Directions of a Pastoral Lifetime: Part Iv: Studies

By William Flewelling

These "Studies" comprise the bulk of my more or less academic-styled searching toward understanding of aspects of my ministry, particularly with regard to ministry itself, to the life of prayer, to ecumenism and various other aspects of ministry as I encountered them along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496918130

William Flewelling

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. Led by a request from Mildred Corwin of Manua OH when I arrived there in 1976, I long developed and led a series of bible studies there and in LaPorte IN and New Martinsville WV. These studies proved to be very feeding to me in my pastoral work and won a certain degree of following in my congregations. My first study was on 1 Peter, chosen because I knew almost nothing about the book. I now live quietly in retirement with my wife of 54 years, a pair of dogs and several cats.

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© 2014 William Flewelling. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 06/13/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1814-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1813-0 (e)

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Scripture quotations marked RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

Table of Contents

Organization in the Church A Review Essay

Befriendment: A Turn To The Heart

Forgive and Forget?

Reflections on Christian Tradition

Toward A Theology Of Stewardship

Faith: An Inquiry by way of The Epistle to the Romans

A Note On Pastoral Method

An Exchange

Sorting a Puzzlement on Senility

A Tension In Ministry

The Use Of Inner Experience

Beatitudes Of Prayer:

Prayer – A Moment’s Meditation

Ministry: A Love That Opens The Closed

Notes On Ministry – An Open Letter

Coming To Preach

Ministry As Anomaly

Liminal Ministry

A Brief Reflection On Ministry

The Privacy Of Ministry

Reflections On Vocation Guessed

From Three Letters

Redemption As Ministry

Ministry … In A Destitute Time

Ministry by Incarnation, by Crucifixion, by Resurrection: a Meditation

Coming To Ministry Fresh

How My Gifts and Abilities Relate to the Regional Minister Gifts Profile of the Christian Church in Georgia

Leadership By Wisdom

Reflection on Preaching

Notes On Creativity

Christian Education As Formation

The Pastor As Theologian

A Homiletical Note

Olive And Me:

The Fool In Ministry

‘Salos’ In Ministry

Brought To Ministry In Advent

Commentary: What I Learned

Theoria, Theoligia, Diakonia

Humility: Gropings After Comprehension

Browsing

Hebrews 10:31-39 A Musing

Boundary Value Problems

Notes on Praying the Scripture: A Reflection

Proverbs 27:6 A Reflection On A Sentence I Analysis

Ecumenical Agenda A Personal Reflection

Seeking God: The Church At One

A Mirror At Whitby

Ekklesia in Oikoumenei (Ecumenism and Repentance)

Church as Personal: A Refraction by way of John Zizioulas

Musing On A Separated Church

Spiritual Parenting: Some Reflections

Imitation In Participation: A Paradigm In Faith

‘In Travail With You Again’ The Mother In Spirit

Praying With The Head In The Heart: a reflection of faithful experience

Reflecting Second Hand from Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

Praying With Our Erotic God: A Reflection By Way of St. Maximos The Confessor

From Plotinus & The Heavens To The Soul, Prayer, Relationship And Ministry: A Brief Odyssey

Thoughts On Contemplation: From Plotinus, Ennead IV.4

Beauty: A Sighted Invitation To The More

A Truly Poetic Unity: A Reflection From Plotinus, Ennead III.2.16-17

Pursuit Of The Transcendent Center: Excluding All

The Experience Of Intercession: A Witness

Contemplation As Completion Of Prayer: A Reflection From Augustine Of Hippo

On Praying: Some Reflections From Experience

Immediacy In Prayer

Spiritual Life: Reflections In A Mode

Moldings Of Worship

Notes On Leading Worship

Church Off Main Street: A Reflective Piece

Bible And Church: A Case Study

Kalandar: 30 March: John Climacus

Conversatio Morum

Coming To Prayer

Musing On Success

Preliminary Notes On Commitment: On The Way Of Christian Faith

White Hats And Black Hats

Preaching A Funeral: Method In Context

The Festival As Sunday

Passion In Liturgy: A Reflecting Discussion

The Fullness Of Praise

Disciples of Christ: A People In Covenant

How Long?!

The Limits Of Cited Authority

The Forward Thrust Of Faithfulness: An Embrace Toward Freshness Of Spirit

A Modest Proposal (… with Apologies to Jonathan Swift)

One Another: An Investigation

Thoughts On Ethics A Reflection through Nicholas Berdyaev

Courtesy And Respect: Adults and the Children Lent Them

Falling in Love: Reflections after the Fact

An Aesthetics Of Prophetic Perception

Our Creating God And The Limits Of Logic

No Bag For These Marbles: A Reflection On Christian Unity

Final Gifts: Nearing Death Awareness

American Morality in Decline

Notes On Community

Preliminary Notes on Commitment: On The Way Of Christian Faith

Confession Of Faith, With Baptism: Notes Upon Reflection

The Supper Of The Lord: Reflections On An Act Of Oblation

Expression Of Faith: Mission And Ministry: Notes In Reflection

A Proleptic Reflection On Assemblies

Foreword

The first of these essays were written by mid 1982, at a time when the generic masculine was beginning to come into open question. Most of the references used assumed the generic masculine and I was not as yet sensitized to the issue, as I would become in the next few years. I have never adjusted my sources for their use of non-inclusive language, and I do not here. For the most part, I have attempted to update those habits of writing in these transcribed texts.

It has seemed to me from the beginning of my ministry that theological reflection on matters of the faith and of life is a part of what my calling has been. As a result, I have indulged myself in this habit, and did particularly so in the first two decades of my ministry – beginning with my Seminary years at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. I arrived there for the Spring term of 1973, graduating and thence being ordained at the end of the Spring term in 1976. All, or nearly all, of these writings come after the time of my formal education; they were written for myself though shared with a handful of friends at the time.

Revisiting these pieces has been satisfying to an old man.

William Flewelling

Organization in the Church

A Review Essay

Founded on

Robert Greenleaf’s

Servant Leadership:

A Journey Into The Nature Of

Legitimate Power and Greatness

24 July 1981

When we turn to considering the Church from the reading of Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (Paulist Press, NY, 1977), we realize that he begins as a student of organization, not theology. And, having realized that fact, we are then amazed at the theological implications of his organizational thought, established as it is on the ideal of the servant. Institutions serve society and the members of society if they are proper and productive and sensitive institutions in the emerging modern scene. Among all institutions, churches stand idealistically upon the forefront of the kind of service leadership Greenleaf envisions; the Church stands among the principal society-nurturing institutions (p.131).

Since Greenleaf places service at the core of his conceptual aim, we should note quickly what he means when he affirms that power is legitimate only when it serves and does not hurt. Serve is used in the sense that all who are touched by the institution or its work become, because of that influence, healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants (p.130). The organization is set up to serve, to render serving easier and more natural for those who are involved, to lift the level of service to ‘best possible’ status. Repeatedly, Greenleaf urges the standard of ‘what is reasonable and possible, given the available resources, human and material’. In his view, a ‘growing edge church’ has the role of persuasively leading a whole society into a fresh mode of action.

The Church deals with religion; it is the institution of religious concern, whose zeal it is to re-bind human kind with the cosmos. We need a religion, and a church to husband its service, to heal the pervasive alienation and become a major building force in a new society that is more just and more loving, and that provides greater creative opportunities for its people (p.80). At the heart of vision stand a number of detailed concerns: care and love are major ones. The Church inherits the role of the natural custodian and exponent of vision, value and staying power; these three are essentially religious concerns and fostering them should become the central mission of the growing edge churches (p.81).

Love is a principal value. Mr. Greenleaf offers the notion that, among other things, love implies accepting unlimited liability for others: others in his vernacular include persons, social forces and institutions, for these are the central elements in the reality called modern life. Love is generated in community, in the trusting and caring living-together of human beings. Love is learned face to face, in a place where trust and respect are mutually given and received and where ethics are lived with one another. Living in community as one’s basic involvement will generate an exportable surplus of love which the individual may carry into his many involvements with institutions which are usually not communities. He goes on to state: All that is needed to rebuild community as a visible life form for large numbers of people is for enough servant-leaders to show the way, not by mass movements, but by each servant-leader demonstrating his own unlimited liability for a quite specific community-related group (p.39).

The servant-leader is within the group: an ensample. Power is used persuasively, as an organic element in a voluntary community permeated by love. Servant leaders generate trust by their simple humanity, by their closeness to the ground of life: they hear things, see things, know things, and their intuitive insight is exceptional. They are dependable and trusted (p.42). The quality of the servant-leader is internal; from the heart of the servant begins the process of change. The quality of the servant comes in the midst of his or her own presence, a being there which lifts people up and makes their evolving life possible (p.44). Coupled with the servant is an order of organization which permits service to lead and for growth to evolve.

Within the Church, the task of organization, for Greenleaf, takes on a double structure. The problem is: "how to build a society of equals in which there is strong lay leadership in a trustee board with a chair functioning as primus inter pares (first among equals), and with the pastor function as primus inter pares for the many who do the work of the church (p.81). Then, the second task is to make the church a powerful force to build leadership strength in those persons who have the opportunity to lead in other institutions, and give them constant support" (p.82). The board (we need not be hung-up on his choice of the word ‘trustee’, a remnant from his involvement in the business and foundation world), is the policy making body. The Board leads by vision, by action and not by reaction and fright. If the Board does not lead in vision and in service (because that body must set the institutional agenda), then the Church will be locked into a cycle of mere mediocrity. Power, in this plan, must be balanced; only that power which is expressed persuasively (not with coercion, overt or covert) will ever build.

The Board leads. That leading is far more important than governing, a process which is best done by smaller, task-oriented groups operating under the overall leadership of the Board and of the Board’s chair. The governing aspects may be guided (in this model) by the pastor. Building is the task of the Board, wanting to build from within and moving in ever-positive directions. Greenleaf writes (p.55):

The place to start is with an equivocal trustee obligation to deliver a new, more serving institution.

The most important qualification for trustees should be that they care for the institution, which means that they care for all of the people the institution touches, and that they are determined to make their caring count.

Such are the desired traits within the working Board.

The Church has a goal of life, abundant life (recall John 10). In designing a Church it is a creative urge to open up a fresh and influential quality of life, a thing of beauty and a lively force of love. He raises the question: "Can you make yours an institution in which the conditions of life in that institution raise all of those involved in it to a higher achievement as fulfilled persons than if they did their own thing without the benefit of those conditions? Can you devise a disciplined participation that raises people’s sights to nobler purposes than they would embrace if they were not constrained by that discipline? … Can you make of discipline the means whereby larger achievement for the person – for every involved person – is assured?" (pp.239-240)

In answer to these questions, Greenleaf offers a brief strategy, in four parts (pp.240-241):

1. Goal establishment. He seeks "a concept of a distinguished serving institution in which all who accept its discipline are lifted up to a nobler stature and greater effectiveness than they are likely to achieve on their own or with a less demanding discipline. All, of course, means all. Any failure is to be considered an uwarrented exception".

2. An understanding of leadership and followership. The basis is the servant-leader, one who operates by the theory of justice in which the least favored in society always benefits, or, at least, is not further deprived.

3. "Organization – structure – modus operendi (mode of operation)". How is power used? How is authority handled? He affirms the failure of autocratic forms of leadership, the necessity of servant-leadership.

4. Trustees, people who hold trust and who give guidance, set goals, determine direction for the serving institution.

Taken together, these elements approach the core of the Church situation for the purpose of correcting the organizational malaise rather than dabbling at the symptoms. Taken together, these elements bring out the painstaking care which must be given to the institution as well as to the people.

Care is a key once more. Caring, we know, is an exacting and demanding business. It requires not only interest and compassion and concern; it demands self-sacrifice and wisdom and tough-mindedness and discipline. Secondly, responsibility is the important handmaiden of care. If we are responsible in our faith, then we care deeply for all who are touched by the life and ministry of the Church; the nearer the touch, the deeper the personal care and the dearer the responsibility. (p.243)

Our world is almost logical; ‘almost’ means that there is forever an undercurrent of ambiguity. That ambiguity must be dealt with by people and by institutions. (cf. p.186) Dealing with ambiguity demands insight, keenness of caring, flexibility in loving, particularly so in a Church and in those who lead the Church. Greenleaf suggests that the responsible servant-leader (and follower) must be able to creatively mingle the ambiguities of life and justice with the hard strictures of necessary modern bureaucracy. There is a life style which both reflects and enhances this ability, one which is personally and institutionally desirable. The following traits are common in such a life-style (pp.298-303):

These traits he offers as some dimensions of a life style that is rooted in an inward grace: sensitive and aware, concerned for the ever present neighbor, both the well-fed one next door and the hungry one on the other side of the earth, seeing and feeling what is right in the situation.

*     *     *

These review comments, drawn from the insights of one man as they reflect off myself, suggest some directions in which we might progress. He demands very much of people. We are used to having boards govern and committees lead; he suggests the very opposite. He demands of us service as the very central definition of our existence; but so does our Lord. Now comes the theological and organizational work of making vision possible. For this purpose are these reflections and collations offered.

Mr. Greenleaf is a retired businessman; his last active business position was Director of Management Research for A. T. & T. Since retirement, he has taught at Darmouth and Harvard. He has also consulted with Ohio University, M.I.T., the Ford Foundation, Lilly Endowment, Brookings Institution, The American Foundation for Management Research, among others.

Befriendment:

A Turn To The Heart

a review essay, based upon

Turning To Christ:

A Theology of Renewal and Evangelization

by Urban T. Holmes

2 March 1982

The Church is to be at work with our Lord Jesus Christ. We begin with that sort of ground level fact and turn our attention toward considering what we need to do, why we need to do it and how it might be dome in carrying into effect this working with Jesus Christ. For the including work of the Church, Holmes begins with a military model: there is an objective to be attained, a strategy for reaching that objective, a set of tactics to effect the strategy. In the process, the Church is ‘mobilized’ to carry out the tactical effort at the strategy toward the objective. For Holmes, dealing with the notion of evangelization and renewal, mission is the mobilization of the church in the cause of Christ. Renewal is the strategy. Evangelization is the tactics. The objective is the wholeness of humanity – humanity united with God. (p.1)

In essence, the pastoral motif being urged upon us is that of an upward thrust, one in which we as churchmen (or women) are intimately and vitally and necessarily involved, yet one which stems from the lifting power of grace, a quiet ferment, easily missed without due attentiveness. Holmes, an Episcopalian, offers a church-centered focus to the process of evangelization, a term he chooses for the low level of overtone. And in his objective, we find the common life of many human beings focused: it is humanity which is to become whole, and each person is to become whole by the personal share which is held in humanity. In fact, the wholeness of being human is found in being human together, and being fully human together always involves a oneness with God. The oneness has more of a ‘for us’ flavor than ‘for me’. Prayer, says Dame Julian of Norwich, ‘oneth’ us with God. The corporate nature of this wholeness reminds us that it is impossible to be human alone, because we are always relational creatures. We exist in relation with others, with one another, and ultimately with God. Without the extending thrust of the common life, individuals degenerate, dissolve spiritually and morally into sub-human lumps of rage, no matter how well confined by the strictures of ‘ought’.

The objective, then, by which all efforts are to be judged in the final analysis is: are human being brought to live in a unity of spirit, of grace, and of love such that they learn from their depths of heart the active love of God? Every project has an outcome. We ask: how close does the actual outcome reach toward the stated objective?

Before progressing very far, a statement of the operating, fundamental belief in the working of the Christian life is necessary. The human mind and the human soul comprise a vast volume, full of ferment. We normally maneuver ourselves in the upper portion of our selves. There we can comprehend and control most of what is happening: we convince ourselves that we are really the captains of our souls. But that is not the place from which we live. The neat patterns we create for our surface lives inevitably get both distorted and broken. One weak reaction to our slips in view is to preserve what has been dated, using glue and rigid regulation. A second, more fruitful response is to find the surface mentality out of control while the root organizing metaphors of our person and common (perhaps archetypal) lives move to reorganize the trivia which make daily habits easy to perform. We live out of the depths of our souls in the important dimensions of our lives. There reside the fundamental bases for our interpretation of the life experience we receive. There lie our religious thrusts, those inner movements of prime importance to our living. Holmes repeated refers to this dimension as our deep memory. It is the level at which we either succeed or fail to engage the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In western Ohio, I recall from school days, there is a place called the Blue Hole. There one finds a blue pond of water which has an exceedingly deep center, plunging down into the earth. As I recall, the bottom was not known by any person. Whether or not those facts are all accurate, the Blue Hole has provided for me one metaphor (of several) for our souls. The top is easily known by any casual observer. But the feeding of the pond comes out of the unknown depths. It is down deep that the floods of God enter the soul, to feed us. The level of divine influx is far below our normal sensitivities; yet it is profoundly there. The only real way to enter into sympathetic union with that source (and the metaphor breaks down here) is to align the soul at the level of the depths; this might be termed ‘befriending God’. (Holmes uses the example of a glacial lake; the analogy fits.)

Thus the strategy which is commended to us is that of a renewal. To the mode of thinking presented, renewal is not to be something timid, nor is it a restoration of conformity to what once might have been. There is also no conforming to the current state of things. And there is no great interest in nostalgia for old times’ sake. Renewal sees itself moving towards a new order, one which offers opportunity for a gracious expansion of consciousness across a wide spectrum of human endeavor. Renewal, the strategy for movement toward ‘humanity united with God in a flowering wholeness (or shalom)’, is described as being characterized by a spirit of risk, a thrust toward confronting the ease of society, a locus for an emerging new order (not a re-tread effort), and developing a climate for cultural renaissance. To show that this in not a pipe dream, Holmes cites the evangelical awakening or revival in the twelfth century, showing its class at Citeaux, in the scholastic theologians, and in a rapidly expanding culture.

The persons and the Church which are undergoing the rigors of renewal emerge from the process with a sharpened taste for the richness which is possible in human life; theologically, we never stir far from the humanity of Jesus, from the fact of faith that God came Incarnate in the human flesh of Jesus. There is no denying the world as material substance. Rather, renewal is seen more in the line of people dipping deeply and sipping sweetly in the very best which human kind can offer, in terms of the arts, of science, of philosophy, of human care so that God can fire the process into freshness and sacred beauty. The person is seen a becoming enlivened, as coming to know God in the intuitive and soul-soaring dimensions where God does touch creatively so as to spark what had not been.

Renewal assumes that depth of humanity and the breadth of the whole world are brought together in a daring mix for a vital infusion of the grace, the presence of God. What has been is simply not good enough because it has not brought us, as humans, fully to God. Indeed, Holmes argues that renewal is a never-ending process, that we grow by jumps and starts Godward. From a review of the scriptural models and metaphors, Holmes sees the end as always the coming to God in intimate union. The objective includes the resolution of all injustice and must apparently be preceded by suffering. (p.82)

Part of the wide concern for renewal presented lies in the serious consideration he gives to human freedom. It is seen as precisely the case that God gives freedom to us as God brings us to Godself. But from the human side of the issue, the freedom permits us to say ‘no’ to God, for example. And not all things are available choices; there are broad limits (sometimes broader than others) upon human freedom. One of the characteristics of being free is having space: ‘elbow room’ for the mind, the heart, the soul. No one can turn around where there is no room to move. We have to have room to move ourselves, room to consider, room to decide. To enter into renewal toward our chosen objective, a person cannot be crowded; the alternative is the gracious roominess of holy presence.

The strategy is renewal. As we look at what is sought, says Holmes, we have to remember the problem. The issue is that, first, the hope each of us has for the future be so vivid that we are free to bet our life on it, and second, that our objective be consistent with the guiding image that Jesus laid before us in his historical witness (p.51). The end objective is, of course, union of ‘humanity in its wholeness’ with God. On the way to that end, Holmes argues that there are seven intermediate objectives which need to be filled if we are to get where we want to go. These seven steps along the way (though not a sequence) address the question: how does a person come to be so inflamed with the love of God that he or she knowingly and wisely risks their life for the sake of the Gospel?" (p.52)

First, there is a sense that the extraordinary is present within the ordinary. Another expression of the same idea is that supernature permeates (but is not confined to, nor is identical with) nature. Nature certainly goes about its business actively. There is a force internal to Nature, what Coleridge calls Natura Naturans (= ‘Nature Naturing’). This force acts as a lively factor which has an organic drive to encompass its diversity in a supreme unity. It is as if the world were pregnant with God – although the image may not be used beyond the sense of a lively fullness with divine presence. Again, we could see this in terms of a personal translucency to God in the created order, a type of symbolic union. Coleridge notes in ‘The Statesman’s Manual (in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, Princeton University Press, 1972, p.30): A symbol is characterized … above all by the translucency of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a lively part in that Unity, of which it is the representative". The importance of this sense of the ordinary being translucent to the extraordinary lies first in the importance of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and secondly in the sense that the renewed ones are becoming by grace a people translucent to God in Jesus Christ.

Second, there is a need for an institutional focus. The labor is not for the sole sake of the institution’ rather the institution is there to define an appropriate space in which the freedom before God can do its work. The larger body is able to transcend our enthusiasm, to remove the rears that our being loosened up in faith will leave us in a void, and thereby permits us to be safely free. More important is the tone which the institution gives. What the institution carries, which is more important than conceptual systems and ethical prescriptions, is the symbolic life of a people …. It is this symbolic world that shapes the intention of our minds in much larger ways than the fine points of any system (p.56).

Third, there is a parabolic dimension. The parables lack the strains of common sense. They do not fit, really fit, experience. They keep us off balance. They shock the imagination. They spur our intuitive levels of life into action. Holmes cites Jesus as a living parable; he is one who opens up onto the delightfully new, arching away from what everybody knows already toward the surpassing present-tense presence of God. And that presence comes only by surprise, and it comes to those undergoing renewal.

Fourth, theology is necessary in order to deal with religious experience so as to channel it toward growth rather than to let it run all over us, demanding no inner cooperation and organization. Renewal is not feeling good. It is being illumined by the Logos, reason, the Fourth Evangelist’s word for the Christ (p.59). Theology guides the reasonableness of our being brought to become renewed.

Fifth, discipline, singlemindedness and moral awareness need to be coupled together. The training is classically called asceticism; it has a purpose. And that purpose is to trim away doublemindedness (in the Epistle of James it is double-soul-ed-ness) while keeping an awareness of the moral (not moralistic) dimensions of our life sharply in focus. The purpose of discipline is to evoke an intention or structure of consciousness that looks steadily toward the goal and, in order to do that, keeps one in spiritual training (p.61).

Sixth, our morality is serious. And it is freeing in its seriousness in that it requires us to have found our principles carefully ingrained into our depths of consciousness so that the situation, the principles of morality, the new sensitivity to human suffering arising from our repentance convolute together on the kernel of faith to bring about decision. (Moralism is not morality; it is rather a pompous put-on which robs us of the space to be free; for it is a rough necessity lumped onto us by someone else and hence is false to our own moral seriousness since true necessity must rise from inside the soul.)

Seventh, there will be leadership moving in and against and through our situations. Leadership leads us. It does not entertain, it confronts; it does not seek popularity, it offends self-righteousness; it does not reconcile until we know the seriousness of our sin (p.65). Further, Leadership is not a matter of acting out an intention of the church so that it may truly look toward the impending reign of God and move toward living in that kingdom" (p.66).

The immediate objectives have what Holmes rightly calls feminine traits: spontaneity, ambiguity, creativity, passion, risk. All of these will be there if renewal is genuine. As a part of this summary, we should notice that there is a definite soft focus to Holmes’ vision; a soft focus will frustrate many committees and may linger into nothingness unless it is brought to life with a good deal of warmth. One might even see these growth strategies and objectives as fundamentally contemplative in nature. I would find them profoundly pastoral as well.

Holmes has established now his objective: a wholeness in humanity united with God. And he has established his strategy: renewal in personal and corporate terms. Renewal is risk, confrontation with existing society (which is always less than ideal), emergence into a new order and the ground for cultural renaissance. Renewal has its own interior shape: it transcends the ordinary; it is borne by an institution; it parabolicly cracks common sense; it has a clear theological expression (i.e., intellectual integrity), inner discipline, moral seriousness; it has leadership in close communion with the stated objective. Renewal leaves no room for mediocrity; neither does the Spirit. Now we find that evangelization provides the tactics which can be used to bring the strategy into effect. There are many forms of evangelization, and Holmes’ concern is to consider the means of judging our choice.

Mission, our being sent out by God to communicate God’s love and gracious presence, begins our answer. If we are sent by God, then we are agents of revelation, active by means of the drawing of humanity to God and to a fellowship/communion (koinonia) with God in God’s love. There is a double action to mission, with God being the actor: God sends and God draws back to Godself. The Christian role is participation in God’s action, incarnating afresh the longings of God. In carrying out the mission God gives, Christians have taken up for themselves five basic models. (1) Mission by recruitment: the aim is to cause them to come into the party. This model is easily degraded unless the edge of recruitment is to the challenge of growth in Spirit from the depths of heart and mind (Holmes uses ‘the deep memory’). (2) Mission by liberation: the aim of liberation is to set free, often taken in socio-political terms. There is value here, if the gospel dimensions are not being trivialized. We are brought to freedom, to our God, in and through the shared depths of soul. (3) Mission by Mutual Interdependence: we cooperate richly with other Christians, usually in the form of established churches. The spread of the gospel of Christ under this model is often quite unselfconscious. The aura left is receptive and pastoral. It is weakest in its tendency to minimize evil, and in its assumption of a (non-existent) Christian society as the basis of the work. (4) Mission by church: the church is seen in terms of a radical incarnationalism and with a developed doctrine of the mystical body. Holmes chooses this as his central perspective (but not the sole one); he holds the restriction that the church be at its best, involved deeply in a Godly sending. (5) Mission by fulfillment: the faith is that which fulfills our deepest longings. The approach is gentle, often too gentle. It is non-aggressive, rejects the all-too-common arrogance of Christians in their outreach, and listens first (and even second as well). Sometimes there is no speaking at all. One feels after all this that there is further a mission by presence which is Holmes’ real agenda and fits his insistence on the centrality of the church as incarnation, coupled with and supported by a mingling of the best of the other theories.

Renewal comes de profundis, let us remember. The performance of the church in doing mission must reach into the deep metaphors which form our personal and corporate consciousness and mode of interpreting for ourselves all the stuff which happens to us day by day. That is what the gospel has to do to be of value. Those who are to be evangelized (beginning with ourselves) are to find the action of the gospel transforming them in their deep consciousness. If the word/matter speaks transformingly, it may provide both space and impetus for metanoia: repentance and the conversion which turns to God, to the new creation aborning. Such a speaking needs to exhibit a certain prophetic element, for prophecy, Homes argues, opens new perspective and a certain, often unwanted, hope by means of fresh metaphors or symbolic structures capable of generating by the implosion of God a very new future: the newness must be in consonance with inner harmonics if the individual or social nexus is to find a fruitful participation (as opposed to a frustrating, antagonistic dissonance). The prophetic thrust must move deeply in people, to draw them from the dangers of a domesticated God toward the God who engages peoples in the murky depths of soul and mind where they themselves are molded in consciousness by their embedded root metaphors.

Evangelization is our tactic for affecting our objective through sincere renewal. Such a tactic must be one which befriends the other in the hidden heart, the depth of soul so that we might provide for one another a space of grace for the transforming power of God to be met in the other. In befriending, of course, we leave ourselves radically open to the working of God as well, and may be finding ourselves becoming enwrapped in renewal also. This is very much in contrast to the trivial, sentimental and surface tints of piety which deeply offend the latent, subtle and shy reality (so Wheelwright) which unfolds and works quietly within us. The honest route is to give friendly honor to our own roots and to those of others, in particular of The Other.

The process is similar to that of acquiring wisdom. Holmes notes: One acquires wisdom not by gobbling at the trough of facts, but by sitting beside her, attending to her, attaching oneself to her. It is an understanding that we absorb through the pores in the heart of our being. It is not merely a garment with which we are clothed. It is a gentle learning that befits the nature of the deep memory (pp.83-84). This attention knows the offense of sensibility at the quick, sudden, forced procedures to come to know or to effect conversion of sorts. The offense is that of one being spiritually raped. God, unlike some of God’s people, does not work that way. God ravishes, to be sure, leaving the soul in delight, but God does not rape; rape violates integrity and brutalizes the person, masking the soul from all but the most surface of considerations. With God, evangelization is fervent in its very gentle attendance upon one another: deep calls to deep.

In a sense, evangelization brings about a double conversion: our own and that of our befriended one(s). The monastic community looks to a lifelong conversation, a lifelong process of turning ever dearer to God. So the continuing element need not surprise us. Holmes suggests a sacramental basis for our conversion, for the sacrament involves ritual at some level, and ritual resonates to the fundamental core of our sensibilities (which may be one reason free church people fear ritual in church). We could note here that the early 19th century revival on the frontier reported that the greatest conversion came about on the sacramental days (a point recalled from Prof. Keith Watkins of Christian Theological Seminary). The sacraments involve us as a relational community: we are not independent; rather we interact in deep communal support in the midst of our Common Life. The sacraments emphasize the Incarnation, creation, the gracious immanence of God: exactly those elements we meet in the personal thrust through renewal toward the objective of union with God. They involve us corporately, together as a community in the mystical body, possessing a deeply shared memory and a means of interpreting our experience (always refreshed by our continuing conversion). Conversion lies in the re-direction of our shared deep-memory: Godward.

Conversion is a surrender to God which acts on three levels. First is that of coming to be passionately in love with God. Second is that of the intellect, in which we come to be able to separate our experience from the meaning we make of our experience. Third is that of moral sensibility, the ability to live by values and not by prescriptive law. (Elsewhere, I have described his values as descriptive law.) Conversion is the surrender that arises out of tension between what is and what comes to be seen as internally necessary (i.e., not imposed from without; intrinsic rather than extrinsic, as will be discussed later). Conversion is a surrender to living with God by the grace of Presence: God to us and we to God. It is a presence of constant searching, constant waiting, constant trusting, just like any other serious presence with anyone. Conversion brings us, and gives us to God for God’s good use. Evangelization has its work set forth in opening the possibility of such a conversion.

Evangelization such as Holmes envisions happens in community, not in a mob. A community is welded of deep care one for another, of profound mutual befriending. In Christian terms, evangelization arises in the context of a believing and adoring community, into which all are invited to fulfill their longing for oneness (p.143). This is not just any oneness, not the oneness of the mob in which all variants are submerged under the unique and oppressive ethos which is imposed, often emotionally. Rather it is a shared oneness with God, one which frees us. And to be free is to have space. … The opposite of space is the obsessive need to be right …. The church, when she is willing to fulfill her vocation, is the institutionalization of the space to seek wholeness. Renewal is the consciousness of the space in which we are turning around to know God. (pp.142-143) Evangelization happens then. If evangelization is real, it is displayed to all in the moral life (particularly public morals) of the community. The social as well as the personal dimensions of morality are important. There must be quality, not so much according to regulation as by means of the ever deepening sensibility of spirit.

Efforts at religious life and the attendant mode of evangelization fall into four basic categories: extrinsic-ideological; extrinsic-imaginal; intrinsic-ideological; intrinsic-imaginal. The terms may be defined for our purposes as:

From the model Holmes has developed, the first (extrinsic-ideological) is least effective with regard to renewal and union in wholeness with God. It does, however produce numbers and a certain militant spirit that is very difficult to argue against until one is unwilling to submit to manipulation and control by one claiming authority, to choose security instead of freedom in the gospel. The last model (intrinsic-imaginal) is quite free and open to the necessary depths of soul and mind. It is also slower in results, particularly since it utilizes the human dynamics which are trained out of many of the people of this world. That sad fact merely hides the dynamics; it does not demolish them. The off-side terms are not void. Holmes offers a surprise-free political theology (his examples are Marxist, and other cultural reductions of the gospel) for the ‘intrinsic-ideological category. Proclaiming the good news of Jesus became akin to selling the party line or sending fraternity bids. It is predictable and not very compelling because it is insensitive to incongruity (p.155). The extrinsic-imaginal is dangerous. The imagination is used in free fancy, cutting away responsibility and rootedness while clinging to a new system of radical defense. Holmes cites Jonesville and the People’s Temple tragedy as one example of the cult-type phenomenon. The thrust here is toward a spiritual drawing as the deep memory is drawn upon with a distinct lack of rootedness, and a sad exposure to crass exploitation. Interestingly, in the intrinsic mode, the imaginal fervor renders one vulnerable to growth and to God, but not to the rapacity of exploitation.

Within his analytic model, only the intrinsic-imaginal quadrant provides a spiritual climate amenable to the development of his style of freedom in Christ. In particular, this was the only arena which called for a growing conversion, a continuing conversion, a sincere befriending of one another and a gentle attendance upon one another, and upon God. The process involved in the continuing labors is that of nurture, a sort of continuance of the initiative provided by the work of evangelization. This is a growing up or maturing sequence in our Christian lives. Growth, again, takes space; evangelization calls a person into that kind of space-in-the-Spirit, so that growth can happen. Spiritually we grow similarly to the way a child grows – only now under the grace of God and subject to our own willingness. We begin at bedrock; the undifferentiated imagination where all is real and untested. The only danger is that some refuse to grow beyond this first vital hint. Soon, however, most move to taking all things literally, with an assumed and demanded concrete one-dimensionality of life. Some grow no further, and spiritual perception remains horribly myopic. (Elsewhere, Holmes cites biblical and doctrinal literalism as the uniquely modern problem or heresy. That is the trait of growth stunted at this level.) Third, the expression is that of reason and strict intellectualism, a form of adolescence. The faith is met pre-critically, naively. Analogies about God are taken as conveying an immediate knowledge of God. (p.173) Here is a world of law and order, or interpersonal concord being enforced. As in all forms of adolescence, resistance and a wrestling with fundamental uncertainties are normal. Support is needed while, at the same time, challenge must be placed in the way toward the necessarily ambiguous facts about God. Growth can be shut down here by sheer fear and deep resistance to any perceived threat. Fourth comes a reasonableness analogous to young adulthood. There is a feel of autonomy which comes, a release from dependence into nascent-maturity. Finally, one is teachable but woefully given to head trips which are free of the still murky materials de profundis. (Holmes feels that this is the best we can expect of most people.)

In some cases, a further growth in Christ happens. Such is always a delight. The tensions within are not resolved, but encountered in their energetic excitement (eg.: male – female, destroy – create, attach – separate, youth – age). The fifth stage is a postcritical participation in both symbolic reality and conceptual and systematic meaning, a second naivete. Finally comes the stage of incarnating God’s love and justice. The latter are the lures, the rare heights from which we can know a drawing along in our synergetic common life in Christ. Interestingly for Holmes’ model, he moves from the levels of unexpected maturing to develop his model. He leaves unanswered the question of bringing an evangelistically oriented group to the levels of mutual care to make present his model. Nonetheless, it is a necessity if there is any value in his model at all; and I believe there is.

Evangelization and renewal must take into account that the knowledge of God requires a continuing self-exploration and understanding. It is not enough to be an extrovert; we have to practice introversion. These are hard words for those who think that evangelization is like selling cars. Evangelization is a very different process, requiring an honesty that would destroy the stereotypical salesman (pp.175-176). Evangelization provides an impetus toward enjoying space, the place of grace which is the presence of God himself. God comes as a lover, not a despot. (p.179)

Theologically and pastorally, the lover is always God. God wants to attract us to Godself; that is why God created us: to give God someone to love and to be loved by. The objective of our enterprise is to love with God toward bringing full and whole human beings toward union with God. The locus of our labor is God’s church, an incarnate setting and the mystical body: here is the principal draw of Presence, both richly human and uniquely divine. We deal with people where they live, even where they do not realize that they live; befriendment stirs deeply or it rings falsely beyond the manipulative moment. In love, we offer space and vital community. In grace, we open ourselves with the others in a gracious vulnerability to God. We even dare growth ourselves and with our befriended-ones. We come together to the embrace of God. We might even note that we enter evangelization in the mode of true prayer. Evangelization becomes a vocation and a mission to love one another with the love of God, in humble holiness and gracious gentleness and persistent presence: all three.

Bibliographic note:

Urban T. Holmes: Turning to Christ: A Theology of Renewal and Evangelization, The Seabury Press, NY, 1981.

Forgive and Forget?

July 14, 1977

(In this paper, the following abbreviations are used:

C.F. for Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity, Noonday Press, 1964

A.O.T. for H.W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, Fortress Press, 1974

P.F. for Gabriel Marcel, Philosophical Fragments: 1909-1914, Notre Dame University Press, 1965

M.B. for J. Gerald Janzen, Ministry of Blessing, Ordination Sermon, May 30, 1976

In the popular idiom, the doctrine of forgiveness, a key doctrine in the Christian system, has been stylized as forgive and forget. No doubt many have tried to flesh out that maxim under the premise that the maintenance of a nagging at the ‘other guy’s’ sin and one’s own self righteous act of graciously (?) allowing him to return to some sort of favor could hardly be called forgiveness. This is obviously correct. But, on the other hand, the identification of forgetting the sin and returning to a (relative) paradisial former state of social setting with forgiveness short changes and even distorts the nature of forgiveness.

Within the realm of human interrelationships (including that of man to God as well), forgiveness covers a wide spectrum of sins. Sin may be understood as the act or attitude which brings about a break in the fabric of relationship. At the trivial end of the scale, forgiving and forgetting are equivalent because there is nothing significant to remember; for instance, as one bumps into another in a crowd, s/he might comment ‘pardon me’, to which the reply comes ‘it is nothing’, which is what it is. This end of the spectrum, being in fact an insignificant instance of normal (as opposed to mentally or emotionally disturbed) social interaction, tending indeed to ‘nothing’, may be ignored. The concern here will be with the significant aberrations in human relationships and with the profound breaks or ruptures which occur.

The relationships into which human beings enter require some degree of commitment of self (Hebrew: nephesh) to the situation ‘me-interacting-with-you’. This may be seen as a general criterion of relationship, ranging from human with God to human with nature. In simple terms the commitment involved may be put as ‘I will enter into and maintain a relationship with X’; this pact is the basis of this relationship, this contribution to life and as such will never again be called into question. The relation between two subjects, A and B (these may be individuals or corporate aggregates acting as an individual – eg.: an ‘am (people) or ‘nature), once established consists of and relies upon what Gabriel Marcel has termed ‘creative fidelity’. That is, behavior will be completely colored by this act embodying the decision that the commitment will not again be questioned (C.F., p.162). Here there is an act which formalizes the relationship and the attitude for which the act is decisive – that is, for which the act cuts away all other options.

The act comes first. It involves risk because it is never founded on adequate information. As Marcel notes (C.F., p.163): In principle, to commit myself, I must first know myself; the fact is, however, that I really know myself only when I have committed myself. Similarly, that to which one commits oneself is never fully known, least of all prior to the act of committal. Neither case is possible, for realization of self – for both parties – and realization of other is only experienced in developing relationships, and then never completely. (Presumption of full knowledge is the idolatry of self-deification and destroys the possibility of the deepening, satisfying mystery of ‘A relating with B’.) As Wolff (A.O.T., pp.106-107) argues from Old Testament data, life … means: to have relationship, particularly with God bur also with others; death is the opposite. Therefore, movement into life and the consciousness of living is predicated upon relationship (so also with God). And relationship is founded upon a decisive act, an act ranging from the familiar friendly handshake to such solemn vows as those of Church membership (baptism or confirmation), or ordination, or of marriage. Each of these acts initiate a particular type of relationship and completely color all future behavior: never again will the decision constituting the act be called into question.

The formalizing act is initiatory. As such it shares the trend setting character of all rites of initiation. In this rather general case, the rite or act is the determining factor in all future actions and all future attitudes related at all to the relationship in question. The more intimate the relationship, the more all inclusive is the coloring of the decisive act. These behavioral and attitudinal patterns are not to be seen as static entities, for the relationship is alive; it is the characteristic of life to relate and be related. Here Marcel’s term ‘creative fidelity’ becomes important on another side. The relationship is founded on commitment to faithfulness and truth. (Hebrew ’emet, truth, carries with the notion of being faithful to what is true, hence to what is real. Note Yahweh’s characteristic hesed we’emet. The two notions of truth and fidelity are necessarily linked closely in any relational system.) That is the basis but not the exhaustive extent of the relationship: as growth is the characteristic of life, life which is predicated on relationship, which in turn requires commitment, risk and fidelity, so is development a characteristic of relationship. Hence, the use of the term ‘creative’. The true relationship to which two subjects, A and B have committed themselves (called here the system A-B) is based on never calling the basic act or decision into question and creatively building upon that base from the possibilities which continually arise. The relationship starts from fidelity to the decisive act – and cannot survive without that – and moves forward into what might become in an A-B relational system, again requiring the continuous element of fidelity to the evolving actual situation and the vision of promise in A-B.

It should be noted that A-B has become a system of its own. There is no long A and B alone, but also the additional entity A-B. (This is what Paul refers to in quoting Genesis 2:24 – And the two shall become one – with respect to marriage, and to Christ and the Church.) The element involved is that of participation – koinonia in the New Testament – that A and B be involved in a subject – subject relationship for one can participate only in another free subject, and as a free subject. The act of decision, decision to become committed to ‘creative fidelity’ with another (i.e., into A-B) is the act of moving from subject A over against object B (and the other way around) to subject A relating with subject B (note the importance of the preposition ‘with’ as opposed to, say, ‘to’). The action of A-B is that of free subject A with free subject B, creatively faithful to the founding and sustaining act, participating in each other within the relational system they have defined and are defining. The freedom of the subject is vital; the element of ‘ought’ is foreign to the relationship, being a force applied to an ‘object’.

Now the system A-B has been described. The basic aim and implication of the movement of A and B into (in Greek, eis) A-B has been presented. And now the discussion must return to the subject of forgiveness, an action involved in the aftermath of a break in A-B.

First, there has been the element of sin introduced; since at least one of the pair A-B is human, or not-divine, this will come as a matter of course since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. At such a time the element of past sin becomes a part of the relational system A-B. Can forgiveness properly be seen as forgetting the past sin – i.e., cutting away a part of the past of A-B, hence a part of A-B itself (since the present includes within itself the past and the developed existential energy from that past)? I think not. This does not mean that the sin itself becomes the central feature in the developing of A-B for that, in the extreme case, would amount to cutting off (cursing, in other words) all that was not-sin in the relevant past of A-B, again lessening the available energy and possibilities for A-B’s continued ‘creative fidelity’. Rather, it suggests that all which has been in A-B from the generative and initiatory decisive act is taken in, with full knowledge of both subjects, and is creatively applied toward the enrichment of the participatory system which both is and is becoming.

Inherent in this continuing act is pain, suffering, for the disorder of sin (chaos) is taken into the living and life-characteristic relational system A-B for the creation of new and further actualized possibilities, the vision of which is blurred by tears; herein lies a part of the redemption of A and of B through the pain of A-B. As with Job (in the Divine Speeches), Deutero-Isaiah (especially in the Servant Songs) and with Jesus and Pauline theology, the triad of creation, redemption and suffering are linked together in forgiveness – as Jesus forgave on the cross – and not in forgetting, casting away from consciousness of reality.

The nature of the sin must also be considered. Recall that sin has been described as a break in the fabric of relationship (i.e., a violence to the system A-B by either A or B). As mentioned before, the trivial cases may be ignored. Of the others, the basic cases may be seen. The first covers a good deal of the spectrum, ranging from some pain to much pain. Here, the break is real in that one or more of the characteristics of A-B have been violated (eg, in a marriage inflicted with infidelity to the sanctity of the marriage bed), but not the underlying element of honesty within A-B. Although the tear by sin may be deep into the developed system, although the fundamental decisive act has been violated, although the mutual pain of A and B may be great, the element of truth still exists, the fundamental commitment has not been ruptured, has not been called into question. Hence, the opening, the basis for renewed mutual participation exists, for trust is still possible.

The second case is that of profound rupture of the A-B system. From one subject of the other, action has been taken which violates not only the evolved fabric of the system, not only the decisive vows and characteristics, but also the fundamental element of truth, the truth pledged; and, therefore, the commitment itself has been called into question. The necessary element of trust has been destroyed; and the continuation of something like A-B requires the introduction of ‘ought’ which precludes a free subject with free subject relationship, precludes the vital factor of participation, reduces one party (say, A) to an object over against the subject