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.