Future of the Church:
Implications for Mission and Ministry
By Douglas John Hall
The following article is an address given at a gathering of Emmanuel College
Alumni/ae on May 15, 2003. Professor Hall would not normally be thought of as
someone sympathetic to the perspective of TDO and so our publication of his
address may seem somewhat strange. But he poses questions of great relevance to
all who care deeply about Christian theology - and he poses them with such
passion, thoughtfulness and eloquence that we can benefit from hearing what he
has to say. Professor Hall has been kind enough to grant permission to reprint
these words. - Ed.
The
topic on which you asked me to speak this morning is a very expansive one. As
some of you may know, I have thought about this subject quite a lot before; but
like really profound questions "The Future of the Church" is one that never
really can be exhausted, and in our time, I think, that is truer than it
ever was. None of us can assume, any longer, that the church of Jesus Christ -
not to speak of this or that denomination of the church - will have the future
that generations and centuries of Western Christians assumed it would have as a
matter of course. Most of us even wonder, sometimes, when we think in centuries
and millennia (as we are apt to do at this opening of a new century and
millennium) whether the church as we have known it will have any future at all.
It
has been my contention, in all that I have written on this subject, that the
Christian Movement does have a future, and one that is at least
potentially more provocative - and more compatible with the biblical conception
of the movement that began with Pentecost - than a great deal of what has
presented itself as church to history heretofore. But to have that
future, we shall have to stop trying to have the future that fifteen centuries
of Christendom conditioned us to desire and expect, and that is a hard lesson to
learn. A millennium and a half of Constantinian conditioning is a great deal of
conditioning!
This
morning, however, I want to move from this broad generalization to consider more
specifically our church, The United Church of Canada.
There are many ways in which the question of our future as a denomination could
be approached, and I am conscious at the outset of the limited nature of what
can be said in the few minutes available. But I decided that it might be useful
as a catalyst to further discussion if I shared with you some of the major
points that I attempted to make at a remarkable gathering of Christians and Jews
in Atlanta this past winter. This event was sponsored by the Institute for
Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. Some sixteen of us, approximately
half of us Christians (Protestant and Catholic) and half Jews, were invited to
think together about the future of our shared traditions. The Jewish delegation
included the four authors of a fascinating and evocative document called
Debru Emet, including Professor David Novak of the University of Toronto.
This document calls upon Jews to rethink the character of Christianity in the
light of post-Holocaust expressions of Christian faith that no longer adopt a
supercessionistic attitude towards Judaism. Debru Emet has been endorsed
by hundreds of Jewish rabbis and religious leaders, and is one of the most
promising developments in Jewish-Christian dialogue.
For
this particular conference, each participant was asked to respond very briefly
to two questions. And what I want to share with you is my response to
these questions, because it represents an overview of what I have come to think
about the present reality and the future challenges to our denomination. After I
have presented this statement, I will make five quick observations about some of
its concrete implications as I see them.
The
first question each of us was asked to address in Atlanta was the following:
How would you describe to someone outside your tradition the most pressing
challenges facing your denomination from within? In other words, if you
were to direct the attention of your denomination inward, what "internal" issues
would you identify as posing the greatest challenge or threat to its viability?
After I explained a little about the history and make-up of The United Church of
Canada (which of course you always have to do in US-American settings!), I
answered that question in the following way:
The
great strength of my denomination is its long and faithful history of social
concern and activism. While in many ways The United Church of Canada has been
the most (culturally) "established" of Canadian churches outside Quebec, it is
also the most vigilant for the general good, the most critical of economic,
racial, gender, ethnic and other forms of injustice, and the most outspoken in
relation to exclusionary behaviour in both society and church. (And in that
connection I spoke about the decision of the General Council in 1988 concerning
the ordination of gay and lesbian persons - a decision that constantly amazes
American Christians, like the Lutherans and Presbyterians, whose denominations
are currently agonizing over this matter.)
The
greatest internal challenge to our denomination (I continued) is its need
to recover a profound and working theological consciousness. As a "union"
church, the United Church of Canada tended from its beginnings in 1925 to subdue
theology; for the doctrinal differences between the three uniting traditions
were in some instances significant, and so over-attention to doctrine proved a
barrier to ecumenical dialogue and unity. One-third of the then-existing
Presbyterian church remained out of the union-ostensibly because of doctrinal
disagreement, though this was frequently an excuse for less honourable reasons.
The
United Church has also been prevented from more intensive theological inquiry by
the very fact of its cultural establishment. Heretofore it has not needed to
commend itself as a community of religious thought, for its pews were
replenished, generation after generation, in a nearly automatic way.
Since World War II, however, this automatic
renewal has ended - quite abruptly. After the brief boom of the 1950s, all
Canadian churches, with the exception of some fundamentalist/biblicist groups,
experienced this depletion, this "humiliation" - much more so than churches in
the USA. There is a growing awareness that without a greater sense of our
identity and mission as Christians, we are in danger of being assimilated
into the general secularity or the vague, amorphous "spirituality" of our
culture. At the same time, unless we are able to undertake a deeper struggle
with our own traditions of belief, we shall be ill-equipped to enter into the
inter-faith discourse that is increasingly important in our
multicultural, religiously pluralistic society.
The
challenge is: How can we achieve greater theological depth without
courting doctrinal narrowness, and without diminishing the "activist"
priorities that have made our church one of the most progressive and even
prophetic forces in our society. There are minorities within our church that
would gladly have us become (in their terms) "more biblical," "more doctrinally
pure and uniform" - and, concomitantly, not only drop much of our "radical"
social agenda but discourage the breadth of belief and spirituality that has
been our ethos and aim. That, in my view, would constitute a very great loss.
Yet I think we shall not be able to sustain our Christian social ethic
(or possible even our institution as such) unless we attain more sophisticated
and disciplined levels of theological awareness and dialogue. On the one hand we
are affected by the general simplism and anti-intellectualism that manifests
itself at many levels of society; on the other hand, theology is so consistently
preconceived by our people as mere "doctrine" - and at that conservative
doctrine -that it is hard to attack the effects of anti-intellectualism in the
church without seeming to suggest a return to sterile dogmatism.
The
shortest way of naming the challenge to our denomination, then, is to say that
we must seriously address the question: What is theology? What would it
mean to be a community of faith seeking earnestly and passionately to
understand what it believes, to the end that it could carry on a mission to
its world that is neither, on the one hand, the imposition upon its culture of
extraordinary and arcane claims nor, on the other hand, a slightly pious,
stained-glass version of the going values and pursuits of the dominant ethos?
What is theology, Christianly understood?
The
second question to which we were asked to respond in Atlanta transfers the focus
from internal to external, missional concern: How would you describe to
someone outside your tradition the most pressing challenges facing your
tradition from outside? In other words, if you were to direct your
denomination's gaze to the world at large, how would you articulate the greatest
challenges put to your community by the world?
To
this I answered:
There are a great many challenges coming to all religious faiths from the
side of the world today, including: the various expressions of ecological
concern; the immense economic injustice of the global population; the pull of
consumerism and pop-culture emanating, chiefly, from the USA, and the consequent
threat to local and national cultures; the covert and overt hostilities between
races and peoples leading, often, to horrendous warfare; the increasingly
obvious facts of religious plurality and culture-conflict, etc.
Above all, our world is challenging us to declare unequivocally whether we are
on the side of life -creaturely life - or do we foster, perhaps
unintentionally, societal mentalities that lead to death in its many forms and
guises? A graffiti written on the wall of the Presbyterian College in Montreal
shortly after September 11, 2001, read simply:
"Religion Kills!" Every seriously religious person and community must address
the challenge stated so incisively in this epithet; for almost every instance of
global violence today, including the war in Iraq, is being fuelled, if not
initiated, by some religion or other. (Incidentally, a book that
addresses this question from inside the Empire is Charles Kimball's When
Religion Becomes Evil.)
The
United Church of Canada, at least comparatively speaking, has been exceptionally
conscious of most of these challenges, and active in seeking to meet them. Its
combination of "liberality" and social-democratic sensibility has given it both
incentive and scope in addressing the great instabilities of "justice, peace,
and the integrity of creation" (to use the World Council of Churches' formula).
If the United Church continues to survive, and even in a certain
(non-quantitative) sense to thrive despite the forces of anti-religious and
apathetic influence in its context and in itself, it is because it has, at its
best, a greater interest in the state of the world than in its own survival and
prosperity. I would say that in this respect the United Church of Canada is
exceptionally wholesome. As a theologian, I do not feel that I must "direct my
church's gaze to the world at large"; the world has been in its line of focus
for a very long time, and still today.
What is less clear (and here I link my responses
to these two questions) is whether my church is sufficiently cognizant of and
attentive to the deeper questions of the world today - the questions that cannot
be answered by acts of compassion, inclusion, solidarity, and so forth;
questions that are not immediately obvious, and often not even asked,
explicitly; but questions out of which persons and whole communities actually
live. Ancient questions, classical questions; the question of being, of
meaning and purpose, of the good, of beauty - perennial questions that are
present today in very concrete and specific forms, even (and perhaps especially)
when they are camouflaged by relative affluence.
For
example, there is an unacknowledged or hidden public despair plaguing our
society - or, to say the same thing in another way, there is an absence, a
dearth, of operative hope. (Operative as distinct from rhetorical hope!)
This absence affects every aspect of life, and all the more so because it is
repressed. It expresses itself in fatalistic, mindless, selfish and often
aggressive public behaviour. Unlike some previous periods (for example the
Victorian or Edwardian period) our historical period is not characterized by any
commanding sense of human purpose, but on the contrary exhibits all the earmarks
of teleological scepticism, confusion and indifference. "What are human beings
for?" asks one of the great seers of our culture, Wendell Berry. According to
the CBC, one in every four Canadians is "clinically depressed" - and surely this
cannot be put down to mere individual malaise. It is a social reality.
There is some connection between this type of despair and the loss of any
compelling anthropological vision. By comparison with the clever machines we
have invented, we humans feel increasingly superfluous and inferior. In both
direct and indirect ways, we are told - by science, by futurologists, by
religions whose enthusiasm for the divine takes the form of a denigration of the
human - that human beings are "the problem." If the human species were to
disappear, says the great Harvard scientist E.O. Wilson, the world would
flourish; if the ant species disappeared, there would be chaos. (Go figure:
which species is more vital, and which dispensable?)
Facile religious answers to such questions are
rightly rejected by our world - or at least by its most thoughtful inhabitants.
That is why a recovery of mere "doctrine" will not do! The questions must first
be lived with - and without religious safety nets. Institutional religion still
functions too consistently as an opiate against precisely these deeper, more
devastating questions. Until a community of faith exposes itself to these
abiding human questions in their contemporary forms, its "answers" will be
superficial, archaic, and (to some) profoundly offensive.
What
I understand by "theology" (to return to my response to the first question)
entails living with and between two never-easily-compatible components: (1)
unprotected exposure to the great questions of the social context, and (2) a
disciplined and sustained contemplation of the tradition (including Scripture
and the long history of Christian thought). The church that is salt, yeast and
light in its social context must live between these two (I repeat)
never-easily-compatible components. It must be on the one hand an explorer,
at depth, of the human predicament, as that predicament is being experienced
here and now; and simultaneously it must seek illumination and relief from this
predicament through a life of sustained study and communal reflection,
listening, and prayer.
This was the substance of my
formal response to the questions posed at the Atlanta consultation. Let me
conclude this talk by offering five observations about the implications of such
an analysis.
First, I should tell you that most of those present at this
consultation - especially the Christians, but also in considerable measure the
Jews - could readily detect the problems and possibilities of their own
communities of belief in much of what I claimed for our church in this
statement. We are not alone! All of the mainline religious communities have been
depending far too heavily on convention, historical conditioning, the religious
habits of the past. We all have majorities that are biblically and theologically
ill-equipped, not to say illiterate; and we are all torn between powerful
minority factions that want to pull us this way or that. Several times in this
particular consultation (and I have heard the same complaints in many other
settings), participants observed that it is terribly hard to maintain "the
centre" in the face of the polarization of the avowed religious Right and the
avowed religious Left - a polarization that the media love, cultivate, and
grossly distort.
Second, what I maintained in this statement is the greatest
challenge to The United Church of Canada, namely, to wrestle with the question
"What is theology?" must, I think, be seen in our case as it applies to a
Christian denomination that on the whole reflects the Liberal ecclesiastical
tradition. Personally, I do not like the distinctions "liberal" and
"conservative," because they tell us very little, and are too easily just
dismissive. Like most of you, I suspect, I have been called "liberal" and I have
been called "conservative" - and of course the meaning always depends on who is
doing the calling! Comparatively speaking, however, it is pretty obvious that
the internal struggle of our denomination is not with a powerful conservative
temptation, such as the Christian Right in the USA. With few exceptions, we
value personal integrity and communal diversity. Our struggle, therefore, is to
maintain these democratic values without crossing over that invisible line that
leads to "anything goes."
I think that the American
"process" theologian, John Cobb Junior, himself a self-declared "Liberal"
expressed the challenge to such communities succinctly and accurately when he
wrote the following:
I
am convinced that liberal Christianity has little future unless it can
articulate its stance to itself in such a way as to differentiate itself from
the activist, mystical, and psychological movements towards which it gravitates
from time to time. Theologically it cannot exist as a watered-down form of
conservative Christianity. If we liberal Christians are unable to state the
authentic Christian gospel meaningfully and relevantly in our own terms, there
is little value in our survival. Unless it is the Christian gospel that makes us
liberal, and not simply an erosion of faith, we are not in any serious sense
liberal Christians. I am personally troubled by the extent to which we have lost
our centredness in the gospel, but I remain quite sure that the gospel requires
of us that we be liberal. [Religion-online (Philadelphia:Westminster, 1973)]
Third,
you will have noticed that much of the response that I gave to the first
question - the question that concerns the internal challenge to our
church - depends upon the distinction between "theology" and "doctrine" and/or
dogma. I am sure that Emmanuel College and all the other theological seminaries
of our denomination have always recognized this distinction, and taught
ordinands to recognize it. Nevertheless, the impression persists in the United
Church (and most other once-mainline churches) that theology is about doctrine,
and that those who are most theologically engaged are those clergy and laity who
know their doctrine, teach and preach their doctrine, and
doing so manifest a maximum of personal religious certitude. In other words,
theology tends to be thought the preserve, not only of professionals, but of the
most reactionary among us. And this has the polarizing effect of alienating
large numbers of other people, including most of the laity, from serious
theological exploration, and consequently of leaving the churches open to
simplistic, non-critical adaptations of the current values, pursuits and
cliches of our media-conditioned society.
When
I claim that the paramount internal question facing the United Church is the
question, "What is theology?" I am not suggesting that we should all
engage in endless debate about "theological method" - certainly not! But I am
saying that we must do something quite intentional to overcome this absurd and
damaging hiatus between Christian thinking and Christian doing.
The Christian life does not offer us an either/or: either thinking or doing,
either orientation to the past or orientation to the future, either
preoccupation with the "text" (scripture and tradition) or preoccupation with
the social "context." We are called to live at the crossroads of both of these
polarities. The disciplined contemplation of what has been handed over to us
(scripture, tradition, the evolution of doctrine) is absolutely vital to our
ministry and our mission. Without it, we shall only reflect our culture,
we shall not engage it. But when preservation of the tradition becomes
the church's primary objective, the world hears no "gospel" but only yesterday's
orthodoxy. To discern "gospel" (for gospel must always be discovered; it is not
the church's permanent possession!), the Christian community must deliberately
and unguardedly open itself to the unadorned reality of its social context. It
will come to know "good news" only if and as it exposes itself to the "bad news"
that is currently threatening the life of the creation.
Fourth, I want to comment on the second, external challenge to
our church as I tried to delineate it in the consultation in Atlanta. And in
doing so I hope to illustrate, a little further, what the work of "theology"
means to me.
My contention in the
statement you heard is that while our denomination has been commendable in its
vigilance for specific issues of justice, peace and other vital contemporary
concerns, we have -with exceptions - neglected the abiding questions of human
existence and struggle: being and not-being, the vocation of the human creature
in the midst of creation - What is good? What is evil? What is time? What is
eternity? "What are people for?" Is there any hope?
These questions are not just "theoretical" or "abstract." They underlie, in
fact, every one of the concrete ethical and moral problems that have occupied so
much of the best Christian energy in our church's past. For instance, there is
no use in telling a congregation that it should devote itself heart and soul to
global problems of justice, peace and the environment if that congregation is
heavily populated with people who wonder, in their private thoughts, whether the
human species has any particular purpose-whether history is meaningful or (as
the modern man Shakespeare said) just "a tale told by an idiot."
And
if your congregation is representative of the human race at large in our time
and place, you had better-I think-assume that at least a significant portion of
it entertains precisely such thoughts.
For despair is the underlying
mood of our age. But despair, theologically as distinct from psychologically
understood, is not just the obvious, hand wringing anxiety that is associated
with the usual neuroses and psychoses. To be sure, our working despair as a
society is in a certain way visible in the high incidence of clinical
depression, or in the alarming statistics about obesity, drug abuse, marriage
and family breakdown, suicide, and so forth (or in the crazed and orgasmic
yelling that so often passes for music in this society). Our corporate despair
is far more dangerously at work, however, in the seemingly benign and
comfortable classes that do not agonize over global injustice, or leave the
protest against unlawful warfare up to "peaceniks," or (often enough) don't even
bother to vote in civic and other elections. This is the despair of which Soren
Kierkegaard wrote when he said, "The specific character of despair is precisely
this: it is unaware of being despair." [Sickness Unto Death] For,
theologically speaking, despair means just what the Latin etymology of the word
tells us: the absence of hope (de -spes, literally, un-hope); the
absence, that is to say, of any working sense of purpose, meaning and vocation
on whose basis human beings would find it necessary - simple necessary! - to try
to act responsibly, justly, peacefully, and lovingly towards the world and its
myriad creature.
It
is not the overt despair of the few that should concern us chiefly, in our
Christian mission, but the covert, repressed despair-that is to say, the absence
of hope-that besets the many. That despair, though it is the most
insidious, is also the most difficult to discern, name, and counter.
And
that is why mere "doctrine," while it is certainly a vital part of the
theological task, is no substitute for theology. The Scriptures, and the best
Christian traditions, can all tell us that despair is the deadliest temptation,
and why, and that its only antidote is hope. And we certainly need to know what
they tell us - Jeremiah, and Paul, and Augustine, and Luther, and Kierkegaard,
and Simone Weil and all the others. But they cannot "go there" for us. We
ourselves have to enter that darkness-each generation of Christians, and in each
place, has again to walk through the valley of the shadow of death; for even
though that which negates life-sin and death and the demonic and the despair of
them - has a ghastly sameness about it, it is never mere repetition, never quite
the same. And until we expose ourselves to the contextually quite explicit
darkness of our own time and our own place, we shall never become persuasive
witnesses to the light that shines in the darkness; for that light only shines
for those who actually live in the darkness.
Clearly, gospel today - and so both ministry and mission - has principally to do
with the transforming power in human life of what we call, in our tradition,
hope. But Christian hope is not North American optimism. It is not "cheap hope."
It cannot be acquired without some close acquaintance with its antithesis -
despair, de-hope -and it cannot be communicated in slogans and catchy
hymn-tunes and upbeat, ten-minute sermonettes. I have to confess that I have
never been much moved by most of the sermons on hope that I have heard, and I
think that's because, with a few exceptions, the preachers of these sermons have
given far too little evidence of their own having learned hope through an
ongoing dialogue with despair. Too often, they have seemed to be labouring under
the impression - the illusion, I would say - that they have to be, or to seem,
exceptionally, professionally "hopeful."
If I
have any advice for preachers today it would be this: let your despair show a
little, and your doubt, and your anxiety about the human (not just the
Christian!) Future; and let us, your congregation, hear something of how you
yourself are wrestling with these negations as one who tries to listen to the
scriptures and the best teachings of past and present theologians biblical
scholars and other witnesses to "the hope that is in us."
Fifth and finally, a specific word about mission, and a specific word
about ministry. First, mission. I have qualms about any overt - and certainly
any aggressive - Christian mission on the part of Western churches today;
because, no matter how well-intentioned and "nice" we may be, we cast shadows
that are not our own. We cast the shadows of a millennium and a half of imperial
Christianity. I think that our Christian mission, at least for the present, has
to be concentrated on being Christian and not on promulgating
"Christianity." If we are genuinely disciples of the Christ in this apprehensive
and restless society, there will always be those who ask the reason why; and
that - when it occurs - is our invitation to become, in the good sense of the
term, evangelists.
Meanwhile, I think that out most important mission as a "liberal" church is to
become knowledgeable and articulate about what we believe - in John Cobb's
sense. Mission is not only the "going out"; it is the preparing to "go out."
There is no point going out into the world as evangelists if we don't know what
the Evangel is! The motto at which we arrived at another conference in Atlanta -
a two month long seminar on the mission of the church in the 21st
Century - was this: "In the church tell the story; in the world live
the story."
Finally about ministry in the sense of a professional ministry: if anything
that I have said in this address is true, then it would have to follow that "the
ministry" has now to become in a real and untrammelled sense a teaching
eldership- which is of course what the Reformed side of our United Church
heritage, i.e. both the Presbyterian and the Congregational ecclesiologies, said
it should be. Particularly in the past fifty years, a managerial-promotional
conception of the minister has strongly tended to displace this. None of the
dominant traditions in which we stand (and certainly not the biblical one)
presents the minister as the CEO of the congregation! If I am right in saying
that our particular challenge in the United Church, as in other liberal churches
particularly, is to deepen our theological awareness and the seriousness of our
internal discourse, then it is obvious that those who have been called and
trained to think theologically about the world will have to become the
congregational enablers of such a process. It also means, of course, that
theological seminaries will have to prepare candidates for ordination to assume
that role, and not clutter their minds and consciences with administrative and
other so-called "practical" tasks that can in most cases be carried out more
efficiently by lay members of congregations. As the church needs to take a
lesson from the synagogue, so the ministry needs to take a lesson from the
rabbinate.
To conclude: we find
ourselves in uncertain times, as Christians today. I think most of us know, in
our heart of hearts, that we cannot carry on business as usual - the world in
which we did that has, like a carpet, been pulled out from underneath our feet.
What we may become is still unclear. Many things will have to be tried-and
should be tried. Most will fail, but some will prove worthy. The main thing is:
think about it; consider it; discuss it; pray about it - don't just let the
long-day's-dying of Christendom roll over us like a great tidal wave. Thank God,
the church is not fated to be only what it has been. Opportunities are given us
today that generations have not had, for we are no longer locked into religious
and sociological patterns and preconceptions that bedevilled even the great
reformers of the past. The end of Christendom could be a new beginning
for the Christian movement.
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