“Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty-dumpty
had a great fall;
All the King’s horses and all the
King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
-Ancient
Prophetic Utterance-
Tony
Jones, in The New Christians: Dispatches
From the Emergent Frontier, writes about his church, Solomon’s Porch. He
says, “It’s not a perfect church, but it’s a beautiful and messy church” (p.
211). He reiterates that thought in Dispatch 20, which reads: “Emergents
believe that church should be just as beautiful and messy as life” (p. 213).
One Sunday, somewhere toward the end of the sermon, I had members of my
congregation turn to one another and say in a loud voice, “I quit! I give up! I
can’t do it anymore…but God can!” One teen jumped to his feet and shouted it
from the top of his lungs, “I QUIT!!” The elderly lady sitting behind him
grimaced but I’m pretty sure she’ll be back next week.
The
“I quit” moment was the culmination of
the morning message, which, in turn, was a culmination of my three weeks in residency at Drew University in New
Jersey, during which crisis after crisis seemed to hit the members of my
congregation. The “I quit” moment was designed to help my congregation
understand that rather than being “freaked out and running amok at the foot of
the cross,”[1] why
not just quit? Give up? Admit we can’t do it anymore? As the quote at the top
of the page implies, for many of us in the church, Humpty-dumpty has had a
great fall and we can’t put him back together. Be it imminent divorce, struggle
with sexual orientation and identity, alcohol dependency, ministry burnout,
loss of employment, a life and death battle with cancer, as well as many other
issues, reality is and was that every one of those issues were present that day in the sanctuary of that little stone church building on the corner. Helping
them quit and give up seemed to be the best thing that I could offer them. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s kind of messy!”
After
the service, one church member went home and posted, “I QUIT!” in bold letters
on her Facebook page. Her Facebook friends were duly alarmed and I was even
freaked out a little bit until I remembered what it was about. On the other end
of the “I quit” spectrum, an elderly gentleman and pillar of the church approached
me after the service and asked, “Why aren’t the altar candles lit?” I think he
was suspecting some big theological shift in the way we were doing worship;
however, the reason the candles weren’t lit was because the burned down candles
were stuck to sides of the candle holder tubes and until we could dig the old
candles out, we couldn’t put new candles in. Beautiful and messy!
I
believe ministry and mission is at its best when it rides the razor edge of
chaos.I subscribe to a theology of Almost Amok – not a frantic, freaked out
“amokness” – but a loosely controlled spontaneity. I have subscribed to such a
theology since the beginning of my ministry and used to question whether I was
overly idealistic and possibly a little bit ignorant. I quickly learned that I
was guilty as charged on both counts, but as I have been exposed to new
insights and knowledge, I have also come to truly beleive that the messier church is allowed
to be, the more beautiful it becomes.
My vision is not to abandon the fortress, but rather
transform it into a sanctuary. I envision the frontier as passing through the
sanctuary church, not outside of it. I envision the exploration and
experimentation as being first within the walls and then outside. I envision walls
that are solid when needed for protection, but permeable when the need exists
for a way in – when sanctuary and acceptance is crucial. Such an endeavor is
dangerous because the sanctuary is easily entered which makes us highly
susceptible to harm. However, the alternative of a closed, guarded entry is even
more dangerous as it makes us susceptible a slow spiritual death and ultimate
irrelevancy.
The
beautiful and messy frontier involves a constant maneuvering of place. It means
pushing some edges only to the point of making some uncomfortable for the sake
of creating a safe caring place of comfort for others. This must be done
without making the former so uncomfortable that they no longer feel safe, leave
the sanctuary, and return to a fortress spirituality. In other words, not
everyone needs to know they are on the frontier. Not everyone must share the
same motives or intentions for ministry to be done. The important task is to
create a space where ultimate safety and care is provided for the optimum
amount of people. This is done by facilitating an ethos of care and acceptance.
Such an ethos is not conducive to the old fortress spirituality but lends
itself well to an open, accepting, caring place as sanctuary.
Jones,
in the epilogue of his book refers to emergent Christians as feral. I find that
to be a sad and depressing viewpoint. He portrays emergent Christians as
“pushing over fences and roaming around the margins of the church in America”
(p. 219). I choose not to accept such a destructive and somewhat hostile view.
His reference to emergent Christians as “once domesticated in conventional
churches and traditional seminaries” (p. 220) seems divisive and exclusive,
especially when compared to Emergent Village Values and Practices, #2,
“Commitment to the Church in All Its Forms” (p. 223). “They occasionally wander
back,” Jones writes, “feeding off the structures and theologies of traditional
Christianity, but they never stick around. Attempts to redomesticate them will
fail” (p. 220). I choose to be more optimistic and open. For me, the frontier
is the place where traditional and emergent meet, and such a place is beautiful
and messy.
[1] Attributed to Bruce
Bridgewater, former program director at Bethel Neighborhood Center in Kansas
City, Kansas.
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