by Brian Volck
While longer on sociology than theology or ecclesiology (what can one expect from the news industry?), a recent CNN story on the difficulties inherent in integrating churches resonates with much said at the recent EP gathering.
by Kyle Childress
About the time I was in college, young comedian Steve Martin had a routine called “let’s get small.” Playing on the mid-seventies countercultural “let’s get high” Martin invited everyone to come to his house and “get small.” Martin said that “getting small” was dangerous for children because they would get “really, really small” and it was also impossible for the police to put you in jail for being small because you’d walk out right between the bars. It was a short, quirky piece of the sort that made Martin famous.
If it was countercultural in 1977, “being small” is even more so in 2008 in a culture that seems to idolize the Big and encourages everyone to “get big or get out” as a Secretary of Agriculture once told farmers. Some years ago Molly Ivins characterized the city of Dallas as the city with Big Buildings, Big Hair, and a Big Jesus. Dallas thought she was paying them a compliment. But even we like living in Big Texas and our society admires Big Business and trans-national corporations, mega-churches, and mega-plexes. We want Big Answers and Big Solutions to Global Problems and we want to super-size everything from fries to storage buildings to football stadiums. Politicians and economists of every persuasion keep telling us that a bigger economic pie is the answer to everyone’s concerns. Closer to home, every day I receive mailings and emailings on how to grow, be bigger, reach more people, raise massive amounts of money, train more people, build bigger buildings, have a bigger sound system, a bigger music program, a bigger youth program, get a bigger church van, where to order a bigger pulpit, or how I can get a bigger Bible with larger print (okay, so I’m keeping that one). In other words, bigger is always better; it is a sign of blessing and success, and if we’re not getting bigger then something is wrong.
Behind these invitations to “get big” lie more alarming assumptions. For example, I also receive more than the occasional letter urging me to join with other clergy, or other churches, in order to stop something in our country or get something done in our town or organize to get someone elected. The underlying and unquestioned assumption is that it is the vocation of the church to run things in our society or at least that we have the size and power to make things come out the way we want them to if we’ll just organize, work, fund, vote, and get involved. Furthermore, if we’re too small to have the leverage to run things then we can use any number of the resources listed above so we can get big.
When we open the New Testament and read Jesus the contrast is startling. He talks about mustard seeds, sparrows, lost coins, and lost sheep. Instead of big productions he washes feet and every time he gathers a big crowd, off he goes to be alone. Instead of seeking power he seems intent on giving it up. And about the closest he came to defining a church is “two or three gathered in my name.” It seems Jesus was interested in getting small long before Steve Martin made a joke about it.
So maybe we need to raise questions about bigger being better. Perhaps we should be questioning whether the church is supposed to run things and whether it is good that the church always needs to grow larger. Maybe it is time to question many of these assumptions and maybe a small church like ours can be one of those who does the questioning. What if God’s Way is manifested through ordinary people doing little acts of grace like sharing bread, asking forgiveness, and being peacemakers? In an empire enamored with “shock and awe,” a capitalistic economy consumed with growth, and American Christianity preoccupied with success, what if the calling of the body of Christ, the church, is to “get small”?
When we come to terms with being small and get over trying to be big, we can be free to trust God rather than our own power and size, and we can be empowered to get on with what God wants us to be about. With help from theologian John Yoder, here are some examples:We do not assume that we are to dominate our town or the wider society. As followers of Jesus, our mission clearly becomes one of servanthood, healing, and reconciliation, the kind of ministry that works best from positions of powerlessness and humility.
We can do mission and ministry as “pilot projects.” There are needed ministries that the wider society is not yet ready to attempt for any number of reasons (they’re too controversial, people are not yet convinced of the need, etc.) but we are able to start. In our own church’s history, we started the Sheltered Workshop, the East Texas AIDS Project, and the Nacogdoches Habitat for Humanity before many others got involved. Eventually, each of these endeavors was adopted by larger groups and organizations here in East Texas.
We are freed to speak out and practice what we believe is the truth of the gospel even though the wider majority does not agree. Sometimes a small church can act in the same way the conscience acts in the life of an individual. For instance, the Quakers spoke out against slavery 80 years before slaves were freed in this country.
We learn to trust the power of weakness. A small church can be innovative and imaginative. We can approach problems from a different posture and perspective from those with power who tend to approach problems with a direct frontal assault.
We learn to see the weakness of power. Sometimes too much power is an obstacle to our calling. Tanks and bulldozers can get in the way of washing feet and giving a cup of cold water in Jesus’s name.
I am not suggesting that large churches are not the body of Christ. Indeed, I know that the best large churches are built around small groups. I’m also not suggesting that we shouldn’t do outreach and invite others to the Way of Jesus. The fact is that we could grow a lot and still be a small church. All I’m suggesting is that Austin Heights is part of a long history of God working through the small, the humble, the weak, and the odd. Instead of worrying over not being big, let’s embrace the wonderful gift God has given us and thank God for being small.
Let’s be careful out there.
July 19, 2008
by Debra Dean Murphy
It’s been more than a week since the Gathering ended and my head is still swimming and my heart is still full. There is always so much to take in when we meet each summer for conversation, worship, learning, and fellowship.
I traveled to Chicago this year with three good friends from my church—new endorsers of EP and first-time Gathering attendees. These friends—Judy, Chris, and Greg—were overwhelmed by all they encountered (in the best possible sense of that word) and we continue to talk about what we experienced, hoping that our own transformed thinking about matters of race and racism in the body of Christ might come to bear good fruit in the ecclesial context in which we find ourselves.
One of the things I like about the format of the Summer Gathering is that we always have persons (often “outsiders” to EP who become fast friends) who put “flesh and bone”—real practical import—to the ideas and insights we hear in the formal plenary/lecture sessions (which were themselves, this year, extraordinary). It was a gift to listen to the stories of New Life/Nueva Vida Mennonite Church (Norristown, PA) and Rock of Salvation Church in Chicago. Leadership at New Life/Nueva is shared equally among three pastors who minister to this congregation made up of Anglos, Hispanics, and African-Americans. Such an arrangement “is not effective,” said one of them, Brother Ertell, only half-joking. But it is a sign of the church’s commitment to the hard work of racial reconciliation in the body of Christ.
I was struck by how matter-of-fact the approach to racial reconciliation is in both of these churches: no anxious hand-wringing, no endless “task-forcing” of the issues. Instead, they conveyed, with humor and humility, a clear-eyed honesty about the challenges facing multi-ethnic congregations and a sense that this way of being/doing church is not an option but an obligation—yet one undertaken with joy and a sense of hope about what God is up to in their midst.
Three days of intense focus on a difficult topic can leave one, as I said above, more than a little overwhelmed. We can begin to think that the problem of racism in the body of Christ is an intractable one. We can slip into thinking that we can do nothing or that we have to do everything. God save us from such despair on the one hand and such arrogance on the other. May we rest in the truth (but not rest on our laurels) that the work of reconciliation has already been accomplished. It is our task and our joy to live into the fullness of that truth and to bear witness to it. I thank all of my EP sisters and brothers—old friends and new friends alike—for the gift of that reminder last week.
July 11, 2008
by Brent Laytham
One of the great joys of our EP Gatherings is eating together. We break bread with friends old and new, discovering at a common table our common life in Christ. That makes it all the more painful that many of us who endorse The Ekklesia Project cannot come together as one body at the Eucharistic table of our Lord. Several years ago, we spent an entire Gathering exploring that pain.
This year our Gathering explored another division that scars the body of Christ—race. Both visibly and invisibly, race and racism have divided us from sharing together at our Lord’s one table. Confronting that reality for three days has renewed my commitment to the Friday fast that EP endorsers commit themselves to. Heretofore, I have fasted because that’s what Methodist pastors do, and because it was a simple practice of solidarity with my sisters and brothers in The Ekklesia Project. But now, committed to “Crossing the Divide,” I am also fasting as a practice of judgment—judgment against my ongoing racism, judgment against our racially segregated churches, judgment against every failure to receive what Christ has already done—broken down the dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14).
Today I fast, not just to be in solidarity with you all, but especially to hunger for the full unity of Christ’s church.
by Brian E Volck
If you mourn the splintering of Christianity, if you pray that all may be one as Christ and the Father are one, and especially if you, in whatever Christian tradition you worship, yearn for a strong ecumenism in which Christians speak from the heart as the Holy Spirit guides them, refusing to merely paper over substantive differences, then there’s something you must hear.
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, liturgical pit bull of Catholic traditionalists in America, has a podcast recording of Pope Benedict XVI and Patriarch Bartholomew I reciting the Greek text of the 381 Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed together. (You’ll have to scroll down through lots of white space on the link to reach the Greek text itself and the podcast link. The occasion, for those interested, was the liturgy for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, opening a year-long celebration of the life and ministry of Paul. Patriarch Bartholomew was at the Vatican in part to return Benedict’s recent visit to the Phanar in Istanbul.)
I realize that most Ekklesia Project endorsers are neither Catholic nor Orthodox, a handful at most can follow spoken Greek, and the thought of two patriarchs reciting a creed produced by a council called by Constantine I will strike some as too high church to stomach, but this is a moment of ecumenical history (to my knowledge only the second time this has happened since the 1054 schism), a millennium of division one step closer to healing.
Zuhlsdorf focuses on the wording of the text (The verb “believe” in first person singular, the absence of “and the Son,” and so forth). Other Catholic (see here and here) and Orthodox bloggers seem more taken by the event itself.
What disappoints me, though, is the lack of liberal (“liberal” misses the mark and is something of a category error, I know, but I’m sticking with the vernacular) commentary on the moment. Has the Nicene Creed (or any creed, for that matter) become “so five minutes ago” we can’t be bothered? When the Holy Spirit invites separated brothers to stand and speak together, are we to pretend nothing happened?
(Originally published Monday, June 30, 2008)
by Debra Dean Murphy
“Hospitality” is an overused word in our culture. We speak of the hospitality “industry,” a 3.5 trillion dollar service sector of the global economy. “Hospitality management” is now offered as a degree program in most colleges and universities.
For many people, hospitality is exercised primarily as a form of social entertaining: magazines like Southern Living set impossible standards for home décor, flower arranging, menu planning, and so on. The people we invite into our well-scrubbed homes to sit at our perfectly-set tables and eat our carefully-prepared dinners (meant to impress more than to nourish) are usually people of our own socioeconomic status, people pretty much like us. Children are often regarded as spoilers of this kind of antiseptic hospitality and are kept out of sight or off-site. Moreover, this Southern Living (per)version of hospitality makes us anxious, guilt-ridden score-keepers. “Didn’t the Smiths have us over for drinks last month, honey? I guess we’ll need to return the invitation soon, though I really can’t stand that obnoxious husband . . . “
But hospitality as industry/management/entertainment is not the hospitality that Christians are invited to practice. As Beth Newman says, Christian hospitality “draws us into a richer context where we must make sense of ourselves as ‘guests’ and ‘hosts,’ acknowledge our dependence on others, and learn to live with gratitude.”
Christian hospitality assumes that the stranger we may unexpectedly encounter has come to bring a gift because, as another writer has put it, “Christ came to bring unlimited gifts, and Christ was a stranger—and that gift may turn out to be crucial for the maintenance and flourishing of Christian community.”
Such a truth has important, unavoidable, uncomfortable implications for how we in the Church talk about and put into practice hospitality toward the strangers we encounter—immigrants, beggars, and other outsiders who are usually not invited to our Southern Living-style dinner parties.
My own willingness to practice gospel hospitality was put to the test recently. My husband had helped arrange a stateside visit for a Sudanese woman, an Anglican priest, he met on his trip to Africa last year. When the plans for her accommodations for her first weekend here were unexpectedly altered, hosting her in our home became the only option. It happened to be the weekend of our older son’s graduation from college—we had lots of things to do (impressive meals to plan) and we were expecting out-of-town visitors. I was not enthusiastic about the intrusion of this guest; I didn’t want to be her host. But as the weekend unfolded, my initial reluctance was duly chastened, my fretfulness unfounded. Dorcas’ presence with us was a gift, and I (and each member of my family) was a recipient of her generous, hospitable spirit. Just who was the guest and who was the host that weekend was hard to discern.
Such an experience is one of the humbling gifts of cruciform hospitality: just when we think we are offering hospitality to a stranger (aren’t we nice), the stranger herself turns out to be Christ in disguise, ministering to us.
(Originally published Saturday, May 24, 2008)
by Kyle Childress
Many of us remember the experience of having someone, usually a parent or grandparent, tell us when we were young, “You know, when I was your age I had to walk to school and it was uphill both ways.” That old saying has been echoing in my head a lot lately. At least since I’ve been walking from my house to the church occasionally and then back again. When I used to drive the same route I knew it was uphill both directions but not in the same way I now know. To be more specific, it is more uphill going than it is coming back and the tilt to one side is hard on the ankles.
Noticing things, paying attention to details is a recurring wonder to me the more walking I do. My preferred walk is the Tucker House trails behind the SFA Native Plant Center. There’s no traffic, not many people, beautiful woods and plant life, and I spot plenty of animals, birds, and reptiles (copperheads!) when I pay attention to what’s around me. Once I leave those quiet trails I’ve noticed a lot of other things. For instance, I’ve noticed that Nacogdoches does not have a lot of sidewalks and we’re not a very pedestrian or bicyclist friendly place. Some folks think that if you’re out walking then something must be wrong with you and they express their thoughts with various rude behaviors. Although, I’ve also noticed that as gas prices soar, fewer and fewer drivers think a walker is odd. I’ve noticed that people are in a hurry and some are more hurried than others as they zoom past me. I’ve noticed people in their yards like to wave, children like to talk, dogs like to bark, and some dogs like to bark, growl, and run after you. I’ve noticed geraniums and azaleas and irises and poison ivy and fire ants. I’ve noticed that good shoes are important and a knapsack full of books is not. I’ve noticed that it’s harder to get mad when I’m walking and easier to smile. I’ve noticed that I can walk further, longer, and more enjoyably than I could six or seven months ago and that my heart feels better. I’ve noticed that I don’t mind the time used for walking like I did when I began. And I’ve noticed that walking is a great time for thinking, imagining, and talking with God.
Theologian Kosuke Koyama suggests that some things God can teach us only very slowly, at a walking pace. As an example, he says that God decided to spend forty years to teach one lesson to the children of Israel: “that human beings do not live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God.” God teaches and walks slowly because God is love and the speed of love is slow; it is attentive; it notices. Koyama says, God walks three-miles-an-hour because that’s the speed of our walking and God walks beside us in love. The prophet Micah says that God only requires us to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8). I wonder if Micah means that God walks humbly and slowly and if we want to know God then we have to walk with the same slowness and humility? Zooming through our lives, pedal to the metal, multi-tasking with our cell phones and gulping our coffee, perhaps we’re missing God? We catch a glimpse in our rear-view mirror of a slow-moving figure and never pay the least notice that we’ve just missed God.
One of my thoughts while walking has been what it would mean for us to be a “slow church?” There is a movement coming out of Europe called “slow food.” It is the opposite of fast-food. Slow food means not only do we take time to eat, enjoy, and savor our food and do so communally, with friends and family, but that we take the time to properly prepare food and notice where it comes from and how it is grown and its effects on the environment. Good meals take time. So do good churches.
My friend Stan Wilson, a pastor of the outstanding yet modest sized Northside Baptist Church in Clinton, Mississippi, and I have been talking about what a slow church might be. Or to use another metaphor, one used in environmental and agrarian conversations, a “sustainable church.” I’m not sure what a slow church or a sustainable church might look like but I’m pretty sure it is a church small enough that the members notice one another and pay loving attention toward others.
English Baptist Thomas Helwys, in his 1611 Confession, wrote that the members of every congregation should know one another so they can perform the duties of love towards one another “and therefore a church ought not to consist of such a multitude as cannot have particular knowledge one of another” (article 16).
My hunch is that a slow church or sustainable church is one that slows down the pace of life and learns to walk with God and with one another. Some of this might very well mean that we literally get out of our cars, out of our air-conditioned houses, and certainly away from the televisions and technology and walk (or guys – join the “old guys yoga” group). Perhaps it might mean that we do more gardening and notice more of what’s going on in God’s creation and encouraging less use of fossil fuels in Nacogdoches. It probably has something to do with local economics and encouraging local neighborhoods with sidewalks where people can walk around and get to know each other. Maybe it means that we don’t produce “fast Christians” with the expertise of a glitzy plan from a mega-church in a big city, and we trust more in what God is doing through one another right here, and that becoming Christian takes time and the practice of skills like prayer and forgiveness and service.
I don’t know for sure but it’s what I’m thinking about when I’m walking. I’d like to know what you think. Meanwhile, as you speed up the hill on Austin Street approaching the church, slow down enough to notice the fellow trudging along. Give him a smile and a kind wave. It might be me.
(Originally published Tuesday, May 20, 2008)
by Debra Dean Murphy
Working, as I do, in low-church Methodism in the South, I’m called upon regularly, in a variety of contexts, to offer extemporaneous prayers. I also frequently hear others—both clergy and laity— pray “on the fly.”
Extemporaneous prayers can be as varied in substance and style as those who offer them, but I have to say that the longer I am in this setting where extemporaneous prayers are valued as “authentic” and “heart-felt,” while historic, liturgical, or other written prayers are subject to suspicion or seen as a crutch for the less articulate (how ridiculous), the more I long to retreat to a corner somewhere, cover my head (and ears), and pray the rosary.
(Praying with beads is a fairly new discipline for me but one that has breathed new life into old habits and assumptions about prayer).
One of the things that is often lost in ad-lib praying is eloquence, by which I don’t mean flowery phrases; there are usually plenty of those. By “eloquence” I mean the basic dictionary definition of the word: the art of using language with aptness; that is, with both intelligence (not cleverness) and with a sense of occasion and purpose.
Which is why, as Stanley Hauerwas once wrote, “the loss of eloquence in prayer is a moral loss.” But try telling that to someone convinced that the language of prayer (and of worship generally) must mimic the culture’s vernacular lest people tune out and turn off.
Why is it that we don’t trust the language of the liturgy—of the historic prayers of the church and of scripture itself—to do its transformative work? Why are we so anxious when we pray not to bore or intimidate—both others and ourselves?
(Originally published Thursday, April 17, 2008)
by Debra Dean Murphy
Easter Monday marked the anniversary of the death of Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered while celebrating the Eucharist at the chapel of Divine Providence Cancer Hospital in San Salvador on March 24, 1980.
We should not wonder that a church has a lot of cross to bear. Otherwise, it will not have a lot of resurrection. An accommodating church, a church that seeks prestige without the pain of the cross, is not the authentic church of Jesus Christ. (February 19, 1978)
Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know that we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down to proclaim blessed the poor, blessed the thirsting for justice, blessed the suffering. (May 11, 1978)
Let us not forget: we are a pilgrim church, subject to misunderstanding, to persecution, but a church that walks serene because it bears the force of love. (March 14, 1977)
From The Violence of Love, Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, S.J.
(Originally published Wednesday, March 26, 2008)
by Debra Dean Murphy
At the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. - Barack Obama, 19 March 2008, Philadelphia
by Randy Cooper
David Kline is an Amish man. He insists that Amish people are not understood. Amish people are maligned for being against all forms of modern technology. That is not true, he says. Rather, the Amish use only those technologies that, in their best judgment, do not harm their community life.
For example, lanterns are not allowed on their farm field equipment. With lanterns they would be tempted to work into the night hours. And working in the fields past sunset would weaken their family life and would overwork their horses.
Several years ago the question came up about whether David Kline’s community would use telephones. Everyone in the church—the community—met and discussed it a number of times. It took all summer for them to decide whether they would have phones. They finally decided against it. And they had two reasons.
First, they knew that if they began to use telephones, they would carry out conversations less and less in a face to face manner. Second, if they had telephones, they feared that their children would begin talking more and more exclusively to one another. The decision about telephones was made in light of what was good for the community and for the human word. Some people believe we live under a “technological imperative.’ If we can invent it or use it, we do so with little foresight as to the repercussions down the road.
Look at what television has done to family and community life. And people now speak of the “virtual community” of the Internet. Imagine being a part of a church where major decisions of your life are brought to the congregation for discernment.
Imagine being a part of a community where everyone agrees to say “yes” to those things that strengthen the community and “no” to those that weaken it. And don’t dismiss the Amish too quickly.
By and large, theirs is the only agricultural community in the entire country that has maintained relative health in the past 30 years. They have something to teach us.
(Originally posted Friday, January 11, 2008)
