Читать книгу Leaning Both Ways at Once - Jeffrey A. Conklin-Miller - Страница 7

Next to evangelism, the most urgent task within the Christian Church—even more urgent than the much more publicized effort for ecumenicity—is the re-articulation of the Christian social ethic, of the relationship of the Christian and the church to the social order. Indeed one might well ask whether that is not essentially the evangelistic task of the day, the proclamation of a Gospel which reunites in the true New Testament sense, faith and works. . . . Such an approach of course presupposes a readiness to undergo the pre-Constantinian church-world tension and conflict.1

Church, World, and Wesleyan Witness

This past summer, visitors to various cathedrals of the Church of England were treated to more than the expected spires and stained glass. For example, a site for holy travelers since the thirteenth century, Rochester Cathedral invited visitors not only to climb the historic Pilgrim Steps but also to play a round of nine holes on the newly installed miniature golf course in the nave. Farther north, the Cathedral in Norwich invited all to come and worship and, for a small fee, to take a ride down the fifty-five-foot-tall slide, also known as a “Helter Skelter.”

In Norwich, the effort was part of the “Seeing it Differently” campaign, offering participants “opportunities for reflective, God-shaped conversations.”2 Such conversations also served an evangelistic purpose, as one of the cathedral clergy explained. To install a Helter Skelter in the cathedral is

playful in its intent but also profoundly missional. It is the Cathedral doing what it has always done—encouraging conversations about God. By its sheer size and grandeur it speaks of the things of God; it points beyond itself. Its sheer presence helps to keep the rumour of God alive and plays its part in passing on the story of Salvation.3

Needless to say, not all perceived such a missional purpose. Quoted in a local newspaper, a former chaplain to the Queen panned the Norwich slide, saying,

My real objection is that it is professional incompetence. People who are running the cathedral should understand how people are converted [to Christianity]. There is no evidence that people are converted by treating cathedrals as a cultural artefact. You want people who will come to visit because they are interested in Christianity. . . . The idea of luring people into the cathedral to have fun is stupid. . . . It is the McDonaldisation of the church.4

Similar divides can be heard almost annually in North American contexts as the Church nears the beginning of the Lenten season. On Ash Wednesday, several congregations see their clergy stepping outside the Church building in liturgical vestments to offer the imposition of ashes to those who have not (or will not) attend services on that day. Giving “Ashes to Go” to commuters walking by or drawing sooty crosses on the foreheads coming through the Church parking lot Ash Wednesday “drive thru,” these clergy see the Church witnessing to the faith in public spaces, extending the Church’s outreach and, perhaps, encouraging the congregation’s numerical membership growth.5 Others see a failure to sustain liturgical tradition and confused logic equating ashes and evangelism.6

Behind arguments over the propriety of miniature golf inside and the imposition of ashes outside the church building, we should acknowledge that, in one frame, what we are overhearing is an argument about the meaning and faithful practice of evangelism. As one priest commented when considering the cathedral initiatives, “We are faced with a missionary situation of trying to connect people with the transcendent when we know from British social attitudes, people have given up on it.”7 Similar dynamics exist in the United States, where the Pew Research Center suggests that 61 percent of Americans report as either somewhat or non-religious.8 This latter category, the non-religious or “religious ‘nones’” has been steadily growing, particularly in younger generations.9 Paired with research that suggests a general decline in the membership and involvement in American congregations, ecclesial interest in empowering outreach and recruitment seems understandable, if not mandatory.10 In turn, disagreements over the proper shape of that outreach seem inevitable.

What is striking about such reflection is the stark differentiation of judgment at work: one person’s faithful and hopeful evangelistic mission is another’s dismal and sinful ecclesial failure.11 It might come as little surprise that there is a spectrum of different judgments on this question among the various theological traditions in contemporary Christianity. But there is also divergence within individual traditions. Most specifically, within the Wesleyan tradition—which will be at the center of this study—Jack Jackson has drawn attention to three major distinct frameworks adopted in Wesleyan academic understandings of evangelism: proclamation, initiation, and embodiment.12 While complementary, these frameworks differ from one another regarding the scope and the focus of evangelism’s concern, as well as the identity and the agency of the Church in the practice. This constitutes, in Jackson’s words, an “imprecise mosaic of understandings of evangelism.”13 That said, it could be imagined that different positions on the definition of evangelism might lead to different positions regarding the faithful shape of the Church’s outreach: for some, this is constituted in ministry focused on the proclamation of the gospel, for others, on ecclesial practices of formation and initiation, and still for others, on the ethical embodiment of the gospel in diverse expressions and contexts. Still, in spite of shared commitments, there would be enough difference at work to render debate over amusement rides in the sanctuary or ashes in congregational parking lots.

For example, Scott Jones considers similar questions and challenges briefly in his book, The Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor. Quoting Dana Robert, Jones observes that “fixing upon a balance between contextualization and remaining faithful to the core of the gospel is an ongoing issue in missiology.”14 His own approach to engage this issue displays a distinctively Wesleyan character, grounded in a commitment to the universal love of God for all creation, focused in the gift of the Incarnation. Jones writes, “Since Christ is God put into human flesh, the gospel can be put into other languages and cultural forms.”15 Christians, then, are called to love not only people, but also the cultures within which they live, and so moved by this love, the Church’s practice of evangelism becomes crucially important.

Jones does consider the critique of market-driven evangelism as well as those who champion such techniques for the sake of Church growth.16 While one side calls for the distinctiveness of the Church’s witness and the other for the Church’s adaptation seeking its relevance in every context, Jones asks whether perhaps “both are partially right?”17 To chart a path between their divergent concerns, Jones emphasizes the importance of discipleship, rightly recognizing that the Church is called to faithfulness within a context that is always local. Given this particularity, the practice of discernment inside an account of discipleship becomes even more important, inasmuch as “the determination of context is a complex matter of judgment.”18

Despite this complexity, Jones displays confidence in the possibility of faithful evangelism engaging context when he suggests that the congregation must identify a “particular target population” and then must “love the members of that group as well.”19 The shape of that love certainly informs practices of hospitality and welcome as well as concern for the “physical needs and justice issues in the community.”20 But Jones argues that evangelistic outreach also requires the Church’s willingness to change in the process of becoming more visible to the community. “Christians today must adapt to the dominant modes of communication in a digital age,” Jones suggests.21 Further programming is necessary in congregations to ensure the presence of “indigenous worship,” an “appropriate communications system to invite persons to know Christ,” and a “system of discipleship” to form new Christians.22 Other strategies and tactics Jones names complete a helpful list for congregations seeking to strengthen their evangelistic outreach.23

On this basis, perhaps Jones would not rule out the possibility of a Helter Skelter in the Cathedral’s nave, just to the extent such an initiative reflects the fruit of discernment of the needs and desires in that particular context. But it is just at this point that I want to draw attention and name a problem for further consideration.

Beyond these questions relating to the tactical propriety of various innovations and differentiated understandings of evangelism’s ends, I think there is more going on here. These examples of (and debates over the shape of) missional evangelism reveal other questions that lie closer to the heart of the identity and the agency of the Church and of the world where it is located. In other words, what appears to be a question about evangelism is, at a deeper level, a more fundamental question: how shall we understand the differentiation and relationship between the Church and the world?

While Jones’s suggestions for congregational development are constructive, and while he is right to point to the importance of discipleship as crucial to an account of evangelism, I fear he may understate the tensions inherent in the Church’s navigation of the world in evangelistic mission. How, for example, does discipleship ensure the Church’s balance between faithfulness and relevance? When the Church leans into the world, how far is too far? A miniature golf course or an amusement park ride in the cathedral crosses the line for some, while for others, it represents missional faithfulness. Presumably, discipleship shaping evangelistic mission requires a discerning judgment that determines the Church’s “Yes” and “No,” responding in each context to what the Church can reflect and what it must renounce. But what is less clear is what conditions make such judgment possible? What kind of community is capable of this discernment? What challenges does this community face from the world that surrounds it?

These are important questions that have not received adequate attention in the study of evangelism. This may be the case because such questions may appear to be more naturally located in other disciplinary contexts. The theological relationship, and more specifically, the theological distinction of the Church and the world, is a topic typically located not in the theology of evangelism, but rather, in ecclesial ethics. Even so, in this book, I will suggest the central role such a theological frame must play in contemporary theology and practice of evangelism. Working from this theological frame, we will be able to speak of the Church and the world in terms that acknowledge their distinct identities and agencies, and thus, create the conditions necessary to discern the faithful shape of the Church’s evangelistic mission in and with the world.

While the Church-World relationship and distinction (to which I will refer henceforth in shorthand as simply “Church/World”) is a theological commitment most recognizable within the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, the concern for the relationship of Church/World (and, at times, a lack of concern for that relationship) is just as crucial to an account of a Wesleyan understanding of holiness, and thus, to an account of Methodist identity in ecclesiology and evangelistic mission. In order then to develop a theology of evangelism that is also truly Methodist, engagement with the distinct identity and agencies associated with the Church and the world is also required. For example, this distinction is crucial if the practice of evangelism participates in the formation of what a Wesleyan would call holiness of heart and life. If holiness at least names the difference Christian identity and practice makes, then concern for this difference should play a constitutive role in an account of how such Christian identity is formed and how Christian practices take their shape.

I will suggest that this focus on holiness contributes to an ecclesiological vision that renders Church in the Methodist tradition in the form of a particular “People” in, but not of, the world. In other words, Methodist evangelistic mission requires a location within an account of ecclesiology that is framed within the Church/World distinction. So framed, the agency of the Church’s witness can be articulated in terms that carve a path between ecclesial accommodation for the sake of cultural relevance in the world (what I will call “understatement”) and ecclesial self-absorption that grounds Christian witness in an aesthetic display to the world (what I will call “overstatement”). Instead, the Church as a visible, practicing, and witnessing People appear as a community constantly engaging both the practices of intra-ecclesial formation and extra-ecclesial engagement with the “other half of the reconciling event” in the world.

This engagement constitutes an expansion of what we mean by the word “evangelism,” as the People called Methodist practice “intercession” in and for the world. Evangelism as intercession suggests practices beyond sole concern for individual spiritual salvation or congregational membership growth. While it certainly includes the proclamation of the gospel, the initiation of people into the Church (or, for some, the reign of God), and the formation of a holy People, evangelism as intercession requires a broader scope. As Stephen Chapman and Laceye Warner have rightly argued, “The concept of evangelism should . . . be expanded to include the entire missio Dei of global reconciliation, particularly through the imitatio Dei of God’s people in their care for creation and all its creatures. Social justice, peace, and ecological concern are not beyond the scope of evangelism.”24 In my terms, this is the work of a People called Methodist, practicing intercession as they stand between formation and mission, between tradition and innovation, between God and the world, always leaning both ways at once.

“Counterweighting” Church and World: Leaning Both Ways at Once

The image of a simultaneous “leaning both ways” is drawn from the concept of a “counterweighting,” revealed in an unlikely set of sources. First, the poet Seamus Heaney in his collection of essays, The Redress of Poetry, suggests that poetry can fulfill what he calls a “counterweighting” function,25 offering a “glimpsed alternative” of life that is often “denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.”26 Poetry, in this light, offers the possibility of forming a “consciousness [that] can be alive to two different and contradictory dimensions of reality and still find a way of negotiating between them.”27 Heaney draws these images from Simone Weil—specifically Gravity and Grace—and argues that Weil’s work is “informed by the idea of counterweighting, of balancing out the forces, of redress—tilting the scales of reality toward some transcendent equilibrium.”28 It is in this counterweighting, this “tilting,” that Weil seeks to inhabit as the tensioned space between gravity and grace, between the “contradictories” of this world.

However, for Weil, life between the “contradictories” does not seek to deflate the tension endemic to that space; as she writes, “The union of contradictories involves a wrenching apart. It is impossible without extreme suffering. The correlation of contradictories is detachment.”29 Instead, Weil poignantly suggests that this tilting requires a “simultaneous existence of incompatible things in the soul’s bearing; [a] balance which leans both ways at once.” That, Weil says, “is saintliness.”30

In other words, what Weil is suggesting is that we do not try to “solve” what we have come to think of as fixed and opposing “contradictories”—relevance and irrelevance, tradition and mission, Church and world. Rather, in Gravity and Grace, she invites us to inhabit the tense space between supposed polarities without giving into the need to eliminate or even alleviate the anxiety and paradox endemic to that location “in between.” Weil invites us to dwell in that intersection, and with that invitation, offers an image to shape ecclesial identity and evangelistic mission; between these polarities, we seek a balance that leans both ways at once, into the Church and into the world.

The Structure of the Argument

We will begin in chapter 1 with consideration of the Church/World distinction, first investigating its necessity in conversations about evangelism and then seeking its influence (or lack thereof) in contemporary Wesleyan theology of evangelism. We will find that the Church/World distinction is often understated or overstated, sometimes collapsing one into the other, or distancing one from the other.

In constructing an account of ecclesial evangelism, we turn to consider the identity and the agency of the world in chapter 2, drawing focus to the formative influence of the principalities and powers. This should come as some surprise, inasmuch as I will also show Wesley’s strong warning to Methodists to navigate their relationship with the world with care. Given the consideration of the identity and the agency of the powers mediated through the example of the modern market-state, I argue for the crucial role of intra-ecclesial formation within contemporary Methodist theology of evangelistic mission.

Pursuing the development of such an account, the final two chapters turn to consider the identity (chapter 3) and the agency (chapter 4) of the Church inside the Church/World framework, oriented toward developing an account of ecclesial evangelism. In the third chapter, I suggest that Methodism is best understood as a “People called Methodist,” a movement for individual and social reform that requires location in a visible, practicing, and witnessing community of discipleship. Such Peoplehood constitutes the basis for a missional ecclesiology that embodies a set of evangelistic practices and structures aimed at shaping transformed lives and a transformed world, leaning into the traditions and practices of the Christian tradition as well as into the needs of the world, both ways at once.

Chapter 4 builds on this account of a Methodist peoplehood to suggest that a Methodist People is not only shaped in the practice of the General Rules, but also, at the same time, in that People’s ongoing evangelistic engagement with the world. Put differently, a Methodist Peoplehood is constantly “appearing” and is “discovered” as it takes shape at the intersection of Church/World. This engagement is best understood as the evangelistic agency of a Methodist People, described and embodied as the practice of “intercession,” the Church standing between God and the world, leaning both ways at once. The implications of such an understanding shapes imagination to envision a People practicing an intercessory evangelism in initiatives and programs, institutions and structures, that are simultaneously larger than and smaller than the contemporary congregation. We will consider some of these embodiments in a brief conclusion.

The Hope for This Work

In his foreword to the re-release of Julian Hartt’s book, Toward a Theology of Evangelism, Stanley Hauerwas suggests that to find a book about evangelism written by a theologian might come as a surprise. This is the case, he says, because

for some time those concerned about evangelism, as well as those writing about it, have not been theologians. They have been sociologists or people that specialize in marketing . . . [and] if the church is to recover a proper sense of evangelism, that is, an understanding of evangelism that is not equated with church growth then a book about evangelism written by a theologian will be a crucial resource.31

This study exists as a contribution to the conversation about the ecclesial identity and the practice of evangelistic mission in the Methodist tradition, and particularly, The United Methodist Church in North America. Even though this study arrives at a moment of division and potentially the fracture of United Methodism, I offer it as an engagement in these conversations with an unmistakable concern for the development of a robustly Wesleyan theological voice in the determination of ecclesial identity and evangelistic mission. To that end, I hope that it joins many others emerging in this field, to serve together as “crucial resources” in this important conversation. How can we continue to speak into the intricate work of discerning the particular needs, the possible adhesions, necessary renunciations, and potential alliances in the textured space where pastors and congregations, where leaders and institutions, where Christians live—namely, at the intersection of Church and world? Our work in answering this question begins now.

1. Peachey, “Toward an Understanding,” 27.

2. Bryant, “Invitation,” para. 2, 11.

3. Bryant, “Invitation,” para. 2, 11.

4. Powell, “Cathedral Faces Criticism,” para. 5–10.

5. See “Ashes to Go”; Shaffer, “Too Busy for Church?”

6. See Conger, “Are Ashes to Go a Protestant no-no?”; Sniffen, “Ashes to Go or Not to Go.”

7. Specia, “God Save the Cathedral?,” para. 15.

8. Alper, “From the Solidly Secular,” para. 3.

9. Lipka, “Closer Look,” para. 3.

10. Sociologist Mark Chaves reports that “involvement in American religious congregations has softened over recent decades. Aggregate weekly attendance at worship services is either stable or very slowly declining since 1990, but it clearly declined in the decades before that, and the percent of people who never attend is steadily increasing. Moreover, each new cohort of individuals attends religious services less than did earlier cohorts at the same age, and each new generation of Americans is less likely to be raised in a religiously active family than were earlier generations” (Chaves, “Decline of American Religion?,” 3).

11. With the term “evangelistic mission,” I mean to bring attention to evangelism’s location inside the broader frame of the missio Dei, God’s creative, redemptive, reconciling activity throughout all creation. With such a placement, I show agreement with Dana Robert, who has argued that “the relationship of evangelism to mission is like the relationship of the heart to the body” (Robert, “Evangelism as the Heart of Mission,” 4). The term “evangelistic mission” hopefully keeps this relationship before us.

12. Jackson, Offering Christ, xii–xiv.

13. Jackson, Offering Christ, xiv.

14. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 121.

15. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 124.

16. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 128–32.

17. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 131.

18. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 132.

19. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 195–96.

20. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 194–96.

21. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 198.

22. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 198, 200–201, 203.

23. Jones, Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, 191–203.

24. Chapman and Warner, “Jonah and the Imitation of God,” 43. See also Warner, Saving Women.

25. Jones, “Practice of Christian Governance,” 117.

26. Heaney, Redress of Poetry, 3–4. I am indebted to Jones, “Practice of Christian Governance,” 117, who mentions Heaney.

27. Heaney, Redress of Poetry, xiii.

28. Heaney, Redress of Poetry, xiii; Weil, Gravity and Grace, 92.

29. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 92.

30. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 92.

31. Hauerwas, “Foreword.”