Class Reflection for Monday of Week 5

Today we talked about Kingdom-like qualities that the historic denominations may or may not possess.  My group looked at the Eastern Orthodox tradition.  One of the things that concerned us about this denomination was its tendancy to conflate the Kingdom with the Orthodox Church…but when we gave our presentation, one student–who seemed more familiar with the tradition than we were–said that it was an over statement and that also we should read The Brothers Karamozov to gain a better perspective of the tradition.  And his comment helped me think about how our theology doesn’t occur in a vacuum, but in history.  I think Dostoevsky also hinted at the idea that “The Church” (i.e. the Orthodox Church) was the center (or perhaps, life center, would be more appropriate in Dostoevsky’s view) of the world…which was one of Karkkainen’s points.  But Dostoevsky was also writing during the rise of the “Kingdom on Earth” socialist-humanistic phenonmenon, which later ushered in Communist Revolution.  And so, with Dostoevsky’s concern in view, we should be cautious when we too quickly dismiss the Orthodox position on the Church/Kingdom….granted, all the authors we have read have been careful to note that it’s not we who usher in the Kingdom, in light of this past error, but so often I think we hold a myopic view of history that, at best, goes back only a generation or two…we’re always reacting to what our parents were doing…and so we casually think to ourselves, “oh yah, of course, we don’t bring the Kingdom.” But maybe as we wrestle with what it means to be the church, to do God’s work in the world, we should also remember that we see through a glass darkly…that there won’t be this smooth continuum between what the church is doing and what God will do when he brings the Kingdom..but it will be radically new.  So we realize that all our strivings are provisional.

Book Review: Sider, Roland J., Olson, Philip N., and Unruh, Heidi Rolland. Churches That Make a Difference (Grand Rapids: Baker Books,2002)

Roland J. Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) and professor of theology and culture at Easter Baptist Theological Seminary.  Philip N. Olson is vice president for church relations at ESA and director of Network 9:3.  Heidi Rolland Unruh is associate director of the Congregations, Communities, and Leadership Development Project at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Churches That Make a Difference is about holistic ministry, which the authors define as “a wholehearted embrace and integration of both evangelism and social ministry so that people experience spiritual renewal, socioeconomic uplift, and transformation of their social context.” (325)   Part One lays out the book’s thesis—ministry should be holistic—and it does this by giving the theological and biblical rational for it.  Part Two describes characteristics of holistic congregations; Part Three outlines steps to develop and elicit support for a vision of  holistic ministry in congregations. 

The authors first concern is to bridge the historic divide that has developed in Protestantism between churches which focus on evangelism and those which focus on social justice.  Each emphasis, when promoted to the exclusion of the other, is a perversion of the gospel.  Here the authors begin, like so many of our other authors, with the teachings of Jesus and with a look at what the Kingdom of
God means.  In addition, there is a certain anthropological thrust running through their theological and biblical rational.  That is, they address the implicit—or explicit—body/soul dualism that conditions much evangelical thought.  People can’t be separated into bodies and souls, salvation isn’t just for one part of the other, and evangelism means the gospel is shared “by word and deed.” (64)  And the authors also address another kind of dualism that affects American Christianity—the individual (or, in the case of churches, secretarian group) versus the larger community.  The authors describe holistic ministry as a partnership ministry—with other churches, parachurch organizations, businesses, and government.

The book’s practical emphasis is very helpful as I think about my case study and the vision I am developing for this ministry context.  Because I am looking at a young adults fellowship group in the middle of
Hollywood, many of my concerns are similar to those of the urban churches that the authors looked at.  Basically, the young adults group eventually ended when the groups leaders became faced with the enormous task of ministering to the growing number of members, who could be characterized as among the dispossessed.  The leadership was comprised of many highly educated transplants to the city, in pursuit of film careers and other professions, while the surrounding neighborhood was home to a decidedly different population.   So two aspects of the book that first come to mind, which are helpful in this context, are the need for a church to really commit to the neighborhood that it ministers to and the necessity of building partnerships to really do effective ministry.  The leadership was simply ill-equipped to deal with the deep needs of some of the members.  By partnering with other churches, other ministries within the larger church body, and social service agencies, perhaps a strong, wider community could have been built to support such members.  Also, because of the demands of the film industry, there was an implicit lack of commitment on the part of many of the members.  That is, L.A. has a culture marked by transience, and it’s probably one of the toughest places to build community that there is.  So right now, the biggest hurdle that I’m seeing in trying to develop Kingdom-like qualities in this context is with the level of commitment people might be willing to make. 

Class Reflection for Wednesday of Week 4

Today Dr. Bolger asked us to imagine what the kingdom of God might look like in our ministry settings.    Immediatley, I began thinking of social justice concerns and the missional posture of the church; that in someways the church’s outward focus is primary over against defining church as a worshipping community.  But, then as soon as you begin separating worship and justice from each other, or elevating one over the other, you can run into problems.  Although all the authors we have read have agreed that there is a dialectical relationship between a community’s inward and outward focus, it seems that churches define themselves by which orientation they emphasize, whether implicitly or explicitly.  And perhaps because of the imperfection of this world, the ability to achieve a perfect balance will remain elusive for most of our communities.  But, that said, it’s been helpful for me to think about the Kingdom of God in terms of God’s reign.  That the Kingdom of God is an action that demands the responses to acknowledge this reign and rejoice for it (worship) and that demands action in accordance with this reign (social/horizontal focus).  Generally, I think of active Christian love as that which is born from worship, as that which is a secondary response to God’s love, but it can make social action into an occasional event, as dependant on something prior, but should it be viewed as such?  Actually, this is a primary question for me now in light of all our reading.  Ingrained as I am with a solid protestant/lutheran understanding of the relationship between faith/works…works are necessarily a response to God’s grace and therefore necessarily secondary to me…this is gospel.  But then, we evangelicals are now only recently getting our heads out of the sand and realizing the importance of social justice…is this a reflection of a lutheran hermeneutic that needs adjusting?  Karkainnen’s summary of Luther seemed to indicate that often Luther is misinterpreted.  Perhaps now we need to bring alongside Luther’s important corrective our own corrective to Luther (or corrective to our misreading of him) and consider more closely what the reign of God means.

Class Reflection for Moday of Week 4

Today Dr. Bolger asked us to imagine what it might look like if Jesus made a visit to the places/contexts of our case studies.  I took a kind of meditative/prayerful approach to the exercise and almost played the role of “audience” to whatever was playing out in my imagination.  The situation that I am considering for my case study is a young adults fellowship/bible study in Hollywood that I attended for a number of years and in which I also took up some leadership duties.  We met in a large room with couches once a week…had some worship time/prayer/and then teaching.  So the first thing I imagined Jesus doing in this context was as soon as he comes into the room, he asks us all to get up, stop by the store to pick up some groceries, and drive down to Skid Row.  And our fellowship, then, would occur in the context of hanging out at Skid Row for awhile.  Afterwards, he’s asked if we could go to somebody’s house to maybe have some dessert or coffee and to just hang out for awhile.  Although we might pray/sing/have some teaching, etc.  the tone of the evening would be more just about hanging out with each other and enjoying each other’s company.  And then I imagined what our times would look like from week to week and again the tone was more about eating together, having fun, enjoying each other’s company, and serving the poor.  Anyway, as the “audience” to this scene, I had a couple of problems with it, i.e., when would we have our teaching or formal prayer time?..it seems like there’s a lot of relaxed hanging out together…does anyone really have time for that kind of thing on a week night?  How would a big fellowship pile into peoples’  houses? And it’s one thing for a group’s dynacism and focus to center in on an individual as charismatic as Jesus, but it seems that we want to avoid that kind of cult of personality in our fellowships.  So perhaps the exercise was helpful in giving me an image of ideal fellowship, but everything changes between Jesus actually being physically present among us versus coming together to worship and celebrate the one who often, at best, is only metaphorically present.  Or, that is, I’m not sure if we should take our cue about how to structure church from pretending that Jesus has already come back and we are living truly under God’s reign…it seems that extremes in the church, that become abusive, are so often built on trying to manifest ideal situations that simplyaren’t reality.  Perhaps in organizing such fellowships there needs to be a dialectic between celebrating Jesus’ presence, but also realizing his absence.  The first allows spontaneity–perhaps along the same lines as the “charismatic” element that all our authors have discussed–while the second gives us structure and purpose as we take stock of our brokenness, limitations, before Jesus’ return.

Book Review: Karkkainen, Veli-Matti, An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical & Global Perspectives. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002)

Veki-Matti Karkkainen is associate professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary.  He has published numerous articles in international journals of theology and written: Pneumatology: An Introduction.

As its title suggests, Dr. Karkkainen’s book is a survey of differing approaches to ecclesiology.  In Part One, he looks at Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Free Church, and Pentecostal/Charismatic ecclesiologies.  As a way to limit and frame this look at the church—in addition to summarizing the main features of these ecclesiologies—Karkkainen also asks questions about their the ecumenical viability. So, he also includes a section called “The Ecumenical Movement Ecclesiologies” in Part One. In Part Two, chapters are devoted to individual thinkers who represent—to varying degrees of agreement—the different denominations discussed in Part One.  Then, in Part Three, Karkkainen highlights a few recent ecclessiological trends operating in specific contexts as a way of looking at the possible church of the future.  Because the book is a survey, it doesn’t have a thesis per se, but Karkkainen describes the main interest of the book as focusing in on “what makes the church church, or what are the conditions for being church.”  

Karkkainen, who is a participant and leader in the ecumenical movement, develops his book around the question of what makes church church precisely because the answer that different denominations give to this question can decide their potential in helping Christendom meet the biblical mandate for church unity.  Although many main line denominations basically agree with Luther’s definition of church—the “pure” preaching of the Word and the “right” administration of the sacraments—the Eastern Orthodox need for bishops to affirm the validity of the Eucharist represents an impasse in ecumenical dialogue with Free Churches, for instance.  And this impasse, perhaps, is nothing compared to both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox definition of unity, insisting that churches return and recognize each, respectively, as the “true church.” 

That said, despite these impasses, however, there are many similar theological trends happening simultaneously throughout the different denominations—even those standing at opposite ends of the spectrum—that may prove ecumenically helpful.  For instance—although the Pentecostal movement and the Charismatic movement are not one and the same—because Pentecostal churches, with their free church structure, and Roman Catholic churches, structured hierarchically, both take the work of the Holy Spirit as their departing point in defining church, there is a point of contact between these denominations that differ in so many other ways. And because the Spirit’s work is this point of departure, the communal nature of church has been brought to the fore in a number of different ecclesiologies.  Because the Spirit equips the people of God with charisms, the Spirit enables each member—not just clergy—of Christ’s Body to do the work of building up the church.  A Trinitarian model of church has also been adopted by many churches spanning the denominational spectrum, which in turn, also brings out the necessity of koinonia to be present for church to be church. 

 In a couple of places, Karkkainen, discusses how important and central the place of ecclesiology has become in systematic theology.  And this repositioning of ecclesiology seems right to me because as he states, “the main task of theology [is] to reflect on and make sense of what is happening in Christian life and churches.” (9) And yet, from an ecumenical perspective, I wonder if the place that ecclesiology occupies does not exacerbate the issue.  If church were simply the place we go after having already appropriated our theologies in our private spheres, then the apparent obstacles challenging the ecumenical movement might not seem so daunting.  One wonders how an Eastern Orthodox understanding of church—and its Eucharist—as an ontological reality, as an event where individuals become persons, might be reconciled, for instance, with the Non-Church movement in Asia.  It’s no wonder that many in the ecumenical movement have begun to define unity in such a way that it hardly looks like unity at all, or that Free Churches decided to define church as something invisible, when clearly in the New Testament church was the outward response people made to Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.  One thing that seemed to emerge from Karkkainen’s survey was how often these different ecclesial emphases—to the utter rejection of others—was so much of a reaction to what had gone before.  The history of the church seems to be driven by pendulum swings in retreat from past errors.  And many of these pendulum swings were no doubt necessary to right wrongs, but it seems that whenever a church mistakes a reaction for true theology, the potential to meet other churches in the middle is threatened.  So, in terms of my case study, I will want to think about the ecumenical viability of whatever model I adopt, and how much of what I present is a reaction to present and past wrongs that I see verses a theologically developed model that takes seriously the biblical model for church unity. 

Class Reflection for Wednesday of Week 3

This week, Dr. Bolger, asked us what we thought the Kingdom of God might look like in society, our personal spheres and our churches.  In particular, he wanted us to think about what the kingdom of God might look like in the specific situations of our case studies.  It doesn’t seem as though there should be an enormously qualitative differance between what the Kingdom looks like in society vs. the church, but it’s interesting to think that if the Kingdom of God did come, would society look like the redeemed, glorified church or would the church look like society, albeit redeemed, glorified.  Of course, the idea is that there wouldn’t be any dicernable difference, but by thinking about why the church exists, what it will be  at the eschaton, we can perhaps have  a vision of what the church should look like now.  Mostly, church seems to be a place we go to worhsip God and become spiritually fed, which are wonderful things, but the church seems to exist alongside our secular lives without really being a sacrament of the future, which is how many of the theologians, those that Fuellenbach discusses, want to describe it. If it acted more as a sacrament of the future, would the church look more like a society…a way of life..that “contrast society” that Loehfink describes, instead of a building, which is so often how we think of it.  It seems that the line between the sacred and secular, then, would have to be blurred some…that is if the idea of redeemed society served as our model for church.  If it is the other way around, that when the Kingdom comes, society will like the church, then we may want to continue drawing the line between the sacred and secular clearly.  In any case, these are the things that I’m thinking about in terms of my case study.  Before  I begin thinking about how I would want to structure the ministry that I have in mind, I will want to wrestle with the larger issues involving the relationships between Kingdom, society and church. 

Class Reflection for Wednesday of Week 2

Last Wednesday’s class was my favorite yet.  Mostly because it was the most content driven yet.  Our discussion about the ways we see domination being played out in culture, in our personal lives, and in our church, has been something that I’ve recently been thinking a lot about–that is, even before this class.  Last quarter, I took a class called “Old Testament Themes in the New” with Dr. Beaton.  Many of the ideas in Lohfink’s book actually paralleled those we discussed in Dr. Beaton’s class.  One the themes that I have been thinking about is Jesus’ appropriation of the “servant” theme in Isaiah and how he applied it to his approaching death on the cross.  And then how Mark paints the picture of a Christian as one who takes up her cross.  And Mark’s expression doesn’t really seem to imply much of how it’s so often interpreted today…that taking up one’s cross means bearing whatever burdens we have been given in life.  Rather, it seems much more radical than that…that taking up the cross means no longer playing by the rules of power and manipulation…to the point where one might have to die because of it.  In thinking about what Mark meant, I have realized how pervasive issues of domination are.  Actually the movie Borat helped me think about how domination and manipulation make up so much of the fabric of society.  I think Sasha Cohen is brilliant , and if I didn’t know better I might say that his character was a variation on the theme of the Christ figure–albeit a perverse variation on the theme.  So Sasha Cohen exposes everybody’s prejudices in this really offensive way…well, who else is doing that much needed work (the exposure not the offense, per se)…Christians! No. But whatever Jesus was doing was really offensive because he got killed for it.  But unlike Sasha Cohen, Jesus’ offense was not just for the sake of being offensive, but Jesus was offensive because of the radical nature of his love.  In any case, the thing is, I’ve realized how prone I am to manipulate and go for power, granted in these small and seemingly insignificant ways.  I once heard somebody say that there was no such thing as a conversation, but really we only play these games with each other, sometimes very subtly or not so subtly.  That seemed an apt assessment of social dynamics.  So, when Jesus comes along and upsets power structures, he seems to be getting at something deep within us…maybe instead of boiling down sin to pride, another way to envision the root of sin is our tendency to grasp after power.  In any case, for the most part, there is nothing in me that wants to relinquish power…or at least in the way that Jesus models for us.  And my current question is, how should we conceive of our personal power?  Lots of times, I pride myself on the ways I can effect changes around me.  Or really is God the only one who should effect real power in the world?

Book Review: Fuellenbach, John. Church: Community for the Kingdom (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006)

John Fuellenbach, SVD teaches theology at the Gregorian in Rome, has taught in the
Philippines, and lectures internationally.  He is also the author of The Kingdom of God.

 

In the preface to his book, Fuellenbach describes his aim, “to present a vision of the church that understands itself wholly from the standpoint of the kingdom, finds its identity in the presence of the kingdom now, and sees its mission entirely in the service of the kingdom.” This aim, then, in effect, serves as Fuellenbach’s unifying thesis, although he surveys a number of different theologians’ views on ecclesiology, thereby offering the reader the ability to draw many of her own conclusions about the relationship between the Kindgom and the Church.

 

Fuellenbach, who writes from a Roman Catholic perspective, divides his book into two parts, “The Church in Scripture and in Vatican II” and “Models of the Church.”    With Gehard Lohfink, Fuellenbach begins with Jesus’ message of the coming Kingdom.  Because Jesus preached the Kingdom, this is what the church should preach. Then he goes on to ask how the church and the Kingdom are similar or different, or exactly what they have to do with each other.  Fuellenbach lays out models, or metaphors, to understand this precise relationship.  Much of Fuellenbach’s concern deals with how the message of the coming Kingdom should inform the church’s posture towards the world; and, then, once this posture is laid out, he looks at how various church structures reinforce or undermine this posture. Fuellenbach is clearly on the side of those who want to bring out more fully implications in Vatican II for a more laity-driven, egalitarian church structure.  Two of the models that he believes capture this kind of structure the best are a Trinitarian model and the model of the church as the temple of the Holy Spirit.  The Trinitarian model brings out the communal nature of the church, and it offers a picture of unity in diversity.  In envisioning the church as the temple of the Holy Spirit, the charismatic nature of the church is emphasized over against a static, institutional, hierarchical one. Fuellenbach offers BCE’s as examples of these models.   

 

In looking at the precise relationship between the church and the Kingdom, Fuellenbach asks, “is the pilgrim church the manifestation of the Kingdom in history?” or “is theKingdom of God equivalent to what the church will become in the end?”   And then he answers both these questions in the negative.  The “already” manifestation of the Kingdom exists both in and outside of the church, and the fullness of the Kingdom is not just the church in glory, but God’s entire creation redeemed.  Therefore, God’s salvation can exist outside the church. Also, the church is provisional and not an end in itself.  But in laying out the scope of God’s salvation, Fuellenbach is forced to wrestle with the church’s raison d’etre.  If God can save outside the church, then why the church?   One of the ways that Fuellenbach deals with this question is to describe the church as a sacrament.  Because a sacrament is an efficacious sign, the church is at once a unique image of the Kingdom and a place where people can meet the Kingdom, however imperfectly this meeting takes place in the time before the eschaton.       

Because so much of what Fuellenbach was doing was to wrestle with the implications of Vatican II, I sometimes felt that I was entering into an ongoing, technical debate between members of an exclusive club, one of which I was not a part.  So, many points of his discussion were difficult and I didn’t always know how to access them.  One of these difficulties involved this last point on the church as sacrament.  Although, he presented it as a way to maintain the christocentric dimension of the church, I didn’t quite see how that worked.  My sense was that the differences between God’s salvation in and out of the church were simply a matter of degree, but he presented the differences as more qualitative than quantitative.  But the precise nature of these qualitative differences evaded me. At best, I understood the sacramental nature of the church as somehow giving language to the world for its experience of grace.  And certainly having language for something can heighten the experience of that thing.  What I did appreciate the most, however, was his ability to thoroughly  depict the issues at stake.  What should the dialectical relationship between the managerial work of the clergy and the charismatic work of the laity be?  What is the foundation for mission if you allow that God doesn’t need the church to do his work in the world?  If you can’t find that foundation are you forced to say that God doesn’t do salvific work without the practical (that is not just praying Eucharistic prayers) work of his church? So these are some of the questions I’m left with after reading Fuellenbach’s book.

Class Reflection for Monday Week 2

So I appreciated Dr. Bolger’s flexibility and interest in our thoughts on the syllabus…mostly because I am fully in support of the proposed changes.  I have some apprehension about the case study paper for a few reasons.  One, I guess I would like a little more wrestling with content before jumping ahead to application, although I understand that ideally those two things should never be isolated from each other…but, perhaps if I had a better sense of what the issues at stake are, I would be in a better position to reflect on my past ministry experiences.  Lohfink’s book, of course, offered a thorough take on many of these issues, but how to apply his idealic vision to a concrete situation seems tricky.  That is, I’m kind of stuck in theoretical preliminary steps…I mean, it seems that if Lohfink’s vision could really play out in any real way…wouldn’t most of our churches, our ideas of what Christianity is all about,  ect., ect., have to start from stratch almost.  Trying to fit his vision back into a ministry in practice, with all the unstated and stated expectations that people bring to it, seems naive.  Not that his vision, per se, is simply naive (although, I thought it did border on that at times), but the ability to effect a paradigm shift within a group of needy, broken people in midcourse seems daunting.  Of course, that’s the rub…we can’t just say to congregants and worshippers, etc…”O.k everybody, just stay at home for the next few Sundays…like, a year or two’s worth of them..until we get this whole Christianity thing figured out.”  And yet, have some forms of American Christianity come to this point–where really their expressions of what it means to live out the gospel are so anemic that these forms should just stop in their tracks right now?  I don’t know if I mean that seriously…probably what I need is a real robust vision of what change is all about, especially change inspired by the Holy Spirit.  Maybe I don’t really have enough experience to have a vision of what the shape of this change would really look like…and I am concerned about my own cynicism…and the spiritual black hole that cynicism can be…So maybe that’s what I need to wrestle with most in this class…the possiblity of change, what we can expect, what will it look like, how much we are actors in effecting it…or do we just pray.

Class Reflection, Wed. January 3

Dr. Bolger, while he was still a graduate student here came in as a guest lecturer to one of my classes to discuss his research on “Emerging Churches.”  His lecture left quite an impact on me, especially when he related how church leaders in England had actually focasted the death date of their denominations.  Although it seems unlikely that anything of the sort could ever happen in this country, the question of the Church’s viability in the West seems to have taken on a new urgency.  And so, since that lecture, I’ve considered from time to time  what it might mean to be part of a missional church in the West but without really being able to grab hold of any definitive picture of this missional posture.  That is, when I really take the time to consider what the Church should look like, what it should be, my thinking gets hazy…or I’m ambivalent about all sorts of things, i.e., the Church should be radically engaged with Culture or perhaps radically disengaged with it as a “contrast society,” etc., etc. So all that is to say, I appreciated Dr. Bolger’s story of his own struggles with the church because it was able to reveal somwhat just how difficult thinking about the church can be.  And so, I am eager to work out my many questions this quarter.