Thrive. Ruth A Fletcher
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that care for creation.
In each phase of its ministry, Fe y Esperanza engaged in a specific mission determined by its context. It adapted itself to the changing circumstances of its neighbors. It listened to the people it was called to serve in order to discern their most critical needs. It strategized about how to meet those needs and took action. Then when the need for a particular ministry was over, Fe y Esperanza stopped whatever it had been doing in order take up a new, more necessary ministry. Over and over again, the church willingly died in order to be reborn as a more effective instrument of God’s love. It became new in order to be relevant.
Changing Conditions
Even though most historic Protestant congregations in the United States do not serve in a war zone, the circumstances in which the church is called to minister keep changing. Here are some conditions which characterize the present:
1 GLOBALIZATION reduces both geographic distance and time. Now, it is possible to buy a Coke in both Kansas City and New Delhi, to shop at The Gap in both Seattle and Shanghai. A computer made in Indonesia may be shipped to a British customer and serviced by a technician in India. When revolutions take place in the Middle East, news sources all over the world simultaneously receive reports and photographs from individuals communicating via satellite.
2 INTERDEPENDENCE creates a web of relationships so every individual action affects the whole. Bank failure in the United States distresses the domestic housing and job markets while affecting the banks in Europe as well. The world now is so interconnected that a small incident can set off a chain of events with far reaching consequences. An economic or political crisis in one nation affects other nations. An ecological disaster in one location holds implications for the entire planet.
3 DISPERSED POWER results from readily accessible information that comes from many sources. People do not depend on experts to give them the answers. They do not endow the clergy, the Bible, or the church with assumed moral authority. They chat, blog, post, and click to express their own views within a marketplace of ideas and opinions.
4 RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY increases as waves of refugees and immigrants change the cultural, political, and economic backdrop in many North American communities. On the street, residents hear others speaking languages they cannot understand and they associate with neighbors who have a variety of skin tones, religious beliefs, values, customs, and viewpoints.
5 EVOLVING COMPLEXITY characterizes the post-modern world where species continue to evolve and systems continue to interact with each other. The theory of cause and effect has given way to new explanations that consider random actions and reactions. Where once leaders relied on linear step-by-step problem-solving to provide answers, now they recognize rational thought as only one way of knowing.3
6 NEW ETHICAL QUESTIONS present themselves as science and technology continue to make new discoveries and to invent new tools. Who should have access to innovations? How should such innovations be used? What affect do new advances have on life and death issues? Current generations face alternatives that their grandparents never imagined.
7 A GROWING GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR exists in the United Sates where a tiny one percent of the population owns forty percent of the wealth.4 In the global community North Americans devour eighty-five percent of the world’s goods and services even though they make up only one-fifth of the world’s population.5
8 THE END OF NON-RENEWABLE PLANETARY RESOURCES such as drinking water and fossil fuel is now a reality. Deserts encroach, seas rise, and storms grow larger and more destructive as the climate changes. Violence erupts over who will control the diminishing food supply. Some parts of earth are becoming more crowded.
Meanwhile, rather than responding to these cultural shifts, most historic Protestant congregations today continue to hold onto an anachronistic way of life from a bygone era that renders the church irrelevant. Sociologist Nancy Ammerman calls that way of life “Golden Rule” Christianity.6
Golden Rule Christianity
The majority of Golden Rule Christians are Anglo-North Americans who build their lives around the principle of treating others as they would like to be treated. They do not go overboard about their religion. They see religion as only one aspect of life, as a personal set of beliefs that individuals freely choose and do not discuss outside the church building. Golden Rule Christians feel no need to impose their beliefs on others, neither do they find it necessary to change the whole world; rather, they are content to do good within their own circle of family and friends.
Golden Rule Christianity was forged when the GIs came home from fighting in Germany and Japan. Those returning veterans and their families voluntarily joined the church much like they joined other organizations. At church they could build relationships, make business contacts, and create friendships that filled the void of relatives who lived far away. New parents found a wholesome, intergenerational place to raise their children at church where they focused on the power of positive thinking7 after the gruesome carnage of war.
Back then, the culture and the church supported each other, blurring the distinctions between the civic and the religious. The name of God was invoked both in Girl Scout meetings and in Bible studies. The American flag graced both the room where the Rotary Club met and the church sanctuary. On Sunday morning, businesses closed because it was assumed that most people would be in worship.
People in the Golden Rule Church did not spend much time defining Christianity. They did not have to. The church’s habits of helpfulness, civilized behavior, niceness, and friendliness were values they held in common with the conventional Anglo-American culture.
The Golden Rule Church was a destination. People “went to” church. Time spent in church was the measure of faithfulness. Successful congregations were the ones that could afford a big building, that increased their budget each year, and that added more and more programs to serve a growing number of members who joined.
In the Golden Rule Church, it was the job of the pastor to lead the flock. The minister was expected to preach, to teach, to administer the sacraments, and to single-handedly care for church members. One of the main ministerial tasks was visiting. The pastor was to call on church members both in the hospital and in their homes, focusing attention on the sick, the bereaved, and those who could no longer get out of the house to go to church. The rest of the minister’s week was taken up with preparing engaging Bible studies and planning an inspiring sermon.
For Golden Rule Christians, worship was the centerpiece of church life. Each Sunday, the order of the service was pretty much the same. The tone was quiet reverence and those who were up front moved with dignity, formality, and orchestrated precision. The worshiping body was usually fairly homogeneous with regard to class, race, and ethnicity.
The Golden Rule Church provided a social life as well as a religious life for its members. Classes, recreational sports leagues, and fellowship events filled the church calendar. Each week, a small army of volunteers kept those programs running by serving meals, teaching classes, leading youth groups and repairing the church building.
I grew up in the Golden Rule Church. My parents counted on the congregation where they were members to socialize me into middle-class American culture and to teach me to value moral character, good citizenship and polite behavior. In the Golden Rule Church, Bible verses and simplistic aphorisms were used to convey in short, pithy bits of wisdom the essence of the Christian life. “Be ye kind one to another” (Ephesians 4:32) was emblazoned across the wall of my Sunday School classroom, probably in hopes that it would inspire discipline. Almost every week, I heard the person giving the Call to Offering in worship remind us, “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). When a disheveled man smelling of alcohol showed up on the front steps of the church asking for a handout, adults often would cluck their tongues and invoke the quote they thought came from the Bible: “God helps those who help themselves.”
The Golden Rule Church made sense of the world by ignoring much of its complexity, viewing reality from a frame of reference that relied on dualistic categories of right and wrong, good and bad, insiders and outsiders. Although the insiders might help the outsiders with good works, it was important to maintain the social boundary between the two groups. Insiders were