While we dare not pander to religious expectations by trying to accommodate every itch and fad (an impossible task, in any case), our thinking about Church and ministry should not be too far removed from responsive tension with the felt needs and hopes of the actual people of God. Tension requires both difference and similarity, distance and familiarity. If our notion of the Church is so different and distant from the community in which we minister, it may well result in interpersonal tensions of confusion and alienation, but it will not result in that creative tension which helps a community to become what it truly is.
Wise words, these. Pastors (and theologians and preachers and…) should be aiming for this kind of “responsive” or “creative” tension that, while not sacrificing all else at the altar of “relevance,” resists the temptation to fly off into the clouds of theological abstraction. Difference and similarity, distance and familiarity—that is the balance to strike. Preaching and theological instruction must, at some point, intersect with the actual world that people live in. Too many preachers walk out of the pulpit patting themselves on the back for their doctrinal accuracy, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their sermon never made meaningful contact with the hearers of that sermon.
Brad East on two ways of reading:
One way of reading something is to ask what’s wrong with it: what’s missing, what’s out of place. Another way of reading something is to ask what one might learn or benefit from it.
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Why should what is flawed take priority over what is good? Why not approach any text—any cultural artifact whatsoever—and ask, What do I stand to receive from this? What beauty or goodness or truth does it convey? How does it challenge, provoke, silence, instruct, or otherwise reach out to me? How might I stand under it, as an apprentice, rather than over it, as a master? What does it evoke in me, and how might I respond in kind?
Such a posture is not uncritical. It is a necessary component of any humane criticism. It is the first step in the direction of genuine (rather than superficial) criticism, for it is an admission of need: of the limits and imperfections of the reader, prior to mention of those of the text.
In a word, humility is the condition for joy, in reading as in all art. And without joy, the whole business is a sad and rotten affair.
Brad is getting at something really important here. The first way of reading—asking what’s wrong with a text—is the wide and easy way that leads to joyless destruction (to riff on Jesus' words). There are certainly many who enter by it. But the second way—that of humbly seeking to learn—is the hard and narrow way that only few can stomach. But there is life and joy to be had for those who do.
It is liberating to know that we do not need to present an apologia for the Christian Church. We do not need to pretend that “real Christianity” hasn’t been tried yet. We are not guilty of the gap between the Kingdom of God and the empirical Church. Indeed, it would be the height of presumption on our part to claim that we are responsible for, and therefore guilty of, that gap. We are not that important; our transgressions are not that consequential. This is not to deny that individually and corporately we have sins to confess, that we have in numerous ways resisted the coming of God’s rule, beginning with his rule in our own lives. But the irony is that one of the ways the Church has resisted the coming of the rule of God is through its own preoccupation with guilt. Guilt is deadly entanglement with the past; forgiveness is the gracious opening to a genuinely new future.
We do not have to justify the Church. The magnitude of what is wrong with it does not mean, as some urge, that we should start saying what’s right with the Church. That way lies self-righteousness, smugness, and fact-denying illusion. The ministry is not the Church’s office of public relations, or it should not be. Our job is not to project a more positive “image” of the Church, as that term is used in the communications media. Our task is to take seriously the biblical images or models of the Church that illuminate the Church’s full mission as the sign of humanity’s future. As we take this biblical understanding of the Church seriously, there is ever so much in the empirical Church of which we must be relentlessly critical.
Whatever else we may be guilty of, we are not guilty of the fact that the Church is not the historical consummation of the Kingdom of God. Far from our being embarrassed by the limitations of the existent Church, it is among our chief responsibilities to underscore the truth that the Church is not to be confused with the Kingdom of God. The Christian community points toward that Kingdom. In some important respects it anticipates that Kingdom. But the Church is as far in time from the Kingdom as is the whole creation of which the Kingdom is the universal future. The disappointment, discontent, and frustration that the world feels over its distance from perfection is also our disappointment, discontent, and frustration. In this sense, the Church is emphatically part of the world; indeed, as Paul describes it in Romans 8, the Church is the most restlessly yearning part of the whole creation. The difference is that we know the reason for the hope of perfection that is within us (1 Pet. 3). That reason is the preview or proleptic appearance of our hope vindicated in the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Living in communion with him, we not only share but articulate and intensify the world’s discontent. Our gospel is not the gospel of optimism, which is, after all, simply a different way of looking at things. It is not simply an angle of vision but a new datum that we proclaim to the world. That datum, which is the message and life of Jesus, is the reason for the hope that is within us and, if only they knew it, the foundation and rationale of hope within all people. And so, because we do not pretend that the Church is the Kingdom of God, we offer no excuses for its not being the Kingdom of God. There will be no satisfactory Church, no Church that can be embraced without ambiguity, until the world of which the Church is part is satisfactorily ordered in the consummation of God’s rule. In short, we cannot get it all together until God has gotten it all together in the establishment of the Messianic Age.
Matilda of Tuscany, an interesting figure I was mostly ignorant of before today, pictured here receiving a dedicated work from Anselm of Canterbury
Are people able to use Nextdoor in ways that enhance neighborliness? Does the app actually help you to “get the most out of your neighborhood” (taken from Nextdoor’s homepage)? I recall Rosaria Butterfield mentioning in her book The Gospel Comes with a House Key that she uses the app to learn about needs and opportunities in her neighborhood. But whenever I open the app, I mainly see people venting about their neighbors. Such is typical on Nextdoor: Noise complaints; doorbell footage of sketchy salesmen or package thieves; arguments over fireworks and their effects on anxious animals; self-promotion; selling junk; and so on.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but this seems to me like a classic example of a technology nudging its users in a certain direction. Is it possible to use Nextdoor in a way that leads to convivial relations among local users? Sure. But to do so is to work against the grain of the app itself. Ian Bogost, writing about Nextdoor in The Atlantic in 2018, said, “If Twitter is where you fight with strangers, and Facebook is where you vie with friends, then Nextdoor is where you get annoyed with neighbors.”
If you still want to use it, be my guest. But make sure you’re clear-eyed about the default direction that Nextdoor wants to go. If you’re not careful, you’ll drift down stream in no time.