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September 29, 2004

This past week I have had the opportunity to talk with several of you and have become aware yet again, how much we depend on each other for encouragement along the way. I think one can bear a good deal if one senses that one is not alone. For instance, it is somehow encouraging to discover that Hebrew looks weird to other people besides yourself, or that you are not alone in thinking that Augustine’s journey of faith can seem at times utterly bizarre, or that reading Calvin or Barth is not without its frustrations and times of bafflement. The way is long and there are many competing obligations and claims that must be addressed. Life has a way of crashing in, most especially when we have finally got everything planned and settled.

Recently, my wife and I went to see the movie Vanity Fair, starring Reese Witherspoon. In the movie (and even more in Thackeray’s novel), the world is portrayed as a place full of schemes and shrewdness, where those who are wise as serpents regularly triumph over those who are innocent as doves. However, the title comes from a very different book, a book which, not unlike Augustine’s Confessions, has to do with an individual’s journey of faith. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is where “Vanity Fair” makes its first appearance, and there it is not so much about “getting ahead” in a glamorous world as it is about the despair of living in a world where everything is for sale. “Christian” and “Faithful” are beaten in “Vanity Fair” and “Faithful” even dies. The way is hard. Yet the journey, in all of its hardship and struggle, is strangely more satisfying than the endless diversions of “Vanity Fair.”

I don’t mean by this that those who study here are more virtuous than other people or better than those who hustle for mere money. In my opinion, there is nothing “mere” about money at all. But I do think that studying to become a teacher or pastor in the church is a marvelously liberating gift, precisely in the focus and stringent demands it places on one’s life. Thursday nights or Friday nights or all day Saturdays have to be planned around, prepared for, aimed at, all of which describes a course of walking in company together toward a specific destination, living a focused, or rather a “called” life. Such a journey is not characterized by the diversions of “Vanity Fair,” but it gives what “Vanity Fair” cannot offer, and what the modern world often holds in contempt: a called life, that is, a life set toward a particular direction. The gift of being directed in accordance with a particular voice is what the faith calls freedom. “Christian” discovered in the company of “Faithful” that we are not made for endless diversions. Endless diversions are finally soul destroying, imprisoning us in comfortable isolation. There are few greater gifts than finding that one is living, in the company of others, a “called” life.

February 16, 2005

When my wife and I lived in Scotland, the announcements given during worship were called, “Intimations,” a word which carried with it not only the sense of “announcement” or “making known,” but also the sense of speaking to familiar friends of things affecting the whole community. There is a tenderness about “Intimations.” Many of these notes I am writing to you contain “intimations” like that, i.e., the description of and concerns with our common life.

The other night when Dr. Wireman spoke to us, I watched little groups of students form after the evening meal, some to talk about what he said, others to cram for Hebrew, others simply enjoying each other’s company. Viewing all of that made me realize how much I have come to depend on this community—as scattered and fragmented and weary as we are. I am grateful for these “intimations” which, strangely, give me joy and hope.

January 31, 2007

Our life together, such as it is, is one of the most important things about our fledgling seminary. These words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Life Together, apply therefore also to us, I think: “If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even where there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith— and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and insignificant, and does not at all live up to our expectations—then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”6 Those words are underlined in my copy of Life Together. Perhaps I need to hear them more than you. Still they are worth remembering and I commend them to your attention.

October 3, 2007

Before Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1939, he wrote a little article summarizing his impression of American Protestantism. The article was entitled, “Protestantism Without Reformation.” In that article Bonhoeffer expressed skepticism concerning what Americans called “freedom of religion,” seeing in the multiple denominations that worship God in their own way, not an example of freedom so much as a flight from the church’s confessional nature and its true unity in Christ. He thought that American Protestants were no longer scandalized by their inability to confess and live together and so they celebrated their disunity by calling it “freedom.” Bonhoeffer was particularly suspicious of a freedom celebrated by largely white congregations that somehow did not implicate them in the life and worship of largely African American churches. In opposition to what he thought was a false notion of freedom, Bonhoeffer spoke of the “freedom of the Word of God,”7 a freedom that cuts against the claims we so often idolize, and draws us instead into a peace we have not made, a life together that comes to us as a gift, a baptism in which we find ourselves placed beside those we have not chosen.

This Saturday I have been asked to preach for Coastal Carolina Presbytery. The presbytery asked me to exhort the assembled saints “to pull together.” All of which has caused me to think how easy it is and how much better we are at pulling apart. In preparing for this sermon, I was struck with how much of scripture has to do with our “pulling apart”: Cain vs. Abel; Jacob vs. Esau; Joseph and his brothers; Saul vs. David. If you want to read a sad story, read 1 Kings 12 and the story of Israel’s split from Judah. “To your tents, O Israel! Look now to your own house, O David.” (1 Kgs 12:16)

In one version or another, that slogan has described the “freedom” which has characterized so much of American Protestantism, and particularly our own denomination (i.e., PCUSA). We are free to . . . split, a freedom that is indistinguishable from divorce or “pursuing my own happiness,” or even worshipping the god I choose and find useful. What is more difficult is to worship the God who has chosen us in Jesus Christ, and has done so quite without our permission. In the divine economy of this God’s choosing, freedom is manifest in “bearing, believing, and hoping all things.” It endures. It is free from that kind of self-absorption that insists on having its own way. It is the freedom Charles Wesley sings about, the gift of being “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” This freedom, Paul writes, does not come from our splitting apart but from God’s free decision to stick us to Jesus Christ, and in him to each other. That basic unity is what is real, not our splits. Our splitting reflects not our freedom but our enthrallment to death, the last enemy whose intention it is to split us from God and from each other. But, Paul writes that Christ is “our peace,” and he has made us one, reconciling us “in one body through the cross.” (Eph 2:14–16)

Our real problem is not our much feared and whined about propensity to split apart. No, our problem is that deep down where it really matters, we are already one in Christ. We cannot escape that Christological fact, try as we might. We were baptized into it, and so we have to deal and learn to deal with those whom Christ has given us to love. In Christ, we are stuck with each other. And the amazing thing is that those with whom we are stuck are given to us as gifts—not enemies to be avoided, not objects to be overcome, but gifts. The whole joy of the gospel comes from this very fact: our unity in Christ keeps surprising us with such unwanted, unexpected, and unlikely gifts. Choosing your own god, and even more choosing your own kind, is finally boring as it is deadly. Our freedom in Christ is much more surprising and adventuresome and disturbing than that. And it is also more beautiful.

February 11, 2009

I have always been fascinated by martyrs. I am sure that part of the reason has to do with their courage, and the inevitable question as to whether or not I would be able to face up to such a fate. It is a silly question, asked only by those who have the luxury to consider such eventualities. I suspect that most martyrs of the faith did not worry over much about their martyrdom. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reportedly, walked to the gallows naked, having prayed, and committed himself to the Lord whom he had sought to serve. Other martyrs had even less time to consider their situation. One thinks of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Oscar Romero. And, as my mother would be quick to remind me, most martyrs do not have such dramatic and well-publicized ends: the single Mom who raises her children, brings them to church, gets them educated and launched; the pastor who spends his whole life in small, unpromising settings and does so without remorse or regret, happy in the service of God; the woman dying of breast cancer, digging in her garden, planting flowers she will never see and enjoying that day’s sunshine. These are martyrs too and quite unromantic ones.

Our suspicion of martyrdom (e.g., “I don’t want to be a martyr!” Or, “Don’t play the martyr act on me!) is meant to indicate that we can see through the religious language so often used to disguise baser motives. Thinking that we can see through all of that hypocritical piety, we easily convince ourselves that there are no real motives for living faithfully or dying well. Martyrs, however, remind us otherwise, which is why we find them so disturbing.

From the beginning, the Christian faith has made it clear that following Jesus Christ can get you killed, either slowly or sometimes quite suddenly. The strange thing is that when people hear that, it sounds like martyrs must be brave if rather sad people, tragic figures, really, like heroes dying for some lost cause. What is more difficult to convey, however, is the martyr’s . . . .what? Good cheer? Confidence? Equanimity? Clarity of mind? Joy?

This morning at devotionals I read the story of Polycarp’s death (+155 A.D.). Polycarp was 86 years old when he was burned to death by his Roman persecutors. Given a chance to denounce his Lord and save his life, Polycarp replied to his tormentors, simply, “Eighty-six years I have served him and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”8 Reading Polycarp’s story has always put a smile on my face, not because I think I could do something like that or that something like that would be easy, but because there is a hint in his words of a friendly insouciance, a kind of careless dismissal of the threat.

In 1996, Father Christian de Cherge, a French monk living in Algeria, was kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and along with his fellow monks, beheaded. (You can read more about this in the book, The Monks of Tibhirine (St. Martin’s 2003), a story that has also received cinematic treatment in the movie, Of Gods and Men.) In a note to his family, he asked them to pray for the troubled country of Algeria and for the gracious people who lived there. He did not want to become a martyr, and particularly he did not want his Algerian captors to be implicated in his death. His last words were addressed to the one who was poised to behead him. He wrote: “And you also, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you are doing. Yes, for you also I wish this “thank you”—and this adieu—to commend you to the God whose face I see in yours. And may we find each other, ‘happy good thieves’ in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. Amen.”9

Do you hear the same ridiculous note in this testimony, that executioner and executed might both be found to be “happy good thieves” whom Jesus might surprise with his unaccountable grace? As if the moment were but a moment and the drama more encompassing and more mysterious than we can know.

Martyrs should not make us feel guilty or subvert our own witness, however small. I think they are given to us as gifts, in part to bring to vivid life what is at stake in this business of the faith, but also to encourage us, even to make us smile, as old Polycarp’s story makes me smile. They also serve to remind us that the Christian life is a life together, a life where others give strength, a life where martyrs make us want to do things we would otherwise never venture.

Maybe that is why we are so quick to disclaim any sense of martyrdom. Their freedom actually scares us. Maybe we should pray to be so free.

March 11, 2009

It’s odd how generations just miss one another sometimes. Some of you would know or at least recognize the name, “Sara Little,” but others might not recognize that name at all. She had been retired from her work as a teacher some time before this seminary in Charlotte got going. She had taught on the Richmond campus of Union Theological Seminary and before that, across the street at Presbyterian School of Christian Education. In any case, hers was a name to be reckoned with. I suspect she was one of the first women to be awarded a PhD from Yale in Christian Education, and I know she was one of the first women to teach at Union in Richmond. She was first in a lot of categories. Her many books had established her reputation as a scholar (above all, her book on teaching, entitled, To Set One’s Heart, (Westminster John Knox, 1983)). Her reputation in the classroom was legendary.

When I arrived in Charlotte in 2001, I knew her by name and reputation only, though if I had attended PSCE or Union, I daresay I would have had a much more vivid impression. At her memorial service yesterday, I heard a former student and colleague of hers talk about what a gift it was—a scary gift at times—to be in the classroom with Sara Little. I also listened to one of her pastors speak about how intimidated he was to find her in his “New Members Class” at Sharon Presbyterian Church. My purpose here is not to praise Sara Little but simply to note that toward the end of her life when she was quite retired, she helped the seminary get started here by giving a lecture on Christian Education. She was old then and not active, but willing, nevertheless, to give us a little push.

Sara was buried in the cemetery at Amity Presbyterian Church, in a part of town where she grew up. When Sara was a child the church was in a rural part of Mecklenburg County, but now the city has swallowed it up and the church finds itself in a transitional neighborhood. Sara was raised on a red clay cotton farm on the edge of Charlotte, attended Queens College, Presbyterian School of Christian Education, and Yale University. She was in many ways a product of the Presbyterian Church and the culture it fostered in this area, a culture of learning and service and hard work and stubborn hope.

As her remains were returned to the soil, I thought about the long journey she had taken from home, the many lives she had touched, but also of the church that was capable of producing such saints. Times have changed. Where there was once a cotton farm with cows grazing in the meadows, now there are deteriorating neighborhoods, gang graffiti, and unceasing traffic. The challenges before us in our day are fearsome indeed and will demand everything and more of us in response. Still, in the early afternoon of a lovely spring day, I stood beside the cemetery and watched as the church’s day school children were enjoying their morning recess. Black and white and Hispanic, 4 and 5 year-olds kicking a large ball around the yard, laughing and rough-housing together in the glorious sunshine. None of them knew Sara Little, but all were playing in the fields of the Kingdom, where the gospel that enabled Sara to set her own heart was making space for them to grow and to flourish. They too will have a long road to travel, a harder one, perhaps, than Sara’s. Still we should not forget the words of the psalmist, “One generation shall laud your works to another . . . .” (Ps 145:4) Sometimes we forget that. In the case of Sara Little, I am glad we did not.

May 8, 2009

One of the many things that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that continues to nourish me is the following: “ . . . that a person in the arms of his wife should long for the hereafter is, to put it mildly, tasteless and in any case not God’s will.”10 Resting in the arms of one’s wife ought to be enough for a man, one might think, but often it is not. We want more. To change the metaphor, it ought to be enough for the church as the “Bride of Christ” to rest in the arms of her Bridegroom, but again, so often we want something more than Jesus. What we are looking for is something more spectacular, exotic, even ecstatic, perhaps even a kind of divine gnosis that will clinch every argument and explain away every mystery.

Recently I attended worship at a so-called mega-church here in Charlotte. It has advertised itself as “Not your grandparents church!” And it promised to provide an “elevated” form of Christian experience. What are we to make of such a claim? I suppose that this claim is better than “Slough of Despond” church or “The Darkside Congregation” but it seems to me that either way the claim is about my expectations for myself. To be “elevated” here is to desire something more than the presence of Christ and being content in his service.

Not too long ago I was talking to a gifted pastor here in Charlotte Presbytery. He told me that he was looking forward to offering a new Bible study for his people on Wednesday night. He had worked hard on it and felt as if he really had something good to present. But he was distressed when the vast majority of his congregants signed up for the “line-dancing” course that was being offered at the same time in the fellowship hall. He laughed when he told me this story, admitting that line-dancing may actually have been a more attractive option than what he was offering, but still I could tell he felt a bit like a jilted lover.

We live in a culture that is in love with the transcendent, a celebrity culture that looks down on the ordinary. We crave excitement. Recently my wife and I went to the movies and 7 of the 8 previews portrayed nothing but car crashes, explosions, and various iterations of the end of the world. Like a drug addict, we need bigger and bigger hits, and soon cannot even see the gifts of the ordinary, the life together that sustains life.

Simone Weil has noted that evil is often depicted as glamorous while good is portrayed as boring. On the movie screen, a car crash looks exciting. But, she points out, in real life a car crash is not exciting but painful, disturbing, and wearisome. Similarly, the boring goodness so easily dismissed in a drama, is in ordinary life a delightful thing, a gift, endlessly creative.11

We are in Christ’s arms, and while we often long to be elsewhere, he somehow holds on to us, and in ways that continue to astonish, gives us himself through the ordinary, daily, enduring, often unexciting and at times too exciting gift of life in him. It would be in the height of bad taste to want to be elsewhere.

May 13, 2009

This morning at staff meeting, Susan Griner reminded us of some salient demographic facts. Hispanics currently represent 12.5% of our population in the United States; African-Americans represent 12.1% and Asian-Americans 3.6% There are more Jews living in America than in Israel, more Cubans in Miami than in any city except Havana, more Poles in Chicago than in any city except Warsaw, more Armenians in Los Angeles than in any city in the world. By the middle of this century a majority of Americans will be non-European.

What to make of all of this? First of all, I suspect these numbers are pretty accurate. Secondly, these numbers reflect my own experience and perceptions. Thirdly, what strikes me about these numbers is not their political or even cultural significance—I see them neither as a threat nor a cause for triumphalism—but their significance for the faith. Many of these groups (e.g., Poles, Armenians, Hispanics) have deep roots in Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions. African-American worship has not only provided the spiritual resources to overcome years of oppression but has also shaped how the whole church has heard the gospel in a new way.

My very little point is this: though these changes may well take Presbyterians of European descent way out of our comfort zone, and though we may well find ourselves in a distinct minority (which, by the way, is not always a bad place for Christians of whatever stripe to find themselves), there is every reason to be hopeful about a future church that will be richer in its expressions of faith, more knowledgeable of the many traditions that contribute to the faith, and more open to ways in which the faith can bear witness in the future.

Some of the traditions Susan mentioned (e.g., Armenians, African-Americans, and others) have much to teach us about what it means to be in a minority and to confess the faith gladly.

Will there be a place for the Reformed witness in all of this? I believe there will be, though it may look very different from our world today. The Reformed tradition teaches us that the church is always in need of being reformed, and this not because we constantly have better ideas on how to improve it, but because we are a church that seeks to follow Jesus Christ, and therefore are a church that is saved not by its perfection but by his grace. Whatever else salvation will look like in the future, it will be a salvation that will draw us into the lives of those whom we have not chosen but without whom Jesus will simply not be our Savior. There truly is no salvation apart from his church! And this is so not because the church is the exclusionary condition but because Christ does not save us apart from others with whom he has stuck us. We are, by his grace and often to our chagrin, connected. Whatever demographic shape the future takes, Jesus Christ will be at the center, which is why we have nothing to fear about the future of the church, though, no doubt, we will have much to learn.

March 24, 2010

Last Wednesday night I was invited to speak to a class that meets at South Mecklenburg Presbyterian Church. Matt Brown is the pastor there and Kim Lee, one of our students, serves on the staff. “South Meck” is a relatively new church located in the far southern reaches of Charlotte, housed in a lovely new building in the middle of suburbia. The people were warm and welcoming and made me feel right at home. What struck me about those who were there was their passion for living the Christian life faithfully amidst all the messiness of early 21st century American suburbia, and the variety of places and traditions from which these very different voices emerged. I would venture to say that most who were gathered there were not from traditional, Presbyterian backgrounds. Some were. But most were from some other tradition or even none: Catholic, Baptist, unchurched, even hostile to the church. Yet God had, in ways more mysterious than we usually note, brought them together and made them a part of the body of Christ.

As I listened to them talk, I sensed for the first time in a long time the miracle that is the church. It is so easy to forget that miracle or overlook it, but a Wednesday night gathering of this sort brings it vividly to life. They were hungry for the gospel of Jesus Christ. They may be hesitant to express that hunger, and their hunger may well be disguised underneath other names or claims, but they are wanting to be fed and are seeking to live a life that is faithful to the gospel that has claimed them.

When I was a pastor, I used to be more amazed than I am now that folk came to church. We often complain at how paltry and small our field of labor is, or how unresponsive others are to what we think important, but the fact is that people still hear the gospel gladly. They come. They worship. They will even come to hear you preach. That may seem like a small or obvious thing, but it is not. It is a miracle.

June 9, 2010

Since my youth, I have been a baseball fan. Growing up, my team was the Brooklyn Dodgers. After they moved to California, I lost interest in them, but before they left, well, Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey were my heroes, as they still are. The “boys of summer” were my team and I can still recount for you the starting lineup of the early 50’s. My father and I would watch the “Game of the Week” which came on Saturday afternoons with Dizzy Dean, sponsored by Falstaff beer. In 1955 the Dodgers won their one and only World Series as Brooklyn’s team, beating the hated Yankees in 7 games. I was in the 5th grade then and got in trouble with one of my teachers because I whooped out loud when I heard the final score. The next year, 1956, the Dodgers and Yankees played in the World Series again but this time the Yankees won with a pitcher named Don Larsen hurling a perfect game. In my opinion Larsen was a mediocre pitcher who got lucky in one game against a really great pitcher, Sal Maglie. Still, a perfect game, 27 up and 27 down, impressed.

Last week an unheralded pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, Armando Galarraga, pitched an almost perfect game against the Cleveland Indians. 26 up and 26 down. The 27th batter, Jason Donald, hit a dribbler between first and second, and Galarraga ran over to cover the bag, getting there just in time to receive a throw to make the final out. Only the umpire, Jim Joyce, called Donald safe. Unbelievable!

There has been a great deal written since then about the “lessons” both umpire and pitcher have provided the rest of us in their responses to this “injustice.” Galarraga’s immediate reaction, that is, his unconsidered, uncalculated response, was to look up to heaven, smile in bafflement, and put his hands on his head. He did not jump up and down or go after the umpire (as I would have done) with veins bulging and expletives flying. Rather he seemed curiously chagrined by it all, smiling in bafflement and incomprehension. Then he went back to the mound and got the 28th batter out.

Later the umpire apologized to Galarraga and admitted he had been wrong and had blown the call. All of this may seem trivial, but it does stand in marked contrast to the way our culture practices outrage in other areas of life. The oil spill in the gulf offers abundant evidence from the world of business and politics that the reservoir of good will is distressingly shallow and unlike the oil business itself, does not require that one drill very deeply before hitting a gusher of incoherent rage. But why point the finger at businessmen and politicians when the church itself seems to offer such a sad spectacle of “passionate intensity.” We find it so hard to extend mercy to others. I am more convinced than ever that especially in church debates “winning” and “losing” are massively inappropriate terms to describe the mind of Christ.

Love, I suspect, “wins” few debates, and more often, “suffereth wrong,” often bearing with defeats that turn out to be more victorious than any victory won by votes. What was so striking about Galarraga and Joyce was that in the midst of “injustice” and its aftermath, neither lost his humanity. How did that happen?

In a not entirely unrelated column, Michael Gerson wrote the following concerning politicians who stray from their marital commitment: “Moral conservatives need to admit that political character is more complex than marital fidelity . . . . ‘The sins of the flesh are bad,’ said C.S. Lewis, ‘but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and back-biting, the pleasures of power and hatred . . . .’ Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies . . . . This recognition should lead toward the most underrated of the moral virtues: mercy.”12

Mercy. Could it be that mercy is what keeps our humanity intact, keeps us from reducing ourselves and others to “winners” and “losers”? Does mercy tell us something true about ourselves, not as a form of politeness but as something that is theologically true? We seek forgiveness, Calvin reminds us, not in the hope of securing a merciful God, much less to appease an angry deity. Rather, God is merciful. And because God is merciful, we can dare to approach “the throne of grace” with confidence, knowing that we will find mercy there. And having found such mercy, we can afford to be extravagant in sharing it with others.

As our denomination begins another “marching season” of church debates, one hopes for mercy.

September 21, 2010

Yesterday I was in a meeting with area pastors to discuss Eugene Peterson’s book, Practice Resurrection (Eerdmans, 2010). Peterson will be here next month to give a set of lectures. The book is an extended reflection on the letter to the Ephesians and accordingly, our discussion centered on the nature and mission of the church. One of the recurring points of discussion among the pastors had to do with the extent to which the church is under obligation to pay attention to the cultural context in which the gospel is proclaimed, as over against the extent to which the church is called to keep faith with the claims of gospel itself. This is not a new debate. Its lineaments have been traced by H. Richard Niebuhr (Christ and Culture, Torchbooks, 1975), among others, and more recently, by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon (Resident Aliens, Abingdon, 2014).

After the discussion, I reflected further on the matter. So many of the agendas which seek to make the church and its message more intelligible have little to say concerning what I would call the “soul” of the church. One of the pastors remarked that it seemed to him that Peterson was interested in what he called “deep church,” that is, the church not merely as a cultural phenomenon but something with a life of its own, possessing its own strange identity.

I do not think that pastor was arguing for returning to the glorious days of yesteryear, when the church was stronger, more numerous, and more visibly important to the culture. For one thing, those days were not all that glorious. However, the culture we are seeking to address today is a culture that is, ostensibly, not much interested in the mystery of the gospel’s word of grace, and which is, to speak the truth, often asking other kinds of questions. Some of these questions have to do with the effectiveness of the church as a consumer item which can do something for “me” or the extent to which the church is an agency of change that will accomplish some generally regarded good or the way in which the church can serve as an instrument for cultural or political persuasion. Pastors are sometimes encouraged to judge their effectiveness in responding to these questions, and by the resulting increase in the number of members their congregations can record or the impact they can make on their communities. These are not unimportant indices of pastoral leadership. The Gospel of Luke-Acts seems very interested in precisely these kinds of criteria, noting the numbers by which the early church grew and the way in which the church’s influence was spread over the Mediterranean world.

Yet as I listened to the discussion and occasionally bit my tongue, I wondered what it would look like if our determination to be relevant succeeded, and the church became a more effective institution led by excellent managers and therapists who could provide the necessary religious commodities that consumers of our culture would like. Having done so, would we have lost our souls, forgotten how to speak the strange language of grace, where so much growth is underground (Cf. John 12:24: “ . . . .unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit . . . .”) and where what is measurable is often what is of least importance? I know that arguing in this way can be an effective way of dodging hard realities and giving into laziness or sentimentality. There is more than one kind of “cheap grace.” But I also know that we are dealing here with mysteries of the gospel that beggar description and simply cannot be reduced to “measurable objectives” or the trivialities of body count.

So what do I want? I hope that our seminary trains pastors who are at least uncomfortable with the culture’s rush to measure things, who are not afraid of being measured but who know the church will be judged not by the culture’s standards or its own, but by the God whose judgment is both more severe and more gracious than we can conceive. I believe that the word of the gospel always finds its own hearers and gathers them together in community. It may not be the community we would have chosen or even would want. It may not look like us or be what we are used to, but it will not be one we have programmed or targeted or managed, but one the Holy Spirit insists on giving us. The church, Will Willimon reminds us, unlike a seminary or university, does not get to have an admissions department. We have to worship and work with whomever Jesus drags to church that day.13 My hope is simply that we train students to love and to serve that ridiculous church. I think if we do that, we will find that the church will become both more transformative and a more interesting place to be, such that even the culture will grow curious about such a strange body in its midst.

February 1, 2012

In 1919 William Butler Yeats published his poem, The Second Coming, whose sentiments have almost become a cliche today. He was writing in the aftermath of World War I, yet the poem articulates what many of us are feeling in the church today: a sense that the centrifugal forces that are pulling us apart are more powerful than the glue that holds us together. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . . .”

The other much-quoted line in the poem expresses what seems all too true in our culture and religious wars of the day: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I suppose that line could apply to many of the political campaigns that are surrounding us at the moment, but they might also apply to the politics of the church, describing a poor choice between a wise and wearied indifference on the one hand, and the passions of entrepreneurial intensity on the other.

It seems strange that largely affluent, comfortable, unthreatened American Presbyterians have found it so easy to pull apart, so hard to stay together, so exciting to construct a new denomination, so tiresome to bear with each other in the old one. I wonder why we are so angry today, why resentment provides such powerful rhetorical fuel for our arguments and divisions. Resentment adds by dividing; it increases by subtracting. And it is very powerful.

So what is the opposite of resentment? And how do we find that stuff? How do we find the grace to bear with each other? The church, Calvin reminds us, exists where the gospel is proclaimed and the “visible word” of the sacrament bears to us Christ himself. Word and sacrament do not bear to us instruments of social policy or denominational purity. They bear to us Jesus Christ, whose life among us is a social policy, whose Passion liberates us from our worst and most earnest passions. As Paul writes, “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is head of the body, the church . . . .” (Col 1:17, 18) In him all things hold together. Which means, I take it, that resentment dies as we are drawn to him. His cross bleeds our anger away.

The most prophetic word that can be said today has to do with what it means to be the church. We know how to serve this or that political end; we know how to engage with this or that righteous cause. What we do not know is what it means that “in him all things hold together.” We would rather grow weary with our resentments and divisions, angrily and no doubt passionately inventing a more spiritual body. Splits happen, we tell ourselves. Divorces are sadly prevalent. That’s the way it is.

I don’t know the solution, much less the best ecclesial strategy. I do know that there is absolutely no point in trying to justify ourselves. There is enough sin around for everyone. And self-justification, no matter how righteous, is finally boring and tedious work. And if, in fact “in him all things hold together,” then we are surely liberated from such tedium and called instead to rejoice in his word of hope. Such liberation deprives our many divisions of the honor of taking them quite as seriously as they demand. In any case, the only appropriate song that answers to our separations and resentments is doxological in nature, a song sung not defiantly or ironically but happily and truly in the knowledge that not even we, with all our “passionate intensity,” can tear apart what Christ has joined together.

February 15, 2012

This past week our seminary has been enriched by the presence of Dr. Darrell Guder. His lectures on the missional church have reminded me of another great missional churchman, Lesslie Newbigin. Many of our students have read Newbigin’s book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. In that book, there is a chapter entitled, “The Logic of Election,” in which Newbigin exegetes Romans 9–11 to show that the God of Jesus Christ always saves by electing the “wrong people.”14 For example, God employs the Jews to save the Gentiles, a scandalous thing to do, particularly since the Jews, in Paul’s judgment, have rejected the gospel. But, he insists, the promises of God are irrevocable, and Israel remains God’s people. Their rejection of the gospel only makes room for the Gentiles to come in. Conversely, the inclusion of the Gentiles is meant to make Israel jealous, and though a hardening has come upon Israel, it will only last until the full number of Gentiles has come in. But when that happens, to quote Paul, “all Israel will be saved.” (Rom11:26a)

Newbigin’s point is that the Gentiles weren’t particularly looking for the Jews to save them, and the Jews weren’t particularly looking to be saved by the Gentiles, the last people from whom they would expect help to come.

If all of this seems a bit contrived to you, think of all the places in scripture where people are saved by the wrong person. The man who fell among thieves is not saved by his fellow countrymen or co-religionists but by the wrong guy, a Samaritan. Joseph’s brothers are saved from starvation by the wrong guy, the guy they had considered murdering and in fact had sold into slavery. The mighty warrior Naaman is healed by paying attention to a little Jewish slave girl, hardly the right person. Jonah considers himself the wrong guy for this job and eventually sulks because the wrong people repent. The “apostle to the Gentiles” is the Jew, Saul, who was bent on persecuting the church, holding the garments while others stoned a follower of the Way. He became Paul who appeared to many as absolutely the wrong guy for this job. God’s people are saved by the wrong guy because they are saved by the Wrong Guy. There was no room for this guy in the inn. Foxes have holes and birds of the air nests, but this guy has no place to lay his head. This guy was a prophet lacking honor in his own country. He came to his own and his own knew him not. This guy eventually is judged to be so wrong that he is placed on a garbage dump between two other outcasts to be killed.

We are all saved by the Wrong Guy—there is no other way. The point? Well, our church is so quick to divide in part because we find it painful, even impossible to put up with the wrong people—whether they be of the left or the right. We prefer to be with the right guys and gals, people like us. Which is why it is so hard for us to hear the gospel, why its gracious logic upsets our more conventional type, why it often leaves us standing outside the party, harrumphing, while our Father and others are celebrating with the wrong guy who just came home.

What connects us to the other wrong guys is not tolerance or a sense of diversity or our own virtues. What connects us to other wrong guys is the Wrong Guy himself. In him “all things hold together,” says Paul (Col1:17). In him. The divine comedy is just that, a comedy. What we fear, what we have so quickly separated, God insists on being joined together, surprising us with the wrong people who become the very means of our salvation. God is sneaky that way, but then what would you expect of One who sticks us to the wrong people by sticking us to the Wrong Guy?

October 3, 2012

A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”15

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a friend, during the course of which I was struck by what seemed to me to be the crucial issue facing the church today. There are so many issues one might mention: hunger and poverty, war and peace, ethnic and racial conflict, internal anger and bitter divisions, economic hardship and limited resources. My friend was justifiably upset with the weakness of the church’s response to many of these issues, and even angrier about the quality of life exhibited in the church itself.

It is so easy to grow bitter about the church. Richard John Neuhaus has written about sheep who all too easily become wolves. And he has noted further that for ministers just starting out, congregational life can provide a real shock in terms of the virulence of sheer nastiness that Christians can deal out to each other. “It is a special sort of nastiness,” he writes, “perhaps because proximity to the sacred multiplies the force of the demonic. Envy, resentment, and unalloyed hatred can make their appearance in any association, but they seem so ghastly in the church because they so flagrantly contradict the stated purpose of the association.”16

So the temptation is to imagine a better church, one that is more attractive, successful, even nicer. And there is nothing wrong with that. We should all long for a church to which people cannot wait to enter, for worship services that are filled to overflowing, for benevolent budgets that expand to include the whole world, for programs that transform lives, communities, even cities. The hard part is living with our disappointment that people don’t always love what we do, or support what is obviously worthy of their best passions, or accept our vision of what the church can be and do. Then is when it becomes difficult to love the church. Then is when it becomes easy to write people off. Then is when we are tempted to look for an exit. But then is also when the crucial question presses upon us: Can we love the church?

Or do we love our dreams of the church more?

I have recently been reading an account of the German church struggle and despite the occasional heroism displayed by various individuals, the witness there was, frankly, disappointing. I wonder if we would have done any better. And I think of those whose task it was to try to rebuild the church in Germany after World War II. How hard it must have been to summon a gospel witness amidst the ruins and manifest failure of the church itself.

But maybe it was no harder than what we face today, where our affluence and abundance of choices so easily trivialize the faith. Maybe our preoccupation with our own decline is more of a symptom of our desire for self-preservation than it is of anything else.

The truth is we are not promised increasing number of pulpits in an ever-growing denomination of successful people. There is very little of that in scripture. Rather there is only (!) manna; only loaves and fishes; only waiting and not knowing and bearing witness and being raised again from the dead. John Calvin insists that the church lives only as it is raised from the dead again and again. Can we love such a church? It seems so paltry at times, so unfashionable, so awkward. Are we really called to love that mess?

A final note: recently I represented our seminary at the inaugural event at another seminary nearby. I was struck by the service, which contained two sermons! There was a good deal of celebration of the success that had already been attained. Success upon success. No stumbles, no failures, no questions, no wilderness, no exile, no losses. Where was the struggle, I wondered.

Perhaps we are blessed to be living with a church that struggles so obviously. It is a gift to be preserved from some kinds of “success.” The hardness, the difficulty, the limits are probably closer to the “narrow way” the church has ever been called to walk. And as affluent and comfortable as we are, we have much to learn still. Only in America might we think that being the church is meant to be one successful thing after another. The crucial issue of our day, as it is of any day, is whether the church will be the church, whether it will, with its words and actions, its life and possessions, bear witness to Jesus Christ. Can we love the Body whose body is always a mess, and is always at its best when struggling? Or would we rather have something neater, cleaner, nicer, more spiritual, something that carries less theological baggage? There is only one reason to love a church that is so messy and troubled. The head of the church seems to do so.

January 31, 2013

We often think of tradition as confining. We learn early on to celebrate “non-conformity” even as we buy the same kind of shoes and shirts. But musicians and bricklayers, I would guess, might tell us that real non-conformity lies on the other side of mastering a particular tradition. One cannot attempt to improvise until one has mastered the instrument or craft and is comfortable enough in that mastery to think imaginative thoughts in another vein. Otherwise, what one is doing is merely cheap and silly and self-absorbed.

The life shaped by Christian discipleship is none of those things. Wallace Alston, in his essay, “The Education of a Pastor-Theologian,” suggests that it is in fact our tradition, particularly in preparing students for ministry, that actually liberates. He notes that in the Reformed tradition, the “ordered life” is a rather different thing from the “driven life” (and by extension, “the purpose-driven life”), just as it also differs from the “scattered” life or the “un-called” life. What is an “ordered life”? Alston calls it a life “lived in the confession of the power of the living God to make sense of human living and dying.” He cites John Greenleaf Whittier’s lyrics: “Drop thy still dews of quietness, till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace.”17

In a similar vein Karl Barth refers to the “ordered life” when he writes that it is the Holy Day, Sunday, that signals true human freedom.18 By ordering our lives the Sabbath liberates us from both the drivenness of our self-justifying busyness and the lassitude of our self-justifying despair.

Alston is bold to suggest what I think to be profoundly true, and that is that no small part of the work of ministry is the task of traditioning. He points out how many sermons today seem to be “first-generation” sermons, all about the experience of the preacher, as if the text had never been commented upon by saints from previous ages whose wisdom might be garnered and made fruitful for today and from whose acquaintance contemporary worshippers might benefit.

There is much that is tired and cliche-like in the term, “the Reformed tradition,” and it is true that worshipping at the idol of such a formative way of being Christian is still worshipping an idol. But again, as Alston notes, the point of mastering or better being mastered by a particular tradition is to be able to bear witness to the essential unity of the church. Our little traditions serve no other purpose than to provide us an entry into the church’s long and broad conversation with scripture’s witness.

So what? Well, so this: there are a number of groups, including various constituencies within our own church and seminary that are trying in earnest to discern God’s plan for the future for both. That future is hard to see for a variety of reasons, not least the various vested interests we might want to preserve. But one thing seems clear to me: trying to discern the future of the church without paying attention to the tradition that has passed the gospel on to us is worse than foolish, and will produce only a stunted and silly, and finally boring something, a something that, unlike the church of Jesus Christ, will be deeply captive to its own trivialities. Traditionalism is not the answer. But the tradition to which we belong is not our enemy. Rather, it is a gift that can liberate us to see beyond it.

February 6, 2013

Yesterday I received an email from a friend with whom I studied in seminary. What occasioned his note to me was the struggle he and his wife were having in their attempts to help the church where they worship. They were in anguish because their pastor wanted to take the congregation out of the denomination, and they, and others, wanted to try to stay. There was a lot of hurt and anger in this note. But in truth, the anguish my friend was feeling about this congregational split is only part of the hurt. Like any divorce there are at least two sides (if not more) and plenty of presenting issues and underlying causes. What my friend was feeling, however, was not just anguish over the split (and anger at his pastor), but a deeper loneliness, a feeling that the church had forgotten how to be a “life together.” Instead, what many seemed to want was a purity of some kind, a righteousness that would be self-evident. They seemed to want their youth back, the time when the congregation was young and vigorous and important. They wanted to be young again, and were suspicious of the old, who were such obvious failures.

One can make too much of the church. Our Reformed forebears sacrificed a lot in protest against the church making an idol out of itself or thinking that it was as important as the One to whom it was called to witness. But I sometimes think that the struggles we are going through to be the church are deeper and more important than mere ecclesiastical squabbles. We are adding to the loneliness of American life with our splits.

Here at the seminary, we say we want to “form leaders and transform the church,” but I wonder if we know how to be the church that we want to transform. Well, maybe we shouldn’t worry about all of this. As a friend reminds me, the church will last exactly as long as God has need of it. According to the Revelation of St. John the Divine, there will be no temple in the heavenly city (“for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb.” Rev 21:22). And in truth, our denomination, our seminary even, has no special claim on God’s will and God is certainly under no obligation to make life safe and secure for us.

Still, I think God does will us to live a “life together” in Jesus Christ. Which means that the church has no more important task today than to gather, worship, serve, and share in whatever life together the Holy Spirit grants to our congregations. Being the church today seems to me to be the most counter-cultural act we could undertake, countering our loneliness and isolation and anger and despair, with the gospel of him who “welcomes sinners and eats with them.”(Luke 15:2)

February 20, 2013

I sometimes wonder if affluence and Christianity can really get along very well. God, Philip Jenkins has said, seems to do much better south of the equator.

Recently I interviewed a potential student, a recent immigrant, who, with his wife and children, had to flee their native Burma and go first to Malaysia, and then to America. He was a pastor in Burma, among the Chin people. When he fled the country, he worked with the UN High Commission on Refugees, helping to care for the 50,000 or so Burmese in the camps in Malaysia. I asked him about that work. He replied: “I woke up in the morning and visited those in prison first at 6 a.m. Then I went to the detention centers to welcome new refugees. Then I went to the camps to visit various folk, and finally to the hospitals to care for the sick and dying.” At one point he was hired by an NGO, eventually being recognized by the UN for his pastoral care for those in need.

“What is your ministry goal?” I asked him. “I want to plant new churches,” he replied. He is currently pastoring a flock of 140 Burmese here in Charlotte. He has applied for U.S. citizenship, but he eventually wants to return to Burma to help start new congregations.

The man is poor; he is living in his third or fourth country after fleeing his own. English must be his fifth or sixth language. And he wants to start new churches . . . .

I have been reading Anne Applebaum’s new book, Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945–1956 (Anchor, 2013). She is an excellent reporter whose account of those years makes for unbearably sad reading. She focuses on three countries: Poland, E. Germany, and Hungary. When you read what these people endured during World War II, first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets, you wonder that any of them are able to hope or plan or envision any kind of positive future.

Among the most crushed were explicitly Christian groups, especially youth groups but also seminaries and pastors. When I read what they went through, and what various minorities went through, I am ashamed of ever complaining about the plight of the American church or the miseries of our own denomination. We haven’t got troubles. Yes, there are splits and disappointments and anger, but most of these wounds are self-inflicted and mimic an affluent culture rather than contradicting it.

I remember once hearing Tom Gillespie speak when he was president of Princeton Theological Seminary. He and his wife, who was of German extraction, were visiting her family’s home town in what was then E. Germany. On Sunday, they went to church, where there might have been 10 people in worship. Gillespie, like a typical American, asked the pastor how many members there were that worshipped in that congregation. “On a good day, like Easter,” the pastor replied, “we might have 18.” 18. Gillespie wondered to himself if he would have the courage to pastor for 20 years, as this pastor had, a flock which, on a good day, might number 18 souls.

So what? Well, so this: maybe we should quit worrying about demographics, strategies for resuming our place of prominence in the culture, the resentments we must struggle against. Maybe we should simply pray to God for courage to bear witness in our day. That is hard enough.

May 22, 2013

Earlier this month I led a travel seminar to various sites in Europe associated with the Reformed witness. One of the places we visited was a little town in southeastern France called Le Chambon sur Ligne. This is a small town, I would guess of no more than 2,000 souls today. It has a city hall and a defunct railroad station and a small city park near the center of town. But it also has a French Reformed Church (a “temple” as it is called), whose pastor, André Trocmé, and congregation, saved the lives of over 3500 Jewish children during World War II.

Near the church, on a stone wall opposite the sanctuary, the state of Israel has placed a commemorative plaque honoring these “righteous Gentiles.” The church itself is simple and quite unadorned. The current pastor, a German native, met us and allowed us to sit in the sanctuary, to see the pulpit, and to hear him tell something of his work in this little, ordinary, small town congregation. To hear him speak, to sit in that sanctuary, to walk down the street to the gate of the church manse (called, “the presbytery”), on the door of which Jewish refugees knocked asking for help, was to sense that one was walking on holy ground.

But here is what struck me. The only adornment on the church building was an inscription over the door. It said, simply, (in French): “Love one another.” There could be no more threadbare Christian sentiment than what is expressed in that phrase. But given what happened in that community and through that congregation besieged by collaborators, Nazis, and others, the words, “Love one another” seemed to sum up the audacity and beauty and power of the gospel as no other words could.

One other note: I cannot emphasize enough the ordinariness of this little church. It was not a cathedral, not anywhere near the centers of power, probably not the pulpit that every young, aspiring pastor was seeking. It was quite ordinary. Yet just so the gospel was enacted there in a powerful way. Could that be the way the gospel happens here too? In Great Falls, Norwood, Mt. Gilead, Waxhaw, Marion, Mansfield, Hillsville, Roanoke Rapids, Weir Shoals, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Charlotte? The gospel is strange that way. It keeps showing up in the most ordinary of places.

October 23, 2013

Yesterday I attended a meeting of Charlotte Presbytery. There is, as I have discovered, no rubric in Robert’s Rules of Order for a howl of lament, but yesterday I wish there had been.

Four congregations voted to leave the denomination and yesterday Charlotte Presbytery gave them permission to do so. The congregations had fulfilled “all righteousness” in securing the requisite percentage of voters to leave, granting them the ability to exit and take their property with them, so there was no debate about that. Indeed, there was little debate about anything. Rather, this was going to be an apparently “amicable” divorce—no expressions of grief, no howl of lament, no expression of hurt or anger or regret, simply a quiet prayer at the end asking God’s blessing on those departing and on those remaining. A pastor of one of the departing congregations even thanked the presbytery for understanding, and expressed delight that he could now see us in the grocery store without worrying about any “awkward moments.”

Well, I hope there are some awkward moments. He and the rest of us deserve more than a few, if for no other reason than to bear witness to our mutual shame.

I understand there is an agreed upon protocol for splitting up, which in this case was followed to the letter. I understand that no one wants a court fight. I understand that the time for a reconciling word to be spoken had come and gone, and there were no more words to be said except, “Farewell.”

But the occasion deserved more than that. It deserved some hot angry tears that we have come to such a place with each other; it deserved a voice wailing that we are so much better at hurting each other and separating from each other than we are at coming together in Christ’s service and at his table. It deserved a voice that could acknowledge the death in our midst and could grieve the loss of saints whose leaving will render those of us who remain (as well as those who leave) lonelier, less interesting, and more broken than before.

There were one or two brave souls who voted against this divorce. Bless them. I don’t think their vote was really aimed at those who were leaving. And I don’t think their vote was a vote for hiring attorneys to defend the inevitable lawsuit that would result. I think their vote was a witness that what these congregations were asking and what the presbytery was blessing was quite impossible, and indeed, impossibly unfaithful. The vote was quite impossible because as much as these congregations wanted to leave, and as contented as the rest of us might be for them to leave, a vote really cannot destroy what unites us in Christ. Nothing, we are told, can separate us from the love of Christ; not even a presbytery vote dismissing congregations to separate bodies. And to pretend that we can do so or even acquiesce in such a request is to tell a theological lie.

I know denominations are poor excuses for representing the body of Christ, but as weak and poor as they are, they represent, to some extent, the energy and commitment the church must invest in the hard work of bearing with one another in the body. Otherwise, why would we take ordination vows promising to do that? Smaller, purer, fragments of the church appear to have an advantage here. They do not have to muster such energy or commitment. Leaving liberates them from that chore.

It is hard to be the church. When has it not been? We would all like some easier way. But our wealth, our vaunted “religious freedom,” our own considerably refined and cultivated resentments all encourage us to listen to our own “inner voices” rather than the voices of brothers and sisters in Christ. My howl of grief is not a howl of anger at those who have left. I do not blame them for leaving. There have been many times when that option has appealed to me too. Nor do I think my denomination, the PCUSA, is exempt from guilt here. A divorce is never the fault of one side only. And the PCUSA, in my judgment, has done many stupid and thoughtless and even unfaithful things in the past several years. But when has the church not done many stupid, thoughtless, and unfaithful things? Our ability to avoid such is not what keeps us united. Rather, it is Christ who holds on to his stupid, thoughtless, and unfaithful brothers and sisters that keeps us whole and makes of us a church. And it is that reality that made me want to howl at a meeting where that reality was not even acknowledged or called upon or celebrated through our tears.

March 12, 2014

Sometimes I think we come closer to genuine faithfulness not when we busy ourselves with urgent or even important matters, but rather, when we cultivate the power to ignore distractions. I confess that I find this very hard to do.

For example, when I am working on a lecture or a sermon, something will pop into my brain and I will feel as if I have to check my email right now to see if there is something to which I must respond. Simone Weil famously said, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”19 She notes further that that kind of prayerful attention is “so full that the ‘I’ disappears.”20 My prayer life, unfortunately, is not that full; there is still plenty of ‘I’ intruding, which may explain why checking my email is such a powerful temptation.

But I wonder if this problem is confined to my personal habits. I wonder, for example, if our church should not cultivate a certain indifference, or better, freedom, that would allow us to say from time to time: “We don’t know about that right now; we have no word from the Lord at the moment; we are going to have to struggle together a bit longer on that topic.”

Perhaps you think this is a cop out, another way of justifying not doing anything. “Not to decide,” a slogan from the days of protest in the 1960’s had it, “is to decide.” And it is true that far too often the church has stood by silently, when we should have spoken out. Why was the German church so silent during the Nazi era, or why were white Protestant pastors so late in seeing and proclaiming the gospel’s message for people, white and black, in the American South? Scripture knows of this failure as well: “Among the clans of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan; and Dan, why did he abide with the ships?” (Judg 5:16f.) Indeed. God’s people have often missed making the critical confession when it has most been needed. I get that.

But I wonder if every issue is equally critical or equally as clear. I wonder if confessing the faith in the face of every concern that arises does not trivialize and diminish our witness. I wonder if we are so afraid of being found with Reuben and Dan that we readily address matters not out of faith but out of fear of potential embarrassment if we do not. Our words cover ourselves but do not bring much light or healing to the issue at hand.

There is something admirable, I think, about the monastic commitment to a rule of faith that allows the order’s life and worship to determine the shape of their particular witness. In the book, The Monks of Tibhirine, the distractions of the world of terror collide with the rule of stability of a Benedictine monastery in N. Africa. Interestingly, the presenting issue for the monks is not how to address the problem of terrorism, much less, articulating a theological response to it. The question they face is whether to stay or to go. As simple, and as difficult as that. In the event, the monks stay. The distractions of terror do not distract them from their mission of prayer and work, ora et labora. They focus their attention on God and on their life together, both as monks and as members of a community in Algeria to whom they minister. Their decision to stay cost them their lives. Christian witness will do that—not it seems to me, by getting on the right side of every issue, but by bearing witness, attentively, faithfully, joyfully wherever God has placed us.

We may debate about what that looks like—well and good—but we will only truly get lost if we lose our focus, our attention, on the One who has called us into the life of Jesus Christ. But for that, we will need the help of the Holy Spirit, for otherwise we will get lost in the ‘I’ that so eagerly distracts and has so many other agendas for us.

6. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 37.

7. Bonhoeffer, “Protestantism Without Reformation” in A Testament to Freedom, 524.

8. “The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp,” in Early Church Fathers, 152.

9. Father Christian de Cherge, “Last Testimony,” in First Things, August/September 1996, 21.

10. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 228.

11. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 62–63.

12. Gerson, Washington Post, June 4, 2010.

13. Willimon, Currie Lecture on Salvation, Austin Seminary, 2008.

14. Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 80–88.

15. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 36.

16. Neuhaus, Freedom for Ministry, 120.

17. Alston, The Power to Comprehend with All the Saints, 68.

18. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4, 67.

19. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 106.

20. Ibid., 107.