Most recently the need for pulling back from the brink was highlighted, and a call to the great middle of the church to resist the siren song of the extremes who would march us off the map into oblivion even more quickly than is happening due to the natural course of long-term institutional decline.
How can the church regain its senses? How can the church seek the mind of Christ? How can the church reclaim its confessional/theological heritage? How can the church receive the gift of vibrancy that attracts — our own and outsiders — into the fellowship of the body of Christ? How can the church reclaim the preaching of the gospel with power and conviction? How can the church be the leaven in a society in which deep rot has set in? How can the glory, sovereignty and grace of the living God be manifested in our time?
As suggested before, our collective being is at stake. We’re in God’s hands, but God is waiting — patiently — for us to see, hear, understand and follow what God is doing in the ongoing saga of redemption in the world, and what part we have in that great work.
In earlier series, the recovery of the sense of awe and wonder in the presence of God was noted, something which happens as individuals, groups, congregations focus on God and God’s will for them and the world — a quiet, patient expectancy — and the conviction that God is really present, if we will but stop long enough to apprehend that presence and its meaning for our lives.
Also noted was the need for the church to mount efforts at all levels to rebuild the community of the church, to learn how to love one another again — with all our differences — and to live together with joy and enthusiasm.
At times the critical role of preaching and preachers, teachers and teaching, mission from the doorstep to the ends of the Earth, under the guidance of the Great Ends of the Church held up in our Constitution, have been noted.
Practically every aspect of our problems and possible avenues for living more faithfully have been probed over the years in the pages of The Presbyterian Outlook.
But now we come to this time — this day, this month, this year, this decade — and ask: What is God saying to us in all of this? Where are we to go if we are to be faithful? To whom are we to listen? What are we to do?
No tidy answers are there to any of these questions, but a modest suggestion: That there be widespread discussion of the fact that we are in a critical period, which requires our deepest devotion, our best thinking, our strongest efforts, our largest vision, if we are to claim the moment we have been given as the mainstream Presbyterian body in North America.
Maybe the most we can hope for is to lay claim to the slogan of Booker T. Washington, who more than a century ago challenged his listeners in Atlanta “to put down your buckets where you are.” All problems, when considered globally are overwhelming and beyond solution, but each of us, in his or her own life, his her own place, can practice those disciplines that build up the foundations through the means of grace, and at the same time can hold the larger expressions of the church in constant prayer.
We need pastors and congregations who are experiencing the strength of the living God through their life and mission to come forward with their stories to encourage the rest of us. And those who are sinking need to ask for our prayers for health and healing. And all of us need to pray for one another and the church and the church in the world daily — individually and corporately.
Only prayer and highly disciplined personal truth-seeking, reading and listening to Scripture by large numbers of pastors and officers will prepare us to hear God’s word and will. No prejudiced study guides. Only the text. For as long as it takes — until God sees that we are serious and so speaks. This is the only way the incision in our pride will be so deep that we will eventually rediscover what love for one another should mean in the church.
The discussion of these and related issues will be continued in a new series beginning next week, “Renewing the Covenant.”
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