OUR TRIUNE JOURNEY HOME, PART THREE
For its part, when the journey outward is privileged and unmoored from a deep relationship with Christ through prayer (inward and together, individual and corporate), it inevitably peters out or runs astray. (17) In that case it, too, becomes a narcissistic endeavor — whether individual or corporate — fueled by the ego-driven fantasy that it is all about me/us and my/our “doing,” rather than God's enterprise. Our human will and action is capable of fueling good work in the world, of course. Yet the Church is not another NGO. Ours is the truly long game: our view is to the Kingdom. There is only One who sustains deeply and keeps the Church on course across time and place and vicissitude.
Indeed, scholars of evangelism have perceived how intimately entwined the outward is with the inward. Bill J. Leonard, for instance, cites with approval Herbert Miller's “threefold” notion of evangelism, which entails (and note the order):
(1) Being the Word — the influence of the Christian's spiritual quality and example.
(2) Doing the Word — the influence of the Christian's loving acts toward other people.
(3) Saying the Word — the influence of the Christian's verbal communication with those outside the church (18) (Leonard 2008, p. 102, citing Miller; italics mine).
This formulation encompasses the two traditional — and often dichotomized — theologies of evangelism: proclamation (“saying the Word”) and works of social justice ("doing the Word"). Miller adds another dimension and gives it precedence: “being the Word,” which he understands as stemming from the quality of the spiritual life of the individual Christian.
To my own ear, what appears most often excluded or occluded in anthologies of evangelism (19) is the role of corporate worship (together) in shaping both the individual and the Church-as-a-body to go out. In the Anglican Communion, too — where twenty years ago the deep relationship between corporate Eucharistic worship and sending out was highlighted and made explicit — questions are being raised by leading evangelists about the centrality of the sacraments.
In her beautiful and important book The Church Cracked Open, Stephanie Spellers, the Presiding Bishop’s Canon for Evangelism, wonders whether the effects of the pandemic (or, more accurately, the effects of the Episcopal Church’s particular response to the pandemic) might perhaps reveal God’s will to re-form the Church radically in a way that de-emphasizes its sacramental life:
…[T]he pandemic raged. The temporary restrictions became semi-permanent adaptations.…. We had invested so much financial, emotional, and spiritual capital in our buildings as the site of the holy (or at least the most intense encounter with the holy) and in the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist as the fullest way to receive God’s love and spirit. We had communicated — with our actions if not always with our words — that clergy mediation is essential for a sustained connection to God. Could God lead us through a radical re-formation, training us to see and celebrate holiness closer to home, and to trust the laity to develop intimate relationship with God and one another beyond the control of clergy? (20)
Online commentators have pointed to early Christian house churches as examples of this kind of worship “closer to home”— failing to note in the process that the oldest extant textual and archaeological evidence suggests that Baptism and Eucharist were central to the life of early Christian communities (see, e.g., Didache 7, 9; Dura-Europos), and that these were led by persons set aside for particular leadership ministries (e.g., “elders” in Acts 14:23; “presbyters” in 1 Clement 44:4-57:1).
To raise a question, as Spellers does, is of course part of any sound discernment process. And yet not every change in earthly circumstance demands a radical change in the Church or a questioning of the fundamentals of the faith. Development and change are intrinsic to life-in-time and imply growth and adaptation; at the very same time, sound development emerges from rootedness and continuity. “The two great sacraments given by Christ to his Church are Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist.” (21) It is through the sacrament of Baptism that the Church is brought into being: through it we are made members of Christ’s Body. Through the sacrament of Holy Eucharist the Body is not only nourished: it is held together and woven more deeply into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These are invisible-realm movements, to be sure, yet they are no less real than what we can perceive with our exterior-oriented senses. De-emphasizing or neglecting our sacramental life will loosen rather than strengthen the bonds of our common life in Christ and risk fragmenting us further.
Spellers is not alone; others, in fact, have gone farther. In the U.K., Canon John McGinley, Development Enabler for the Archbishops’ College of Evangelists, presented recently a proposal named Myriad (Greek for ten thousand) that seeks to establish 10,000 predominantly lay-led house churches in the Church of England by the year 2030. In the course of his presentation he offered that:
Lay-led churches release the Church from key limiting factors. When you don’t need a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of a church . . . then actually we can release new people to lead and new churches to form. It also releases the discipleship of people. In church-planting, there are no passengers. (22)
One wonders how formation for these lay leaders would take place so that they may remain rooted in the ancient faith of the Church, not fall prey to fundamentalist readings of Scripture, act in love when faced with pastoral challenges, and, most fundamentally, remain attuned the movements of the Holy Spirit – and not any other spirit. Of note, Canon McGinley’s statement generated significant backlash; subsequent apologies and clarifications/amendments were issued. Yet from a psychological perspective the original language and its context cannot be said to lack meaning. Declining membership numbers are mentioned these days in every conversation about evangelism and every proposal for radical action. Fear is a powerful motivator. And the spirit of fear is not the the Spirit of God.
So it is with deepest respect and admiration for their zeal to invigorate our journey outward that I would caution our leading evangelists not to forget the formative power of the Eucharistic liturgy — that juncture of contemplation and action! — in our individual and collective going out. In a fundamental way, it is through the habitus of regular Eucharistic worship (23) that human beings become more and more in-mersed in a dynamic flow (24) that stems from the Source — from God’s own triune life (25) — and develop a particular kind of vision (26) with an eschatological orientation, which leads us to become more and more transformed in the image of Christ and consequently to go out, offering ourselves in self-giving love for the transformation of the world and the carrying out of God's mission. This, in turn, draws more and more people back to God in thanks and praise and adoration. (27) It is a fluid in → out → in → out → in movement that draws all back into the Source through Jesus: the juncture, mediator, and lynchpin.
The mission of the Church is to restore all to unity with God in Christ. We inadvertently work at counter-purposes with God’s Holy Spirit — and may well promote our fragmentation and unraveling — when we dissociate or de-emphasize any strand of the Christian life in our teaching and praxis. The movements of the Spirit do not devalue interior life with God, do not relegate sacramental worship, do not neglect proclamation of the Gospel or service to a hungry world in need. Deep formation and balanced practice in the triune strands of our journey home — inward, together, outward — cooperate with the restoration of humanity’s fullness of life in God.They are the Church’s deepest expression of love requited: the giving of our whole being — our whole life — to God. What other response could any lover make?
[17] I am indebted to my late bishop, the Rt. Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, SSJE, for teaching me this circa 2005.
[18] B.J. Leonard (2008), Evangelism and Contemporary American Life, in The Study of Evangelism: Exploring a Missional Practice of the Church, P.W. Chilcote and L.C. Warner, eds. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans.
[19] See, e.g., Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The Study of Evangelism: Exploring a Missional Practice of the Church. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
[20] Spellers, S. (2021). The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community (p. 19). Church Publishing Incorporated.
[21] Catechism, p. 858.
[22] Davies, M. (2021, July 2). Synod to discuss target of 10,000 new lay-led churches in the next ten years. Church Times. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/2-july/news/uk/synod-to-discuss-target-of-10-000-new-lay-led-churches-in-the-next-ten-years.
[23] See Smith, J.K.A. (2013). Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Baker Academic. See also O’Malley, T.P. (2014). Liturgy and the New Evangelization. The Liturgical Press.
[24] Meyers, R.A. (2014). Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering As God’s People, Going Out in God’s Name. Eerdmans. See also, Smith.
[25] Meyers, p. 154.
[26] See Smith, pp. 124-150. See also O’Malley, pp. 48, 78, 83; Meyers, p. 229.
[27] See Meyers.
