The Sign of the Spirit.

Every year it is a challenge for whomever is assigned the New Testament reading on the Day of Pentecost, all those place names from the ancient world.  The story is from Acts 2.  The disciples of Jesus, still in hiding after his death, and still processing the experience of his resurrection and ascension, receive the Holy Spirit in the form of fiery tongues, enabling them to speak and be understood by people of many languages.  The reaction of bystanders who hear them is: “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?  And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?  Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”

In his book on Pentecostalism, theologian Harvey Cox talks about William Seymour, the Black preacher who began the ministry on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where the global Pentecostal movement began in 1906.  Pentecostalism is the fastest growing segment of Christianity, with around 400m adherents.  (To put this in context, there are currently about 75m Reformed Christians in the world.)  The original mission was wildly and, at the time offensively, multi-racial, including whites, Blacks, and Hispanics.  Seymour himself saw this diversity as a confirmation of the Holy Spirit’s Presence, in the raucous diversity of that tongue-twisting list in Acts 2.  

The phenomenon of “speaking in tongues,” technically “glossolalia,” became a fundamental element of Pentecostal practice and identity.  We know that this was something the early Church did; the Apostle Paul talks about it a length in 1 Corinthians.  (That is not necessarily what the apostles were doing in the miracle of Pentecost; they were understood by people who spoke a diversity of languages.  Glossolalia is a form of ecstatic speech that is not comprehendible by others.)

This being America, Seymour’s movement soon became divided by racism, with many white adherents segregating themselves from others.  They focused on the “speaking in tongues” piece, separating it from the fact that what happened both to the apostles and at the Azusa Street mission was multi-racial and multi-cultural.  In order to maintain the white-supremacist Jim Crow regime in America, they chose to interpret glossolalia as other-worldly, ignoring and rejecting the explicit diversity indicated by all those place names in Acts 2.  This, of course, corrupts and defeats the whole point of the Christian understanding of Pentecost.

The ability to “speak in tongues” remains one of the main indicators of Pentecostalism.  And, as I say all the time, “if it helps you follow Jesus, knock yourself out… or be slain in the Spirit, or whatever….”  More power to you!  It is certainly working by just about any measurement.

At the same time, the true indication of the Presence of the Holy Spirit is not so much a personal experience of ecstatic speech.  It is the breaking down of ethnic, racial, cultural, and national boundaries.  It is the emergent diversity of a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-national community of disciples of Jesus Christ.  Indeed, this diversity is constitutive of the Church.  It is the indicator of Christian spiritual authenticity.  

One major theme of the New Testament is the dissolution of the barriers between Jew and Gentile.  A group claiming superiority and imagining itself to enjoy certain privileges had to learn to become open and inclusive of others, in part by realizing its own solidarity with them in a larger system of oppression.

How we get from that to the racially segregated excuse for Christianity we have in America is a tragic and bloody tale of bigotry and slavery justified by heresy.  

But we won’t know the Holy Spirit until Pentecost is more than reading a bunch of place-names and using other languages, one Sunday a year.  We will know the Spirit when we bear witness to and practice a radical inclusiveness and diversity.  

For us Presbyterians, this will mean giving up some of the most cherished elements of our identity, and our power.  It will not be a continuation of the fruitless activity of trying to get “them” to join “us.”  It will be when we figure out how to lose ourselves in solidarity with others.

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The Ministry of the Future.

God’s future is always present; God’s Presence appears to us as a future that is always coming, impacting our lives and world, breaking in, breaking out, emerging.

In the last few months I have discovered the excellent science-fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson.  His latest novel is The Ministry for the Future.  It takes place a decade or two ahead of us, and tells the story of an office set up by the UN to get greenhouse gases under control and reverse global warming.  This Ministry for the Future is designed to make sure that humanity has a future on a reasonably hospitable planet.

It occurs to me that this is something like what the Church is supposed to be.  The gathering of Jesus’ disciples represents and embodies his life and teachings, and serves as a kind of anticipation of the Kingdom of God, which always seems to be “coming,” but is also somehow also already here.  The Church is the Ministry of the Future in that it reflects and expresses the Light of God’s Kingdom, now.  It presents an alternative future for a humanity hell-bent on self-destruction.  It offers people a Way of life, peace, equality, and compassion, in contrast with the suicidal direction in which we are now headed.

More than anything else, proclaiming and anticipating this new future, in which God’s eternal Presence is revealed, is the Church’s true ministry.  It is the most fruitful way to follow Jesus’ final commandment, to “make disciples of all nations.”  Discipleship happens in a community that is consciously moving forward into an emerging, unfolding future, revealed in Jesus Christ.

In short, we are called to be today the Church of tomorrow.  God is calling us now to dwell in forever.  

This future orientation does not mean that we should indulge in the reflexive jettisoning of the past that is too often a feature of ecclesiastical reform movements.  It is taking us centuries to recover some of the good and useful things that the Reformers carelessly ditched from the Roman Catholic Church, 500 years ago.  We are discovering the beauty and depth of, for instance, Mary, the saints, liturgy, and some holidays and seasons.  It is a regrettable pathology of Modernity to think that every generation has to reject out of hand everything the previous generation accomplished.  

In God’s Kingdom there is no dualism between past and future.  These are effects of our temporal, mortal nature.  Embracing the future sometimes means locating and lifting up those historical expressions of faith that did indeed participate in or reflect God’s Presence.  There is a sense in which God’s future is always present and it is we in our egocentricity who are the absent ones, consumed with interpreting and managing memories, and providing for or against eventualities in an unknown future.

The divine Presence, the fullness of time, has emerged into history before, and those experiences and events need to be cherished and remembered.  Thus Christian tradition at its best is the story of these interventions of clarity when the future appeared.  Hence the lives of the saints are supposed to remind us that God was never absent, and the future has always had an impact in ongoing history.  Indeed, sometimes we find the future precisely by looking to the past.

What would it be like if we took this seriously?  What if we saw the Church as witnessing to God’s Presence, revealed in Jesus, as something to be lived into and anticipated in its present life?  I know that when we see our lives shaped by thanksgiving and joy, compassion and justice, equity and forgiveness, hope and love, we are really participating in the Truth that will be revealed and completed in the fulness of time, which is to say, what we experience as future.

I am reminded (again) of one of my favorite illustrations: the Magic Eye pictures that were a fad in the 1980’s.  The pictures are a jumble of patterns, shapes, and colors that appear to make little sense.  But if you contemplate one long enough, eventually a 3-dimensional image can appear to emerge.  The image is always there, of course, encoded in the ink on the page; it is our eyes and brains that have to adjust in order to see it.  While we are waiting for the image to resolve, we experience it as future.  As it starts appearing, we might even remark that it is “coming” into view.  The reality is that it is always present and available, our perception simply hasn’t caught up to it yet.

It is our perception and experience that slogs unconsciously through time.  But sometimes the fog clears and we get the momentary knowledge of a wholeness to be fulfilled in the future, even in our temporal existence.  It’s like we get a sense of the end of the story, even as we are living it.  Like when Paul says, “All things work together for good.”

The Church proclaims and lives in the light of that future, which is the Truth.  In the fullness of time, all shall see and know it.  For now, however, we proceed in trust that this is our destiny.  Now we serve as witnesses, testifying to what others cannot (yet) see, which they indeed dismiss as false.  

The Church is therefore the ministry of this future, which is to say, it is the living witness and responder to God’s Presence, which breaks in to our history, and into individual experience, from time to time.

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If Jesus Is God, Act Like It!

The Lord Jesus, during his earthly ministry, was apparently allergic to the application to himself of theological titles.  He refers to himself humbly as Son of Man, which is practically to say, “Just a Normal Guy.”  The Church later became fairly obsessed with talking about him and getting the words perfectly right concerning who he is and what he does.  What they came up with is not wrong.  I affirm the doctrines of orthodox Christianity regularly.  But these doctrines mainly articulate how and why Jesus is worthy of discipleship.     

What if we understand Christianity more as a Way of living in the world than a set of written doctrines?  What if Christianity were not a specific, discrete religion, even a complex of beliefs, but a lifestyle, a constellation of practices, that are (at least in theory) considered compatible with almost any religion?  

This is the way many people understand Zen.  I know of Zen practitioners and even teachers, who retain their Jewish or Christian faith.  Or consider a 12-step system like Alcoholics Anonymous, which does not require one to give up any other paths, whether medical or religious.  One only has to admit that one’s life is unmanageable because of addiction, and commit to the path of healing. 

Jesus’ calls himself the Way, and his followers use that term to describe their movement.  He is only rarely concerned with what his disciples need to think or say; but he is deeply interested in what they do.  Even when he talks about “belief,” it is clearly not about just harboring intellectual opinions, but a way of life, a practice, action, behavior.  

What if, instead of nailing faith in him down in detailed, doctrinal propositions, we expressed it in the quality of our life, what we do with our bodies?  What if we were less concerned with saying in words that “Jesus is God,” and more interested in acting in a way that bears witness to that confession?   We tend to think that our mission must expresses our theological statements.  Maybe our theological statements, what we say about Jesus, need to be a function of our discipleship.  Maybe doctrine needs to be less about what we think, and more about practice.  

It is not that we want to avoid giving offense, or that we are ashamed or reticent or compromised about proclaiming who Jesus is.  But as a matter of humility, grace, and missional fruitfulness, it may be a distraction.  Arguing about and explaining titles and doctrines can get in the way of actual discipleship.

 

Jesus understands that words often divide and confuse.  Words always come with baggage.  They have personal and historical connotations that are out of the control of the one using them.  But actions of love, compassion, forgiveness, and service almost always unite and attract.  Faith cannot ultimately be nailed down in words anyway; it is about the Spirit.  The point is that we be the right people: Christ in the world.  The fact that we follow him should be enough of an expression of Who we know him to be.  If we are not following him in our actions, our words are worse than meaningless, the are lies.

If Jesus is God, then act like it! 

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Discipleship in Three Movements.

The Church needs to be in the business of making disciples.  This is the mandate given to us by the risen Christ himself, in Matthew 28:18-20. 

I identify three movements to disciple-making.  These are not necessarily sequential, but concurrent.  All three have to be functioning at a high level.  Congregations, and individual Christians, need to be working in all three areas, all the time.    

1.  Personal.

Following Jesus’ example in Mark 1:15, the beginning of discipleship is a call to repentance.  In Greek, the word for repentance is metanoia, which means a change of mind or way of thinking.  (Indeed, it really and more deeply means moving beyond thinking and mind altogether.)  The Hebrew understanding of repentance is a reversal, a 180 degree change in the direction of our life.  Repentance, in short, is about a radical change of approach, from one way of thinking and acting to the opposite.

In repentance we move from being driven by ego, to flowing with our Essence, which is love.  We release our own thinking and accept what Paul calls “the mind of Christ” emerging within us.  We participate in this in a two-fold way, first (a) by a regular discipline of prayer and meditation, and second (b) by reflecting on our self-understanding as expressed in our personality and how we make our way in the world.  

By noticing where we are personally and corporately enslaved by ego, and by developing a practice of Presence, we grow into our true humanity in Christ and as Christ.  Gradually, through a comprehensive widening of our perspective, we bring the ego into the service of God’s love, revealed in Christ. 

2.  Community.

The second movement of discipleship is community.  We need to be instructing, nurturing, cultivating, and welcoming people in a gathering where this love happens.  This is the Church, a community of honesty, compassion, forgiveness, healing, thanksgiving, acceptance, and joy.  

There are at least three aspects to this.  The first is (a) belonging, which is often a condition of believing.  That is, we come to trust in Jesus Christ because we find ourselves welcomed into a loving community that trusts in him.  The second is (b) teaching, for faith has specific content.  The Church has a particular way of looking at, and living in, the world, which is described in the stories, theology, and practices of the Church.  A third element is (c) worshiping.  Belonging and teaching are embodied in the ritual life of the Church in which we use sacred words, actions, images, and symbols to bring together the contemplative and the communal, and send us out on our mission to bring the love of God to others. 

When Jesus calls his disciples “the light of the world,” he means how we shine as this exemplary community, this “city upon a hill,” emanating blessing to all (John 13:35).  This light is deeply attractive to people, especially in a society as alienated and disconnected as ours.  Our witness in community is thus our primary mode of evangelism; it is how we communicate the good news of Jesus Christ to others.

3.  Service.

The love we find in Jesus Christ and share together in the Church overflows in identification with, and care and advocacy for, the least among us in the world.  This movement of justice is also two-fold, having to to do first with (a) what we do and how we act together as a community (Matthew 11:4-5), and secondly (b) what we encourage our national institutions, including government, to do (Matthew 25:31-46).  This service is our engagement with the world and the chief way we serve as leaven, salt, and light, in obedience to Jesus.  

So all three movements of discipleship — personal, communal, and social — are essential.  They need to be kept in balance, feeding, supporting, and overflowing into  each other.

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Learning From the Cistercians.

Last year I read an early book by Thomas Merton called The Waters of Siloe.  It is mostly a history of the Cistercian Order in Roman Catholicism.  (Merton is such a good writer that he makes this material not just interesting but positively riveting.)

The Cistercian Order is an organization of monastics, offering at a high degree of strictness three things that have historically never been wildly popular among the general public: poverty, chastity, and obedience.  But they do have an identity, what we might call today a “brand.”  And that is a deep dedication to silence, simplicity, and prayer.  

Cistercians know who they are and what they are about.  They know that this is not going to appeal to everyone.  Indeed, it is not a movement designed for worldly success in terms of numbers of adherents.

So when a new monastic house is established somewhere in the world, they send a few brothers to do this work and become a presence.  They do not site their monasteries in or near cities, generally; that would detract from the quiet they covet.  They do not do what we would call “outreach” except to let the local Roman Catholic communities know they are there.  But there is no sense in which they would even imagine advertising out to the world and inviting men to come and join them.

A monastery might thrive and attract novices, growing and building a facility and so forth.  Or a new foundation might gain no foothold at all, and have to be closed, the brothers assigned somewhere else.  A monastery that thrived in one century, might crash in the next.  The whole movement has seen relative booms and busts over the millennium of its existence.  Occasionally they faced persecution from various powers.  Sometimes they gain sponsors.  There are amazing adventures about new communities in wild, inhospitable places.  Sometimes great voices emerge, among them Merton himself.  But there are also dry, difficult, fallow periods that can last many generations.

At no time does it ever seem to occur to them that they need to engage in “adaptive change.”  There is no sense in which they have to “get with the times.”  (Except perhaps when they had to adhere to the reforms of Vatican II.)  They have zero sense of “marketing;” the very idea would be anathema to them.  When they have to close a monastery, they might mourn.  But they do what they are called to do; they are true to their mission whether it “works” by the world’s standards or not.  

They know they are out of synch with the culture; that is the whole point of their existence!  They are who they are and they are happy doing and being that, regardless of the response they get from people.  They are not appealing to people but to God.  And were the whole order to have to shut down, I am sure they would also take this in stride as part of God’s plan.

Finally, they are not trying to do everything.  They understand themselves to be a part of the larger Body of Christ which is the Church.  There are missionary orders, and orders that provide health care, and and orders that do social services.  There are orders specializing in education, and  at least one even stricter order that basically prays 24/7.  And they are part of a global Church with a vast network of dioceses and parishes.

So I get two take-aways from all this.  First, the Cistercians know who they are and what their mission is.  Second, they do not look to the world for affirmation or to set their agenda and provide their standards for success.   

We Presbyterians might learn something from the Cistercians.

First of all, we don’t know and fruitfully articulate who we are.  Secondly, we do measure our success by importing standards from the world.  Both of these are harming our witness.

I suspect we would be both more successful and happier were we to intentionally focus our mission on something we do well, and then rely not on society’s approval but God’s.

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Reflections on the Recent Gallup Poll About Church Membership.

The Gallup Poll just released a new report about the declining membership in churches.  It  basically says that for the first time since they have been measuring it, fewer than half of Americans are members of organized religious communities.  Here is the link, if you want to read it.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx?fbclid=IwAR2SgVAAlCi6lg_O2xtt5H_Pfek8b5ty0ZaxRs1-S0wnFNd9pn6ocKj9neY

My Facebook feed has been exploding with commentary about this, mostly from my  minister friends.  The report is nothing new; we’ve been going through this slow-motion train wreck in the Church for about 50 years.  The last year that the Presbyterian Church USA or its predecessor denominations saw an increase in membership was, I believe, 1972.  This crisis overshadowed my entire career.

And every few weeks or months another study comes out quantifying this decline, and everyone gets all hand-wringing and apoplectic about it.  Blame is placed and remedies are proposed.  And then nothing much changes.

The assumption is that this decline in membership means we are not successful.  Is that true?  It depends on how we understand success.

To me, success is defined by Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of the Church.  We cannot look to models of success imported from secular society as appropriate for the Church.  Metrics like the traditional “3 B’s:” butts, bricks, and bucks — that is, numbers of members, size of buildings, and amount of assets — are irrelevant to a community that professes to trust and follow Jesus Christ.  Jesus doesn’t command us to do anything for the sake of increasing these quantitative categories.  Indeed, he seems positively allergic to “success” in terms of popularity and wealth.

That doesn’t mean they are unimportant, but they are derivative and secondary.  Gains in the number of participants are a by-product of mission, not its purpose.  The Jerusalem church reportedly gained 3000 members after Pentecost, but that wasn’t what the apostles set out to do.  They simply proclaimed the gospel.

The Church’s mission is, according to Jesus himself, “making disciples” (Matthew 28:19-20).  That is not necessarily the same thing as getting people to come to, let alone join, a church, though it is related.  The important action is “teaching them to obey everything” that he has commanded us.  It doesn’t matter how many people come to church if this is not happening when they get there.

What he has commanded us, of course, is summed up in several commandments to love God, each other, our neighbor, and even our enemies.  Churches are supposed to be schools of love.  Jesus intends them to be places of healing, forgiveness, acceptance, and liberation.  If churches are are largely not doing that we should not be surprised if fewer and fewer people want anything to do with us.

At the same time, love requires, as Jesus says, that we in some sense lose our selves, our lives, our possessions, our habits, even our relationships.  He says this in very strong and even off-putting language.  As Bonhoeffer put it, “When Christ calls someone he bids them come and die.”  That is a hard sell.

Anyway, my point is that the Church needs to be in the business of making disciples.  Period.  We need to be agents of God’s transforming love, beginning with the renewal of our minds.  We need to be instructing and nurturing and cultivating and welcoming people into a community where this love happens.  Then it needs to overflow in care and advocacy for the least among us out in the world.  This is our mission.

If doing that makes us popular and attracts new members, so much the better.  If doing that means we lose members, well, Jesus says to shake the dust from our feet and move on.  

For it is not what we are losing here that is important.  If we can be a smaller church that is at the same time much more effective at expressing the healing, transforming love of Jesus Christ, that is way better than being a “successful” church with lots of members, but few actual disciples.  Our life has to be about missional focus, integrity, authenticity, and unity. 

If a church is making disciples, that is people who actually follow Jesus in lives of compassion, justice, and shalom, it doesn’t matter whether their worship is traditional or contemporary, or whether they are gaining or losing members.  It is the disciple-making that means everything.

The Gallup report is indeed bad news.  But it is not bad news because we are hemorrhaging members; we’ve known that for decades.  It is bad news because we continue to be obsessed with how many members we are losing.  It is bad news because we are losing members for the wrong reasons.  If we were losing members because our radical discipleship to Jesus was placing us in a counter-cultural position, that would be acceptable.  But we are mainly losing members because we are either boring and irrelevant, calcifying in our own inertia and nostalgia, or we are fake, vacuous, and hypocritical, doing whatever we think will be popular, or we are nasty, hypocritical, self-righteous, and judgmental, doubling down on our racism, homophobia, and nationalism.  

If we were making disciples, what the Gallup Poll says would not bother us.  

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