When Chicago pastor Jong Hyeong Lee first put that question to the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in late July, a silence filled the room – a recognition of what a big question that was, and how hard to really know.
The answers – tentative, speculations more than certainties – were like a flashlight shining out from a tent, showing a glimpse of sky, a glimpse of ground, a glimpse into the wilderness, a flash of who-knows-what? What it all adds up to may look a lot different in the morning – but it’s a question well worth asking to a denomination that at times can have trouble seeing beyond the next General Assembly, beyond the latest furious squabble inside the tent.
Here’s some of what the task force members saw, squinting into the darkness:
Uncertainty is certain. Expect surprises. There has been so much unexpected change in the last century that Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, said of herself: “I’m an agnostic about the future,” in part because she never would have predicted that the Cold War would have ended when and in the non-violent way it did. We don’t know what will happen, Wheeler said, but we’re sure there will be change.
In 1960, the rules seemed clear, said Jenny Stoner of Vermont, the task force’s co-moderator. You stayed in your job, you got raises every year, “you bought a house and you raised your children.”
Now, uncertainty is the great certainty, “the central fact in many people’s lives,” Stoner said. Some folks don’t worry; they say, “something will happen,” they figure things will work out. Others, feel overwhelmed, upset not to have a solid plan. People seek stability and community, Stoner said, “a sense of who they are other than a consumer.”
Milton “Joe” Coalter, the library director at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, would say only this about what lies ahead: “I don’t know.”
Don’t look west. Barbara Everitt Bryant, a research scientist at the University of Michigan Business School and former director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, said the 19th century was the British century, the 20th century was the U.S. century, and the 21st will be the Asian century. Western dominance will decline, and the reordering will bring into focus pressing international questions, including those of economic disparities, Bryant said.
That will raise new questions about the responsibilities of the U.S. in a reordered world. “I’m very concerned about empire,” said William Stacy Johnson, former lawyer who teaches systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. “I’m very concerned that the American empire threatens the American republic,” and that the church in the West seems more concerned about sex than about the deep concerns of the world, about such things as war and violence and torture.
“I’m from Korea but my passport is from USA,” said Lee. “USA is hated, hated, hated” by so many.
“I think we live in a culture and a society that for a while has enjoyed global preeminence that is increasingly feeling under siege,” said Mark Achtemeier, an associate professor of systematic theology and ethics at the University of Dubuque School of Theology. With the shifts in power, “this means life in our culture will probably be increasingly dominated by fear, and fear tends to produce defensiveness and increasing brutality and tribalism. In the face of that, probably the most cogent message we have for the church” is what Jesus said: “Be not afraid.”
A world of contrasts. John “Mike” Loudon, a pastor from Lakeland, Fla., sees the contrasts in his own community. Near his church, in an affluent area, the roads run beside million dollar homes. Not a mile away, people live in “desperate poverty,” Loudon said. And it’s not just Lakeland. Red states versus blue states. High-tech medical treatments for the affluent versus villages decimated by AIDS in Africa.
John Wilkinson, a pastor from Rochester, N.Y., said he sees so many sources of conflict – including race, religion, economics and politics. José Luis Torres-Milàn, a pastor from Puerto Rico, said of the U.S.: “So wealthy and yet so poor.”
“We need to see where greed and poverty are affecting the whole fabric of our lives,” said Joan Kelley Merritt of Seattle.
A multicultural world. In the U.S., many forces are pushing against the Anglo-dominated, predominantly Christian way of looking at things. Secularism is a tremendous force – with immigrants coming from many places and faith traditions, and many Americans having no allegiance to organized religion at all, Wilkinson said.
The growing Latino population has huge implications for ministry, Johnson said.
Officially, the numbers are 40 million, unofficially 70 million, Torrés-Milàn said. And Latino Christians bring their own gifts, he said – they are “grounded in Jesus Christ,” they share not just their faith but their lives and their personal stories, they seek God not individually but as a community of believers.
Increasingly, the U.S. will be seen as a mission field and “we will be receiving the gifts of our partner churches overseas,” said Scott Anderson, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches.
Gradye Parsons, who is director of strategic operations for the PC(USA)’s Office of the General Assembly and provides staff support for the task force, said: “I hope we get over taking care of the poor and start worshipping with the poor.”
The power of religion. In a world of violence, religion may sometimes fuel the difficulties, but may be an antidote to the conflicts as well, Johnson said. He sees hope in ongoing Christian-Muslim-Jewish conversations despite all the tensions. And “the center of gravity in Christianity is no longer in the West,” he said.
There are lots of hungers in the world,” for community, connection, relationship, Wilkinson said.
In the U.S., “everyone says, ‘I’m busy, busy, busy, rush, rush, rush,” Lee said. “They’re looking for something. They’re looking for money and pleasure. … They do as they please” but are “a hollow man, vacant man” inside.
Is the church too secularized? Does it lead society or does it follow – for example, on the matter of same-sex marriages, Lee asked, adding: “I think God’s looking for some means to transform this whole world.”
Embody the answers. “We have to be less about sex and more about bodies,” said Sarah Grace Sanderson- Doughty, a pastor from Lowville, N.Y. As technology makes it easier to communicate, people feel more disconnected, more disembodied, more out of touch. The church needs to be savvy and wired, she said, but also “constantly creating spaces where we’re calling people beyond that to places where hands touch hands,” where they can see one another, where they know for sure “we are body, mind and soul created in the image of God.”
Mainline in decline. Like it or not, mega-churches pose some real questions about the future of mainline denominations in a post-modern world, said Jack Haberer, a pastor from Houston. He sees a hunger to “flatten out the hierarchies and give us community.” And the mega-churches, along with the declining membership in mainline churches, directly put the question forward: What does a post-modern church look like?
In this century, the PC(USA) will have to face the consequences of its membership losses. “I think we’re going to be closing thousands of churches in the next 30 to 50 years,” particularly in rural areas,” Anderson said. And he dreams of the day when the coveted job for a PC(USA) minister will not be a tall-steeple pastor, but a church planter.
“We need to be flexible in structure,” Loudon said. “I think we need to be technologically very savvy, even small churches.” When necessary, “we need to be able to pick up our tent and move.” Wilkinson used the phrases nimbler, leaner, less bureaucratic, and Anderson, organic, fluid, connected.
Johnson sees many post-moderns returning to tradition in creative and incarnational ways. Intrigued by the emerging church movement, “I’ve started hanging out with these 20-somethings with their heads shaved and all kinds of piercings and tattoos,” he said. And he’s become convinced that “denominations can’t continue with bureaucratic forms” of getting things done.
Perhaps it would also help to look outside the tent, across the borders. “In our Book of Order we state very clearly that we are not the church,” Parsons said. “We are just one toenail of a church. When you frame it like that, I am part of a growing church.”
Learning to trust. Gary Demarest of California, the task force’s co-moderator, said he sees the tension between people not knowing what the future will bring, but wanting to control it. Demarest said he’s coming to understand “the difference between knowing and trusting. The longer I live, the less I really know but the more I trust.”
Demarest said he can see the PC(USA) continuing to fight “until we either die or go broke.” Yet “I am filled with hope.”
The real hope. Many people are worried and anxious, and in their pain respond to a “feel-good, in the moment” sort of an answer, said Mary Ellen Lawson, stated clerk of Redstone presbytery. She hopes they’ll swing from that to the centrality of the gospel.
“We have a message,” Loudon said. “We have Jesus.”
Know your song. “Let me tell you how a minority survives,” said Martha Sadongei, a Native American who comes from the Kiowa nation, whose mother was from the Tohono O’odham nation. “It’s knowing whose song you sing. … It’s not giving up on your core beliefs but holding on to them,” even with change brewing all around. For Presbyterians, for all Christians, “the core belief is Jesus,” Sadongei said. “It’s the song we sing from the ages. It’s the song we will sing much further down in the ages. You just have to know your song.”
