Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
A real treat for us today is we have
an opportunity to talk really with one of the pioneers of the missional conversation,
a man that Michael and I both got to meet while we were in seminary,
two different seminaries at two different times,
but a professor who is instrumental in our journeys as we prepared to pastor.
And Dr.
Darrell Guter joins with us today.
And Dr.
Guter, it is an absolute
thrill to have you with us.
We’re so grateful for your time that you’d be willing to share with us
some of your insights on this conversation about missional theology and what it means for the church.
Well, I thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity to be involved in this kind of
conversation.
It’s a great way to continue something that’s very important for me,
but you do it while being retired.
And the conversation has been a nice,
retired pace for that.
So I’m
more than most people do, unretired.
I sometimes think I’m getting a D in retirement.
Well, again, thank you for being with us.
And to start with,
we wondered if you would be willing
to just give us your sense of an overview of the kind of the history and the context
of the idea of missional.
And I know that you were involved in a good bit of those foundational
conversations and a lot of that beginning work as to move the church towards thinking about
mission and missional in a new way.
And I wondered if you’d just summarize
kind of your own experience of being involved in that conversation for us.
There’s a lot of different approaches that one could take to a large conversation like this,
and it is by now a very large global conversation.
I think it would be accurate to say that the whole
discussion about the centrality of the church’s mission is probably in the modern period,
say, from the 17th century on,
very closely tied in to the international missionary movement,
the planning of Christian communities outside the boundaries of the Christian West until ultimately we become
really a global community.
And that is often talked about as the ecumenical movement or the
significance of the church’s discovering its unity in all of the cultures around the world where we
find Christian communities witnessing.
The direct discussion, as I’ve been involved in it,
is a combination of reflection about what was going on when we went into the mission field,
that is, when we crossed cultural boundaries and left the Christian West behind us.
What was happening there, theologically,
and what was its importance for us in the so-called Christian part of the world?
And this Christian part of the world had for centuries defined itself as Christian.
I always point out to my students that if they are traveling in Europe,
the landscape is characterized by church steeples,
and everybody,
going back to the high Middle Ages,
lives within hearing range of church bells.
That’s Christendom,
everybody under the same umbrella,
the church,
being the church of all people with highly centralized leadership functions.
The Protestant mission begins to break that open a bit and begins raising questions,
particularly about the divisions of Christianity that we exported to the rest of the world,
so that in India,
every five miles, you’d have a mission station from a different Western denomination,
and that was very confusing to young and new Christians in these new areas.
In the West, at the same time,
we see a growing awareness that Christianity is declining,
is losing its power and clout and the numerical hold on the population.
It’s slow,
and in many areas it was not happening.
There have been areas of real revival in the mission field,
which have been also important,
but we become aware more and more in the 20th century
that Christianity is losing its central and dominant role within our Western societies.
That process, which sometimes we call secularization,
is raising all kinds of questions about
who are we and what are we for,
both in our old traditional locations and in the
ecumenical church, which is going around the globe and which is in a multicultural,
multilingual,
multorganizational,
and in many ways far more vital than the sending churches of the West
where we’re at home.
That’s maybe just enough general background to say that it’s a complicated
conversation because it’s a complicated historical process and we’re caught up in it.
It is important to note that recently,
in the last couple of decades,
the decline of Western
Christianity has become more pronounced so that the last year when the typical kinds of databases
were being analyzed in terms of where’s the church’s growth in North America,
for the first time we heard that less than half of our population in the northern part of the Atlantic
in the United States and Europe,
less than half were identified with the church.
That’s the first time we’ve seen a decline that obvious.
So the actual missional church discussion
begins really,
and we want to tie it down to dates and people,
when a British-Scottish missionary named Leslie Nubigan,
who served about 40 years in India and was very involved in the first part
of the 20th century in the formation of the Church of South India,
retired and returned to Great
Britain where he’d grown up after his years of mission service.
And he discovered when he returned
to Britain that while he had been in India,
his home church, his home church culture,
had pretty much secularized and the churches were progressively empty and the sense of the
church’s presence and power in the society was rapidly diminishing.
So he began to raise the question.
He said, “In the West we can really observe that the Christian movement has become
again a mission movement.
We’re surrounded by unbelievers.
We’re in a society that needs to bear the Gospel.
But we’re a church that for all those 20 centuries has existed to take care of our members,
a church that has existed to maintain its institutional structures, its theological practices,
its sense of Christian vocation and identity.
And that reason for being was being
weakened by this process of secularization.” So Bishop Nubigan asked the question,
“How does the church that was once at the heart of a vibrant Christian cultural movement,
how does it become
again a missionary church when we are clearly living in a mission field?” That question he was
asked primarily in Great Britain,
which is where he was just settled and that led to a
conversation in the 60s and 70s,
which came to be called the Gospel and Culture Discussion,
in which
his question was basic.
How does our church become a missionary church,
an outreach community,
in this secularizing society?
That question, that undertaking, jumped across the Atlantic and came
to the United States and enlisted the interest of a cross-section of people deeply concerned
about the state of the church in North America.
And that movement began to take shape.
We got some grants from some interested foundations to do research on the issues that we were talking about.
And we actually set up a research project which I coordinated in the United States,
what was called the Gospel and Culture Network.
And we did a study very much based upon Nubigan’s
work and his provocative questions.
And our question was,
“If we were to do theology
as the church in the West,
theology that equips us for our serving in our society as a mission
outreach,
as a church that is missionary by its nature,
if we were to do that,
what would be the
theological tasks that we had to grapple with?
What is the theology we need in order to function responsibly with integrity,
with conviction, as a witnessing community?”
And we generated a book
which answered that question in terms of the themes that we needed to work on.
We didn’t write the missional theology.
We said, “These are the agenda of a missional theology.
This is where the work has to be done.” And we suggested for this process that what we were looking for
was the theology and practice of a missional church.
We added “a-l” to the word mission to make
the point that we were claiming that going all the way back to the scriptures,
the church’s purpose is to serve God’s mission.
The church exists for the good news for all the world,
and our life together,
our gathering, our institutional functioning,
our traditions should be serving that vocation of God’s mission rather than being focused solely on our own
welfare and what it is that spiritually enriches us personally.
That book came out then called Missional Church,
a theology of the sending of the church in North America.
We were basically working on the United States and Canada.
And the book was intended to start conversation,
and I think it’s fair to say that it did start conversation.
I think both of you studied the book in seminary,
and it’s still in print,
and nowadays there’s a great deal of debate about
the term missional itself,
and many people don’t like it.
I still use it,
but I always have to
explain it because everybody has a different definition.
But it’s clear that we struck a chord
with this question about a faithful,
believable,
textually, culturally alert Christian witness
in a post-Christian,
a post-Christendom context.
So I would say that’s the background.
Why don’t you ask a few questions or feedback,
some comment, and I can try to refine what I’m saying for you.
Sure.
I think Michael and I have talked,
Dr. Guder, having both had the benefit of
encountering the idea of missional and the theology of missional in your classrooms,
we have been surprised,
I think to some extent,
at the breadth in the way that the word is used in other contexts.
And so it has made it difficult,
as you say, that conversation has certainly
continued and spun off in new directions.
And I think,
you know, I think while there’s deep,
deep value, it has created a sort of confusion as people wrestle with what do we mean
when we say missional.
And it has at times been a hard term to pin down, I suspect.
Yes, I agree with you.
It has become difficult,
and partially it’s because people have
used it in such odd ways.
I have, for instance, actually heard people say and say seriously,
we’re doing missional.
And my response to that always is,
well, whatever it is, it’s not even English.
Missional is not an adverb.
But it did confirm that we were on to something that needed to be addressed,
but that the discussion needed a lot of discipline and work and more research.
In fact, it’s interesting.
One of the most powerful and comprehensive outcomes of the missional
discussion has been the growing examination of scripture in terms of how scripture actually
works in the church to equip witnessing communities for their vocation as witnesses,
that the scriptures themselves need to be interpreted from what we call a missional hermeneutic.
And this may be one area in which the understanding of missional is more well
developed, because it’s linked to how the Bible works as the Holy Spirit’s instrument for our formation.
When people use missional as a program description,
or as a clever little advertising
slogan, then obviously, they don’t have it.
The language of the missional church is reflected in, for instance,
Vatican II, the Roman Catholic process,
which I’d say is profoundly focused on mission,
when it emphasizes that the Pilgrim Church is missionary by its very nature.
What our Catholic brothers and sisters are saying,
when they say missionary by its very nature,
I think they’re defining missional,
and they’re using the word missionary.
And that’s fine.
Many of us use the language of incarnational witness to flesh out what we mean
by missional calling and missional witness.
We are obviously engaged with the historical issues.
What have we learned about the Christian mission from the first century onward?
And what have we lost or distorted?
Where are there problems with regard to our mission as God’s church that we
inherit from this history?
So a lot of us in the missional discussion are spending time looking at our history,
our theology.
How have we defined the church and its purposes?
We find, for instance, that when we look at the whole history of Western Christianity,
we rarely find any reference to
mission as a theological theme.
Although the case can be made that the New Testament Church
existed for its mission as my father has sent me,
so I send you.
That’s as my father has missioned me.
So I mission you.
It’s as simple as those central themes in Scripture.
But we have a great
deal of work to do to reclaim that centrality of mission.
I would make the claim that the
Protestant theologian of the 20th century,
Karl Barth,
is preeminently a theologian of the mission of the church.
He never uses the word missional,
but he climaxes his great treatment of the gospel
with a central statement,
“The vocation of the Christian is witness.” That’s both the corporate
vocation as a gathered community and the individual vocation of each Christian person on his or her pilgrimage.
So, Dr.
Guder, you mentioned how it can be difficult when we’re engaging with this
missional language to get in sync with your conversation partners because so many people
come with so many different operative definitions.
And you explicitly mentioned the people who
kind of think of missional as another word for marketing or they make it more of a trite kind of
distribution of the church’s message.
And I’ve certainly experienced that.
In fact, in this series that we are in the middle of,
we’ve talked about how that can be a danger,
especially as churches are presently in a moment of struggle,
you know,
as many congregations in the mainline
are having to have some difficult conversations about lack of membership and lack of church
growth, these kinds of things,
that it can become tempting for us to become engaged in the idea of
mission as the saving movement of the church instead of a reflection of the church’s true
identity in Jesus Christ.
And in my time with you,
you spoke a lot about vocation and the
vocational identity of the church.
And you spoke of that both as individuals,
as Christians, but you also spoke of it as the vocation of the church itself.
And I’m curious,
do you see that
vocational identity as being an important corrective to some of those more trite understandings of our missional identity?
And maybe how would you tease that out for us?
What makes vocation so important in this conversation?
You’re absolutely right that it has come together as the,
I would say, the central understanding of the church’s mission in its authentic New Testament biblical sense.
I mentioned earlier on that Carl Barth summarizes his theology of the church’s ecclesiology
with this great assertion,
the vocation of the Christian is witness.
So witness becomes the fundamental understanding of who we are and what we’re for and what we do because we are the Christian Jesus Christ.
There are lots of ways of identifying deficiencies in our inherited
traditions that help us understand what we’re working towards when we’re talking about the missional church.
If we understand mission as one of the various programs on the organizational chart of a church,
then we have too small a view of it.
Mission informs the very purpose of our gathering.
Barth talks about the missional church as a church being gathered,
a church being upbuilt
or edified or equipped,
and a church being sent.
And out of the sending comes gathering.
Sending generates the call to become a follower of Christ.
And when one responds to that call,
one is then enlisted in the mission of Christ as a part of his sent people in the world.
Now, if we’re dealing in a religious context like North America where people,
if they’re involved in the church, are largely looking for something that meets their own spiritual needs,
then we have too narrow and too small and too shallow an understanding of mission.
The appropriate way
is to begin with the biblical disclosure of God’s creative purposes and God’s saving work to restore
all of his creation to the goodness for which he made us.
The point, the mission that we’re
talking about is not our mission,
it’s God’s mission.
And the mission of God has become
a growing emphasis in the missional discussion from the first to the end,
the beginning of scripture, from the beginning of scripture to the end of scripture.
The scriptures are a testimony
to the vocation of God’s people beginning with Israel through their long and complex history
and moving at Easter into the ongoing movement of God’s initial church through the apostolic mission.
And that’s a very different perspective when we’re thinking in terms,
how do we respond to God’s call to be his sent people in the place and in the context in which we find ourselves?
Those are the primary questions.
How do we engage scripture so that sending, that sentence,
one can use the language of commission,
we’re commissioned by God,
our calling generates a vocation,
a calling which is our sentence.
Remember the word for church in Greek ecclesia is really the gathered community of the sent ones,
those who are set apart for a particular purpose.
That’s the overarching understanding of the
church we inherit from the biblical tradition and which we have to reclaim,
particularly in a society
which has allowed us over time to attach all kinds of purposes and programs to church
that serve other agenda rather than serving God’s mission.
I will always come back to my Bible here
so I quote this correctly.
1 Peter’s definition of the church is very comprehensive.
“You are a chosen race,
a royal priesthood,
a holy nation,
God’s own people, so that you may declare
the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
That’s a very comprehensive statement drawing together major images and themes of God’s people
from the entire sweep of Old and New Testament.
All of it focused on our calling to make known
the wonderful deeds of him who’s called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
That text, I think, stands for the whole sweep of scripture,
which is basically about that calling to be God’s
people for God’s witness.
You know, I remember in our conversations in Seminary Dr.
Guter, we would talk about these themes,
and of course they’ve carried with me,
as you know, I’ve gone into service to a local congregation,
and in my time here,
though short,
I’ve begun to see how
this language of vocation is so powerful because by its nature it’s active.
It requires an understanding of the active work of the Spirit of God in us,
number one, that God is a live network
and that that should therefore make a difference in our lives,
and so because of that then it
requires an active source and sense of identity within us so that when we go into our own vocational identities,
and I’ve always heard you speaking of that much more broadly than just the thing that
gives you a paycheck,
the world in which you live,
the circles in which you are called to have a
witness, that your entire life then becomes an active part in the mission of God.
What strikes me in that is it’s really a call to a reimagining and re-understanding of the fundamental gospel,
not just a re-reading of scripture,
though that too is substantial,
or a reimagining of our Protestant theology.
What you’re asking the church to consider is how does the gospel change our
lives, and to whatever extent that’s true,
that has the implication to radically reshape our communities.
Do you think I understand that rightly?
Right on, Michael.
Give yourself an A.
That’s a very good summary of the energy of this emphasis, particularly upon
calling our vocation as witness.
We would emphasize that in the New Testament,
witness defines the overarching purpose of the gathered church.
Acts 1a,
“You shall be my
witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria,
and to the ends of the earth.” That’s the beginning
of the Christian mission,
and it’s under this clearly articulated rubric.
Witnesses are to be
evidence in the world that God’s Spirit uses to bring about the healing of the nations.
The church exists not because God needs a church.
The church exists because God has a mission,
and to carry out that mission,
He draws together His people.
Take the stories that Jesus called
in His disciples in the synoptic gospels.
That’s the pattern.
Jesus calling people to become
His followers so that He can encrypt them and send them into the world as evidence for the world
that God’s love is true,
that there is healing,
and that there is purpose.
The whole understanding of witness,
I think,
as you said, defines who we are and what we do and the purposefulness
with which we live.
The Christian vocation is a tremendously exciting adventure because it’s
about God’s purposes for creation and our opportunity to be God’s instruments in bringing that about.
The language is very dynamic.
Jesus keeps emphasizing in his preaching that the
kingdom of God is breaking in,
and we are a part of the continuation of that process.
Over centuries,
God’s kingdom,
God’s rule is breaking in,
and we are a part of that process
as God uses us as witnesses.
Dr.
Guter,
this is a massive question,
and there’s no judgment in it because the church is always a mix of things we get right and things we get wrong,
but in some ways,
this missional journey, in many ways, this missional journey, as you describe it,
is a rediscovery of something we’ve lost.
Can you give us the thumbnail summary
of perhaps how we lost it either in the Western church or the American church?
What were the components of losing our sense of that missional witness, that identity,
and maybe perhaps that
gives us some clues as we seek to recapture it?
Yeah, I think that’s a very necessary part of the
whole missional conversation, trying to understand what has happened over history that has created
real obstacles to our hearing and following through on our mission of vocation.
How have we distorted our understanding of it?
I would suggest a couple of ways of understanding that
or grappling with that question.
First of all, I would say that there’s definitely,
in the history of Christianity,
a set of problems that come as we become an institution,
invested in buildings and in wealth and in power.
When those things began to happen,
which in some ways were very good,
in the fourth century,
the Roman Empire stopped persecuting
the Christians and began to favor them.
You can only be grateful for that,
but the downside of
that process is that as we became the official church of the Roman West,
we became also then
a political instrument of the power, the state,
the culture that we were in,
and that often polluted
our commitment to Jesus Christ.
We were constantly being called back to obedience to the gospel,
the many revival movements,
and movements of spiritual renewal,
the monastic movement, all of those through our history,
are evidence of God’s Spirit continuing to work in our midst.
But we have grappled,
we’ve struggled with the temptations and the seductions of power
and wealth and property for a very long time,
and that’s now up for grabs as Christian demands,
and it’s an opportunity for us,
I think, to clarify our actual vocation.
Another way of talking about it, which you may remember from the classroom,
I think you can say that there’s been
a process in the way we grapple with the gospel and our understanding of our calling,
which I call reductionistic.
We have tended to reduce the gospel primarily to a message and a religious
program that deals with our eternal salvation.
The gospel is,
in a sense, the divine insurance policy.
The gospel is what we have to believe,
know and believe in order to be saved,
and I would contend that that is too small a view of the gospel.
It isn’t just my salvation,
it is, in fact, the healing of all creation out of all of its rebellion,
which I am to serve and which
agents of God’s healing.
When we reduce the gospel primarily to that vertical line to my relationship with God,
where will I spend eternity?
We’re dealing with truth,
but it’s not the whole gospel.
The gospel is not primarily about my saveness.
The gospel is about God’s love for
the whole world, for God’s love.
The world is the motivation of the gospel.
When we do that kind of
reductionism and focus upon ourselves and the benefits that we gain,
and in the Reformation,
theologians talked about the benefits of the gospel.
In a sense, that’s a very valid theme,
but it’s very easily manipulated and distorted because then we begin to focus on what we get,
and that makes the church into an institution that is focused upon its members and their
need to do to maintain their saveness.
And that’s, I can say say yes to you,
is a very
real foreshortening of the gospel.
The gospel is not simply about the church’s gathering saved sinners.
No, this is God’s people going back to the call of Abraham through whom all creation
is to be blessed.
One of the ways I’ve seen these work out is that there’s a constant emphasis all
the way through Scripture that the witness to God’s love and purposefulness is to be found in righteousness,
in justice,
in people living out their lives in accordance with God’s good design of our lives.
And we’ve tended to lose that focus upon gospel and justice,
and there’s a great deal
of agitation today in many parts of the church to reclaim the centrality of God’s reign as a reign
of justice, of peace,
of healing,
of which we are to be instruments,
we are to be agents that God
is using for that purpose.
Nubian talks about the church as first fruits,
as a first symbol,
a first signal of the good news that is breaking in and that God intends to heal all creation.
Does that speak to your question about the distortions that we’ve brought into the discussion?
Yeah, very clearly.
And as a sidetrack, Dr.
Guter,
it’s probably early to say,
but it has been an interesting year and a half in that so many churches found themselves
without access to their building and asking questions about how are we a congregation of
Christ when we don’t gather in a specific space?
And I wonder if that will have some potential of
helping move some of those conversations forward.
I think that’s extremely important and it’s a
student of you to be recognizing it.
The danger is very great to return to business as usual and not
recognize the opportunity that this lockdown and this virus that presented us to ask ourselves
basic questions about how do we understand and carry out our vocation?
What does it really mean
to be God’s witnesses?
How does the New Testament or how does the Bible as a whole
actually challenge us and shape us for faithful living?
How do we become a called out people in
Ecclesia who are demonstrating to the world that there is grace at the heart of everything and
that God’s love is healing love?
And I’m not one of those that argue that the church should get into its buildings,
but we should become much more strategic and missionally thoughtful when
we use our buildings,
ask ourselves how can our buildings,
how can the expressions of our
gathered life actually serve as evidence before a watching world that Jesus Christ is present in our midst?
Another large area that I think relates to the initial discussion very directly
is the question of theological debate and controversy and even argument within the Christian community.
We need to be grappling constantly with our understandings of who we
are and what we’re for and that’s going to mean that we also disagree with each other.
So the question is how do we as witnessing communities disagree Christianly?
How does the world see God’s presence in the way Christians love one another even when they don’t agree with each other?
And right now we’re in a,
as you know, a terribly dichotomized society
with a tremendous amount of divisiveness and judgmentalism and false witness,
I would say, to use the biblical language.
How do we present ourselves as an alternative community who don’t
get caught up in those exercises which are so destructive?
You know, Dr.
Guder, you are
actually moving, I think, to speak to one of the things we wanted to ask you and that is
recognizing the breadth of the missional conversation and realizing how extensive
it calls us to reconsider our reading of the scripture,
our theological understanding of who
God has called us to be,
and even more so how we structure ourselves as church and church is.
I’m curious,
what would you maybe point us to from your vantage?
Are there some marks or
characteristics of a congregation that you would lift out as being good signs of the
churches that are living into a missional identity that you might say that it may be a
foreshadowing of what the future church will look like,
who is living into this missional identity?
That’s obviously an extremely important question and I think we’re in a good position because
there are, I would say, a lot of engaging,
challenging undertakings with regard to the
question, how does this translate this missional theology of the church into our reality?
How do we make it, how can we become agents for it’s actually happening?
It’s a little bit self-serving
but this question emerged immediately when the missional church book appeared and the first
question we got was,
what does it look like?
What are the practices?
How does it relate to worship?
How does it relate to the inherited structures that are important to us?
We actually did a next
step as a research project of the Gospel of Our Culture Network and we set out to examine
the scene in North America and ask ourselves if there were congregations in which missional
ferment could be seen or tested and how would we find them and how would we engage them and gain from their experience?
Out of that came actually another book,
I’m a little chariot and you probably
know about it, but it’s the book,
The Continuing Conversion of the Church.
Well, that’s my book on the subject.
“Treasuring Clay Jars” is the title I mean,
edited by Lois Barrett.
I was one of the
authors in that book and what we did is we tried to identify the practices that we actually could
observe in congregations and we documented them.
We came up with about eight basic practices that
have now been taken by a lot of people and worked with very productively and I think adapted to concrete situations.
I’m involved with the Presbyterian Church in Western Canada
at their Theological College in Vancouver and it’s been very interesting.
They’ve taken this
understanding of the practices of a witnessing congregation quite seriously and they’re doing
a lot of serious exploration on what is actually happening in our congregations,
how can we build
on it, how can we learn from each other,
how can we encourage each other and up in the Vancouver area
they’re doing some really remarkable things because they’re asking that question and they’re
finding that there are answers in their experience.
So I’m encouraged that when people risk
experimenting,
raising the questions as you have done and give people permission to dream dreams
and have visions that it is in fact bearing fruit and we see in the Seattle area the formation
of quite a large number of very innovative churches that fall outside the inherited
structures of denominational congregations but are very definitely focused upon the cultural
context of the northwest,
Cascadia as they call it,
which is highly singularized and in which
there are growing numbers of witnessing congregations.
So one option would be to look
at that book or to look at,
I mean there are many books that are coming out now that are very
good.
An introduction to missional theology by,
oh dear my age is playing,
you know I just spaced
out his name, John,
okay it’ll come to me.
Anyway there are theological projects ongoing
in which this question is being grappled with and I find that very very encouraging.
Dr.
Gooder,
along those lines,
as the tension arises in those moments,
are there some ways
that you find best for congregations to engage this conversation?
As Michael and I have had this podcast,
our hope is to be able to let some of these ideas ferment at a congregational level and
as you I know have been involved in the kind of the largest evolution of the conversation,
what are the most likely ways in your experience that on the at the ground level congregations
discover this invitation to be missional?
One of the things I have observed and I have actually seen some concrete examples of it is
has to do with the biblical formation of the witnessing community and how that happens.
Part of that is the questions that we ask scripture.
How do we
interrogate scripture so that it becomes God’s formative word for us?
And those questions like the basic question you’ll remember this from classes I think
is when we’re grappling with a particular text we ask ourselves in a variety of ways how can this
text continue the formation of faithfully witnessing communities then and how does
they do that now?
There’s a great deal of our task particularly for the teaching elders in
the tradition that we share is to translate and interpret the scriptural story in such a way that
it becomes that it continues in us that we understand we are to add our names to the lists
of the disciples that we find in the four gospels when Jesus calls them to follow him so that they
can become apostles and all of us experience that kind of calling.
That’s what our baptism
is really all about.
We have to begin preaching and teaching our baptism as missional vocation.
That gives the Holy Spirit the opportunity to bring that knowledge to fruition in us.
I have been suggesting and I’ve seen some congregations tested that we spend serious time
working on all of the imperatives of the New Testament that are formed with the reflexive pronoun one another.
Love one another,
forgive one another,
support one another, weep with one another.
There are almost a hundred of them, 99 I think,
and they are all about the
conduct of the witnessing community.
They’re talking about concrete shapes of behavior
which serve as credible witness.
That’s where I would put that whole question
of how we deal with our political and theoretical divisions,
our disagreements.
We let ourselves be shaped by the one another language of the New Testament.
I think we can
pray that the Holy Spirit will give us the courage to risk behaving towards each other as credible witnesses.
Demonstrating to one another that Christ’s love binds us and is more
important than what we think theologically about this or that particular point.
That would be another possibility.
I mean there’s so much.
I’ve taught Philippians
in class at the seminary and in congregational settings.
Philippians is a magnificent formative epistle around
the question of our conduct.
Lead your life publicly worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
That’s a debate worth having.
What is worthy witness?
What does that look like?
What does our world need to see if they’re going to get some glimpse of the validity of God’s
healing love for everyone?
That’s a compelling idea,
Dr.
Guder, and as you were talking,
I have to admit to you I just had a new connection get made because you were speaking just a little
while ago about this idea of reductionism,
right?
The idea that one of the problems is
that we’ve seen the depth of our theology sort of fall to more individualized perspectives,
and what struck me in this moment to hear that from you again was how even more prescient that is right now.
You know I was in the classroom with you 10 years ago and even then technology
wasn’t what it is today.
I’m aware that as we’re talking to you it’s it’s across over a thousand miles.
It’s being recorded.
It’s going to be accessible to those online.
We’re being formed and shaped not just in our church buildings but by our phones and our TVs and our culture,
which is incredibly or I’m sorry is step by step being tempted by greater narcissism.
We live at the center of our universe,
and so theological reductionism paired with a cultural temptation
toward narcissism does lead the church to some very turbulent
waters, and I wonder if we have
some very difficult conversations ahead of us,
certainly some very challenging discernment to
follow a God who does call us into this relationship with one another as you speak.
It seems to me
that we we have some hurdles ahead of us.
Do you think that’s fair?
That’s absolutely fair and it’s honest,
and I think our congregations need to understand that the passage we have entered into
this process of the decline or disintegration of Christendom is actually happening.
The scholars will talk about our living in a liminal passage.
We’re in a threshold passage where we don’t know
what the other side looks like and what it’s going to be like to get through it, and this is
a very difficult,
challenging time.
This is not a time in which it is easy to figure out
what Christian witness looks like.
We need to be using the best insights we can share with each
other about how God is working in our lives Monday through Saturday that they can become a resource
for each other as we seek to be faithful.
If I come across a Christian brother or sister who says to me,
“I’m just looking for a church that meets my needs.” I recognize already there’s the challenge.
That is not the reason there is a church.
My needs are met because of God’s faithfulness
to the world and because of the vocation of the witness who is a person God is using
to bring about healing,
and that is as true of us as a gathered community as it is true of us as individuals.
There is enormous need for us to be honest about the challenges that we face.
This is where the Psalms are tremendously useful because there’s so much evidence in the Psalms of
struggling with what it means to be God’s people.
I think this is what we have to learn to do,
not offer retreats away from the challenges of our society,
but rather in the invitations to
enter into the challenges because God promises to meet us there.
As he promises in Luke,
where we meet in counter-opposition,
God will give us utterance.
God’s Spirit
is present in our midst in order to equip us for precisely those challenges.
I have a doctoral student who’s working with a colleague in Holland,
and he’s doing it on
Presbyterian decision-making, and one of the outcomes of his research,
which is very, very extensive,
is that he is saying the Presbyterian Church should put away,
take away, not use Robert’s rules of order.
This is over the century,
and particularly modernity,
has become a way of decision-making which does not incarnate the gospel.
It creates divided factions
in the church.
It creates winners and losers.
It’s a very compelling argument.
There are several denominations around the world which have come to the same conclusion.
My student is doing this in the context of the Presbyterian Church.
I think we have to be
willing to make that kind of bold decision that there are things about us as Presbyterian Christians
that really have to change if we’re going to be faithful witnesses.
Darrell, one of the things that I treasure about this conversation and you’re guiding me into it
is that so many in our Western American church right now do live with an experience of this
decline, and when your primary experience of the faith is Christendom and it begins to crumble,
it feels like you’re losing something.
And while that is true,
I think the benefit of this conversation
is the promise that in the losing we are also gaining.
In fact,
we may be moving
into new ways of living that are deeper and more faithful in some instances than what we have lost,
and I think it tempers that sense of decline.
I think it provides some comfort in the midst of
those challenges and changes.
For something as radical as Presbyterians giving up Robert’s rules,
the idea that that could lead us to a new and better place is a tremendous comfort,
and we are so grateful that you have pioneered those conversations for your role in them.
Michael and I, I know I speak for him.
We both consider it a deep blessing to have been in your classrooms
and to be guided by your knowledge and your insight,
and we treasure this time that you
would share with us to help us continue to wrestle with these thoughts and to move forward in these
fields.
Well, thank you.
I’m humbled and I’m greatly encouraged by this conversation,
by the questions you’re raising,
which are right on,
getting right at the heart of the challenges,
and it’s an indication to me that the missional discussion is something God’s Spirit is doing,
and we’re very privileged to be a part of it.
I applaud it, and I thank you very much for
sharing this excitement with me because it is an enormous source of encouragement to me.
Well, you are more than welcome,
and we are grateful for the time.
Friends,
thank you for taking the time to join our conversation with Dr.
Darrell Guder.
We are grateful for the opportunity to be reminded of how deep and nuanced this conversation is.
I hope you’ve been encouraged in your own faith and maybe even spurred to live into that vocation that God
has given you, that you might be a missional witness in everything that you do and say.
That said,
we look forward to seeing you next week as we wrap up this series where we continue
to reflect on what it means to be a missional church and a missional Christian.
We hope that you will join us for this.
We tie some of these threads together.
Until then,
be blessed.