[Dialogue] Spong on th Church of the future

[KroegerD@aol.com]

August 17, 2005 
The Emerging Church 
Time after time I am asked by people to describe what the church of the  
future will look like. It seems to these questioners that one who has written a  
book entitled A New Christianity for a New World should be able to  address 
that question. That is especially an expectation since one chapter in  that book 
actually purports to describe the church of the future. Entitled "The  
Ecclesia of Tomorrow," I went so far as to suggest a new name for that new  
structure. The Greek word 'ecclesia' means, "to be called out!" Explaining this  choice 
I wrote: "I see this new church ….as the community of those who have been  
called out of limits, out of prejudices, out of brokenness, out of  
self-centeredness." That was the negative side, but I also wrote that I see this  new 
church positively as a community of people who have been "called into life,  
called into love, called into wholeness, called into God." These were only broad  
strokes, however, and they did not provide the specific roadmap for which my  
questioners were asking. They wanted to know exactly what that church would 
look  like, how it would differ from the ecclesiastical structures of today, what 
its  shape and form would be and how they could begin now to move into that 
new  identity. Behind their questions is the knowledge that at best the church  
structures of today are not working and at worst they are dying. They also 
look  with some envy at evangelical churches that are thriving and wonder if 
that  represents the future of Christianity, as many evangelicals claim. These 
are  genuine concerns and require a serious response.  
First, let me say that I completely discount the staying power of what  
evangelicals claim as their 'success.' Churches that traffic in certainty and  
offer security can never finally deliver what they promise. Security and  
certainty are always illusions not realities. The success of these churches is  built 
on a hysterical response to life's inescapable basic anxiety. Their appeal  is 
ultimately an idolatrous claim. Certainty and security will never be human  
possessions.  
The church of the future is something into which people must live as they  
walk into that future. There is no roadmap. There is no assurance that today's  
forms, no matter how sacred or how revered through time, will meet the needs 
of  tomorrow's world. I wonder how the persecuted Christians meeting in the  
catacombs of the second and third centuries, would respond if someone told them  
that they would evolve into the dominant institution in the Western world 
with  Gothic cathedrals built on the highest hill in the center of the town 
dominating  the countryside as Christianity dominated the political life of the 
Western  world. While these representative Christians would not be able to 
imagine that,  I am sure that 13th century Christians looking backward in time would 
recognize  that the church in the catacombs was in fact their ancestor. We 
are not able to  transcend our time to envision a future that will be built on a 
totally  different set of pre-suppositions. All we can finally do is to note 
developing  patterns.  
In our travels on the lecture circuit across the world we see glimpses of the 
 church of tomorrow that surely represent a new and emerging Christianity. I  
think of Paul Tenaglia at the Unity Church in Chelsea in New York, who on one 
 occasion opened his liturgy by saying, "Welcome to Unity of New York! This 
is  one church where you will not be told that you are a miserable sinner." 
Surely  one mark of the church of tomorrow will be that we will stop the 
emotional abuse  of our congregations with liturgies designed to enhance guilt. Most 
regular  worshippers do not yet understand how destructive it is to be 
confronted Sunday  after Sunday with words like: "There is no health in us ….. We are 
not worthy to  gather up the crumbs under thy table." What kind of liturgy is 
it that  constantly portrays the worshipper groveling and pleading, "Lord, 
have mercy,  Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy"?  
I saw another mark of the church of the future in a sign on the wall at the  
Church of the Redeemer in Morristown, New Jersey, inviting all comers to eat  
together at the Lord's Table in their community Eucharist. The sign read: "The 
 only prerequisite for receiving communion in this church is that you be 
hungry."   
I saw an expression of the church of the future in the Cathedral of Hope in  
Dallas, Texas, as I listened to a 50-person male chorus perform magnificently 
in  anthems of praise, love, joy and hope. They were called "The Positive 
Singers."  It was a unique name and filled with poignancy when I learned that they 
adopted  this name because they were all HIV Positive.  
I saw the church of the future in the First Methodist Church of Omaha,  
Nebraska, as they worked closely with a synagogue next door to explore together  
the roots of their faith, the sources of their division, and the sordid history  
of their centuries of separation. I also heard there an oratorio on the  
Resurrection that transformed Easter forever for me.  
Then there was The New Dimensions Church of Tulsa, Oklahoma, an  
African-American Pentecostal congregation with an incredibly gifted minister  named Bishop 
Carlton Pearson who calls himself "the black son of Oral Roberts."  This man 
has found so many of the traditional boundaries and convictions of the  
Pentecostal tradition to be security giving, but not life-giving - so he has  begun 
within the Pentecostal tradition to come to a new religious consciousness  
that does not rejoice in identifying those who are lost, but places a vision of  
what each person can become before his people. He has asked them to give up 
the  security of certainty and to embrace the courage to be and to walk with him 
 beyond traditional barriers of separation into that biblical promise that 
God  will make all things new.  
I saw it on a poster, I believe, on the wall of a United Church of Christ in  
Ames, Iowa, that said: "Why is it that churches that claim to have all the  
answers, don't allow any questions?"  
I have seen traces of this future emerging church in a group of Roman  
Catholic women in St. Paul, Minnesota, who organized the educational wing of  their 
church separately from their church, so that they, not the church's  
hierarchy, might control the explorations into God that go on in that place.  These 
women also demanded a say in who their priest would be before they agreed  to 
help form that now thriving congregation.  
Although I have never visited the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte,  
North Carolina, I have admired it since the days when their senior Minister was  
the great Carlyle Marney; but someone sent me a copy of their mission 
statement  or covenant. It included so many of the qualities that I look for in the 
Church  of the future that I share it with you in its entirety.  
We, the members of the Myers Park Baptist Church, are a people  on a journey 
of faith. By God's grace we are experiencing God's love through  Jesus Christ 
and in the community of the faithful. We are discovering in this  experience 
our freedom to become new creatures and our responsibility to be  faithful 
stewards of our lives and of this world. We will be open to all new  light, 
strengthened by God and each other in our faith. We will sustain a  critical 
examination of Scripture, belief and ritual as interpreters of God's  active presence 
in the world. We will accept controversy as a reality of life  together and 
an opportunity for growth toward maturity. We covenant to be a  community of 
God's new creation and affirm that we are open to all and closed  to none. We 
covenant to nurture this church as a community of faith and as an  instrument 
for reconciliation in the world: by worship, by Christian  education, by the 
dedication of our personal and material resources and by all  the other ways we 
express the significance of our lives with God and one  another. We covenant 
together to be priests celebrating God's presence in  community and in the 
world, believing we are participants in God's kingdom on  earth.
There are many others that deserve mention. Space, however, precludes me from 
 being thorough. I think of churches that have touched me deeply in cities 
like  Houston, Austin, Dallas, Little Rock, Greensboro, Sacramento, Denver, 
Phoenix,  Scottsdale, San Diego and many others where Christians, hungry for more 
than the  structures that church life now offer, are daring to think outside 
the boxes of  their traditional past and to develop new forms for a new world. 
This ferment is  present in every Christian tradition. It is sometimes open, 
sometimes hidden.  
The Center for Progressive Christianity in Cambridge, Massachustts, headed by 
 the Reverend James Adams, lists eight prerequisites required for a local  
congregation to be identified with their ministry and mission. The Church of the 
 future can be seen in their principles:  
    1.  Proclaim Jesus Christ as our Gate to the realm of God;  
    2.  Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for 
the  gateway of God's realm;  
    3.  Understand our sharing of bread and wine in Jesus' name to be a  
representation of God's feast for all people;  
    4.  Invite all sorts and conditions of people to join in our worship and 
in  our common life as full partners, including (but not limited to): 
believers  and agnostics, conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, 
homosexuals  and heterosexuals, females and males, the despairing and the hopeful, those 
of  all races and cultures, and those of all classes and abilities, without  
imposing on them the necessity of becoming like us;  
    5.  Think that the way we treat one another and other people is more 
important  than the way we express our beliefs;  
    6.  Find more grace in the search for meaning than in absolute certainly, 
in  the questions than in the answers;  
    7.  See ourselves as a spiritual community in which we discover the 
resources  required for our work in the world: striving for justice and peace  
among all people, bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his  brothers 
and sisters;  
    8.  Recognize that our faith entails costly discipleship, renunciation of 
 privilege, and conscious resistance to evil - as has always been the 
tradition  of the church. 
(For further information write: _office at tcpc.org_ (mailto:office at tcpc.org) )  
Today churches throughout this nation have signed on with this organization  
and its Progressive Christianity Network has spread to Canada, the United  
Kingdom and Australia.  
Outside English speaking nations I also see radical renewal taking place in  
Sweden, inspired by the witness of a great Lutheran bishop named Claes-Bertil  
Ytterberg, and in Finland led by another great Lutheran bishop named Wille  
Riekkinen. This bubbling, emerging reformation recognizes no boundaries of  
either nationality or denomination. We cannot rush the process of reformation  
but we can and must encourage it. Perhaps the first step that every church might 
 consider taking is to stop defending dying structures, to get out of the way 
and  to let the new birth take place.  
— John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Ken from Melbourne, Australia, writes:  
I first heard of you when driving back to Melbourne from Adelaide when you  
were interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Company. I subsequently  
purchased some of your books and the theories you put forward opened up a  
completely new way to appreciate Christianity. The only disappointing thing to  me 
seemed that you didn't stress in sufficient detail your thoughts on the  
likelihood of an after life and what form you believe it would take.  
Dear Ken,  
The subject of life after death dominated my study life for almost three  
years. I hoped to write a book on that subject but the deeper I got into the  
material, the less I discovered that I could articulate other than informed  
speculation. Since informed speculation is hardly worthy of publication, the  book 
was never written. In my opinion, no one can know anything about life after  
death with the certainty and the scholarship that writing a book requires.  
However, I did write two chapters in two different books that were designed to  
analyze the power of the idea and to state what it is that I believe about 
this  vast and mysterious subject. A chapter can handle that - there is simply 
not  enough data for a book.  
The first of these two chapters came at the end of my book on Jesus'  
Resurrection, that bore the title: Resurrection: Myth or Reality? A Bishop  Rethinks 
the Meaning of Easter. The second was the next to last chapter in  my book, 
Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to believers  in Exile.  
I believe in life after death. I do not know how to talk about a realm beyond 
 the human since all the words I know how to use are shaped by the world of 
my  human experience. Most life after death talk is about behavior control, 
which I  regard as a sad chapter in the paternalistic history of institutional 
church  life. I have said in these two places all that I can honestly say about 
life  after death, not because my confidence is weak but because my ability to 
put my  faith into words is so limited. I commend these two chapters to you 
as at least  a starting place.  
— John Shelby Spong  
 
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