A Small Herd Resists.

We will soon have priests reduced to the role of social workers and the message of faith reduced to political vision.  Everything will seem lost, but at the right time, at the most dramatic stage of the crisis, the Church will be reborn.  She will be smaller, poorer, almost catacombal, but also more holy.  Because it will no longer be the Church of those who seek to please the world, but the Church of the faithful to God and his eternal law.  Rebirth will be the work of a small rest, seemingly insignificant yet indomitable, passed through a process of purification.  Because that's how God works.  Against evil, a small herd resists.

—Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI

I don’t actually like Ratzinger that much, generally.  But I strangely agree with what he says here, though from a completely (or mostly anyway) different perspective.    

In the Modern world, which as an article of “Enlightenment” (rationalist/materialist/individualist) philosophy denies any kind of transcendence and questions if not denies the reality of God, ministers of the gospel have no function that is not reduced to something secular, useful, and quantifiable.

Therefore, ministers in the Modern Age largely became merely informal, unofficial agents of the culture: their main job was promoting patriotism, social conformity, and dutiful participation in the capitalistic economy.  At most they tried to make Scripture and theology serve the establishment.  The cascading civilizational crises of the first half of the 20th century blew the cover off this role of religion for many.  The domesticated god they were preaching about, little more than a mascot and cheerleader for the Modern world, basically failed in every way possible.  Many ministers, who could not stomach the old role, went into other more practical professions, like psychology, social work, education, the arts, law, or politics.  This is what my dad’s generation went through.  (It is still happening as I understand that only a fraction of seminarians today are preparing for service in congregations.)  

The church has not gotten over this.  We still automatically reduce faith to something intelligible to secular Modernity, and very often that comes down to politics.  This happens on both right and left, obviously.  Now, politics is not unimportant.  There is no apolitical gospel; Jesus’ message and life had deeply and undeniably political and economic dimensions.  We live our our faith in our political actions, whether we admit it or not.  The problem occurs when the secular stuff is given priority and sets the tone.

But for the Church our politics and economics have to be derivative and secondary; they have to be based on and grow out of our spiritual life, our discipleship, rooted in contemplation.  I call this the “vertical” dimension, the “eternal” that intersects with our time, connecting us to God’s truth and life.  Without it we are just political activists, loyal to some ego-centric ideology, which is doomed to disintegration with whatever Empire it has projected and imposed on us.  Which makes it “evil,” as Ratzinger says.  When the Church allows itself to be pressed into the service of some secular political agenda, it becomes complicit in the reign of terror that faction inevitably produces when it takes power.

Rather, the Church’s true calling is to make disciples who then flavor and influence culture in the direction of God’s eternal truth, revealed in Jesus Christ as he is attested in Scripture.  This truth actually has a specific content, which I summarize as love and justice.  It is inclusion, forgiveness, welcome, and equality.  It is sharing, generosity, simplicity, and humility.  It is community and healing, and all the other qualities we see in Jesus.  It necessarily identifies with the marginalized, the broken, and the lost.  It cares for creation.  It is universal compassion.

These are all things we glean from the Scriptures about Jesus Christ and how he indicates we need to live.  I didn’t make them up.  They are not some “left agenda.”  Read the gospels for yourself and see.  Read the Sermon on the Mount.  Read Romans 12.  

So, the gospel must not be reduced to a political vision… but it has to be expressed in one.  The people who share that vision and express it will always be a “small herd,” a tiny flock, a seemingly insignificant minority, gathering to sing, pray, hear the Lord’s Word, and share in his Body and Blood.  As such we function as leaven, light, and salt, flavoring and influencing a larger world, coaxing it ever closer to the truth.

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Time, Change, and Eternity.

Time is about change, and change is not always welcomed or appreciated.  We are living in a time of great social changes.  It can be scary because we do not know what is coming.  I have seen three ways churches and people deal with time and change.  

1.

One is a concern for restoring the past.  Especially during the early part of my ministry (the 80’s), there was a pervasive sense of having lost the “glory days” of the 1950’s, and a drive, or at least a longing, to get them back.  In their view churches began losing members when we started going along with cultural shifts.  Even now significant nostalgia remains among some, along with anger, grief, and fear about where we might be heading.  They want somehow to go back to the way it was.  Conservatives often say they are all about the authority of Scripture or upholding orthodox doctrine, but mainly they are just advocating a return to an earlier culture, one that they argue was more stable and more religious. 

2.

Others, especially many younger people, reacted in the opposite way.  They saw the cultural changes of the last few decades as almost unmitigated progress.  The problem was that the church was out of synch with the times.  Therefore, they undertook to make the church more “relevant” by adopting new music, new technologies, new language, new media, new theologies, new morality, new social relationships, and generally reveling in newness and novelty.  Liberals claimed to be following God’s “new thing.”  But some of these tactics also came to be adopted and developed by many evangelicals who used the new approaches selectively to communicate older theologies, politics, and morality. 

3.

Then, early in the 21st century, we saw a third approach which recognized the inadequacies and failures of both prior approaches, and therefore tried to anticipate or manifest the future of the church.  It wanted to get ahead of the curve and express the faith in terms of “emerging” culture.  The idea was to notice the shift from the modern to the post-modern, and identify and anticipate what was coming “next” by basically continuing the trajectory.  Here we find evolutionary models like those of Ken Wilber and spiral dynamics.  They sought to live into a culture that was still in formation.  

The thing about all three approaches is that they were all basically about marketing, asking: “how do we sell the church to consumers today?”  It’s about what people want: the old, the new, or the next?  We interpret time and its changes through our egocentricity.  That is, our desire and our fear condition our outlook.  They shape and skew our memories, our experience, and our hopes. 

Distinct from attempts to privilege the culture of the past, present, or future, the gospel of Jesus Christ is timeless, eternal.  Jesus proclaims “fulfilled” time, which is not just the sum total of everything that happened in linear time; it is a different kind of time altogether.  It is a Truth that is always there above, within and beneath our experience of time, which occasionally makes itself known to us.  

The gospel community is called to live in this other kind of time, the eternal now, God’s time.  We need to be the interface with the eternal, the beachhead of the Kingdom of God, and radically counter-cultural leaven and salt within a society.  This means refusing to wed ourselves to the culture of any generation, past, present, or future.  We are citizens of heaven, which is to say God’s all-inclusive, universal creation.  

Therefore, the authentic gospel community is necessarily going to look like an anomaly or anachronism in our time.  It does not compute.  It does not fit into the way people normally think, no matter which generation they relate best to.  We have to finally learn to be okay with that.  It is time to embrace this discontinuity with culture, and be who God calls us to be no matter what kind of reception we receive.

We need not examine social trends to figure out how to effectively market our brand.  We need to discern the Spirit.  Adaptation means learning how to communicate eternity in the context of a particular society.  

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