[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
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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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