Co-sponsored by the Cross-Cultural Alliance of Ministries, the Montreat Conference Center, and the Presbyterian Outlook Foundation, the five-day event invited participants from 33 states to ask, “What is the church you’re dreaming of?” On the encouragement of co-convener Louise Johnson, the conferees also were encouraged to ask themselves, “What is standing in the way? What are you going to do about it? and … Who else can you dream with?”
Soon conferees were caught up into a whirl of apocalyptic unboundedness via the biblical exposition of Brian Blount, president of Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education. “Freedom is a frightening thing,” he declared.
Expounding on the “outlandishly strange book of Revelation,” Blount declared, “We are — those of us who believe in the Lordship of Jesus Christ — born free. At 1:9, John declares that Christ set us free by his blood. To be washed in that blood is to be born anew, to be born free. The problem is, in a world infested by a dragon, to live free is a frightening thing.”
So, he asked, “What do you do with your knowledge that you have been born free in Jesus Christ in a world where a dragon lurks unbound? Are you bound or unbound?” He got to the point. “Well, what does an unbound church look like?”
• The unbound church isn’t tethered to its safe space sanctuaries, but operates behind the enemy lines of poverty and social injustice.
• The unbound church isn’t tethered to tradition, but builds upon tradition to create new traditions as it engages the world in new ways.
• The unbound church isn’t tethered to just doing mission trips but has begun a journey that will recreate itself fully as a missional reality.
• The unbound church isn’t tethered to the idea that church members ought all to look alike and think alike, but drags people of every physical hue and theological complexion into its spiritual and missional endeavors.
• The unbound church doesn’t sit on the sidelines while politicians and lawyers and activists decide our social fate; it lives and operates as powerfully on a social and political battlefield as it does in a spiritual bubble.
• The unbound church doesn’t just fight for issues that affect people in its neighborhoods or congregations, but is willing to exhaust itself and its resources on behalf of people it does not know, may never see, and will certainly never join.
• The unbound church doesn’t fear fights that may cost it dearly, because the unbound church is free from fear and ready to follow Christ’s call into any and every draconian situation that is devouring God’s people.
• The unbound church doesn’t do its high wire ministry act with a safety net, because it doesn’t fear falling before the dragon. It believes that no matter what happens, God will raise it up again.
“Live unleashed. That is our calling.”
An unbound church must come to terms with its own chains. So said conference Bible study leader, Christine Yoder, associate professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. Expounding on Paul’s shipwrecked voyage, on Jonah’s unlikely voyage, and Agur’s wisdom (in Proverbs 30), she brought words both of assurance and of warning, “God does intend to save everyone on the ship. But God does not intend to save the ship on which they sail.”
Shane Claiborne challenged these voyaging conferees about the character of their faith and the structures of their ships. The keynote speaker told of how, when John the Baptist’s disciples asked Jesus if he was the messiah, he responded, “Tell them what you have seen and heard.” Claiborne asked this crowd, “If people were to ask us ‘Are you Christians?’ could we say, ‘What do you see and hear?’”
Claiborne, a founding member of the monastic community called The Simple Way in Philadelphia, Penn., (and author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical and Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals), reminded Church Unbound conferees that the top three impressions of Christians in our country are that they are anti-gay, judgmental, and hypocritical. “We have a little bit of an identity crisis,” he added.
“One thing I’ve learned from liberals and conservatives,” he reflected. “We can have all the right answers and still be mean.”
Claiborne elevated Mother Theresa as an example of one who rose above that mentality. “She had such a passion for unborn babies [that she showed it] not by wearing a tee-shirt about ‘abortion is murder’ but by coming alongside women in need and saying, ‘If you’ll have your baby, I’ll help raise it.’”
Reflecting on the vision for the church unbound, Rick Ufford-Chase opined, “It’s not just a younger generation but a next generation of folks of all ages that are desperate for a new kinds of church.” Ufford-Chase, the former General Assembly moderator and present executive director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and of the Stony Point Conference Center in N.Y., invited comments from two dynamic smaller church pastors.
Bill Golderer, organizing pastor of the Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia, ministers to a congregation that has grown rapidly to 200-300 in attendance, of whom 60% are persons of color and 20% are homeless. “When you start these endeavors, we Presbyterians think we’re doing due diligence and we’re not. We do demographics studies — it’s an acquisitional mentality. That (is) no way to begin.”
The post-recruitment, post-acquisitional approach to church development is far more risky because it assumes that the church should break out of a single demographic target audience. “Getting people of all kinds of cultures together in worship is not fun. It is frightening.” He added, “If you do church in a new way — church unbound — don’t expect an award or a book deal.” He added, alluding to Brian Blount’s address the evening before, “The dragon is us.”
Maggie Lauterer, pastor of another rapidly growing Presbyterian church, this one in rural western North Carolina (worship attendance has grown from about 12 to nearly 200 over the past few years), reflected on the many radical changes made in her congregation that have turned it around — done in large part to make the church more welcoming for the unchurched. Among them, “The coats and ties have disappeared from our church, so the people who come in feel normal.”
Mark Lomax kept pressing difficult questions. The founding pastor of First Afrikan Church in Lithonia, Ga., assistant professor of homiletics and, presently, acting dean at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, asked, “Where are we when the church is such a friend of empire that the church is never attacked by empire?”
Jim Singleton, pastor of First Church in Colorado Springs, urged the conferees to unbind a passion for the harvest. “What would it look like to do this good news sharing — to enter into this harvest — that allows people to come into relationship with Jesus Christ?” he asked. We have to face up to the dragon, the impediment of our own collective introversion: the average Presbyterian shares his or her faith about once in every 15 years.
Reflecting on the history of evangelism in the old PCUS (the topic of his Ph.D. dissertation), he reminded that the annual reports filed by churches a century ago always asked, “How are you establishing your church beyond its bounds?” The denomination of old, indeed, expected to be a church unbound.
In order to change in the right ways, we need to change for the right reasons, said José R. Irizarry-Mercado, the academic dean and vice president of the Evangelical Seminary in Puerto Rico. “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.”
Richard Kannwischer, pastor of First Church in San Antonio, Texas, found clues for unbounded living in 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.” 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 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.“
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.”
As the time together drew to a close, participants asked. “What’s next?”
On Friday night the 4th of July (after the Montreat community’s Normal Rockwell-style, small-town parade; and prior to the holiday fireworks) Rhashelle Hunter pointed to the future by pointing to God.
Drawing upon Moses’ initial divine encounter on the mountain of God, Hunter, a member of the planning team for the event and currently director of racial ethnic and women’s ministries for the General Assembly Mission Council, urged the conferees to encounter afresh the holy. “Have you experienced the holy? The majesty, the mystery of God? I experience it here at Montreat. … There may be places in the earth that are holy ground for you.”
The timing is holy, too. “We stand before God at a pivotal time in the life of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It is a time of great possibility, a time of transformation, a time of re-formation, of regeneration, of renewal,” she said. Reflecting on comments offered at the beginning of the conference, she said, “My friend Merri Bass of Montreat Conference Center said, ‘Where we were is no more. And the church to which we’ve been called doesn’t exist yet.’”
