Visioning and the Gospel
Those of you reading this probably got East T-Mor's email about annual conference. If not, here is the link to the Vision 2020 thing. I don't really want to comment on that, but on visioning within the Church.
Now I think I first need to make a quick qualification. The temptation to idealism within the academy is enormous, as is the temptation of judgment. This isn't to say that it's wrong, only that it's easy. I think all of us in field ed's or CPE's know there is a difference between Rutgers South and the parish and so that should be kept in mind.
But now to my idealistic judgment. Thinking big is a business strategy. Strategy is a war term and pulls us into a war metaphor. A lax use of language is a great deficiency in so much of the Church Universal and the Church particular, Macedonia UMC and High Rock Lake Summer Ministry no exception. I assume most of you have dealt with the arguments concerning the Church's appropriation of foreign tongues, so I will not go into it here.
Moving on...
The great challenge comes beyond the rhetoric of visioning, beyond the rhetoric of church growth, butts in the seats, money in the coffers, building committees, stewardship sunday, trustees arguments, parking difficulties, politics, and anything else that might get in the way. We need to bracket that off because an argument about language is not my concern. My concern is the church.
I don't have many answers, but there has to be a way that we can discuss the vitality of a congregation without falling into the pit of semantics. That is the discussion I want. Please respond with ideas, correctives, etc. In a few days I will try and write something substantive, but until then, consider this a prolegomena of sorts.
posted by Unknown at 3:14 PM
10 Comments:
Thanks Jerry, I hope you do.
And part of it is going back to finding out what church means, in particular definition. If we don't have a precise ecclesiology than the Church is hollowed out and turned into the lions club.
But with any form of construction, it's a lot easier to tear something down and rebuild than it is to work within an existing structure.
How can you say "strategic plan" is more military than "mission"? HELLO?
Upon second thought, maybe we should use the word "crusade"?
Somebody forgot to tell Paul not to fill Ephesians 6 with militaristic language. Oh wait, I forgot. That wasn't Paul, right?
Tom, the main issue with military language and foreign languages within the church is that they are analogies. When Paul talks of the armor of God it is language that useful his pastoral and pedagogical purposes, and even then, it is entirely defensive. There is no forward march of the Christian soldier, no strategy against the forces of darkness.
Tony, concerning spiritual warfare, while that might be a helpful way to understand mission, I wish there was more of a grounding of the language in the scriptures and traditions, as opposed to war. And it is still just an analogue that we often mistake for a battlefield. Concerning reconciliation, I don't think "dealing with Post traumatic stress disorder and other festering wounds" has anything to do with war or war metaphors. It is the opposite of war. So far opposite of war that it doesn't need war as a foil.
But I'd say that nowadays, business language is more dangerous. Even if you don't buy Christological pacifism, the continuing appropriation of the Church of the language and practices of capitalism was the main issue I felt the need of confronting. But I didn't even want that argument. The whole point of the post was to try and begin to move away from that argument because it is tired and circuitous and probably a wee bit gnostic and docetic.
Of course the militaristic language is metaphorical. But Paul apparently thought it was a helpful metaphor, and I think dismissals of military language within the church are myopic in their vision of what language is and isn't in the Scriptures and tradition. Maybe it's a metaphor that would make Herr Hauerwas cringe (although I don't see why it should--Paul's Christianized taking up and subverting of literal military language would seem to fit his agenda nicely), but I suspect some other things in the NT would be different if Hauerwas had written it. And furthermore, there is a strategy (stand firm!), an enemy, and a decidedly non-defensive weapon (a sword), even if it is employed in the defensive strategy of standing firm. Somebody's going to bleed (metaphorically, of course).
All that being said, I heartily agree that the church should strive to conceive of itself in language that is solidly based in Scripture and the tradition. There just happens to be a lot of such language. Simply using that language will not be the church's long-sought panacea; the church must be circumspect about the way it uses that language.
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I wonder about this idea that the church should use language that is rooted in scripture and tradition. Is homoousios rooted in scripture? How do we understand using the terms of the creeds if they were new non-scriptural terms being used to describe what was taking place in scripture. I'm not so tied down to not (maybe I shouldn't use two negatives there...I'm open to...) using language borrowed from other places as long as we are careful to define how we're using it (as in the case of homoousios - did I spell that correctly?).
One quick example: I love Marcus Buckingham's strengths based leadership model. I think the word "strengh" is a good way of contemporarily reflecting on "gifts" or "call".
We shouldn't continue to use scripture as an epistemic criterion for language, for it mutilates scripture and breeds fundamentalism. Nevertheless, the language of homoousias is the language of tradition, as are the creeds.
Appropriating foreign tongues is helpful but it is not used well and that poor use blurs the line between church and world to the point of unintelligibility. You might be careful Tom, but most people aren't. People aren't careful with language and so it is cheep. Qualification and care takes time and people feel an absence of time, and so they relate the church to the Simpson's even though it is relativistic atomism. But it is easy, people know the Simpson's, kids know the Simpson's, they don't know the Church so let's piggy back to teach them. But that piggy back is limited by the completely non-Church television cartoon instead of but the infinite splendor of the Church.
I'm not trying to be a fundamentalist about language, and all i ever said was I didn't want to have this argument. I said that there is too much of the language of business in the church, what I was implying is that the line between business and church has been blurred beyond recognition and that is dangerous.
I'm not sure that I agree that the langague between church and business/world has been so blurred as you describe, Wilson. The people I know who are using non-"tradition"al terms to describe the gospel (i.e. the Simpsons) are almost entirely missionally focused. They see it (new langauge) as a bridge to present the gospel. Whereas the people I know (except those at Duke) who are "tradition"al in their langauge tend to be somewhat insular. The church becomes more like a country club and less like a communitiy with a vision and mission to reach the world with the gospel.
Thoughts?
Tom
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