[Dialogue] Spong on th Church of the future

Janice & Abe Ulangca aulangca at stny.rr.com
Fri Aug 19 10:35:04 EDT 2005


Wonderful, wonderful signs of the life-giving church of the future!  Janice Ulangca
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  From: KroegerD at aol.com 
  To: MICAH6-8 at topica.com 
  Cc: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 7:42 PM
  Subject: [Dialogue] Spong on th Church of the future



  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  
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