Last week I attended the annual conference of the ordained Clergy in our diocese. The featured speaker was an academic specialist in what used to be called Christian Education, but is now more often called “Formation.” Her presentation boiled down to a couple of ideas, neither of which was new to me. I had heard these ideas and discussed them and even promoted them when I was in seminary. I thought I had incorporated them into my world view. So I was surprised when I had a strong emotional reaction to the conference program. I experienced sadness, even despair, and gripping anxiety that kept me awake long after the portly priest I shared a room with had stopped snoring —anxiety about the future prospects for the church.
So what were these ideas? The first is the broad historical narrative of a transition to “Post-Christendom.” Basically this means that for about 15 hundred years, the church has served as an integral pillar of a society which was assumed to be completely and irreversibly Christian. The church was the air that the people breathed and the water in which they swam. Individual lives would wax and wane, and the church would be there to bless and give meaning to all the crucial thresholds of human experience--birth, coming of age, marriage, parenthood, and death. But the church itself, and the social order of which it was the religious DNA, was as stable and eternal as the mountains.
But in a process that was slow and hard to see at first, all this began to change. The pace of secularism, skepticism, pluralism and materialism which began advancing 500 years ago has picked up frightening speed in the last fifty. In the modern West, there was a final surge of Christendom in the postwar boom of the 20th century United States. But that wave and its aftershocks are receding fast. For the professional clergy, this phenomenon is a threat to their livelihood and to the survival of the institutions to which they have given their lives: Shrinking and aging congregations, diminished resources for staff and programming, fewer and fewer full-time stipendiary positions, and a general sense of social irrelevance.
Maybe that’s why the conference made me so anxious. It was one thing to talk about Post-Christendom when I was in seminary. After all, I was not yet one of those who is supposed to know what to do about it. It is quite another to sit with my colleagues, my fellow leaders of the Christian community, and listen to their heartfelt anguish about the challenges of sustaining a legacy fewer and fewer people seem to want. And mingled in with their grief for the possibility of being the last elders of a vanishing tribe, was fear for their salaries, benefits, and pensions.
As I think we all know, anxiety about what we will eat and what we will wear is not limited to the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California. And I hope you would agree that this is not just lack of faith. For millions of people, this anxiety is not a spiritual failure, but is grounded in daunting material reality. We live in a time when the economic system that is responsible for producing and distributing the necessities of life is largely failing. Instead of offering people the means to realize a meaningful place in the social order, directed toward human development and the well-being of all, “the economy” seems more like a merciless juggernaut of cutthroat competition for a limited supply of goods, where one mistake or stroke of bad luck is enough to condemn a person to poverty or worse.
There are those who say that such an economy is inevitable. Some say that is so because of the simple mathematics of an expanding population on a planet of limited size and carrying-capacity. But there are others who find the cause in human nature. We are inherently self-interested, this logic goes, and so the only possible economy, and the only one that is desirable, is one in which we struggle with one another in a ceaseless race to acquire more wealth and power for ourselves. The winners and the losers, so it is said, deserve what they receive, for it is this struggle that tries and proves the moral worth of a person. It is ironic that so many Christians, who bitterly fight against the teaching of Darwinism as a biological theory, uncritically champion it as a social one.
These are not new ideas, not at their core, and Jesus explicitly rejects them when he says that no one can serve God and wealth. There is no room in his teaching for the rationalizations that say it is God who made human beings greedy and covetous, and it is God who rewards hard work and thrift with prosperity. According to Jesus, our material prosperity and creaturely survival does not depend on our work or our cunning but on the providence of God. The correct model for our economic lives is not the farm or the factory, or even the “market”, but the wilderness.
But the natural order that Jesus holds up as a demonstration of God’s will for us is not the “nature red in tooth and claw” of the Darwinian survival of the fittest. It is the incredibly abundant world that the first European adventurers found when they came to the shores of San Francisco Bay: a sky black with clouds of migrating geese and ducks; the highest Grizzly bear population in the world feasting on the salmon that choked the creeks and rivers; oak trees bending under the weight of acorns that were cultivated with little more than carefully-set fires.
The second idea that we discussed at the Clergy Conference is that the fall of Christendom opens for us the opportunity to recover a deeper purpose, a more essential strand of our DNA. This is the idea that the church came, as Jesus comes, for the sake of the people who are not on the inside. The work of the church is to form disciples of Jesus Christ for the continuation of his mission. His mission is to invite and incorporate people into the mission of God. This mission is not about “growing the church” as a means to balance future budgets. If it were, it would be service of Mammon, and deserving of failure.
Neither is it about converting heathen souls for citizenship in an otherworldly kingdom. The Kingdom of God is at work wherever we go, and it is not divorced from the work we do every day, or Jesus would not have likened it to a man who went out sow seed, or woman who mixed yeast into her dough. Christ’s body has a future because God has a future for the earth which is already present and visible for those with eyes to see it. The future is the renewal of the abundance, beauty and harmony for which God created us. This coming world is not simply the restoration of primal nature, the world as it was before the coming of human greed, violence, and folly. It is Creation reverently beheld, tended, shared and offered to God by human intelligence, human desire, human will and labor, transformed by grace into that love and power we know as Christ.
This new world has been revealed to us in a historic person, Jesus of Nazareth, who manifested it in word and deed, and gave his life to bring it to birth. When Jesus says, “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you,” the “you” to which he speaks is plural. This Gospel is not a summons to individualistic striving, as if to say, “if only I can think positive thoughts, do only good deeds, and tot up my ‘spiritual experiences’” I will have plenty. It is the call to become a holy people. It is the charter to become a new kind of nation, ruled by Christ’s dependence on God, his forgiveness and love and servanthood.
The Kingdom of God is not the church. But without the church, how will we train our eyes to see the at workings of the invisible God? Without the church, how will we see sign that points the way to this new world? How will we recognize the Body--taken, blessed, broken, and shared with the world?
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