The Adam-Shawn Dialogue - first response

Shawn:

Enclosed is my opening statement. This statement begins where I begin when I hear your concerns in our Church.

I have recently been reading Bill Easum’s Dancing with Dinosaurs: Ministry in a Hostile & Hurting World and Easum contends in that book that “the shape of the future is always on the fringe of normality during times of paradigm shifts” and so he begs the question about the current plane of reality that is our United Church by asking,

Who, then, do we turn to when looking for clues about ministry in the twenty-first century? We certainly cannot turn to those who insist on clinging to the status quo. We turn to the people on the fringe of normalcy.

He further mentions that these people who live on the fringes are mostly seen as mavericks, “but they point the way to the future.” These are the people who end up being crucified by the religious and political establishment. “They are the prophets of tomorrow, and we must listen to what they are saying even if they make us uncomfortable.” (Easum pg. 34-35)

Over the past three years I have served on the Moderator’s Advisory Committee for currently the Rt. Rev. Dr. David Giuliano. On the committee I have been known as the “wild card” for a number of reasons:

· I think differently than everybody else on the committee does

· I see Christian faith and discipleship through a different lens

· My personal background is non-white

Because of these things I have been called the “wild card” a name I have grown to adore. It’s a name that describes who I am called to be. The problem in our United Church of Canada is that I don’t think that the bureaucracy and many of the ministers actually see the “wild card” as a breath of fresh air and an opportunity for God to use these prophets to preach to the dry and scattered bones within the institution. But in some Christian congregations the voice in the wilderness that commands us to welcome and calls us to join God’s family (by doing God’s will) there is hope.

I recall the story of a preacher from the southern United States who had a church of several thousand members; it was a racially integrated church and a visitor comes up to the preacher and says, “I’m shocked; why is your church like this?” And the preacher responds saying, “Well, what do you mean? Like what?”

“Well, I didn’t expect to see a whole array of people – black folks, white folks, Native Americans, Hispanics – all in one congregation. How did you ever grow a congregation like this?”

“Well,” says the preacher, “Our last pastor left us and we couldn’t find anybody to preach for us so I volunteered to lead the congregation and the first piece of Scripture we faced was from Acts:

‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’ (Acts 10:34-35)

Immediately following that service the deacons met with me and said, ‘We never want to hear this type of preaching again. It is dangerous to our congregation.’”

“So what did you do?” asked the young man who was visiting.

“I fired all the deacons and I preached that congregation down to four members and just as we began to worry about closing shop the Holy Spirit showed up and membership exploded. Sometimes in order to serve the Gospel you have to kick out all of the people who don’t like Jesus so that the ones searching for him can find a place in the kingdom.”

William McKinney says it another way:

The old denominations have no hope of reaching out to the new populations of America [or Canada] – to people of colour, to those drawn to the TV preachers, to those who struggle to make ends meet – if they remain bound to the notion that it is either possible or desirable to restore our churches to their earlier position of dominance. It is only when we accept the fact that our own new off-centeredness that we will have a chance to partnership with peoples whose current experience is also not of the center but of the margins.

This is the crucible for the Church today; this is the severe trial of the Church today. Are we willing to be refined not into a Church of conformity, but rather into the Church of apocalyptic welcome.

One of the most surprising texts in the Gospel of Matthew is this one:

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward. (Matt. 10:40-42)

Bart D. Ehrman, an atheist thinker, calls Jesus of Nazareth an apocalyptic prophet, and I think the biblical scholarship supports that – as opposed to the Jesus Seminar. Anyway, I like to think of this text as an Apocalyptic Welcome; I like to think of this passage as one that reveals that which God is calling out of us. But we need to get our words straight about apocalypse, which is a Greek word that means “to reveal” or “to disclose” or “to unveil.” The word welcome, on the other hand, is about the positive greeting on the arrival of a person – be they a friend or a stranger. The God that Christians worship in Jesus Christ discloses generosity through us – the Church – to those we love and to those we hate. The Apocalyptic Welcome is deeply rooted in the cross and our most ancient Christian hymn found in the book of Colossians:

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Col. 1:15-20)

It is the purpose of Jesus Christ to reconcile all of the created world to himself – this means all people, all creaturely life, all single-celled organisms, all protein molecules, all hydrogen atoms, all inanimate objects, all dark matter, all galaxies, all black holes, and all quasars and pulsars in the universe. This hymn is saying that Jesus Christ is seeking to reach out and cradle all warring factions of humanity in his arms. This is Apocalyptic Welcome – the grand unveiling of God’s generosity to us in Jesus Christ. Part of Christ’s open-handedness to us is that he doesn’t give a damn whether we like each other or not; he will, however, have us together, and not killing each other.

The grand discovery for me over the past few months has been the emphatic assertion throughout the Gospels and the Epistles that God’s gonna get all that God has created and that includes the conflicting camps and warring factions who hate each other – even the Church!

That’s my more theological groundwork before we begin to get into more particularities.

Thanks,

Adam