Recently, I posted the following comment in an online chat group of parish pastors:
“The difficulties in moving from seminary to parish, from classroom to ministry, from in the church to outside the church - are all brought on from a failure to realize two inter-related things. 1) The Bible and the church's statements of doctrine are NOT the good news of God active in the world - they are words about the good news. We get hung up in words and forget that the words are about true events of a God who is active deep into our lives. Creation, Covenant, Exodus, Promised Land, Exile, Return, Birth, Life, Cross, Resurrection; all these are words about actual involvements of God in the life of the world.
#2) - We are too long on being conversational about the faith and too short on being incarnational of the faith; the call upon us is to live the story out, not sit inside and talk the story to death.”
I ended the post by saying I was going to think about this some more. It received a lot of “likes” and several comments, most of which were to the effect that I had got it right the first time and should not overthink it. Alas, I am an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator (look it up on Wikipedia) and I am constitutionally incapable of not overthinking things. So here are some more thoughts on the subject.
I think it was C.S. Lewis who pointed out the difference between 1) looking at a map of the Amazon River and 2) actually taking a trip to Brazil and traveling up the same river. Too often, we pore over the map without ever plunging into the river of life with God.
Soren Kirkegaard wrote about two young lovers, one English, the other German, who met on the beach in France where they spoke to one another in high school French. They returned home and soon the English young man received a letter from the young woman, written in her native German. He laboriously translated it using a dictionary and a grammar. Kirkegaard points out that it is only because of his personal experience with the girl that the young man bothers to translate it at all, and it is through the actual experience of knowing her that the letter itself has meaning that only the young man understands.
So it is with our Bibles and Prayer Books; we only bother with them and truly understand them because of some encounter with or hunger for that mysterious holiness that lies behind and beyond them.
In recent years there has been a lot of talk among church growth types about how important it is for the church to move from trying to be “attractional,” to being “missional.” Attractional means trying to get people in the world to come to you, missional means being purposeful about going into the world.
I believe being missional is the same thing as being “incarnational.” We are called to put flesh on our faith in the midst of other people’s lives. That is the reason Jesus built no buildings and started no organizations and spent his time in the streets and by the lakes and in the dining rooms and backyards of notorious sinners.
Now, we are not Jesus and we need a place to meet together with others who are attempting to follow Christ. Even Jesus went to synagogue every week and took a community of folk around with him that evolved into the church, the body of Christ in the world.
It is those words, “in the world,” that we should pay attention to. Each congregation is called to plan its ministry in such a way that it is focused more on the community and less on itself –and each individual believer is called to be what Luther called a“little Christ” to other people in our everyday lives; to be kind and generous and forgiving at work and at the store and in the neighborhood and with our families. It is in those spaces that we can really become “the truth that we confess,” the body of Christ "in the world,”
Peace, Delmer