The Hard Work of Hospitality

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

We first take away their cell phones. We take away their cell phones and then we take away their access to Facebook, followed by their access to email and the internet, and finally (gasp) we take away their IPods. We call it a Technology Sabbath. All of their forms of media are gone in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You can almost see the scratch marks on their laptops and IPods as we pull them all away for thirty long days.

After this, we put them through one month of hard situations in which they, as a group, are required to crawl together over various obstacles. Some of these obstacles are solid and real, even terrifyingly real. They find themselves high above the treetops on a high ropes course and dangling on the side of a mountain on a rope climb. Some of the obstacles are less concrete but every bit as real as they are confronted with theologically rich questions they cannot answer easily. Finally, they are required as a group to confront the discomfort and dissonances of a cross-cultural setting in South America.

For many summers now, I have had the opportunity to observe cohorts of approximately thirty young adults each year being challenged by a Lilly-funded youth program we host at the Ockenga Institute called Compass. They move from living in a wilderness setting, to the classroom, and finally to a missions context. It has been a laboratory of community of sorts for us as we have had the privilege of standing back, year after year, and observing intentional community in the making, where complete strangers are transformed into a lifelong community of brothers and sisters, all in the confines of one month. How long does it take for the awkward glances of a nervous stranger to become heartfelt straight-ahead, eye-to-eye acknowledgements of a fellow believer in Jesus Christ? We have found it has not taken long when these fellow believers are required to face hard times together.

And it does not take long for these young people to express authentic forms of hospitality toward one another. We see it everywhere, from the simple words of encouragement extended to a sister who is trying to make it up the last 20 feet of the side of a mountain, to their small group conversations as they tell each other their stories, to the youth sitting up all night next to a fallen comrade who was a stranger only a few weeks prior, caring for her as she barfs up foreign food in a foreign land, to the worship they share that, at moments, are deeply moving and instructive to their souls as brothers and sisters in Christ.

The lesson learned in simple ways is that extending hospitality to one another in our churches is not always easy. It is not easy for these youth on a one-month excursion into community building, and it certainly is not easy for us in our churches. But too often we have relegated our expressions of hospitality to its entertainment value. Isn’t this, in fact, what we point to in our culture when we talk of the ‘hospitality industry?’ We point to entertainment in all its forms. Hospitality and entertainment have become synonyms in our cultural consciousness.

Unfortunately they have become synonyms in our church lexicon as well. Too often we have built our lives together around entertainment. At worst, our times together serve as distractions; we use them like watching a good movie or a baseball game on television where the entertainment value of the experience itself becomes an end in itself. Too often hospitality is relegated to self-selected venues where we invite those we feel most comfortable with to share a common experience of mutual gratification. Often times not much is required of us outside of the effort it takes to make a salad or, in the case of a typical men’s ministry, pancakes. We like to keep things light and conversational. In fact, this is how we measure success and failure for ourselves; the degree to which we individually leave feeling at least mildly satisfied.

There is nothing wrong with any of these forms of entertainment in themselves. However, the danger that entertainment brings to the topic of hospitality is when the entertainment value of our lives together takes over. The various enticements of the forms of entertainment at our disposal can easily serve as a distraction to the hard work required of expressing true hospitality to one another.

Look and listen closely to the stories around you in your churches. You will see and hear hard choices being made everywhere: An unemployed brother over there just trying to keep his credit rating from exploding; the teenager over here making decisions surrounding new temptations that could impact the rest of her life; the couple over there whose marriage secretly isn’t going all that well; the single sister over here who is so lonely she can hardly keep herself together; and the elderly woman over there who has got to make a decision on when to pull the plug on a life partner. If all that our hospitality involves is simply about entertaining ourselves, none of these stories will be heard let alone responded to.

James’ Long Boney Finger

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

I was reading through the second chapter of James the other day and found his long boney finger poking me in the chest again. The good brother of Jesus was once again yelling at me, in this case about my ever so subtle tendency toward expressing favoritism in my church.

The scene he paints could not be more vivid: The setting is the gathered place of worship, perhaps a messianic synagogue (James 2.2-4). As we read the story in the second chapter, possibly the glint of gold on the finger as the sun hits it is what we are drawn to first. Then we notice the purple robes. Clearly this person who just entered the synagogue is a person of distinction. We cannot help but notice him, and if noticing him is our only fault, perhaps we would be okay. But, it takes only this first glance at this visitor for the social gravity of the place to take over. Like a rock, the rich visitor falls to the front of the place of worship. When he arrives at the front, he found a poor man without a ring, void of a colorful robe, and perched at his feet. Let the worship service begin.

Extending beyond my own personal proclivities in this matter as I face the fellowship hall of my own church every Sunday, I find the most dramatic example of preferentiality in the church today in general is in the celebrity status we give to some within our congregations. Don’t we offer certain individuals in our Christian circles celebrity status that mimics the larger culture around us? People and US magazines have nothing on us in this regard. If we were to compare the lists of celebrities who are hot commodities in the Christian world at any time, our lists would be remarkably similar. We should resist this celebrity culture for the sake of these individuals as well as for our own.

Further, the greatest dangers in our churches in this regard maybe the most subtle. Discussions involving the status of churches themselves inevitably will illicit a clear profile of what would conventionally be considered “healthy” or vital churches versus those considered not so. Any pastor committed to the current canon of literature involving numerous church growth models in circulation will know that the “sweet spot” in any congregation involves attracting young couples in their 20’s through their 40’s who have lots of children and youth to fill church programs. These are the productive years in the lives of families; the hope is, of course, some of this productivity will translate into the productivity within our churches as well. Conversely, when discussing less productive churches, the most natural description is that they are small churches “filled with old people.”

There is undoubtedly logic to this profile that has a great deal of merit to it, and it has, by and large, passed the test of time for pragmatic reasons. But stepping back far enough to see this perspective against the larger backdrop of the kingdom of God, does this profile of church life not illustrate precisely what James rails against in his example of what is not to go on in the churches he is writing to in first century Asia Minor? Like the silver ring and purple robe of the wealthy visitor, we give preferential treatment to the most productive in our midst. It is for these that we re-engineer our worship services, sometimes to the objections of a prior generation. It is for these that we develop our best programs. And it is to these we seek to attract and accommodate. We do these things while those who we may deem less productive—the aging, sometimes singles, at times the economically challenged—tend not to get as much of our attention. Even our descriptions of them suggest that we view them somewhat as liabilities to our church life.[1] Of this, I will only repeat James’ admonition: “My brothers (and sisters), as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism (2.1).”

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[1] There are several who are beginning to rethink some of these values that have become so central to our thinking of church life. Two who have especially rethought the role of the elderly within our churches are Gordon McDonald, Who Stole My Church (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2007) and Cedric W. Tilberg, Revolution Underway: An Aging Church in an Aging Society, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1984.

Extending Hospitality is Messy Business in Churches

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

One of my all time favorite images from the vast storehouses of wisdom hoisted on us by Garrison Keillor in his radio show, Prairie Home Companion, as I can recall it, can be reduced to a single two minute moment when a young Garrison, resisting all impulse to do otherwise, found himself in the late fall of the year throwing an overly ripe tomato toward his older sister who just happened to be bending over looking south. The overly juicy tomato came in low and hard from the north and hit her squarely on the part of the anatomy where one normally sits. Can you hear the wonderful, big juicy splat of that tomato?[1]

Putting aside the deviance of an adolescent young boy, this is the kind of sound we need to hear more of in our churches. We need to hear more splattering. We need to see and accept ourselves more in the context of the messiness of our lives. I realize this runs contrary to some of the efficiencies and professionalism that many of us like to bring to doing church life, we corporate types. But, we are not neat and tidy people. Nor do we serve neat and tidy people. In building our lives together—programmatically, institutionally, socially—should we not be more attentive to the actual condition of our lives outside of our gathered community? In our planning, should we not be attentive to the dangers of forcing square individuals into round holes?

Sometimes expressing hospitality to one another abhors the neatness we want to give it. We hesitate extending ourselves, for example, hoping for the “perfect time” to invite someone into our lives, not realizing that sometimes the less-than-perfect time is really the absolute right time. Sometime we are so concerned about chipping our fine china that we don’t extend hospitality on paper plates. And, on a more programmatic level, sometimes we have become so scripted that we have wrung all the spontaneity out of our life together. People live messy, messy lives and churches should bear some of that messiness with it. I leave it to you to decide what this might look like in your church.

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[1] Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion radio broadcast, recorded, May 15, 2008.

Falling in Love

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Let’s call her Martha Kavinski. She was my first secretary at the first church I served as pastor just out of seminary. When they invented New Englanders, they carved her in New Hampshire granite and pointed to her thereafter as the model for the rest of us. She was tough as nails, she was utterly undiplomatic, and most of all, she did not like me. She met me at the stairways leading up to my office at the church on my first day, and right then and there, I felt like a first grader on the first day of class looking up at raw authority.

It did not take me long to realize that Martha was not the only one not immediately enthralled with my presence. The congregation was peppered with individuals who had been at the church a long, long time, and they wanted to make it clear to me early on that life had gone on reasonably well before I arrived and probably would go on just as well after I departed.

My experience, I am sure, is not unusual to most of you in ministry. Although my first years were not a disaster, they were not easy. Who would have thought that moving the church library to a more public location so that it actually could be used by the children of the congregation would provoke three meetings and an act of the full board of the church?

In hindsight, perhaps the only thing that saved me was what many would consider a grave liability on my part. I entered into the world of this three hundred year old church without a clear set of ambitions for the congregation. Perhaps too naïve for a clear plan, I fell back on something far more basic: Gradually, unconsciously, seemingly against my will, I found that I began to fall in love with this congregation, Martha and all.

In working with students and young pastors these past years at the seminary, I have noticed a growing trend that hints at good news and bad news. Perhaps buoyed by a cottage industry of church resources, pastors are entering their ministries with a growing awareness of the envisioning process required for healthy congregational life. That’s the good news. The bad news is that often time these well-intended visions of what a congregation should become comes with airtight, tone-death agendas.

A look at these agenda-driven processes from the inside looking out bears reflection. As a person who is now facing his mid-fifties, I can more readily fit into the skin of the long-time parishioner who has committed years of labor and well-intended, if often misguided, leadership in a church. The parishioner’s kids may have been born and nurtured in the church; he or she may have helped to develop and taken ownership of a program that at one time clearly met the needs of the congregation; he or she may have spent countless Saturday mornings toiling over the church lawn.

What does that parishioner see and feel when a pastor enters into the life of a church with a satchel full of good ideas on how his or her church needs to change. Change the worship service. Eliminate the hymnal. Get rid of a timeworn program. Re-organize the committee structure of the church. No doubt many of these things might benefit the church greatly and might be essential for new growth, both spiritually and numerically. But, on the face of it, what do these things say to those who, apparently, are in need of change?

I am convinced that churches are less in need of pastors’ well-designed agendas than their love. Falling in love with a congregation is an amazing legacy to give to a church. The measure of that love, like marriage, involves loving churches exactly as they are, with all their imperfections, before seeking more of them.

Martha died at 75 and I count one of the high moments of my ministry at that church the eulogizing of her at her funeral. We became fast friends in Christ. In the end, she saw what I saw in the subsequent six years of our ministry together. That creaky old church grew ten fold. I am convinced it changed and grew in large measure because the congregation genuinely felt loved by its pastoral staff. It is amazing what love can do when love comes without strings attached.

Whining Through the Ages

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Let me whine for a while. I think I’ve reached that moment similar to when I have played a favorite song one too many times. You know the kind of song I am talking about; the song with the lyric, the melody line, the refrain that perfectly encapsules some part of your life…perfectly. And, you make the fateful, if understandable, mistake of playing it one too many times. Now crushed by the weight of redundancy, the song loses its meaning. When does a cliché become a cliché?

This is what I feel about the current language describing Generation theory. No longer is it enough to call ourselves Christians, human beings for that matter. The current climate has us all corralled into increasingly-smaller holding pens called Gen X, Y, Z, post X, Y, Z, the emerging X, Y, Z.

It is not that Generation theory hasn’t been a helpful paradigm, even truthful to a point. The simple reality that cultural values shift through time from one generation to the next is so self-evident it is hard to conceive that it has only been in recent years that the idea has taken root in our national consciousness.

But, have we not pulled the thin strands that hold this concept together almost beyond the breaking point? How many churches have I observed in recent years being completely re-engineered on the basis of this concept alone? Worship services, small group ministries, evangelism, outreach, teaching: Every aspect of church-life has been filtered through the generational lens. Pastors now look upon their congregations as if they are filled with generational subspecies roaming across the Serengeti. Each subspecies—Gen X, Y, or Z--thinks differently, speaks a different language, and responds to God differently in the most fundamental of ways.

Not long ago, I met with the leadership of a national para-Church organization on behalf of the seminary and I made the fateful mistake of questioning the veracity of Generational theory. The silence around that table of leaders was deafening. For a moment, I thought perhaps I had questioned the Resurrection.

Part of what drives my passion on this issue is personal and results from my own work in my doctoral work on assessing the empirical research on religious conversion. Fifteen years ago, if anyone would have questioned the truthfulness of brainwashing or deprivation theories as singular explanations for how individuals change religious commitments, they would have been laughed off the stage. Not so today. We have moved well beyond these explanations to others. Similarly, the surrounding orthodoxy around Generational theory is equally vulnerable to change. To speak of it as a concept is not so much to diminish its usefulness as to caution us of its limitation. How much now rides on this conceptualization in your church?

I think one of the most dangerous implications of our over-dependence upon Generational theory is that it so causes us to focus upon the differences in individuals within our churches at the expense of what unites us together. My twenty-some-year old son wears his pants a little lower than I do. He uses vocabulary at times that sends me scurrying for further explanation. He enjoys different forms of music. But, when I look deep into his eyes, when we talk about what touches us most intimately, when we speak about God, and our family, and our mutual traditions, we are the same species.

Further, we share the same Gospel. The things that both of us look for in Christian community—authenticity, honesty, winsomeness—are the same. Exactly the same. The similarities far outweigh the differences, and the current focus on what makes us so different prevent us—prevent us as a church—from focusing on the most important things, that which binds us together in Christ. The huge amounts of time spent on fine tuning our churches into parts has become a grand diversion from what really, really matters.

I’m done whining now.

Reading in the Company of Others

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

What are you reading? Look down there on your nightstand, or is it the little table next to your desk in the office? Or, perhaps I should ask, ‘are you reading…anything?’

I confess, in the midst of some of the frantic moments of my day-to-day life, these questions conjure up huge mountains of guilt for me. There are times when all I want to do is crawl into a small dark corner, sit on a soft barker lounge, and escape into the drama of a flat screen television. You know the scene: the diet coke and chips are on my right side, the clicker is on my left side and then… clear as day, I hear those aggravating, sniffling words from my dear old friend, Charles Spurgeon,

The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. Brethren, what is true of ministers is true of all of people. YOU need to read. (#542 Spurgeon Sermon “Paul-His Cloak and His Books” in the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit 9 (1863): 668-669).

Sometimes I just hate Spurgeon.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes a date with a barker lounge chair, a diet coke, and a clicker is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, put the three together and they can become a habit, and habits sometimes become preoccupations, and preoccupations sometimes become lifestyles.

So, how do I get out from this corner of guilt that I have painted myself into? Recently, I have begun to approach reading in a new way, new way for me, that is. Actually, my guess is that this approach has been around for a long time and I have just been looking the other way.

For years, I have viewed reading strictly as a solitary enterprise. That is, take the television and clicker away and you would have seen me on that same barker lounge, with the same diet coke, only this time reading alone. What I chose to read was a private affair. How I engaged with the ideas in the book was a private affair. How I used what I learned was a private affair. Everything was private.

All this has changed recently. I am beginning to view reading more communally, that is, as an act of community. For the past two years I have found myself in a monthly reading group and have found the experience liberating for a variety of reasons. First, do you see the rut that follows me wherever I go? Left to my own inclinations, I tend to read the same types of things over and over again. What is it for you? For me it is biographies and historical novels and survival literature. Being a card-carrying member of the group has changed all of this. What we read is a group decision. I have been forced to read things I otherwise would not have read. Go figure, I just read two great books on worship that would have, otherwise, been on the bottom of my reading list.

Further, the book group has allowed me the opportunity to think through what I have read in the company of others. Imagine this; my first reading of a book is not always right! Sometimes in mildly annoying ways, these men have forced me to think differently and creatively. Our reading together has challenged me in ways that would not have been the case if I were reading in solitude. Typically we have walked away from our times together intentionally asking ourselves how the residue of what we have read will stick with us for the long haul. How might the book we just read change us even in small but concrete ways?

Maybe it has something to do with the air in the room that us common readers of books share. Once ideas are floating out there, outside of our individual heads, they somehow become more objective and concrete. We find that none of us are in sole possession of them; they exist separate from us. Like a good tennis match, watching these ideas being batted around from one side of the room to the other has made reading an entirely new sport. I like that.

Friendship of a Pastor

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

It is quite amazing the things you realize at a funeral. There we all were, almost three hundred friends and family members, all of us there to honor my father who had just passed away a couple of days earlier. They came from all over the Midwest. The older folks, representing his five full-time and several interim pastorates sitting in the front rows to hear better, were the most conspicuous.

We laid my father to rest, and in doing so, we were really laying to rest sixty years of faithful ministry. It was my task to eulogize him for the family. As I looked out over the mourners that day, and particularly those tired souls in the front rows, I couldn’t help but think of the kinds of relationships that were being represented there before me.

How had they perceived my father? There my father was before us, first, seen through the eyes of a wife, certainly the most intimate of the relationships being represented. And, then, there were the four grown boys, less intimate but equally loving. There were four daughters-in-law. How did daughters tethered to this man all these years out of marital pledge rather than blood kinship view this man and his life? There were plenty of nephews and nieces who largely saw him past his prime. There were only a few of his peers left who observed him in his prime—no siblings, but a few brother and sister-in-laws. And finally, with the exception of the church custodian and the ladies who served lunch that day, all of the rest sitting there saw this man through the lens of his ministry amongst them as their one time pastor.

Of this latter group, I couldn’t help thinking of one of dad’s most memorable sayings while I was growing up: “My best friends are ex-parishioners.” Certainly he never made this little adage public, but there was something in dad’s past that always made him wary of getting too close to those he served. Perhaps it was a piece of pastoral wisdom that he learned in his seminary days from the forties.

Whatever it was, in hindsight I think this self-imposed ministerial convention left my dad privately lonely. Publicly, no one would have guessed it. Dad was a big, gregarious man. Our home was a big, hospitable place. Our family life was cluttered with people from all walks of life. Dad’s life was filled with relationships, but at the end of the day, few of those relationships could easily fall under the category of friendship, narrowly defined. Most of his friends sat outside the church door, at least of the church he was currently serving. Only when he left a church would he express friendship openly to certain special people.

The wisdom of this little saying of dad’s can easily be disputed? Is it wise for pastors to nurture friendships within their own congregations? If not, are pastors, then, doomed to a life of solitude? Aside for his or her family, where else is the source of community for those who are to oversee community to come from? What was dad so fearful of? And, what advice should young pastors be given as they enter into a profession that is enormously challenging, potentially filled with conflict, and often lonely?

Lost in the Taiga

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

What could it be? Scanning across the sea of dark green coniferous forest, there it was, a square break in the darkness, a tiny patch in the fabric of the uninhabited Siberian quilt. It almost looked like a tilled garden. But, how can this be? They were hundreds of kilometers from civilization.

From their helicopter on that spring of 1982, Russian geologists looking for drilling sights in the subarctic mountains--taiga--of Siberia were desperately searching for a small morsel of land where they could put down. What they found, instead, was a thin fragment of civilization that first dumbfounded them and then captured their full imaginations. Parachuting in, they found themselves staring into the black din of a musty, sticky cabin, barely held up by sagging ceiling joists.

And from out of that cabin came an amazing human story. Huddled in that humble cabin came five hollow figures seemingly held together by bailing wire. First came the old man, his disheveled beard matched by his patched—his re-patched—shirt and pants. Two grown sons followed him, and then, behind them they could hear the hysterical cries of two grown daughters. It was summer so all were without shoes. But, come winter, they walked the snowy mountain range with homemade birch bark boots. The geologists stood face to face with the Lykov family. In turn, the Lykov family stood face to face with other human beings. The grown children had never seen another human face other than their family members. Never. They lived their lives completely to themselves, surviving solely on subsistence fare of potatoes and pine nuts.

What could have driven this family of hermits into this vast wilderness? Vasoly Peskov tells this amazing story that has reached millions of readers in his chronicle, Lost in the Taiga. What drove this family for decades into a life radically set apart from civilization? The Lykov family was part of a small group of “Old Believers” who began their journey from the outside world during the reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church during Peter the Great. Systematically setting themselves apart from the world, they spent what time they had each day that was not filled with scraping together enough food for the next, in long ritualistic, pietistic prayer. Their sole goal in life was to remain uncontaminated by the larger world.

The story of the Lykov family was part of my summer reading. I found it an amazing story not because it was so dramatically different from where most of us live our lives, although this is certainly the case in one sense. Quite the opposite, I found the story so compelling because I related so much to it. What is this impulse in all of us that closely measures our commitment to Jesus Christ by the degree to which we separate ourselves from the world around us? Like the Lykov family, I realize there is safety in maintaining a distance from the world, be it geographical, intellectual, or moral. But, in playing it safe, do we not risk a contamination of another sort? Like the Lykov family, losing contact with their world caused them to live tiny, utterly selfish, and distorted lives.

The point is, Jesus’ example in the Gospel clearly points us to the often forgotten truth that we, the Church, need the world out there—our associations, our towns and communities, our relationships with our unbelieving friends and enemies—as much as they need us. Without continuous, ongoing connections with our world, we all run the risk of living very small safe lives robbed of the very relationships that stirs the gospel in our souls.

Seminary or Cemetery?

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology and
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling at the Charlotte campus

“Seminary or Cemetery? Cultivating Spiritual Vitality in Theological Education.” This was the title of the Integrative Seminar at GCTS-Charlotte this past Saturday. The title reflects the common joke about seminary experience: that it kills the soul. We spent this past Saturday talking about this topic. Dr. Hollinger challenged us in the opening chapel to ask ourselves “have we lost our first love?” speaking from the letter to the church at Ephesus from Revelation 2:1-7. He pointed out that Ephesus was once a thriving city with a vibrant growing Christian community. Now it is an empty ruin. The challenge for us is to journey through seminary and our theological education without becoming an empty ruin. How can we do this?

Dr. Steve Klipowitz started the day with a presentation on the survey he took of GCTS-Charlotte students. He asked our students to rate their spiritual vitality and indicated whether it had increased or decreased during their seminary training. About 50% of the student body responded to the survey. Respondents were 37% MDivs, 28% MACCs and the rest the other MAs. I will not repeat all the results here, but I would like to highlight some of the outcomes that could be worth noticing and taking into consideration.

The average score on spiritual vitality was 6.65 out of 10. However, the responses really were bimodal: there were a group of students who reported their spiritual vitality was “fair” and a group that were “good” or better. There were some key factors that discriminated between these two groups. The three most important were: active involvement in a vital church, maintaining regular devotional life, and participating in a small group. Students reported factors contributing to the decline in their spiritual life such as tyranny of the urgent (over-committed, too busy, stressed), lack of devotional time, and just the vagaries of life. Those who reported the poorest spiritual vitality tended to be those working more than 40 hours a week as well is going to school, being in seminary more than four years, and being in full-time ministry.

I would just make a couple of comments: while the seminary is very concerned about the spiritual life of students and tries to be actively engaged in encouraging spiritual vitality, the three biggest factors were factors that are for the most part outside the control of seminary: Church, devotional time, and small groups. Again, some of the biggest threats to spiritual vitality are in the students’ control; e.g., working more than 40 hours a week while going to seminary.

At student orientation this year, I encouraged the new students to consider their priorities and make adjustments in their time commitments to accommodate the demands of seminary. When I came to GCTS for the D.Min. program, I sat down and counted the cost. I realized that I needed to add about 20 hours to my weekly schedule for work related to the program. I then chose to drop teaching Sunday school, leading a small group, serving on the board of a nonprofit, and serving as faculty adviser for a Christian sorority at UNC Chapel Hill. All of these things were good things, but they were not the things to which God was calling to me at this season of my life. I encouraged the students to think about this, and decide whether good things might be interfering with God things.

I will leave you with a couple of other gems from the day. Dr. Alan Myatt talked to the students about spiritual friendships, and the important role they can play in maintaining spiritual vitality. He recommended the book Sacred Companions: the Gift of Spiritual Friendship & Direction by David G. Benner. I encourage you to check it out. Finally, I will leave you with some of the questions that were addressed to the students at our integrative seminar:

• In what ways are you encouraged by your spiritual condition?
• In what ways are you challenged or discouraged?
• What steps can you take to support and encourage future spiritual growth in your life?
• In what ways do you think the seminary could better support spiritual formation in the lives of students?
• How could students better help each other maintain a fervent life with God?

Would John Calvin Stay in the Episcopal Church?

By John Jefferson Davis
Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics

Readers of this article in the Episcopal Church may rightly ask, “Why should we care about what John Calvin would think about the current problems in the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican communion? He lived in the sixteenth century, and we live in the twenty-first; and he was a Presbyterian anyway, not an Anglican.” The reason why the question posed in the title is of interest to Episcopalians asking themselves, in the midst of the current battles over human sexuality and biblical authority, “Should we go, or should we stay?”, is that John Calvin, the founder of the Presbyterian tradition, and Cranmer and the English Reformers, founders of the historic Anglican tradition, both shared a common view of the church: they were “catholic” and not “separatist” in their ecclesiology. They saw themselves as attempting to bring into being a reformed catholic church – not to start a new “denomination.”

The answer to the question posed in the title above, is, in short, “Yes, Calvin would encourage evangelicals in the Episcopal Church (and in other mainline denominations such as the PCUSA) to stay in, to maintain an evangelical witness, and to work for renewal.” The reasons in support of this conclusion can be seen by examining Calvin’s discussion of the unity of the visible church in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. IV, ch.1.9-21, “Means of Grace: Holy Catholic Church.”

Calvin cites the example of the Old Testament prophets, who at times found themselves to be a lonely minority in the midst of a theologically and morally corrupted Israel. “Isaiah does not hesitate to liken Jerusalem to Sodom and Gomorrah [Is.1:10]. Religion was in part despised, in part besmirched. In morals one frequently notes theft, robbery, treachery, slaughter, and like evil deeds. Still the prophets did not because of this establish new churches for themselves, or erect new altars on which to perform separate sacrifices.”[1]

The Genevan Reformer also cites the example of Christ and the apostles, who worshipped in the Jerusalem temple, despite the imperfections of the religious leaders of the day: “Even then the desperate impiety of the Pharisees and the dissolute life which commonly prevailed could not prevent them from practicing the same rites along with the people, and from assembling in one temple with the rest for public exercises of religion. How did this happen,” asks Calvin, “except that those who participated in these same rites with a clean conscience knew that they were not at all contaminated by association with the wicked?”[2]

Jesus cleansed the Temple of money changers (Matt.21:12-17), but did not tell his disciples to abandon its worship or liturgy. Jesus commends the poor widow who makes her financial contribution to the Temple treasury (Lk.21:1-4); Jesus does not consider her expression of faith in God to be contaminated by the personal imperfections of the religious leaders who controlled the Temple. Jesus instructed Peter to find a coin in the fish’s mouth to pay the annual tax required of every Jewish male over the age of twenty, used for the upkeep of the Temple (Matt.17:24-27; Ex.30:13). Jesus expected his disciples to pay taxes to Caesar (Matt.22:21), knowing full well that the personal lives and policies of the Roman emporers were not fully in keeping with the standards of God’s law; nevertheless, the disciples would not be “defiled” by paying the tax.

Jesus was not a “separatist” in relation to the Jewish church of his day. Someone might say, “Jesus had no choice: there were no other ‘denominations’ from which to choose at the time.” This in fact is not quite the case; the community of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran considered themselves to be the “true Israel” in a “new Covenant” with God. They alone interpreted the Holy Scriptures correctly; they were the ‘final remnant”. They considered the Temple leadership to be apostate and hopelessly corrupt.[3] Jesus did not go out into the Judean desert to join the Qumran sectarians, but stayed among the people to bring spiritual renewal by preaching repentance and faith in God. Jesus did not “come out” and separate himself, but became known as the friend of “publicans and sinners”.[4]

Strikingly, the apostles and the early Jerusalem church continued to go up to the Jewish temple to pray (Acts 3:1) – to a temple controlled by the party of the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection and the reality of angels and spirits (Acts 23:8). Evidently Peter and John and Paul did not understand the admonition to “come out from them and be separate” (2 Cor.6:17) to require that they separate themselves from the Jewish “national cathedral,” so to speak.[5] The temple, despite its corrupt leadership – Sadducees and priests who had conspired to crucify Jesus – was still a divinely ordained institution, dedicated to the worship of Yahweh, not Baal; the temple liturgy, based on the scriptures of the Old Testament, was still a liturgy that the early Christians could pray without compromising their Christian convictions. The early Jewish Christians continued to attend the Jewish synagogues well into the second century, until changes in the synagogue liturgy – prayers anathematizing the Christians – made it impossible to attend.[6]

In commenting on the apostle Paul’s relationship to the troubled Corinthian church, Calvin notes that among the Corinthians “… no slight number had gone astray; in fact, almost the whole body was infected. There was not one kind of sin only, but very many; and they were no light errors but frightful misdeeds; there was corruption not only of morals but of doctrine. What does the holy apostle . . .do about this? Does he seek to separate himself from such? Does he cast them out of Christ’s kingdom? . . . He not only does nothing of the sort; he even recognizes and proclaims them to be the church of Christ and the communion of saints [1Cor.1:2]! … The church abides among them because the ministry of Word and sacraments remains unrepudiated there.”[7]

Calvin, like Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel,[8] and the other English reformers, had a high regard for patristic authority,[9] and, like the fathers, had a “catholic” and not “separatist” or “sectarian” view of the church. Their “catholic” ecclesiology is drawn largely from Augustine and Cyprian. Calvin cites Augustine’s admonition that zeal for the purity of the church should be tempered with charity and mercy: “The godly manner and measure of church discipline ought at all times to be concerned with ‘the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ [Eph.4:3] … Holy scripture bids us correct our brother’s vices with more moderate care, while preserving sincerity of love and unity of peace.” The godly, says Augustine, are to “… correct what they can; bear patiently and lovingly to bewail and mourn what they cannot; until God either amends or corrects or in the harvest uproots the tares and winnows the chaff” [Matt.13:40; 3:12; Lk.3:17].[10] For Augustine, the visible church was a “mixed bag”; only at the end would the Lord of the harvest be able to unerringly separate the wheat from the chaff.

He also cites Cyprian, the North African church father who had a very high view of the unity of the church: “Even though there seem to be tares or unclean vessels in the church, there is no reason why we ourselves should withdraw from the church; rather, we must toil to become wheat; we must strive as much as we can to be vessels of gold and silver.”[11] Having cited Cyprian, Calvin adds further: “First, he who voluntarily deserts the outward communion of the church (where the word of God is preached and the sacracments are administered) is without excuse. Secondly, neither the vices of the few nor the vices of the many in any way prevent us from duly professing our faith there in ceremonies ordained by God. For a godly conscience is not wounded by the unworthiness of another, whether pastor or layman; nor are the sacraments less pure and salutary for a holy and upright man because they are handled by unclean persons.”[12]

Cyprian’s views on the visible unity of the church were worked out against the backdrop of the third century Novationist schism,[13] and Augustine’s in the context of the Donatist schism of the fourth century.[14] The followers of the North African bishop Donatus considered themselves the “one true church,” in distinction from the compromising catholics; they refused to accept as valid the sacramental ministry of bishops who had been ordained by traditores – catholic bishops, who during the Decian persecution had yielded to the pressure of the Roman authorities and handed over copies of the holy scriptures. In the context of this controversy Augustine articulated the crucial “catholic” view of the church, in which the validity of the sacrament does not depend on the personal holiness of the minister, but on the words of Christ, who is in fact the true minister of the sacrament.

This Cyprianic-Augustinian view of the church is the historic Anglican view, enshrined in article 26 of the 39 Articles, “Of the Unworthiness of Ministers, which Hindereth not the Effect of the Sacraments”:

Although in the visible church the evil be ever mixed with the good,[15] and sometimes the evil have

chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the

same in their own name, but in Christ’s, and do minister by his commission and authority, we

may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the Sacraments. Neither

is the effect of Christ’s ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God’s gifts

diminished from such as by faith, and rightly do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them;

which be effectual, because of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by

evil men.

Nevertheless, it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil ministers,

and that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and finally, being found

guilty, by just judgment be deposed.

In his response to the Donatists Augustine also observed that one split from the church usually leads to another: the followers of Donatus began feuding among themselves, separating into further factions: the Urbanists, the Claudianists, the Rogatists, and the Maximianists. The Donatist schism was to persist for over a hundred years, troubling the peace of the church. This pattern has been repeated in church history: those who “come out” of the parent body then conclude that the new church is not pure enough, and come out of the new church to form a church purer still.

In the sixteenth century Anabaptists,[16] Baptists, and various independent sects separated from the Church of England and from the Lutheran and Reformed churches on the continent because they judged that the magisterial reformers had not gone far enough in purifiying the church. In modern American church history, J. Gresham Machen and his followers left the mainline Presbyterian Church in the midst of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy, to found in 1936 the Presbyterian Church of America (later renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). Machen and his follower Carl McIntire then had disagreements over biblical interpretation and abstinence from alcohol, and McIntire decided in 1937 to found his own denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Church.[17]

Recent Anglicanism[18] in America has also seen its share of church splits. In 1977 the “Anglican Catholic Church” was formed in response to the Episcopal Church’s revisions to the Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women to the priesthood.[19] In 1991 about one-third of the churches in the Anglican Catholic Church left to join the “Anglican Church in America”.[20] In 1988 the small Anglican denomination of the “Holy Catholic Church Anglican Rite” was formed, but it now appears that the unity of this small body is threatened by disagreements over questions of Marian devotion, “the place and importance of the Mother of God.”[21]

As the new Anglican Church in North America emerges and organizes itself, time will tell if the various subgroups within the new denomination can maintain unity with one another without the “common enemy” of theological liberalism in the Episcopal Church, or whether historic tensions over the ordination of women, and cleavages between evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics will once again rear their ugly heads. Will there be historic replays of earlier nineteenth and twentieth century battles between evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics in the new denomination over baptismal regeneration, the place of the 39 Articles, the reservation and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the invocation of angels and the saints, Marian devotion, reunion with Rome, and so forth?[22] Will the new denomination have clear answers to such questions as, “By what principle or principles do we decide what Roman Catholic doctrines and practices are acceptable in this denomination? What Roman Catholic beliefs and practices, if any, are excluded?” The ACNA provisional constitution art.I.7 states that “We receive the Thirty-Nine Articles … as expressing fundamental principles [not, “doctrines”] of authentic Anglican belief” – but what exactly are these “fundamental principles,” and where are they specified? Without clear answers to such questions, the Protestant/Anglo-Catholic/Roman Catholic elements that influence the ACNA’s basic identity remain ambiguous, and a potential source of future intramural conflict.

Some Concluding Thoughts:

So when all is said and done, what final thoughts might John Calvin have for conservative Episcopalians who are asking themselves, “Should we leave, or should we stay?” I could imagine Calvin saying something like this: “The bottom line is, stay with the parent body until they eject you or the parent body abandons the Nicene faith. Be careful in throwing around the term ‘apostate’; distinguish carefully between the beliefs and practices of an individual member of the church; an individual priest; a particular parish; a particular bishop or group of bishops, and the denomination as a whole; distinguish between confessional repudiation of doctrine and ecclesiastical failure of discipline. The Augustinian, “catholic” and historic Anglican view of the church would be that the church as a whole, considered as a denomination, remains a viable church of Christ as long as the “Word is preached and the sacraments duly administered,” which in your Episcopal context means, ‘As long as the creeds have not been repudiated, and the Prayer Book expresses in the liturgy the historic orthodox faith.’ You would have to leave if the creeds are repudiated or essentials of the faith removed from the Prayer Book; or: you are either forbidden to preach the gospel in your parish, or commanded by the bishop to perform practices (e.g., blessing of same-sex unions or same-sex weddings) that you believe violate scripture and your conscience; until that point, stay and preach the gospel, maintain your orthodox witness, and work for renewal.”

Calvin’s ecclesiological advice might sound unrealistic and hopelessly idealistic, especially in our modern American context of individual freedom, “consumer choice” and a “free market” in religion; it is certainly easier to simply leave an unsatisfactory church and shop around for or start another.

Others may say, quite understandably, “We have tried to work for renewal for years – or decades – and it just hasn’t worked.” Fair enough. But on the other hand, did Jesus ever promise his disciples an easy time of being his disciples? Before he prayed his “High Priestly Prayer” for Christian unity (Jn.17:20-23), he had warned his followers that being identified with him would lead to conflict and opposition (Jn.16:1-4). God calls some to remain as faithful “Jeremiahs” in their “Jerusalems” during hard and troubled times.

At the end of the day, some conservative Episcopalians will choose to stay, and others will choose to leave – both for reasons, which seem to them, to be compelling and sound. Even with such an outcome, the spirit of Christ’s prayer for unity could in some measure be answered not in terms of institutional or denominational unity, but at the level of attitude and mutual perception. Could both groups in charity recognize one another as fellow Christians? Could both groups perceive each other as acting out of conscience and good faith? Could the “leavers” refrain from seeing the “stayers” as “compromisers”, and the “stayers” refrain from seeing the “leavers” as “schismatics”? So much will depend on attitude and mutual perceptions. Could both groups in a parish[23] caught in the current conflict continue to cooperate with one another in local and global mission, and even have occasions of intercommunion? One might hope so; and upon such a less-than-ideal outcome, one suspects that John Calvin, and more importantly – Jesus Christ – could look with some measure of approbation.

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[1] Institutes, IV.1.18. Citations for the translation of Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960).

[2] Institutes, IV.1.19.

[3] G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 37, 38: “The Religious Ideas of the Community”.

[4] The sectarian and separatist impulse in Christianity tends to focus on “truth” at the expense of unity and love; theological liberals tend to focus on love and unity, but at the expense of historic truth. Scripture indicates (e.g. Jn.17: Jesus’ ‘High Priestly Prayer’) that all three values – truth, love, unity - are essential for a healthy and vibrant church.

[5] In the context of pastoral issues in Corinth, the plausible context of this statement to “come out and be separate” is the apostles’ earlier admonition (1Cor.10:14-22) for the Corinthian believers to “flee from idolatry” – to avoid active participation in the sacrifices of pagan temples dedicated to Apollo, Asclepius, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the other gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. They were not morally contaminated by indirect contact with idolatrous practices, e.g., meat sacrificed to idols (1Cor.8:1-13); but they would be contaminated by direct participation in the temple rituals of the pagan gods (1Cor.10:14-22).

[6] For background on the so-called “Benediction against the Heretics” (Birkath ha-Minim), see James Louis Martin, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2003), pp.56ff.

[7] Institutes, IV.1.14.

[8] In his celebrated Apology for the Church of England (1562) Bishop John Jewel distinguished the Church of England both from the Roman Catholic Church and from sectarians such as the Anabaptists; the C of E was continuous with the primitive catholic church of Christ, the apostles, and the holy fathers: Works of John Jewel, v.3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), pp.67, 77.

[9] On the high regard for patristic authority by the Anglican divines, see Arthur Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans: the Limits of Orthodoxy (Herefordshire, U.K.: Gracewing, 2001).

[10] Augustine, Against the Letter of Parmenianus III.i.1; III.ii.15; cited by Calvin in Institutes, IV.1.16.

[11] Cyprian, Letters liv.3, cited by Calvin, Institutes, IV.1.19.

[12] Institutes, IV.1.19.

[13] See article on “Novationism,” Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p.968.

[14] See article on “Donatists”, Catholic Encyclopedia, accessible online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05121.htm.

[15] Cf. the similar statement in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chpt.25.5, “Of the Church”: “The purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error.” Similarly, the Augsburg Confession (1530), chpt.8, “The Church,” states: “Again, although the Christian church, properly speaking, is nothing else than the assembly of all believers and saints, yet because in this life many false Christians, hypocrites, and even open sinners remain among the godly, the sacraments are efficacious even if the priests who administer them are wicked men, for as Christ himself indicated, ‘The Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat’ (Matt.23:2). Accordingly, the Donatists and all who hold contrary views are condemned.”

[16] On the sectarian impulse in the Anabaptist tradition, with its search for the “pure New Testament church,” see Franklin H. Littell, The Origins of Sectarian Protestantism: a Study of the Anabaptist View of the Church (New York: Macmillan, 1964). The English Reformers rejected this sectarian view of the church: see art.26 of the 39 Articles above. Ironically, new Anglican groups in the United States are closer in some aspects of their ecclesiology to the Anabaptist-separatist tradition than to historic Anglicanism.

[17] For historical background on these Presbyterian controversies and church splits, see: Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954); Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a separatist perspective on these controversies, see Gary G. Cohen, “The Bible Presbyterian Position on Ecclesiastical Separation,” WRS Journal 11/2 (August 2004) 5-12, accessed online at http://www.bpc.org/resources/reading/articles/history/separation1.html. In the context of current controversies in the Presbyterian Church USA over sexual ethics and biblical authority, Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA urged evangelicals to stay in the denomination: “I worry much about what would happen to Presbyterian evangelicals if we were to leave the PCUSA. When we evangelical types don’t have more liberal people to argue with, we tend to start arguing with each other … the cause of Reformed orthodoxy was diminished when … conservatives … left the mainline denomination. They quickly began to argue among themselves, and it was not long before new splits occurred in their ranks. The result was that conservative Calvinism itself became a fractured movement.”: “Why Conservatives Need Liberals,” Christian Century, January 13, 2004, pp. 22-25; accessible online at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2933.

[18] In nineteenth century America, evangelicals in the Episcopal Church separated from the parent body to form the Reformed Episcopal Church. Robert Prichard, A History of the Episcopal Church (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1999), p.148: “Frustrated by their church’s inability to root out Oxford theology, a small number of evangelicals led by Bishop George David Cummins of Kentucky and priest Charles E. Cheney formed a separate Reformed Episcopal Church (1873).” The denomination remained a rather small splinter group, currently numbering some 141 congregations with an aggregate membership of 13,600. The Reformed Episcopal Church is expected to affiliate with the North American province of the emerging Anglican Church in North America.

[19] On the “Anglican Catholic Church,” see online article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_Catholic_Church; the denomination remains a relatively small group of 135 churches with a membership of some 10,000.

[20] For information on this small Anglican denomination, see their website at http://acahomeorg0.web701.discountasp.net/. The denomination is said to have some 100 congregations and approximately 5,200 members.

[21] See the denomination’s website and discussion of the Marian issues, “The Challenge to the Holy Catholic Church Anglican Rite,” at http://holycatholicanglican.org/resources/challenge.php.

[22] For various accounts of these Evangelical/Anglo-Catholic tensions, see: Mark Chapman, Anglicanism: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 57-93; George E. DeMille, The Catholic Movement in the American Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1950), esp. chpt.3, “The Impact of the Tracts”; chpt.4, “The Beginnings of Ritualism”; chpt.5, “The Fifties – the Storm Subsides”; chpt.6, “The Second Ritualistic War”; John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996; see esp. chpt.3, “Ritualism Rampant”; W.S.F. Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism: a Study in Religious Ambiguity (London: Routledge, 1989); Francis Penhale, The Anglican Church Today: Catholics in Crisis (London: Mowbray, 1986). On the marginalized place of the 39 Articles in the life of the Church of England today, see J.I. Packer and R.T. Beckwith, The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today (Oxford: Latimer House, 1984).

[23] For an example of such a “Two Parish Vision” (Christ Church Episcopal of Hamilton-Wenham, MA), see the link at http://www.christchurchhw.org/postingdetail.php?sub=Master%20Calendar&id=659.