Class Reflection Monday of Week 9

Today Dr. Bolger gave an interesting lecture on “church growth” and approached the concept positively by reviewing how McGavern thought about it.  Essentially, in India, McGavern noticed how churches didn’t grow when potential converts were asked to jump social boundaries and adopt a new culture.  So McGavern thought about how the gospel might become inculturated in a specific context, and how its expression could authentically reflect a particular culture while also stay true to itself.  The gospel expressed in this way was his vision for a “People Movement.” Lots of good questions were raised about this kind of vision for missions and the church.  Dr. Bolger talked about the specifically modern/western development of a secular sphere and how this concept is foreign to many cultures and, thus, should be seen critically.   And yet the secular sphere, and the individualism that it implies–which we rightly criticize–is a direct outgrowth of a Lutheran hermenutic and of the great American invention, the separation of church and state.  Granted much more (probably such insidious things as materialism and consumerism) than Luther and the freedom of religion go into making us who we are today, but before we go and denounce individualism altogether (and modernism, which gave rise to the concept) we should remember that the concept helped put an end to all the wars and persecutions that ravished a Christian Europe.  No doubt, it also had something to do with what Jesus said, but for some reason there seems to be something cyclical about how the church ignores or obscures what he had to say about killing each other.

Class Reflection for Wednesday of Week 8

Today Dr. Bolger wasn’t there, and so we had a short class, but a good discussion nonetheless.  The t.a.’s did an excellent job facilitating the discussion on Fitch.  The class helped me have a more critical eye with which to view Fitch’s method.  I was surprised by some of the polarized reactions in my small group over the book. But it’s almost as if Fitch wants to create that kind of polarization…his critique of modernism is so sweeping and his embrace of postmodernism so total.  And for what he was trying to do–to incite change within the church, perhaps his oversimplified approach to these philosophical systems, used to sum up centuries (for modernism, at least), was the best way to go about it.  I suppose that’s what the terms modernism/postmodernism are good for…they can help us sum up an incredibly complex set of events and ideas into a single word.  And then we can use this word as a tool (or a weapon, perhaps) to fight our different battles.  Perhaps that was what certain people in the class were objecting to.  That Fitch’s “postmodern” approach had a kind of modernist/positivist feel to  it…by using the word as a tool or a weapon.  But I don’t think it’s modernist to use language as a tool…that’s just what it means to use language. But, there are ways to use language with integrity…and perhaps Fitch was substituting postmodern language for Kingdom language too much.  All this is to say, that the relationship between postmodernism, modernism, and Kingdom is increadibly complex.  For one, does any of us really know what these words mean or signify?  Although we may agree on a common definition for each,  the terms signify so much that it seems hard to control their usage.

Class Reflection for Monday of Week 8

Today we discussed our short case study papers together in groups.  Personally, for my own writing process it wasn’t all that helpful.  Most of the constructive criticisms that I received and those that I gave were suggestions that details be added and main points be elaborated on. These were obvious critiques in light of the limits of the first paper.  That said, I definately liked the idea of sharing our work with each other and anticipate that we will benefit from each other’s comments when there’s more to comment on.  And beginning the process did elicit good questions from the class about what some of the expectations are for the final paper.  But this process is somewhat difficult for me and, in fact, I don’t think I did very well on this first paper.  I kept wanting to approach it linearly and build as I go instead of laying out main ideas with few details attached…but of course, all my papers tend to be too long…perhaps because I get lost in the details.  So this will be a stretching exercise for me.

Class Reflection for Wednesday of Week 7

Last Wednesday Dr. Bolger presented us with an outline of “Kingdom Perspectives on Mission.” Essentially it was a list of key things that characterize the Kingdom.  And he asked us to think about how these characteristics could develop in the contexts of our case studies.  One question that the class had was on the difference between this model of mission, a Kingdom-driven model, and a trinitarian model for mission.  Dr. Bolger said that they essentially led to the same conclusions, but a Kingdom model might be more didactic than a trinitarian model.  Jesus describes the Kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount and so he is teaching us something whereas a trinitarian model seems more concerned with form than content.  That is, because there is only so much we can say about the Godhead, the metaphors we use for it are restricted to imagining how the three persons in the trinity interact with eachother in mutuality and love.  Jesus, however, told us some more specific things about the Kingdom like “love your enemies.”  I think that it’s important to hold onto both these models as ways to think about mission.  Although, as Lohfink discussed, the Kingdom of God implies that there is only ruler and therefore all exist in egalitarian relationships under God, the way that Kingdom language is sometimes taken does not always promote an egalitarian structure.  Or, at least, that’s an internal criticism that lots of Catholic theologians level against their church.  The idea of the church as a sacrament of the Kingdom led pre-Vatican II church leaders to adopt a hierarchical model.  And so, in thinking about the structure of the church, we should perhaps take our cue more from a trinitarian model, but in thinking about what should happen within that structure, a Kingdom model can be more informative.

Shorter Case Study Paper

Intro

“What connection does Jesus’ message of the coming Kingdom have to the church’s message today?”  An answer to this question can inform the broader question, “What should the church look like today?” As a way of addressing these questions and as a way of narrowing a response to them, this paper will look at a specific ministry to see what it might mean for Jesus’ message of the Kingdom to shape a specific context.

Context

The specific ministry I have in mind is a young adult’s fellowship group that existed for a few years in
Hollywood.  The group was attached to a large, prominent evangelical/mainline Protestant church with a history of teaching and sending out many evangelical leaders of the last century.  The church is situated on the boarder of two neighborhoods, separated by economics and class.  On one side, the neighborhood is characterized by trendy coffee shops and boutiques catering to an upwardly mobile cliental that live close by.  On the other side, the neighborhood is more working class and hosts an immigrant population as well as a number of homeless people.  The leadership of the larger church body had been exclusively male, while the leadership of the young adult’s group involved many co-leaders, male and female, who were picked from the group.

What the Kingdom of God Might Look Like Here

Some of the problems faced by the group and which eventually led to its demise were the socio-economic differences in the surrounding neighborhood and those within the makeup of the group as well.  That is, as a young adult’s group in the middle of Hollywood it attracted many well-educated transplants to the city, who were interested in beginning profitable careers in the film industry.  So, at first, the group was mostly homogenous, economically and socially, and racially as well—it was a predominantly anglo group.  But over time, the group began to attract people who lived in the poorer of the two neighborhoods.  This addition brought a welcome diversity to the group, but it also asked the group to grow and mature in response to the different needs that these newer members or visitors brought with them.  Some of these needs were physical, i.e., the homeless visitors often were in need of food.  But many of these needs were emotional and spiritual as well.  As the number of members with deeper needs grew, the leaders of the group—many young twenty-somethings with specific career goals—felt overwhelmed by the scope and range of the needs—so much so, that the group eventually ended.  So the felt presence of the Kingdom of God in this context would address both these needs of the newer members as well as the sense of being overwhelmed that the leaders experienced.  The Kingdom’s healing and freedom would have been especially transforming in this context—where people might be healed from emotional and spiritual brokenness, where people might be able to get their physical needs met, and where burdens might be better shared between the young adult’s fellowship group church and the surrounding communities. 

Activities

For the ministry to thrive in this neighborhood, partnerships between the larger church, the young adult’s fellowship group, the surrounding businesses, local social service agencies, and local government would have to develop and grow.  So, for instance, the young adult’s group could form relationships with some of the older members of the congregation.  The establishment of such bonds could respond to a number of potentially unKingdom-like practices in the church.  For one—using David Fitch’s assessment of the North American Church as a lens—the larger Church, hosting the young adult’s group, tends to promote isolation between small groups and ministries so that there is a fragmented sense of community where formational stories are not as easily shared between members; i.e., many of the young adults who came to the fellowship had no real connection to the larger body and could come, get their needs met, and leave without having to invest in any real commitments.  Also, in creating tighter bonds between the different fellowships, the burdens felt by the young adult fellowship leaders could be shared with older, wiser, members of Christ’s Body.  Making connections between the small groups within the church is just one example of how the Kingdom might become more rooted within the activities of the church, and another step would be to make connections with organizations outside the larger church body.

Conclusion

In looking at the relationship between God’s Kingdom and the Church, Gerhard Lohfink asked, “what was Jesus doing in his ministry?” And Lohfink offered that a large part of what Jesus was doing was gathering a community around him to partake in God’s eschatological Kingdom.  So first and foremost, the Church becomes a truer sign of the Kingdom when it is able to create real community.  The young adult’s group that I am looking at suffered from the fragmentation and isolation between and within the various communities that it encountered.  So, in order for it to embrace more Kingdom-like practices such fragmentation and isolation would first need to be healed.  

Class Reflection for Wednesday Week 6

Today Dr. Bolger continued his discussion on the Emerging Church.  One thing that struck me about his description today was how inefficient life in an emerging church might be.  When I was on leadership for a young adults group, it was my group’s job to lay out a plan for social service.  We were all sharing the responsibility for the group and decided that before we did anything we should pray and seek God’s guidance.  This, of course, was an important step.  But, I don’t know if it was because of the similar temperments among us, or because none of us were really profoundly dedicated to social service at the time, but we prayed and talked for weeks, but we never once organized anything.  I think we all enjoyed the fellowship and discussions we were having, but there was no one who took the initiative to spearhead a project, and it wasn’t immediatly clear whose job it was to rally the group into action.  Perhaps the problem was the make-up of the group…we all had a natural affinity for one another, but perhaps we couldn’t complement one another.  Also another problem might have been that we really didn’t have a solid theology for what we were wanting to do.  I think most of us were in the group to form friendships, and so by meeting and praying we were able to get our needs met, and the idea of service was secondary.  Bu perhaps if we had had a vision of being formed first for service and that our fellowship might come out of that we would have been more active.  In any case, as I think about my case study, I will want to think about the make up of  a leadership team and how to actually promote action in a consensus model of leadership.

Book Review for Week 7: Fitch, David, E., The Great Giveaway (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005)

David E. Fitch is  a pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Long Grove, Illinois, and is adjunct professor of ministry, theology, and ethics at Northern Seminary.

The Great Giveaway by David Fitch is a sweeping critique of the Evangelical Church in North America.  His thesis is that the message, purpose, and ethos of the larger Evangelical Church have been co-opted by, or have been given away to, the meta-narrative of capitalistic liberalism, and so this church has lost touch with its own meta-narrative given to it by scripture and Christian tradition.  After laying out this problem in the introduction, Fitch then devotes each of his chapters to different “marks” of the church, how each has been corrupted by this alien meta-narrative, and then he offers suggestions for how the Evangelical Church can reclaim these marks to become more authentically Christian.

The lens through which Fitch carries out his critique is postmodernism.  As a philosophical system, or school, which is essentially driven by a critique of modernism, postmodernism gives Fitch the tools with which he can examine the Evangelical Church’s compromising relationship with capitalistic liberalism—which is essentially modernism’s favorite son offering its own version of salvation, one which need be distinguished from the salvation offered by the favorite son of Christianity.  In fact, the main problem with modernist assumptions is that they don’t take into account the need for such distinctions.  Modernism, confidently wielding the tools of the scientific method, does not just believe that reality is all of one piece, but it mistakenly believes that the scientific method offers the only hermeneutic necessary for discovering this reality.  Postmodernism, however, questions such confidence. For instance, the truth buried in the Bible cannot just be dug up by an individual who can employ the historical critical method sufficiently.  Rather, such an individual brings a whole host of assumptions created by her situation in time and space to her reading of the Bible, and so all knowledge is a cultural construct.  For Fitch, then, the gospel cannot be understood outside of a strong, self-conscious community, which takes seriously the need to create disciples formed by a Biblical meta-narrative.  So the thrust of Fitch’s critique is leveled against the individualism that has invaded the Evangelical church and against the economic system that has, as its foundation, the promotion of the individual over the community.

In terms of my case study, I have been thinking about whether or not the phenomenon of a “Young Adults Fellowship” group can even be faithful to the type of vision that Fitch is promoting.  Because such a group often took the place of church for many of these 20-somethings, there was a way in which they were isolated from fellowship with both older and younger Christians who might be able to enrich their culture thereby giving them more of a “story” to bear fruit in their lives.  The tendency of Evangelical churches to separate and isolate the generations from each other, where those with a natural affinity for one another easily commune, seems antithetical to the gospel vision where Christ creates a new community of people, despite their differences. And can Fitch’s vision of the type of support offered in a healthy Christian community be adequately embodied in such a single generation group? His critique of the Evangelical
Church’s relationship to capital seems especially incisive.  When we bemoan the radical discrepancies between the rich and the poor and try to rally Evangelical support for our causes, how much of what we are trying to do is an uncritical embrace of a capitalistic ethos, which says that having the utter freedom to purchase is one of the greatest goods there is. Rather, Fitch offers that a greater good is promoting a mutual interdependence between members of a church community so that when needs arise people don’t immediately look for an economic escape from the freedom of want but look towards each other for other kinds of support as well.  But this support seems to necessarily imply the participation of a range of members at different stages of life.  So, for my case study, I will want to introduce a model of multi-generational kinds of fellowship.

Class Reflection for Monday Week 6

Today Dr. Bolger continued his discussion on the emergent church.  One thing I thought was interesting about his lecture was the implications about the gospel that he seemed to be making…that part of what Jesus was doing in his work was to narrow the gap that is achieved in a subject-object dualism.  This, is, however, not immediately obvious when you read the gospels, and there is a long history of reading scripture in which subject-object dualism is pronounced.  This occurs when the lens with which you look at scripture is rather narrow.  That is, you can easily reduce the gospel story in such a way that Jesus’ ministry solely concerned saving people from their sins–people, then are objects to evangelize. And yet, Jesus was also doing a lot more than just evangelizing people…but he was also creating a community without dominating structures..where the marginalized are embraced as equals.  So Jesus didn’t just do a feeding program for the poor, but he considered the poor as friends.  This difference of looking at the Christian life as either promoting more of a subject/object dualism or rather a subject/subject partnership is tricky, though, and I don’t think you would want to throw out one for the other, necessarily.  Or do you? On the one hand, God came in the form of Christ and bridged a great distance…Jesus was also a servant to humanity.  On the other hand, we worship Jesus as divine, and in this way there is a great distance.  Do we model our ministry more on the former theological truth that follows from the idea of incarnation/crucifixion….or do we model our ministry more on the basis of Christ’s work to spread alien (i.e. divine) truths to a broken humanity (i.e., the older Roman Catholic model of the priesthood seems to be modeled more after this latter truth).  Although Paul seems to think that Christ’s divine nature/ divine work was epitomized on the cross…so perhaps when we are elevating Christ’s teaching ministry over his work on the cross we are really missing something. 

Book Review: Boff, Leonardo, The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997)

The title of Boff’s book, Ecclesiogenesis, refers to what Boff understands as a new phenomenon in the Roman Catholic Church, the birth of a new type of ecclesiology.  As a Brazilian theologian he has seen the emergence of Christian communities among
Brazil’s poor, called basic communities that have come up with creative new ways for addressing the shortage of ordained priests.  As lay-supported communities, they are more characterized by mutuality, reciprocity, and equality among members instead of the alienation that can be suffered under hierarchical structures. Boff doesn’t altogether reject the need for institutional structures per se, but his thesis is that basic communities offer up an ecclesiological ideal that “official” churches should emulate.

 

After laying a positive description of basic communities, Boff proceeds by reexamining the traditional understanding of Roman Catholic ecclesiology and the basis for this tradition using exegetical and theological tools.  His arguments are leveled at the church’s hierarchy that, among other things, necessitates the presence of an ordained priest to preside over and to consecrate the Eucharist.  The second half of his book deals with “quaestio disputata” that pertain to a defense of the sacramental validity of the eucharist apart form the consecration of a priest ordained under a traditional understanding of apostolic succession.  In a radical move for a catholic theologian, Boff quotes from Tavard’s “Protestant Ministry,” “It is not apostolic succession which makes the church Catholic, but the catholicity of the Church which guarantees apostolic succession.” (69)  For, Boff, the prime significance of church leadership is less that it can be traced back to the apostles, but more that it can effect a symbol, or sacrament, of unity among the different churches.  That is, although Boff, like Vatican II, understands the local church to be the whole church, in order for it to be orthodox it also needs to recognize the catholicity of other local churches.  It is the symbol of a Catholic leader that can effect this orthodox recognition. The other prime function of church leadership is to organize and encourage the charisms given already to the people by the Holy Spirit. Although these charisms can be “supernatural,” Boff mostly identifies them as the contribution each member brings in order to fulfill the necessary tasks of the church. 

 

 

This description of basic communities has brought to the fore, once again (with Sider et al, Karkkainen, Lohfink, Fuellenbach), a vision of the church as inherently outward-oriented.  Not only does Boff describe catholicity of the church as being “open to its counterparts,” but also “to the eschatological church as well.” He writes, “The particular church is in via, still imperfect, incomplete, holy and pentitent, for it is sinful.  It will be complete, fulfilled, when the Lord comes at last.” (20)  So, as such, the church needs to realize how provisional it is in light of God’s coming Kingdom. With Lohfink, Boff describes a vision of the church that is not absolute, but which stands humbly under the reign of God, along with the rest of society.  An understanding of this provisional nature, then, can be ecumenically fruitful and it can inspire the church to partner with other organizations for the good of the community.  Because Boff equates such catholicity with a church’s faithfulness to apostolic tradition, a church without such outward-orientation, then, is not being faithful to the gospel. And so as I think about my case study, it will be important to think through the ministry’s potential for real catholicity, and whether the leaders understand their role as only that which creates structure or whether they really see themselves as bridge-builders in God’s Kingdom.

Class Reflection for Wednesday of Week 5

Today we talked about the so-called “Emerging Church,” which, as self-consciously “post-modern” resists any definitive labels or categories, although there are certain emphases that such churches seem to embrace: Focus on community, elevation of the laity, use of the arts, eclectic appropriation of various Christian traditons, engagement with culture/context, and porous boundaries.  And, as a genXer, this type of church makes perfect sense to me.  If the leaders of such churches are anything like me, they were disillusioned with the cookie-cutter spirituality of their parents’ churches, which also glaringly missed the mark when these boomer churches started the “alternative services” to attract the kids. Well, that’s an overstatement and a caricature of our parents’ church, but the underlying sentiment still lies beneath the surface, even if our parents’ churches can still offer us lots of good stuff.  So, in some ways I am very attracted to the ethos driving the emerging church.  One thing that has concerned me a bit though–or at least has been a question for me–is the effect that these church’s appropriation of common cultural phenomenon has on spirituality.  That is, I was a bit taken aback when Dr. Bolger discussed the night-club atmosphere of some of these churches…which allows a culture to worship God with it’s own symbols and music and which maintains a porous boundary between church and the rest of life thereby lessening the stark division between the sacred and secular.  On the one hand, when such divisions are mutted, one’s spirituality can become more holisitic…on the other hand, there is the increased danger that instead of the sacred infusing the secular, it’s the other way around.  Of course, part of the impact of the incarnation is that God risked divinity to come in the form of humanity….that the incarnation is the ultimate mutting of such distinctions.  Similarily, another way to view these same issues is to look at the relationship between form and content.  Does form affect content, and if so..why, how, to what degree?  Once upon a time we got all our stories either orally or from books..now we get our stories from t.v., movies, the internet, etc….are such mediums neutral?  Or does the manner in which we receive our stories affect who we are as people…and then the same questions can be applied to liturgy, etc…I have to admit that I am a little shy when it comes to embracing new forms of technology because of these questions, but it light of the incarnation, perhaps mine is just a conservative response to change.  And if God had asked me about whether or to send his send son in the flesh, I might have been extremely cautious in nervous in the face of such innovation.