I have a mischievous habit of asking pastors the question: “What’s going on with your church on Thursday afternoon?” Their predictable answer is usually some equivalent of “nothing much.”
That question was provoked by the chapter title in a book I read a few years ago, Where Is the Church on Thursday Afternoon? The response of most pastors is a predictable “Christendom” answer. After all, the church is about the clergy and about properly authorized services and sacraments and the custodial care of passive members. Responders think only of the “church gathered” for its meetings and assemblies, and under the supervision of the church’s duly ordained leadership.
Other questions follow quite naturally: Does the church, then, cease to be the church at the benediction? Is there still a church when it is not gathered in one place for worship, but “scattered” into the homes and neighborhoods and offices and marketplaces? If not, then how is the church to be the salt and light of God’s mission in the community and society at large?
This type of questioning was sharpened for me just a few years ago when I (as a septuagenarian) got permission to be an interloper in a fascinating convocation of gifted and creative young (mostly twenty-somethings) gathered at a lovely retreat in the Pacific Northwest, over a long weekend, to explore that exact question: “How are we to be salt and light in society and in our local churches?” More than one hundred very gifted young adults came from across the country. They were journalists, medical researchers, musicians, lawyers, teachers, several young Roman Catholic priests, community developers and social workers — Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Independent — all with the same vision and similar questions.
It was a fully participatory conference. There were no keynote speakers. There were twenty-nine seminars on many thrilling and relevant subjects. Each participant had agreed to be a panelist in two of these in his/her pre-registration agreement to be in the conference. These were anything but brain-dead. The discussions in seminars, across dinner tables, in prayer groups, in after hours, were all incredibly intense and profound (as well as exhausting and thrilling). But a common complaint (not griping, mind you, and not with any destructive intent, but rather with a certain sadness) was that in their desire to be God’s salt and light, they found the local congregations or parishes of little real help as equipping agents the other six days. Congregational life consumed them with in-house meetings and responsibilities that seemed indifferent to the world outside.
They offer to us a dimension worth pursuing. For example, a faculty committee asked me at one of our denominational seminaries a few years ago, what I had observed in my involvement with a score of other seminaries that might be of profit to them. I begged the question. I could only respond that according to the Presbyterian Poll of that year, we were a denomination of “Biblically and theologically illiterate laity.” That being so, I observed that about 95% of the church was laity. These men and women spent, on an average, about 150+ hours somewhere besides in church meetings. It meant that whatever was being taught in seminaries to the church’s pastors was not coming through to the 95% of the church sitting in the pews. Therefore one could conclude that the seminary was dismissible as any kind of healthy factor in equipping God’s people for the mission of God in their daily engagement with the world God loves.
Somehow, our understanding of the church has been subverted to focus on the (dubious) category of “clergy” as the active ones who are at the heart of the church. So long as they perform their role with the homiletical and sacramental rites of the church gathered, then it does not seem to matter what happens to all of those folk who passively occupy the pews with no sense of God’s calling to be the transformers of the culture. Or as Lesslie Newbigin states it: “the church’s missionary confrontation with the world.”
And we wonder why the church in North America is so ineffective! The gospel of the kingdom of God is a radical and transformational gospel. God’s people are to be equipped to think and behave in the light of that same gospel of the kingdom. But sadly, they are not. Those who are effective usually find their resources outside of normal church meetings. It was just such a search for companionship and resources on that journey into “Thursday afternoon” that brought them together at the conference mentioned above. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see the rank and file of the Presbyterian Church equipped to be the church on Thursday afternoon and so leave blessing and transformation in their wake?
Robert Henderson is an author, retired pastor, and member of Western North Carolina Presbytery.
