I’m in Grand Rapids, Mich. for the United Church of Christ’s General Synod. I’ll be here for the whole Synod, which officially opens Friday and ends June 30. On Thursday I spent the day covering a pre-Synod consultation on immigration.
The event included great speakers, immigrants who shared their stories, and community organizers including keynote speaker Norma Chavez-Peterson of Justice Overcoming Boundaries and Baldemar Velasquez, known for his work with FLOC, organizing farm laborers.
But the best quote of the day came from Dave Ostendorf, who said that liberal Christians tend to be “resolutionary” instead of “revolutionary.” He and others called for people of faith to go beyond passing resolutions and having church meetings to actually taking ministry outside of church walls and into the community to get things done, engaging systems and structures to get at the root causes of social problems.
One thing I appreciated about the day’s event is that those in attendance seem to understand the intricacies of justice work. They talked about the unintended consequences of the efforts of well-meaning Christians; they distinguish between feel-good, drive-by charity work and actually listening to, honoring, and empowering people who are oppressed so that they can shape their own futures with dignity. Those are nuances that you sometimes don’t hear when it comes to church mission and outreach.
In light of Ostendorf’s remark, I couldn’t help but think about the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). In about a month, the General Assembly will vote on whether to stop being a “resolutionary’ church. The idea is to replace sometimes-controversial Sense-of-the-Assembly resolutions (and a couple of other types of resolutions) with a dialogue process: Calls for Action.
But if we stop being “resolutionary,” we’re still far from revolutionary, and sometimes, a revolution — a turning-upside-down of things — is in order. While resolutions should not be confused with actions, I wonder if now we’ll fall into the trap of mistaking conversation for action. To be fair, the Calls for Action open a better space for dialogue than the 12, 24, or in a few cases, 48 minutes of floor debate. But at the end of the day, will anyone urge us to take it a step further?
How, as church, can we Disciples go from resolutionary to revolutionary, instead of going from resolutionary to…a bunch of nice Christians who can proudly say that we all get along? I hope we can find a way.
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June 27, 2009 at 9:08 am
Danny Bradfield
Interesting observations. Makes me think of another way to phrase it: instead of expressing our opinions on issues through resolutions, we can express our opinions through action. I can picture church folks saying, “Well, they didn’t let us vote on it at General Assembly, so i’m going to ‘vote’ by doing something…”
June 27, 2009 at 10:22 am
knapsack77
Can i switch hats from posting to commenting? Why, thank you.
Two sides that i see to this problem are the practical and the visionary, which i’d present as not two ends distant from each other on a spectrum of church life, but literally the sides, barely apart but rarely seen at the same time, like the faces of a coin.
Visionary — we’ve pounded for decades into our clergy training, and affirmed repeatedly through the search and call process (intentionally or not, and largely not, but no less forcefully for its unconsciousness), that pastoral leadership is managerial, collaborative, facilitating. Hey, i make much of my living these days as a facilitator, and i won’t say that isn’t a skill or a very challenging task to take on.
But facilitation isn’t the same as helping cast a vision and building, actively building a consensus around it. I had arguments in seminary as to whether consensus is something that naturally occurs, which a pastor should seek to discover and then communicate (the faculty/regional staff view) or if a vision is most often built and shaped by leaders, and pushes beyond where the “polling” consensus might start (yep, that’s what i think). You can’t go beyond a certain basis of understanding and support, but i think congregational leadership means leading, not just reflecting.
And on the level of the wider church, we had a long and i’d say good ride as a church with a compelling vision of missions. Yes, there were inappropriate and unjust things done in the name of sharing the Gospel (boarding schools where Indian children couldn’t speak their language, shoes on Hawaiians, etc.), but the compelling vision of taking the Gospel where it hadn’t been, and sharing it through both word (preachin’ to the heathen) and deed (wells, medical care, farming tools, feeding directly) caught the imagination of apothecary clerks and farm wives all across the Disciples’ world, and gave us that sense of purpose and unity in the wider church.
In the late ’50s and ’60s of the 20th century we vastly de-emphasized and reframed what missions meant, and quite frankly, the picture never came into focus. In Iowa or Arizona, if you ask a very average, but very regular Disciple, to talk about missions, you will either hear about a recent mission trip to work in New Orleans or Mexico, or . . . a stammered recollection of having met a missionary, somewhere, once, and that they, well, “I think there’s still missionaries out there somehwhere, aren’t there?”
Habitat and hurricane relief has been a boon in some ways, but also a further dilution in others — for many churches, mission is turning into trusses and cinder block, with very little sense of what we want to “fill the building” with. Lots of groups — atheists, Civitan Clubs, Kiwanians — are doing that. What makes our mission a mission vision that brings us together as the Body of Christ? Where is the vitality of spiritual purpose and initiative that moves the Body, other than doing good things for hurting people? Or is that it?
Practical — this starts with buildings. We are cursed by them. I love going to Bethany, WV, where the Meeting House is just that. No steeple, and a minimum of plaques and stuff. Simple even 170 years later to maintain.
Our congregations are laboring under a huge burden of building maintenance, which we respond to by fetishizing the buildings (don’t even let me get started on regional camps). The building is not a tool for ministry in the life of the Body, it *is* the Body. If i could agitate for one resolution before we end them, it would be to ban every brass plaque and memorial stone from every piece of church property that we have. “In memory of” and “Celebrating the ministry of” are anchors that keep the Ship of Faith from freely sailing. You may need an anchor or two on a ship for stability, but when a 20 foot schooner has 17 anchors, something is wrong.
Old buildings, and even newer buildings, are turning into huge money pits, and we can’t weatherize or make energy efficient these structures and landscapes fast enough; meanwhile, civil society is more and more wanting to tax and fee our properties like any other, and they’re finding ways to do it. For the record, i love old buildings, and don’t want rid of all of them, but the idea that the Building is the Body is bad theology that needs to be preached against, and yet how can you when the roof needs patching and the parking lots resurfaced? We can’t rid ourselves of church buildings wholesale, but we can defetishize how we treat them, so we can tear down and rebuild or at least renovate without it being more trouble than changing the Words of Institution.
And along with buildings, clergy compensation. I really don’t know what to say here, other than when you look at how many congregations, right now, are paying a reasonable salary (let’s say median income for your zip code), and full housing and/or health benefits, it’s what i intuit as an amazingly small, but an amazingly unknown figure. The number of “large” congregations that are counting on a spouse’s job to provide health care, and are paying less salary than you ought to be able to call full-time, but still think they are operating on the same basis they were thirty years ago, is stunning — to me, anyhow. In my opinion, not one in four congregations are really justified in saying they have “full-time” ministry.
So if we have been moving for some decades away from full-time ministry — buffering ourselves from reality by a) opening up to women in the 70s and 80s but paying them less, b) accepting that male clergy would have working wives, then c) starting to implicity expect those spouses, male and female, to provide health care, and d) trimming off all of the various expense funds that grew in the 50s and 60s for cont. ed., books & periodicals, assembly expenses, down to the zero they now are in most congregations — where are we now? Well, i’d say we’re in denial. We made a big push to restore and rejuvenate the Church Wide Health Care program, & churches responded, but mostly it came out of BMF giving. I’ve been told “that’s not true,” but i’m curious as to how many congregational annual reports and newsletters those people read.
So to be revolutionary? We need to empower clergy to lead — not dominate, not to boss around, but to lead by vision and example — and we need to empower leadership that is not ordained right alongside of them/us, licensed ministers and elders in particular.
And I do think that there are lay leaders who have a sense of where God is at work and nudging their congregation to go, but they aren’t sure where or how to voice their dreams and visions — but they feel very secure about having discussions about the cleaning schedule and fixing the door from the kitchen out to the back parking lot, so that’s what they lift up at meetings.
In some cases, would those leaders step up if there wasn’t a “full-time” ordained minister in the pulpit and on the budget? If a church is really only paying for a quarter of a pastor, then maybe they shouldn’t have the illusion that they have all of one, and all that ministerial leadership to lean on. How many congregations could think differently about how they shape their worship and mission if they knew it was really up to them, and the pastor, ordained or commissioned/licensed or semi-retired was there simply as a sounding board parts of the week.
Which may be why interim ministry is such a source of vitality in the church and for congregations these days. Seriously, some of the most interesting stuff in congregational life i hear around a five state area comes in congregations that have an interim who is “on site” two, three days a week and lives a long ways away. Then they hire a “real” pastor, and all that energy and initiative goes back into the tuckpointing and reguttering . . . and the real pastor isn’t getting their health care from the church, and said that if the pension fund contribution can stay bulked up, they’d take $12,000 salary and a housing allowance that covers their mortgage.
We’re resolutionary, not revolutionary, not because there’s no radical vision still rattling around the liberal wing of the Restoration Movement (see the pacifist Campbell and the unitarian Stone, for pity’s sake), but because we’ve fetishized our buildings and the role of clergy to compensate for the loss of any larger unifying vision that can replace the power of global missionaries going into Tibet and the Congo.
If i had any sense after typing this long in a white-hot froth, i’d not hit “submit comment,” but i’m just gonna do it, and then mow my lawn. My wife has fetishized a tidy exterior, and it’s not like we’re gonna all stop doing that any time soon. But creation care, which is the grand unifying vision of the Gospel at work in our generation that i think could take us where God wants us to go, means that at least i don’t have a chemical bath on my grass like every other neighbor on my street. Sometimes they ask me about why, and then i get to tell them about what i believe, which is the heart of evangelism IMHO.
Yikes – thank you to anyone courteous enough to actually read a comment this long.