual nurture going on as well, in congregations across the country, where pastoral work is being done to support people in their spiritual growth.

At the reunion in 1983 of the northern and southern streams of Presbyterianism, we got a new Book of Order. It has four new chapters at the beginning that give the theological underpinnings of our governmental practices. It begins with Christ as the head of the church, and gives the preliminary principles by which we function. Second is a wonderful chapter on “The Church and Its Confessions.” Then, there is a third chapter on “The Church and Its Mission.” It contains what I regard as two further marks of the church. The first mark of the authentic church is to be in mission in the world. The second is to be a community of diversity. By including women and men of all ages, races, conditions, and abilities the church is “providing for inclusiveness as a visible sign of the new humanity.”

These marks of the church are what make the church normal, up to standard: Preaching the Gospel; administering the sacraments; spiritual nurture; mission in the world; and, being a community of diversity. It is these last two: mission in the world, and diversity, that are hard to accept for some who are quite certain about the first three marks. As contemporary Presbyterians we need to affirm all of them to be true to what we have learned from Scripture under the leading of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus prayed in John 17:20 that “all may be one,” it was not just an interesting option. The purpose is evangelism, “that the world may believe.”

I was at Columbia Seminary a few weeks ago. After an hour and a half discussion with students and faculty in which we had dealt with a wide range of problems in the church, their new president, my friend, Laura Mendenhall made the most helpful comment. She said: “I read through the Book of Acts last summer. They had problems greater than ours. But the Holy Spirit was at work and created a church that now is spread over the whole world.”

That is what I need to remember. This is God’s church. The Holy Spirit is not done with us. Isaiah 43:19 depicts God as saying, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” I want, this year, to be open to discern what God’s Spirit is doing in this great church .

Amen.

The Greatest Story Ever Ignored

by J. Barrie Shepherd

Covenant Network G.A. Luncheon
212th G.A., Long Beach CA
26 June 2000

Acts 12:6-17

Excerpts from this address appear in Covenant Connection Vol. 3, #3.

Thank you for those generous introductory words. Speaking on such an occasion, and before this most challenging of audiences, a gaggle of fellow clergy, can be a daunting task. I was tempted, indeed, to open with the prayer of the pious Scot, elder in the kirk, who, while earning his daily bread in a whisky distillery, tumbled one day into a vat of the finest single malt. As he fell he was heard to utter this fervent prayer:
Lord, grant me a mouth worthy of this high occasion.

As some of you know I recently retired from the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York — mother church of New York City Presbyterianism. Retirement: that’s when you move from Who’s Who, to Who’s he? On my last Sunday in that historic pulpit, I was reminded of the pastor greeting parishioners at the door after his farewell sermon. There was much talk of how he would be missed, but all that was nothing compared to the outright sobbing of one of the older members; this poor lady seemed possessed by grief. “Now, now dear, don’t be so upset,” the pastor murmured modestly; “I’m sure in his own good time the Lord will send a new minister every bit as good as I am.” “Ah, but that’s it,” sobbed the lady. “I’ve been a member here for 50 years and I’ve seen a dozen ministers, and they just get worse and worse and worse!”

I think we’d better pray:
Stretch us, O God, at this midday hour. Draw out all of the kinks, the knots, the cramps and creases, all the weary, fearful, timid places of our souls, and shape us into something new, something beyond, something brimming, spilling, running over with abundant life. Let us be born, be born anew this day, in Christ. Let us say, AMEN.

Allow me a text, because as a preacher, and a Scot, I tend to get lost without one. You remember in Acts, when Peter is flung into gaol, and the Angel of God appears in the night, strikes off his chains, flings wide the prison gate, and leads him out to freedom. Bewildered at first, Peter makes his way to the house where the rest of the apostles were gathered, praying earnestly for his release. He knocks at the door, and when Rhoda the maid recognises his voice she runs back to the gathering to tell them Peter himself is standing outside.

And their response, in chapter 12 and verse 15:
They said to her, “You are mad.”

This was the church speaking, you realize, not the Pharisees or Sadducees, not the priestly clan of the Sanhedrin or Pilate with his lofty Roman logic and law. This was “the early church” that spoke so dismissively, scornfully to Rhoda, that assured her she was seeing ghosts, that could not recognize an honest-to-God miracle, the deliverance of the Holy Spirit, when it was staring them in the face, or trying to beat down their door. This skeptical, incredulous bunch who today would have sent poor Rhoda to a psychiatrist, this was that “early church” we so often refer back to in reverent and envious tone, looking to them for guidance, a model, an example, at the least, of how to exist as a Christian community. This was the church of Jesus Christ, about as close to the Master, to the origins, as we can possibly get, that said to Rhoda, “You are mad,” that informed that poor slave girl she had to be insane.

And it didn’t end there. Throughout the rest of the New Testament, in one situation after another, we see the glorious message of resurrection, of liberty through faith in the risen Christ, degenerate into a series of petty squabbles and disputes over authority and jurisdiction. Who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s clean and who’s dirty, who’s in and who’s out?

And it’s been that way ever since — has it not? They did it with Origen, with Francis and Joan, Luther, Galileo, Wesley too, and Teresa, Schweitzer, King, Dorothy Day in our time — said they were crazy, pronounced them clean out of their minds, because they had seen, caught and lived a freedom, an abundance of life, a reality of resurrection that the rest of us, this established, everyday, meat- and-potatoes church could not even recognize, let alone grapple with.

It doesn’t take much history to realize that the Christian church as an institution has pretty consistently resisted new ideas, fresh visions, any but the most gradual, incremental kind of change from the beginning. Born in ferment and the dynamic of a revolutionary gospel message, we Christians matured almost instantly, almost indecently, into a group that cherished above all else stability, reliability, tradition, permanence and precedent. Perhaps it was the need to convince the Roman Empire that we were not just another crazy band of zealots. Perhaps it was the urge to preserve at least something from the chaos of that empire’s long, slow collapse into chaos.

Whatever. The radical enthusiasm and simple direct vision of the kingdom taught by Jesus of Nazareth, a kingdom that crept in like a thief in the night, like leaven that secretly ferments and bubbles up until it transforms everything it touches, was swiftly overcome by other, more mundane concerns. That realm of God, consistently portrayed as a feast of one kind or another in Jesus’ teaching, soon became something more orderly and dull, more akin to civil government or the courts of Roman law. And the followers of a man who — I’d be willing to wager — never attended a single committee meeting, unless we count those gatherings at Caiaphas’ and Pontius Pilate’s palaces, promptly got themselves all bogged down in policies, polities, and procedures.

Did you ever wonder about those apostles who called Rhoda mad? I mean, maybe they weren’t praying at all — if they had been, surely they would have discerned the action of the Spirit among them. I suspect they were gathered in executive session, trying to compose the very first Book of Order, principles, guidelines, a manual of procedures for dealing responsibly with the authorities — when the liberated Peter, full of the spirit, came pounding on their tight-locked door. The greatest story ever ignored, yes, the greatest story ever ignored.

I have long had a thing about that lovely old exclamation in the King James Version of Isaiah 6:
Woe is me, for I am undone!

Oh I know the newer, more accurate versions have, “I am lost,” “I am confused,” “I am disoriented” or something similar; but I do my devotional reading in the familiar King James, and that phrase still resonates deep within.
Woe is me, for I am undone!

You see, we get so knotted up nowadays. Knotted up personally with schedules, commitments, habits and attitudes, preferences, preconceptions, prejudices; knotted up institutionally with rule books and guide books, precedents and procedures, chains, yes that’s literally what we call them, chains of command. Do you realize that the original Book of Order comprised some 10 pages, while the current version has 128, not counting appendices? We get so knotted up nowadays. And then somewhere, somehow we find ourselves in the presence of the Almighty, and the first thing that happens is our knots are all undone. We are set free — wonderfully, fearfully free, like Peter with his chains struck off, his prison bars set wide, and a new world of possibility in Christ set before him.

Now let’s be careful here. I am not advocating anarchy, the abandonment of all structure and regulation, that dreaded state called “anything goes”. Certain knots are necessary; they hold us together, after all. But my suspicion is that these essential knots are fewer, far fewer than any of us would easily admit. And that if we could begin, both personally and institutionally, to undo this unnecessary burden, we would be set free, amazingly and alarmingly free. Just like a piece of string with all its knots removed, set free to be useful, full of uses in holding things together, binding up the fellowship of Christ, bridging all kinds of chasms and establishing new links with whatever or whoever lies beyond. You see, I’m not against rules and regulations per se; but I am against, I am appalled by what these regulations, and our continual fighting over them — I’m appalled by what this is doing to us, and what it is keeping us from doing in the service of our risen Lord.

I’m talking about the difference between a church that is run by, dominated by its rules and regulations, and by its incessant and eternal fights over those rules and regulations — yes, paralyzed by them — and a church on fire with that liberating gospel of new life in Christ that broke open Peter’s gaol and can still break wide open every impasse, every seemingly insoluble dispute. What was that word in that overture again, “irreconcilable” differences? Sounds more like Divorce Court to me than the church of our risen Lord. We face an issue, and I hope you will agree, that goes far beyond the ordination of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gendered Christians. We are, of course, fully and unshakably committed to that goal –and let no one call this into doubt — we have been from the beginning. And by God’s grace it will happen, and happen soon. We’re shooting for next year in Louisville. But the real issue goes beyond; it goes right to the nature of the church, the future of this church we love and serve.

Between a rock and a soft place: that’s how I’ve come to view the situation of the church today. Between a rock and a soft place. For centuries, millennia, we have been wedded to this image of the rock — Petros — that upon which Christ’s church is founded. And to be sure it is a powerful , effective image, one that evokes stability, solidity, changelessness, the Almighty God of the Hebrew Covenant issuing eternal laws from that majestic rock, Sinai. That insurance company knew what it was doing when it offered us “a piece of the rock.” But the trouble with images — and as something of a poet I have learned to work with and craft images with great care — the problem with metaphor, simile, analogy and the like is that however popular, however dominant they become, they are, all of them, of necessity imperfect. They don’t quite fully do the job; they simply cannot tell the whole story.

And there is another side to this God of the Covenant — that’s what Jesus came to reveal, didn’t he? — a side most powerfully portrayed in the parable of the Prodigal, when the forgiving father/God did not wait for an apology, for any admission of guilt, shame, repentance, but as soon as he glimpsed the outline of his long-lost son, way out there on the horizon almost, just lifting the latch of the gate to the furthermost field of the family farm, he ran from the house, all the way down that dusty farm road and flung himself upon his boy, embraced him, welcomed him home. And there’s not a lot that is rocklike about that, is there?

And so this God of the rock, this unshakable, immutable, Almighty One of Israel, this Deity about whom the theologians thought up all those omnis — omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent — this double-belt-and-suspenders God, is also somehow the Lord of the Dance, One who walked the weary roads of Palestine, who wept great tears as of blood in a garden for us, who went, at the last, or almost the last, to death on a cross of shame for our sakes. And we find ourselves — don’t we? — between a rock and a soft place. Caught, in other words, between a stern, unchanging, almighty God of justice and law, and that fond, forgiving father of the prodigal, caught between a majestic concept, as we have just observed on Trinity Sunday, and this God who insists on messing everything up by becoming incarnate.

So too with the church. We have clung too long to that hallowed old image of the rock, set firm amid the flux and flood of our times, safe, secure and unchanging above the turbulent, troubled waters, a beacon of unchanging light and truth, laying down the law according to the Book of Order, and then inviting folk to follow it, to follow it or else.

I am more and more convinced that our times call for a church that is willing to forsake its cherished place of authority and power, to climb down from its secure perch high on that lofty rock, and to plunge right in, risking itself among the torrents and rapids in reaching out to those in peril and distress, the forgotten, the rejected, the despised, the oppressed.

That’s where I see Christ today. Not high on a throne somewhere pronouncing judgment, right and wrong, clean and unclean, who’s in, who’s out. I look for Christ in the rapids, right where the river runs its swiftest and most dangerous and nothing seems secure. I look for Christ among the homeless and troubled, those who count for little or nothing, the small change of our world, folk who do not and never will figure on the bottom line. I look to see our Lord among those who struggle daily with depression and despair, desertion, bereavement and addiction — those for whom, because of race, class, circumstance, or sexual orientation, nothing seems secure — those who find no foothold in the swirling waters and need above all else a hand, a hand beside them in the flood, a hand that still can steady them and point toward the shore, a hand that bears the marks of deep suffering and rejection of its own. That’s where I seek Christ today, not so much on the rock, as in the perilous waters.

I wrote a poem about this a couple of Easters ago. It was an eleventh-hour gift to my Easter sermon next morning, and many of you know how miraculously welcome those gifts are. I’d like you to hear it now

Holy Saturday at The Green Market

I think I caught the risen Christ,
just yesterday, on Broadway alongside Union Square.
We were returning from the Green Market
– fresh fish, green mesclun with a pinch
of bright and edible nasturtiums tossed on top,
some tiny new potatoes for our evening meal –
when I glimpsed ahead a shambling, awkward figure
lurching his twisted way along the sidewalk
and jerking fiercely now and then as if in seizure.
He wore a red baseball cap slightly off center,
sweat shirt, jeans, sneakers — all shabby
but well cared for, clean — and over his right arm
a cardboard carton with the lid cut off to shape
a sort of basket, I suppose, to display wares.
I glanced in as we passed and sure enough
there were ball-point pens, other plastic items
in there waiting to be purchased. Silent –
in my head — I wondered at the courage of one
so violently deformed, yet coping, contriving
to survive this predatory city.

Those contorted legs could not move him
that fast and we were swiftly past him to confront,
lying across a heap of trash bags up against the wall,
a homeless man, asleep, with the usual pathetic sign
informing all and sundry:
I’m in trouble, please help. Someday
I may be able to do the same for you.
I walked on, ignored both plea and promise,
passed right by as I’ve been taught to
by this casual, careless, care-less cruel city;
then glancing back over my shoulder saw our friend
in the red baseball cap struggle across,
laboriously read — how long it seemed to take –
that grubby and ill-lettered sign, then lean
over and drop something in the cup.

Yes, I realize, it only encourages. I know
they’ll likely spend it all on booze. I’ve heard
and lived these arguments, knowing far too much,
believing far too little, and being so afraid,
for years now. But there was something in
that simple act, an eastered innocence
put me to shame, drove me to my knees
among the sidewalk lily vendors.
I think I caught the risen Christ,
a day early, but there just the same,
on Broadway yesterday alongside Union Square.

A couple of months after that incident I had another vision on the streets of New York City. It was Gay Pride Day. My first in Manhattan and therefore quite an eye opener, a revelation you might say. The scene, much of it, is quite normal and respectable. 90% of the marchers in the parade would not seem out of place in your typical Sunday congregation. But that other 10%. Michty Me! as we used to say in Scotland. Michty Me!

It was right after church, so I was still wearing my clerical collar and dark suit. The parade passes right outside our Fifth Avenue doors, and so First Presbyterian staffs a water table along the curb. With hoses from the church kitchens, gigantic urns, and trays crammed with paper cups, we offer “a cup of cold water in Christ’s name” to all who pass by. And after several hours of marching, on a blazing hot June afternoon, it is most welcome. Anyway, this was my first experience, as I said, and so I hung out near the back of the crowd until some compelling force drew me, first to the front, then behind one of the urns filling cups and trays, and finally out on the street itself, clerical collar and all, holding out our simple gift of Christian charity. What happened next is the subject of another poem. I call it “Real Presence.”

Real Presence

Yes, a frilly pink tutu
was, more or less — more less
than more — all he wore,
that and a tall pair of teetering
stiletto heels and parasol — from tip
to toe in matching lurid pink,
strutting his jet-glow black and
body-built stuff from side to side
in flagrant full gay pride
parading down Fifth Avenue.

From giant urns outside our church
we plied the passers-by with plastic
cups “o’ kindness yet” on a hot June
afternoon — “in Jesus’ Name.”
Fully clothed, and more,
dark clergy suit, black shirt and
stiff white collar, I stood my ground,
clutching a tray of cooling draughts
to represent a welcome and a blessing –
at the least — as child of God.

Beaming, he tripped across bestowing
smiles, spectacular, on all and sundry,
chiefly me. Daintily he took the cup
I offered, leaned perilous close –
those tipping heels! — and kissed me on one
startled cheek, his bristles coarse, lips –
generous smile notwithstanding — brushing
deep, appalled revulsion through my gut,
despite all my head was murmuring of
tolerance and Christian love.

“Oh Reverend,” laughed the lady
from the sewing circle,
“you should see the juicy kiss
mark on your cheek.” And as we both
dissolved in honest, healing mirth,
first head, then heart took over
from my gut and raised a prayer
of thanks for grace’s all-too-often
way of shoving me, still screaming,
toward birth.

Real Presence.
As the years went by that parade became more and more a part of my liturgical and spiritual life. And I became bolder, much bolder. The last couple of years I made a point of singling out the most bizarre and outrageous characters. They would come strutting by, naked perhaps except for a leather thong here and there (more there than here), and pierced in every imaginable, and most seemingly excruciating spot with rings, heavy ornaments and such. They might well be screaming invective at our church buildings; after all, they had passed many places of worship along the length of Fifth Avenue and almost all had greeted them as Saint Patrick’s did, with barred doors and an intimidating police presence. “F the church!” they would be yelling; and then I approached with my tray of cups, and no matter how outlandish, how alien they appeared, they melted, became instantly and completely human, smiled bashfully, said, “Thank you, Reverend,” or “Father,” gulped down their drink, and marched on.

In the second book of Kings there is an intriguing episode in which four lepers have, let me suggest, a message for our torn, fearful and divided church. Israel’s capital, Samaria, is under long and desperate siege by Ben-Hadad, king of Syria. Elisha the prophet announces that the city will be liberated the very next day, but no one listens. That night four lepers sit by the city gates debating:
“If we go inside, we starve. But if we stay out here we also die. Let’s take our chances with the Syrians.”

They cross to the enemy camp and, behold! it is deserted! The Lord has driven off the Syrian host in panic. Well, those lepers had a blast, feasting, drinking, carrying off treasures and concealing them. But then they stopped and said a curious thing (2 Kings 7, v. 9):
“Then they said to one another, ‘We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news; if we are silent and wait until the morning light, punishment will overtake us; now therefore come, let us go and tell the king’s household.’”

We too, who are seen by some within the church as lepers, we too who have been invited more than once to move outside the gates, we too have stumbled upon unearned treasure. We too have found ourselves blessed beyond our dreams. And we too have great and liberating news to share.
This day is a day of good news!

In the full and free deliverance brought by the cross of Christ, the siege — every siege — has been lifted. Hunger, fear, suspicion, are no more. The enemy has vanished and we, all the inhabitants of this city we call the PC(USA), we are set free to rebuild those precious bonds of community and respect , generosity and even love.
Owe no one anything except to love one another…
wrote Saint Paul in Romans 13:
… for whoever loves the neighbor has fulfilled the law.

Set free, then, our chains struck off like Peter’s, we remain bound to only one thing, each other. Christ has given us each other, gay and straight, conservative and liberal too, Bible thumpers and Bible massagers, and has challenged us, is challenging us today, to find ways, honest, caring, hard-wrought ways, to live together and to serve him for Christ’s sake… to serve him for Christ’s sake.

One final poem. I wrote this in Atlanta during our national Unity and Diversity Conference last fall, wrote it inspired by how much we all shared; devastated by how little actually keeps us from the urgent needs of a hungry world.

Tryst
(amid a lovers’ quarrel)

Where, then, shall we meet?
Not yet, it seems clear, on the windy street corner
of whom to lay hands on, and why;
nor in the echoing lobby
of just what our sweet Bible must say about
this or that, him or her, who’s in, who’s out;
nowhere on those steep climbing steps
spelling out all the what and how much
one has to believe to be saved;
nor poised on the threshold of views
about government, guns, the rich and the poor,
about babies and sex and the state of the world.

Where, then, shall we meet?
Can it be before the One who takes
our weary, blistered feet and washes, dries,
refreshes them with tender care, then sends us out
to bear, repeat his humble acts with gentle,
world-bestowing kindness?
Or if not there, before the final Judgment Seat
of One who told us, with an earth-shaking insistence:
Feed my sheep… feed my sheep…
Feed my sheep.

Thank you.