Summary/Reflection: Bp. Todd Hunter & Congregations for the Sake of Others

“I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.” ~ Philemon 9

Bishop Hunter’s big success at yesterday’s afternoon lecture at St. Steven’s Church in Sewickley was an act of informed synthesis. Ostensibly, we were there to hear about “Church Planting for the Sake of Others,” but the talk in no way developed that idea as a concise thesis. Don’t misunderstand, Bishop Hunter did address issues of mission and even offer some new ways to think about it, but he delivered information to us scattershot, a shotgun spread of issues ranging from how we tell the Christian story to engaging in an informed way with our culture. Nebulously, however, a coherent big picture for the future of Anglican ecclesiology and mission eventually came into view.

He began with a splash of cold water: evangelical Christianity is on the decline. According to sociologists of religion, he says, we’re bleeding numbers. He chalked this up to the fading currency of dogmatic truth in the post-Christian West, which I’m sure is insightful, but I was wondering about when these sociologists were taking these numbers. If in the aughts (00’s), his interpretation might have overlooked the problem of George W. Bush, who did no small amount of damage to evangelicalism’s reputation.^ He also refused to criticize some “Moral Majority” leaders like Robertson and Falwell—I appreciated his respect for them as people trying to uphold righteousness in a failing culture, but thought he remained too shy of acknowledging great public sins like their 700 Club conversation on September 12, 2001 blaming 9/11 on lesbians and the ACLU.*

The bishop described a familiar cultural situation: most Americans don’t consider Christianity to be our default religion, but rather one of many religious options. Pluralism and tolerance rule public discourse on God. He brought up the New Atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.) and told us how they’ve changed the tone of atheism from mere dismissal of religion to an outright denunciation of it as morally bankrupt and necessarily damaging. He countered this with statistics about historically steady church attendance and atheism’s lack of popular appeal.

What’s the zeitgeist then? Is it surprising to say that a mushy, post-confidence pluralism prevails, neither outright denying nor outright affirming the existence and/or relevance of God to human life? I’m not sure he spelled it out just this way, but it represents the sum total of his statements on the subject and is, I think, perceptive and relevant. Think of last year’s blockbuster Avatar and the way it’s pantheist-buddhist mystical interconnectedness and call for us to love and defend the weak and the different enriched its otherwise Dances With Wolves in Space plot. I loved the movie, but recognized it as an epic drama of the Obama age: “We’re sorry about Iraq; everything’s connected; there’s something that gives us hope; we’ll use the best technology to show you.”

So what? Bishop Hunter contended that we must recognize this situation as de facto and respond appropriately. “There’s no way into mission apart from reality,” he said. And mission “only happens by understanding and facing reality.” Paul’s Areopagus speech in Acts 17 serves as the model—we make a bridge from their reality (“unknown god”) to ours (“the God who made the world and everything in it”). We don’t preach the gospel by relativizing our story: “It was the particularity of Jehovah that liberated human beings.” Our hardest job, as he puts it, is “lovingly contending” for the uniqueness of Christ. It’s anathema to our culture, yet we can’t shout them into agreement with us. There has to be another way.

“How do we,” he asked, “take the particularity of Jehovah and be his people in this time and place?” In his view, we can neither rely on the strength of dollars or implicit social capital** and must rethink church and mission in terms of loving our neighbor as ourself.*** And that’s where the idea of “Congregations for the Sake of Others” creeps in, as it commends Christians to love people into Christ rather than seeing them as numbers to be secured as the spoils of evangelistic combat. Rather than think of church as one hour a week on Sunday, let’s think of it as all week long, where ambassadors for Christ are living gospel lives among the lost and then bringing them into community and worship on the basis of love.

He commended, almost apologizing for fear of offending Anglican tradition, an instrumentalist view of the church suggesting that Sunday worship is not an end in itself. I guess that’s a sacramental theology debate to be had another day. But he insisted that nothing ought to get in the way of gospel proclamation and gospel living, and that traditions which do need to be reconsidered in light of this imperative. He mediated, however, saying that “Worship was never meant to be in opposition to mission.” There are ways, he said hopefully, of bringing together a robust and historical sacramental theology with an urgent and nimble evangelical mission. He did emphasize that we need a leadership culture that celebrates risk and can deal with failure, the opposite of which is a “paralyzing conservatism.”

Bishop Hunter proposed many things that I, with a strong background in free church evangelicalism, have long been familiar with. In essence, that we need to recapture a biblically Christ-like model of being and doing Church because resting on an institutional legacy does not foster the God-dependence essential to incarnational ministry. His best advice: “Find a reckless abandon to the person and work of the Holy Spirit.” Sounds like the bread and butter of my childhood charismatic evangelicalism—-no surprise since Hunter spent many years with Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard Church. His great success yesterday was not in presenting something new, but rather in presenting something ancient: the apostolic witness of Christ’s life and Paul’s commands (esp. Romans 12:1-2) as the ultimate models for church life. Hunter practices what he preaches, as his talk took the particularity of YHWH known in the life and times of Christ and the early church and demonstrated how it speaks to our contemporary American cultural landscape.

*Such jeremiads have tempting parallels in scripture, but they betray a total ignorance of America’s toxic foreign policy towards Muslim countries since World War I.

**Here "social capital" implies a broad cultural assumption that the church and/or bible hold recognizable moral authority.

***For a non-professional historical take on this idea, see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997). For a biblical take on this idea, see the bible, especially Matthew 22:37-40.

^Addition, 11/13/2010: I should add to this the problematic fallout from 9/11 in general and the cultural polarization which made evangelicalism seem a Christian doppelganger of violent Islamic fundamentalism.

New Season, End of Year One

What a year.  It's strange going back to school after any kind of absence.  It's strange learning and training to do something you love after wandering through a post-graduate liminal length of time of entry-level jobs and self-questioning.  I learned this year that going to seminary neither fixes nor exacerbates your problems--it merely exposes them, taunting you, "What are you going to do about it?"  Exposure certainly feels like exacerbation, but self-honesty helps one to see the situation clearly.

I reported last that I was probably taking Hebrew, maybe doing CPE, and definitely taking a June intensive.  Well, scratch all that and reverse it.  I'm neither taking Hebrew nor a June intensive but am 100% for CPE.  I've just finished my first week.  I'll explain for the non-initiated:  CPE stands for something like "Clinical Practical Education" and is a required 400 hr service-ministry internship for all ordinands in the diocese of Pittsburgh.  Many people in the area spend a summer at the VA hospital, daily learning how to hold to God's light vis-a-vis the stark realities of life and death, mortality and disease--and deal with the attendant emotional stress, no less.  

Our program at the jail is not federally certified, so I could not count it towards becoming a chaplain, but it has been approved by the diocese to count towards the ordination process.  It is therefore not officially "CPE," so our chaplain has retitled it "Pastoral Reflection Group."  Why the jail, then?  Well, the jail is 40 minutes closer and the program costs $200 less.  And the chaplain is awesome.  Let me tell you about Denny Ugoletti.

Denny (Dennis) is my dad's age, bright-silver haired and about 5'8".  He grew up here, in Western Pennsylvania, before and after the collapse of the steel industry.  A speed-reading former boatman, Denny delivers both simple Bible truth and wise theological reflection in the blue-collar cadences of steel-town Italianglese.*  He's goodfella as well-read pastor.  He's been a jail chaplain for nearly twenty years and is ordained in the Assemblies of God.  Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith rocked his ecclesiology without negating his pneumatology and so he's been at Trinity full time this year (that's another way of saying it changed the way he thought about church without quenching the Spirit).  He is a riot to have in class, as his sharp wit comes at you sideways through the Scorsese-dialect.  My recent favorite ad-lib was at the talent show when, asked to read a joke from a sheet of paper, he stopped mid-setup, free-associating into a real-life story much funnier than whatever cheesy joke he'd been assigned ("You're giving birth to a rug!").  In short, I can't imagine learning jail ministry from anyone better.

It's strange, the way the heart works.  I own the curious combination of a fiercely rational mind and a heart which feels so deeply that it readily clouds my judgment and analysis; I am intellectual-passionate.   Both mind and emotions were on full throttle this year, each spilling over into the other, making it difficult to always sort out my proper responses (please forgive me a little vaguery on these points).  But if I say that being trained and evaluated to do that which I have always had eyes for--namely Christian ministry--has brought a deeper level of stress than undergraduate life managed, perhaps you understand.  Before I cared because of vague notions about having a "job" once I graduated, now I care because it's the most important thing I know of.  No pressure, right?

Only this week have I made peace with a place of pain I've carried with me most of this year.  I literally have been under academic pressure since Labor Day last year through the last assignment I submitted this Wednesday; once this semester's deadlines passed I have finally had the clarity of mind to clean heart and home.  Bryan and I made some real progress on the apartment Thursday night and plan to do more today.  I really want to cook more this summer.

*Italian-American English.  Pronounced ee-tal-yan'-glehy-say.

This Week in Encouragement

On Wednesday morning I felt inexplicably funky. One of those days you're thankful for the liturgy because you don't have any more to offer than your physical presence and willingness to assent to the truth. Apropos that Martha G used the living dead as part of her sermon illustration. Eucharist, prayerfully received, always gives me a brief jolt of God's kindness. This week I also received prayer, which was from someone either insightful, listening to the Holy Spirit, or both. I mostly remember now that she prayed that God would remove doubt and fear from me. This helped me identify those thoughts as not from God and as barriers to his work, doubly so since he was pointing them out to me through her.

Friends of mind in Tallahassee sent the Trautmans and I a care package with encouraging letters, junk food and pictures of the Bodoh girls. Thanks friends! I remember my spiritual family in Tallahassee with deep fondness and appreciation. How many people get spiritual community like you during the quagmires of twenty-something pre-adulthood? I so covet all your prayers; I love it here at Trinity but it has still been a huge transition and this context is really helping me focus my spiritual growth. So I am not only coming into a new community, going back to school, learning Greek, becoming a member in a new church and trying to discern God's next step (with dramatic implications for the rest of my life)--I am also, with God's help, dredging the subterranean junk of my heart and dealing with it by his kindness and severity, providing a thick layer of spiritual warfare over it all.

Also, my sister blessed me with some prophetic encouragement the other day by sending me a list of attributes and promises the Lord spoke to her about me. It is good to be reminded of the good that God and other people can see in us; I am often my own worst critic. Especially meaningful was her connection of the Psalm 37:4 command/promise to delight yourself in the Lord and receive the desires of your heart with a specific desire of mine--more especially so since I haven often regarded that desire and that verse together! I love you Katie! :D

Last Saturday, before I left Jacksonville for Pittsburgh, some people close to me were sharply questioning my decision to move here. It was painful and frustrating. So I was in a weird mood as I went to board the plane and saw a mid-50s man with bushy eyebrows and carry-on luggage bearing the Anglican seal. I said to him, "Are you Bob Duncan?" He turned, smiled and said he was. I told him I was from Trinity and then we realized we shared both flights that evening.

When we disembarked in Charlotte, he was waiting for me at the gate and offered to buy me dinner during our layover. So for the next hour we chatted and ate Chili's. I really like him. We covered a wide range of subjects and covered a little of his personal history and a lot more of my own. I had the distinct feeling of being gently probed by the man who might ordain me in three or four years. After the discouragement before leaving, it was a blessing to have a "chance" encounter with the archbishop of American Anglicanism. It seems just one more step in the process of belonging to this new family. And speaking of my sister the prophet, she even said she hoped I would sit next to someone interesting after I wearily quipped that "There's never anyone interesting on commuter flights."

Lastly, I would like to point out that, save the archbishop, all this encouragement came by the way of women. Pick up the slack, brothers! Don't be outdone in the imitation of God. :)

Kairos, anyone?

Next week is our fall reading week: no classes, no chapel, no advisee group, no nothin'. I'm flying to Charlotte on Monday afternoon and back to Pittsburgh from Jacksonville on Saturday afternoon. Woot.

I'm going to need the time to: see family, get out of Ambridge, study Greek, run on the beach in the Florida sun, read 4 books.

I received my new laptop last Friday. On Saturday the left speaker began omitting screeching static instead of any proper sound. Sunday night I spent an hour on the phone with India, troubleshooting--finally HP agreed to take it back and gimme a new one.

I also spent an hour on Sunday after service at a parish meeting where the rector explained the details of the recent court decision* on the diocese of Pittsburgh and fielded questions from the congregation. The bishop and standing committee will decide by Monday whether or not to appeal the decision. I would hazard to say the people at the meeting were about 80/20 in favor of appeal, but I have no idea how representative that is of the diocese at large. I commend all who might pray and lobby on this issue to the words of Fr. David Sandifer from when Calvary Anglican (Jacksonville, FL) lost their building: "I think it will be good for us." To everyone else: please pray! Pray that those making the decision will have the wisdom of much counsel and sensitivity to God's leadership.

This weekend I'm going to a prophetic conference at Shepherd's Heart, the charismatic-Anglican-homeless church in downtown Pittsburgh. It's been a while since I've been to anything really crazy (OneThing Montgomery was energetic, but not wacko. Not that all wacko stuff is bad...); I've got to walk that fine line of discernment and openness, I guess.

It's been a good week. Stress levels are down. Productivity up. Please pray against any Satanic attack against the peace I have right now, especially since I'm attending spiritually-charged meetings in a spiritually-charged part of town at a spiritually-charged moment of diocesan crisis this weekend. Hm. Kairos, anyone?

*The Pittsburgh Court of Common Pleas ruled in favor of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh (over and against the EDoP [Anglican]), granting them legal rights to all diocesan assets. Millions in trust funds, property and buildings thus go to them.