[Dialogue] Recent discussions about identity and institutions

[Margaret Helen Aiseayew]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "frank bremner" <fjbremner at hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:25 AM
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Recent discussions about identity and institutions
> I'm grateful that this discussion is proceeding.

Frank,
I glad someone is grateful the discussion is proceeding.  I promised myself 
that I would not intrude upon it again, but the very day you sent this post 
I had a conversation with one of the professors of a seminary course I was 
taking. I guess I was rather hard on them and this particular professor had 
knocked everything ecumenical that anyone had mentioned for two weeks.  I 
decided to corner him with the suggestion that his negativity in this regard 
could discourage other students in efforts that might prove very beneficial 
to their communities and eventually their congregations, quite apart from 
his continual push for the immediate result of increased numbers within the 
congreagation which was always his push.  We had a lively disagreement.  He 
finally turned to me and asked what was my experience with Ecumenism that 
made me such ardent advocate?

I said that I was a staff member of the Ecumentical Institute.  His eyes 
turned into saucers and he said, "E.I.?"  I said many people had referred to 
us as EI.  He sputtered and stuttered and sputtered through some half 
questions to make sure that I wasn't taking about some other EI and then 
declared, "Well, the Ecumenical Institute didn't have anything to do with 
ecumenism.  I mean it didn't have anything to do with anything that I have 
been calling ecumenical in class.  It only had to do with radically calling 
the church to be the church in any and all of its circumstances."

I can only say that the conversation did not accomplish anything for which I 
had hoped.  Over the remainder of the courses I became clear that this was 
someone who had encountered us long ago and never gotten beyond the offense 
(or guilt?).  He basically dismissed anything I had to say in the remainder 
of the classes as either being too radical for the average local 
congregation or as setting myself apart from normal people by sharing my 
experience.

Some institutional images don't fade.
Sometimes your identity is someone else's projection (or defense).