by Jack Haberer
OUTLOOK editor
“Dream big, but live small.” It’s one of his life mottoes, but when Shane Claiborne pressed that upon the eager crowd at the Church Unbound Conference in Montreat, N.C. on Wednesday, July 2, their vision for the “church they dream of” began to take shape.
The conference, co-sponsored by The Presbyterian Outlook, the Cross-Cultural Alliance of Ministries, and the Montreat Conference Center, had invited Presbyterians of all ages, ideologies, and regions, to imagine a church that reaches outside the boxes of its own construction.
José R. Irizarry-Mercado, the academic dean and vice president of the Evangelical Seminary in Puerto Rico, defined that box, in part, as our penchant for controversy. “For sure, we are Presbyterians. We make public declarations about big and important issues. But the time we engage in deliberating these significant matters pales in comparison to the emotional energy and time we invest in lesser issues. We are so defined by our ecclesial narcissism that we have come to imagine that the inability of the church to grow and be effective is [caused by] the ideological and political antagonism of those factions that inhabit our pews and presbyteries,” he stated. Instead, he said, the cause of the decline “is not the ideological rift of our congregations but the triviality of our debate before a world that is yearning more than ever to go back home to God.”
In order to change in the right ways, we need to change for the right reasons, said Irizarry-Mercado. “One can but hope that our future concern for the Presbyterian Church is not a concern for the survival of houses of worship and institutions and structures. I hope that’s not what concerns us here. But what concerns us is the sustenance of a rich tradition that centers in the right proclamation of the Word, the nurturing of communities of belief and the fulfillment of God’s mission in the world.”
He nailed the point: “The Reformed faith defined clearly the essential elements that make us Christians: not institutions, not communities, not committees. Only God’s grace. Only God’s word. Sola gratia. Sola scriptura.” But Presbyterianism has developed an “institutional persona and organizational complexity,” leading to different labels: “sola bureaucratia and sola structura, only bureaucracy and only structure.”
Irizarry-Mercado offered hopeful words. “When Christians are able to break from their cultural captivity and be brave enough to raise a prophetic voice, however untraditional or unpatriotic it sounds, and apply the same kind of honest critique to their theology and scriptural interpretations, we may be moving toward a more liberated church. It is uncommon for some one who has a strong point of view to critique her own point of view, but it is possible.”
He also added that such self-critique and initiative must come from various styles and approaches. We need “to recognize that a healthy church needs traditionalists and avant-garde entrepreneurs to provide the correct balance of affirmation and criticism.” e ha
Christine Yoder, Bible study leader for the conference, had launched the day with an exposition of the Book of Jonah. She first reflected on the story’s insights into the judgment and grace of God, as well as the normally violent Ninevites’ surprising hospitality toward Jonah and their ultimate repentance and faith toward God. She pressed the conferees to see how the God of grace presses us to overcome the Jonah within us to engage graciously with “the other.”
Richard Kannwischer, pastor of First Church in San Antonio, Texas, delivered the evening’s sermon, expounding on the Jewish festival of Succoth (or Booths) when Israelites’ camping in makeshift tents enables them to engage “the other.”
Living in tents, makeshift huts, was to remind them of “the impermanence of our lives.” The festival was marked with sheer celebration — it was not to be a time of suffering. It also was a time of hospitality; the sheer experience of living in tents generated lots of visiting with neighbors in their tents. “You can imagine how this would transform a suburb or how this would transform a neighborhood, if everyone was willing to leave the shelter of their three-bedroom, two-bath- homes and to camp out together.”
Also, “there was a time in Succoth when the homeless and the indigent and the poor really became a part of the community. They were already camping out anyway. It’s just that everybody else decided to join them.”
Reflecting on that history, he said, “Sometimes I wonder if we have forgotten the ancient wisdom of our elders. Sometimes we forget … that our only true home is found in God, and it is portable. The Festival of Tents is to remind us that God is our only true shelter. The point is that there is only one true place, one place where life and death, heaven and earth converge, and that is in the person of Jesus Christ. And so, borrowing the image of another rabbi called Paul, he says that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with human hands but is eternal in the heavens.”
Speaking to the present context Kannwischer noted, “Truth be told, that text is [all the] more appropriate as we struggle in a dying denomination in a post-denominational world. [We know] that even if the tent that we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with human hands.”
In order to become the church unbound, in the spirit of the festival of Succoth, he said, “We ought to get out of our sanctuaries, and we ought to get out of our homes, and we’ve got to get into our yards and into the streets and into the parks, and we’ve got to go where the community is gathered.”
That point came home earlier in the day in the words of Shane Claiborne. “What I love about Jesus is he had space for everybody together. He had a Zealot and a tax collector at the same table.” He quipped, “Zealots killed tax collectors for fun on weekends!”
Claiborne did indeed push folks to live faith beyond the box – a faith that embraces the grace of God and loves one’s neighbor. “What I like to say is, ‘When we really discover the love of neighbor, capitalism becomes impossible and Marxism becomes unnecessary.”
