Immediate Belonging
Juan Oliver
“…though arguments aren’t always better for being
ended, they are always better for being addressed. …what arguments do show …[is] that behind
nearly all taste squabbles are value disputes.”[1]
Allow me to suggest
that behind our current arguments about our crisis in numbers lays a dispute
about values.
Imagine Phillip saying
to the Ethiopian eunuch, either, “Sure, why not, let me sprinkle
you right now. Don’t even get off your horse!” or, “Sorry, you are
an Ethiopian eunuch, --it’s out of the question!" Instead they traveled together and talked,
back and forth, about Scripture. I do not know of a better image of the process
by which people come to belong to a group. Yet it is truly ironic that the
story Phillip and the Ethiope is often trotted out to protest against precisely
that process. Then we complain about decreasing pledges.
As Celeste Gardner
recently pointed out in APLM´s listserv, one should not approach a person
(or parents of one) with a ready made answer to a request for, say,
baptism. Did Phillip and the eunuch talk
about what it means to be part of the Body of
Christ, the Church Catholic? Probably, though I think, not in those
terms. Did they talk only about the eunuch’s feelings? Or did they talk also what Jesus and his
community meant to Phillip and his people, and what that community was all
about? Were there objections, back and
forth as the two tried to frame individual meanings and
meanings-shared-in-community in a new Ethiopian eunuch’s synthesis? For unless the Ethiope at least began the
process of constructing meaning for himself out of the conversation, the
process failed, remaining only indoctrination. So, bless Phillip for
providing, as Celeste called for, “…the framework in which the community engages
each other in conversation and discernment.”
Such a framework –a
structure for coming to belong—is totally absent in most Episcopal churches
today. Never mind that congregational development expert Arlin Rothauge
found that congregations with no intentional path to belonging do not grow in
numbers. Never mind that people
struggling with Christianity (if not a vaguer itch for spirituality) absolutely
need and want the attention offered in this process.
Today it is more common to find
just the opposite of the Ethiopian’s journey. A vignette:
Sally and John just had Thomas,
their first born. They have not been to
church in almost twenty years, but feel a vague interest in getting Thomas
baptized. They call Mother Trish, who, just out of seminary, is of the opinion
that since we are all God’s children, there must be no obstacles to baptism. “Oh how wonderful,
congratulations on your new baby! --When
would you like to hold the service?” she says to them. They set a date convenient to the parents,
family, and friends. They say goodbye
and hang up. Trish feels good about herself for “including them.” Sally and John are pleasantly surprised that
this was as easy as ordering from Amazon, but a little bewildered at how little
attention they received.
Unlike Phillip and the
eunuch, Sally and John have no journey with the community into which they are
grafting their child. They do not get to meet other congregants. They do not
have the slightest chance of making meaning-in-community out of Thomas´
baptism. Beliefs and patterns of understanding are not mutually explored. The art of conversation is left unexercised
and, as a result, Sally and John have no idea of what of who we are as the
church, or what this means to them in their lives. They are not given even a
chance to grapple with core questions that are foundational to us as a
community. At best, they might, years
later, say something like “What? I never heard such a thing! Jesus is GOD?” At worse they will leave after the baptism
and never be seen again, like a bridegroom leaving the bride after the wedding
reception.
Why is this so
prevalent in our church today? The ´79 BCP (and the ’85 BAS) stress the church
as the community of the baptized. So
it is a bit bewildering to find ourselves, 34 years on, falling again and again
into Trishism. Would you
adopt a child into your family or marry into your spouse’s family without a
long process of conversation? What is
making us assume that such a process of conversation is unnecessary, unwanted,
even threatening?
It strikes me that it
often stems from our particular cultural context.
The Religion of Consumerism. The rites and rituals of consumerism shape
the world in which we find ourselves. From the mass media creation of
artificial desires, through the conferring of identities based on what
purchases, to the treatment of everything as a commodity to be sold and bought,
our world is one in which individuals are formed expecting to get what they
want when they want it. If they can’t,
they are, by definition, losers at the game, for the moral of the story is,
“Whoever dies with the most toys wins.”
Perhaps we tend to
assume that belonging, too, should be immediate, depending only on the individual’s decision and similar to the decision to,
say, become a Costco member. It is not.
Costco calls you “member,” but
in fact, you are just another client. Anthropologists never cease to point out
that there’s a whole lot more to the process of belonging to a group
than individual initiative: things like community conversations, marking
ritually the stages of belonging, and transformation of both the individual and the community and much more.
How is it then, that
we are so easily tempted to ignore the process
of belonging? I believe, with Shawn
Strout, that we have fallen into the wrong ecclesiology: our theological
understanding of what the church is, and what it is for, is seriously flawed.
The church is not a self-service
store. In this world of immediate availability
and the immediate satisfaction of desire, the church community naturally feels
that it must provide whatever is wanted, by whomever, at all times. Pastoral care is reduced to the caricature of
pleasing people. Church leadership comes
down to corporate management techniques.
Church structures are expected to include employers, employees, and
purchasers of services. That, however, is not a theologically accurate
description of the church. In fact, it is an Anti-church, for it is a community serving a consumerist culture – the
culture of Mammon, and you cannot serve him and God at the same time.
Nowhere in our
theology does it say that we are a store, or even a service- for-payment. The
church of Jesus Christ is not a club into which a person decides to enter,
paying dues (pledges) to pay a staff (mostly clergy) to receive a service
(liturgy, visitations, etc). It is not even, primarily, an institution. Yet in the consumerist anti-church, it
is not rare for people to see the local congregation as the local franchise of
an international corporate chain.
According to our
Prayer Book, we do not welcome people into our store, but into the “Family of
God.” “Newcomers” are not customers.
They are our relatives. From another theological angle, we are adding limbs to
our Body. Since when is your leg the
purchaser of your brain’s services?
Wrong image! From yet another
angle, we are a New Jerusalem – a city, a community of people in relationship
to each other.
Therefore, even before
developing its institution to
organize ourselves, the Church of Christ is a Family, a Body, a City. People
are brought into familial relationships with other Christians through a rite
that mimics birth. We should take responsibility, like Phillip, for
accompanying the person (or her parents) through a process of gestation, dying
to the old self and emerging with a new self, born again through interaction
with our family. Sadly, the “included” fall for “immediate belonging” only too
often, not realizing that, like Sally and John, they are being disempowered
with a big smile and a welcome hug.
“But Juan, I do not have time to do
all that with each newcomer!” I already hear the cardinal Rector say. The good news, dear cardinal Rector, is that
this is best done by your staying out of
it. Even if “newcomers” instinctively
make a beeline for the priest, the fact is that the kind of conversation I am
calling for is best led by trained lay
members of the parish. There, in a group setting characterized by
confidentiality and growing trust, people can explore together what it means to
belong to Christ in community. Such a
process is a gift rather than a barrier.
Salvation in a Body.
Shawn Strout reminded us in our listserv discussion that, “Baptism does not save us
individually.” I would add that it saves
corporately. It is tempting to hope that God will heal us
only individually, one-one-one, leaving our relationships unaffected. But it´s
not reality! It is an illusion to think
that our relationship to God can improve regardless of our relationships to
others. For being is relational. Ayn
Rand aside, we cannot be individuals without being in relationships. In the consumerist anti-church the
relationships among members are expendable. What matters is the number of
(interchangeable?) pledging units.
If the Church is the
New Jerusalem, where God dwells with people, the very fabric of relationships
that constitutes the church is called to be the green shoots of the Kingdom
that we expect every time we say the Our Father. If the local church cannot be seen (yes, like
a city on a hill) as hope-inducing evidence that a better world is possible, it
is not the true church, no matter how many crosses we slap on it. Who knew?
Perhaps our crisis in numbers is a crisis in the way we treat each
other. I suspect that if we worked on
our intra-ecclesial relationships more people might be curious enough to see
what makes us tick.
Core
questions
Still, within this Family/Body/City there are some shared
understandings (not without disagreements – we are a rambunctious family) about
serious questions like,
· Who do we say Jesus is in
relation to us and to the Godhead?
· What, exactly, was his good news, for which he was
arrested, tortured, executed?
·
How
does he live on, and what is his
relationship to us the rest of his Body, the Christian community?
·
Flowing
from that, What do we think the
church of Jesus Christ is or is supposed to be?
· What does God gather us for, and what does he send us to do?
· Then, flowing from that, How are we to organize ourselves for this?
and from that, How shall we
incorporate new members into our community?
The sequence of steps
is important! If we start with the latter questions, we end up misunderstanding
the former, or worse, betraying them and our family. Look:
· We have to grow in numbers so we can meet our budget.
· Therefore, we should make belonging immediate and simple,
upon demand.
·
To do this, we should organize ourselves to welcome people who
want to join us, without obstacles.
·
God gathers us so people who want to join us can have a group to
join. God sends us out to find more
people to join us.
·
The church is therefore a member-making business, with a central
administration and local branches – a spiritual Costco.
·
Jesus lives on in our central administration, i.e. in the
clergy, through ordination. We can only access Jesus through clergy.
·
Jesus´ Good News was his own life. He talked a lot about himself and
his message: The Kingdom – God is going to be Lord of your individual
heart.
·
The death of Jesus had nothing to do with his message. It was a
huge mistake, Judas´ fault.
·
Jesus is important because he was very close to God. God is very far
away.
Beyond here, folks, there be dragons.
In sum, there is a serious weakness in contemporary American Anglican reflection on
sacraments and ecclesiology: the
tendency to boil everything down to individual initiative. Married to a commercial model of the Church
and its mission, this consumerist ecclesiology undermines any attempts
to build community, and to reflect and act like one, while ignoring our
relationships with each other. This is
the genesis of the anti-church, which cannot die soon enough.
Juan Oliver is a member of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation,
Societas Liturgica, and The Council of The Associated Parishes for Liturgy and
Mission, as whose president he served from 1997 to 2001.
This post is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of OPEN, the online journal of APLM.
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