Bread for the Journey. Thomas W. Currie
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Well, maybe we shouldn’t worry about all of this. As a friend reminds me, the church will last exactly as long as God has need of it. According to the Revelation of St. John the Divine, there will be no temple in the heavenly city (“for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb.” Rev 21:22). And in truth, our denomination, our seminary even, has no special claim on God’s will and God is certainly under no obligation to make life safe and secure for us.
Still, I think God does will us to live a “life together” in Jesus Christ. Which means that the church has no more important task today than to gather, worship, serve, and share in whatever life together the Holy Spirit grants to our congregations. Being the church today seems to me to be the most counter-cultural act we could undertake, countering our loneliness and isolation and anger and despair, with the gospel of him who “welcomes sinners and eats with them.”(Luke 15:2)
February 20, 2013
I sometimes wonder if affluence and Christianity can really get along very well. God, Philip Jenkins has said, seems to do much better south of the equator.
Recently I interviewed a potential student, a recent immigrant, who, with his wife and children, had to flee their native Burma and go first to Malaysia, and then to America. He was a pastor in Burma, among the Chin people. When he fled the country, he worked with the UN High Commission on Refugees, helping to care for the 50,000 or so Burmese in the camps in Malaysia. I asked him about that work. He replied: “I woke up in the morning and visited those in prison first at 6 a.m. Then I went to the detention centers to welcome new refugees. Then I went to the camps to visit various folk, and finally to the hospitals to care for the sick and dying.” At one point he was hired by an NGO, eventually being recognized by the UN for his pastoral care for those in need.
“What is your ministry goal?” I asked him. “I want to plant new churches,” he replied. He is currently pastoring a flock of 140 Burmese here in Charlotte. He has applied for U.S. citizenship, but he eventually wants to return to Burma to help start new congregations.
The man is poor; he is living in his third or fourth country after fleeing his own. English must be his fifth or sixth language. And he wants to start new churches . . . .
I have been reading Anne Applebaum’s new book, Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945–1956 (Anchor, 2013). She is an excellent reporter whose account of those years makes for unbearably sad reading. She focuses on three countries: Poland, E. Germany, and Hungary. When you read what these people endured during World War II, first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets, you wonder that any of them are able to hope or plan or envision any kind of positive future.
Among the most crushed were explicitly Christian groups, especially youth groups but also seminaries and pastors. When I read what they went through, and what various minorities went through, I am ashamed of ever complaining about the plight of the American church or the miseries of our own denomination. We haven’t got troubles. Yes, there are splits and disappointments and anger, but most of these wounds are self-inflicted and mimic an affluent culture rather than contradicting it.
I remember once hearing Tom Gillespie speak when he was president of Princeton Theological Seminary. He and his wife, who was of German extraction, were visiting her family’s home town in what was then E. Germany. On Sunday, they went to church, where there might have been 10 people in worship. Gillespie, like a typical American, asked the pastor how many members there were that worshipped in that congregation. “On a good day, like Easter,” the pastor replied, “we might have 18.” 18. Gillespie wondered to himself if he would have the courage to pastor for 20 years, as this pastor had, a flock which, on a good day, might number 18 souls.
So what? Well, so this: maybe we should quit worrying about demographics, strategies for resuming our place of prominence in the culture, the resentments we must struggle against. Maybe we should simply pray to God for courage to bear witness in our day. That is hard enough.
May 22, 2013
Earlier this month I led a travel seminar to various sites in Europe associated with the Reformed witness. One of the places we visited was a little town in southeastern France called Le Chambon sur Ligne. This is a small town, I would guess of no more than 2,000 souls today. It has a city hall and a defunct railroad station and a small city park near the center of town. But it also has a French Reformed Church (a “temple” as it is called), whose pastor, André Trocmé, and congregation, saved the lives of over 3500 Jewish children during World War II.
Near the church, on a stone wall opposite the sanctuary, the state of Israel has placed a commemorative plaque honoring these “righteous Gentiles.” The church itself is simple and quite unadorned. The current pastor, a German native, met us and allowed us to sit in the sanctuary, to see the pulpit, and to hear him tell something of his work in this little, ordinary, small town congregation. To hear him speak, to sit in that sanctuary, to walk down the street to the gate of the church manse (called, “the presbytery”), on the door of which Jewish refugees knocked asking for help, was to sense that one was walking on holy ground.
But here is what struck me. The only adornment on the church building was an inscription over the door. It said, simply, (in French): “Love one another.” There could be no more threadbare Christian sentiment than what is expressed in that phrase. But given what happened in that community and through that congregation besieged by collaborators, Nazis, and others, the words, “Love one another” seemed to sum up the audacity and beauty and power of the gospel as no other words could.
One other note: I cannot emphasize enough the ordinariness of this little church. It was not a cathedral, not anywhere near the centers of power, probably not the pulpit that every young, aspiring pastor was seeking. It was quite ordinary. Yet just so the gospel was enacted there in a powerful way. Could that be the way the gospel happens here too? In Great Falls, Norwood, Mt. Gilead, Waxhaw, Marion, Mansfield, Hillsville, Roanoke Rapids, Weir Shoals, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Charlotte? The gospel is strange that way. It keeps showing up in the most ordinary of places.
October 23, 2013
Yesterday I attended a meeting of Charlotte Presbytery. There is, as I have discovered, no rubric in Robert’s Rules of Order for a howl of lament, but yesterday I wish there had been.
Four congregations voted to leave the denomination and yesterday Charlotte Presbytery gave them permission to do so. The congregations had fulfilled “all righteousness” in securing the requisite percentage of voters to leave, granting them the ability to exit and take their property with them, so there was no debate about that. Indeed, there was little debate about anything. Rather, this was going to be an apparently “amicable” divorce—no expressions of grief, no howl of lament, no expression of hurt or anger or regret, simply a quiet prayer at the end asking God’s blessing on those departing and on those remaining. A pastor of one of the departing congregations even thanked the presbytery for understanding, and expressed delight that he could now see us in the grocery store without worrying about any “awkward moments.”
Well, I hope there are some awkward moments. He and the rest of us deserve more than a few, if for no other reason than to bear witness to our mutual shame.
I understand there is an agreed upon protocol for splitting up, which in this case was followed to the letter. I understand that no one wants a court fight. I understand that the time for a reconciling word to be spoken had come and gone, and there were no more words to be said except, “Farewell.”
But the occasion deserved more than that. It deserved some hot angry tears that we have come to such a place with each other; it deserved a voice wailing that we are so much better at hurting each other and separating from each other than we are at coming together in Christ’s service and at his table. It deserved a voice that could acknowledge the death in our midst and could grieve the loss of saints whose leaving will render those of us who remain (as well as those who leave) lonelier, less interesting, and more broken than before.
There were one or two brave souls who voted against this divorce. Bless them. I don’t think their vote was really aimed at those who were leaving. And I don’t think their vote was a vote for hiring attorneys to defend the inevitable lawsuit that would