My national denomination (Mennonite Church Canada) has engaged the national body of congregations in two major processes. One dealing with an ethical and exegetical matter the other with the overhaul of our organizational structure. These processes as well as my increased involvement with the national church body have heightened my sense of two conflicting ways of being church in the midst of potentially divisive processes. Now what follows is admittedly simplified but I want to take a stab at clarifying at least one basic factor in the division and conflict that we are experiencing. Mennonite Church Canada (as well as many other churches I am sure) is currently a tale of two systems.
Tag: Mennonite church
Building a capacity to love: Confessions, authority, and virtues in the Mennonite Church
In the ongoing discussions around authority and the Being a Faithful Church (BFC) process in Mennonite Church Canada I recently heard a well-known leader in the Mennonite Church suggest that we suspend the authority of our Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective for a period of, say, 1o years. As much as I can be critical of the various institutional mechanisms of authority in the Mennonite church I was not sure of the usefulness (never mind possibility) of such a suggestion.
A call to worship
At the Mennonite Church Manitoba gathering on March 5th we watched a video describing the report of the Future Directions Task Force (FDTF). This report details substantive changes in the structure and work of Mennonite Canada, Area churches, and congregations. While I am broadly in support of the structural changes (or at least don’t have some other great idea) I want to focus on one element of the guiding theology in this report (and in the general communication of Mennonite Church Canada).
One line from the video crystallized this element for me. While explaining the various proposals of the report the narrator said, “Mission is the tone for everything we do.” Mission is the tone, the animating stimulus and identifying frequency of everything we express as the Mennonite church. This is a theological misstep.
Until we have done the explicit work of understanding and acknowledging the abuses of historic Christian missions then I simply cannot see how it can be helpful to think of mission as that which animates and identifies everything. While much has been done addressing abuses in missions one crucial component remains almost completely neglected. In nearly every official document of Mennonite Church Canada what is good moves from the church into the world. There is no accounting for how the Christian and how the church can receive good news.
For this reason alone I cannot support mission (that is, sending, the moving from church to world) as that which animates all we do. And even if we had adequately addressed the issues related to Christian missions I still wouldn’t think it is the right way of orienting ourselves as a church.
The beginning, way, and end of faith is worship.
Perhaps this goes without saying but if this is the case then there is all the more need for it to be understood and articulated well. Perhaps there is a concern that such a statement would reflect a culture of narcissism or navel gazing. This would be to misunderstand worship.
Worship is the practice and context in which we direct our attention, determine our values, form attachments, and express devotion.
If this is our understanding of worship then it necessarily forms a dynamic relationship with the rest of the world. For instance our worship will put us in conflict with our current economic system. Advertisers attempt to direct our attention, money is used to determine an equivalent for nearly any value, debt and wage-labour form our attachments and call us to express devotion. Worship, understood in the broad strokes I have outlined, has profound implications in relation to the world around us (in ways that we would have typically called ‘mission’).
Worship nurtures a form of offering and receiving which can help disentangle ourselves from the supremacist elements of missions that work explicitly or implicitly in our theology.
Worship provides a more interactive understanding of formation and witness which have functionally operated as silos in our current structure.
I understand that worship is a term that can quickly become vague and nebulous taking its shape from our various contexts and practices. But this is the case with any term we offer as providing some larger context or understanding. I would still maintain that it is difficult argue against the statement of worship being the beginning, way, and end of our faith and so it should be articulated as such in this time of change. Worship is a practice and context that pulses in our gathering and spreading. The circulation that worship offers is necessary for a healthy church near and far.
The Bible and authority
In the first post of this series I claimed that the authority in the church is never a matter of a clear or simple line of expression and application. There are various crossing and conflicting lines that we must navigate in how we understand and express authority. A place where many of these lines cross is within and around the Bible. In the Confession we state, “We acknowledge the Scripture as the authoritative source and standard for preaching and teaching about faith and life, for distinguishing truth from error, for discerning between good and evil, and for guiding prayer and worship.” Here again, while the Confession does acknowledge the role of the church, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus in discerning the will of God there remains a commitment to, in some way, running these all through the Bible in order for them to validated. In a sense I agree with that. However, I am guessing my understanding of the Bible and its role as authority differs from many I encounter in the church.
The Bible emerged over time and the Bible we have today does not look the same or have all the same books depending on Christian denomination. The Bible owes its existence to experiences and decisions that occurred outside the Bible. So some form of torah was given and practiced by the Israelite people and then along came a prophet and said I hope you know that just following the commands is not really what God intended. This of course was only later intensified with the coming of Jesus and dramatic split it created among those who considered his life, death, and resurrection the revelation of God and those who did not. And then came the decision around which letters and texts should be read and kept among the churches. The Bible exists because people encountered something that did not fit the prescribed authorities of the time. Sometimes these expressions were accepted like supplements but other times they were accepted only after dispute and fracturing.
But you don’t need to study the history of the Bible’s formation to see how this at work within the Bible. There are the daughters of Zelophehad who stand up for the integrity of their cause and force the religious leaders to rethink their position (Numbers 27). There are the prophets who I already mentioned. There is Job who refused to accept the orthodoxy of his friends and would not rest until he was given a hearing with God. With Jesus there are instances where he uses scripture as a source of authority but when approached by John’s disciples about him being the messiah he says simply go and tell John what you see. When facing other religious leaders Jesus puts it more pointedly, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:48). In Acts Peter must decide if experience of the Holy Spirit’s movement is sufficient for him to move away from his biblical position on Gentiles. Paul asks the church to live with ‘the mind of Christ’ allowing him to theologically discern that the biblical precedent of circumcision is not decisive for faithfulness.[1]
In all this I began to see that to take the Bible seriously meant to understand how its formation and its content asks us again and again to be willing to put the Bible down and look into the world to see how the Spirit might be moving; to take responsibility and stand up for and alongside those expressions and individuals once rejected by church doctrine and practice. The Bible and our traditions of authority have never been settled they have always reflected a certain intensity of what was, what is, and what is to come. I hope to look at this image of authority as intensity in my next post.
[1] In fairness to the Being a Faithful Church documents (which I have often been critical of) these shifts occurring in the Bible are noted as part of the process of discernment. One of my concerns with the BFC has been the way later documents have limited or muted the implications of these observations for how we understand authority (hence this series).
Faith, confession, and authority: Introducing a work in progress
The feedback that emerged from the Being a Faithful Church[1] process indicates that as a national body Mennonite Church Canada does “not have an appetite to change the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective” (BFC 7). I do have an appetite and I am guessing others may as well. Over time I hope to work article by article to bring our current Confession into conversation with some of my own thinking in this area. I want submit these reflections here so that further conversation could emerge from those who also have an appetite to re-visit this document.
I first wrestled with my relationship to our Confession in my ordination process with Mennonite Church Canada. Part of the process was to read and comment on aspects of our Confession. I was generally familiar with the Confession but a new question formed in my mind as I read over it again. How does the Mennonite church articulate and express authority? I did not find a clear answer to this question and I it is important to be clear about this ambiguity. Already in the introduction to the Confession we find a puzzling statement,
[Mennonite confessions of faith] provide guidelines for the interpretation of Scripture. At the same time, the confession itself is subject to the authority of the Bible.[2]
While I appreciate the openness of such a statement what is troublesome is that this irony, paradox, or conflict of interest is nowhere further clarified or engaged. Instead of wrestling with that fundamental tension I found that the waters were only further muddied in the Articles themselves. Within the Confession we now have authoritative statements on Scripture, Jesus, Holy Spirit, and the church that create additionally confusing lines of authority. In the course of these posts I hope to further clarify these tensions but for now I will try and summarize what I see happening (but don’t take me as authoritative, go and read the Confession for yourself!).
- The confession teaches us how to read the Bible.
- The confession is in submission to the Bible.
- The Bible is the Word of God written and is authoritative for establishing truth and error.
- Jesus is the Word made flesh and so the Bible finds its fulfillment in him.
- Jesus is known in the words of the Bible.
- The Holy Spirit continues to speak.
- The Holy Spirit will not contradict the Bible’s witness of Jesus.
- The Bible is authoritative for the church.
- It is in the church that the Bible must be interpreted.
Without acknowledging the initial tension of the confession and its relationship with or as authority these statements unfold as a recipe for confusion, frustration, and abuses. As I read our Confession as well as our Being a Faithful Church documents I see the commendable desire to engage the ongoing task of discernment but I remain concerned over the continued ambiguity of authority. The lines of authority that are mapped out in these documents continue to end ultimately with the question of who holds the most persuasive or influential reading of the Bible. Setting aside all of this ambiguity the BFC documents in particular continue to assert that the final authority rests in the Bible. What I want to suggest is that such statements are not only unhelpful but also unbiblical. In the next post I will offer a few biblical images that could hopefully shift many current notions of biblical authority in the church.
[1] The Being a Faithful Church documents reflect a multi-year process of developing tools for congregational discernment and the application and development of these tools for specific issues. These documents develop a commitment to ongoing discernment and the openness to reaffirm, modify, or change previous positions. The full package of documents can be found at http://www.commonword.ca/ResourceView/43/13465.
[2] Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, 1995. Waterloo: Herald Press.
Declaring the good news
16 ‘See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. 17 Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; 18 and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles.19 When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time.’
Matthew 10:16-19
What are we doing as Christians when we declare the gospel, the good news? Typical of historic Christianity has been the assumption that the gospel, as a message, as a relationship, even as the power of God (to put it in the Apostle Paul’s language), is something which moves from the Christian or church to the non-Christian or the world. It is hardly necessary to point out that the mission of the Church has been to declare the gospel throughout the world with either the implicit or explicit assumption that the world is insufficient (to put it mildly) before such a message is declared.
Full strides and half measures
[A sermon based on Galatians 5 preached Sunday November 8 at First Mennonite Church in Winnipeg]
I clearly remember my first encounter with what I guess could be called proper philosophy. In high school I was taught an ancient Greek story in which Achilles is running a race. As the race was going on one philosopher said to another, Surely before Achilles finishes the race he must pass the halfway point? There was of course agreement. The philosopher went on, and surely he will then encounter the halfway mark of that distance. Again, agreement.
But you can see where this is going. The question finally comes out, How can Achilles finish a race without first accomplishing the infinite task of passing through these half-measures? Now you might think this is the worst sort of abstract philosophizing and perhaps this explains something about my preaching but this story stuck with me and I think it is in fact quite telling.
My shameless appeal for church giving
Those who have read some of my articles in Mennonite publications or heard me speak quickly find out that I can be a little critical of the church, or maybe more than a little. This is because the church remains important to me and maybe even more than that the hope of expressing good news is important to me. I want there to be good news in the world and it pains me when the work of the church can bring pain to others. So I am often critical.
But the truth is that I don’t have much of an audience to speak critically with other institutions, like the government or businesses. I have not figured out the best channels to communicate strongly and directly a criticism of the government’s increasing inability or lack of will to distribute the abundant resources of our country. It is no secret to say that wealth is being increasingly concentrated to the few. And just as frustrating is the enduring social belief telling us that such concentration will somehow work itself out in our favour or is the result of hard work.
But because money is the engine for development and employment those with the concentration of wealth will be able to grossly influence the values that will guide who and what gets funded. Not surprisingly those expressions critical of these concentrations of wealth (advocates of strong changes in environmental or labour policies) or those expressions that appear superfluous, inefficient, to these concentrations (‘wasteful’ expressions like the arts or humanities) will struggle to make a living, never mind flourish and develop. Again, this is not really news, but I have not figured out how to address these issues to those with responsibility and powers to make changes at the level of government or corporate interests.
So I speak to the church. I speak to the church because within the church are people living and working in all sectors of society. The church is made of people who are called to be formed in ways that will help articulate good news to those struggling (even when it means bringing bad news to those responsible for it). The church is also able to model and experiment with alternative economies. We are able to distribute our resources that may align with or come in conflict with the distribution of our larger economy.
To the extent that we give to the church we are able to support and provide a livelihood for those our society has neglected or actively silenced. We can provide leadership in education to resist increasing pressures to form individuals only as good producers and consumers as opposed to reflective and engaging citizens working to support the most vulnerable among us. We can free up those with a vision and ability to address injustices. We can give employment to those working at new innovations or recovering old traditions based not on efficiencies but on quality. The church and many segments of society are indeed engaged at all these levels whether it is church members working at the Centre for Policy Alternatives, developing alternative agricultural practices at Canadian Mennonite University, offering bold artistic visions at the Mennonite Heritage Centre, or just getting in the way of violence with Christian Peacemaker Teams. I could go on, but I also could go on describing how constrained most of these institutions are because of decreased financial support. I do not know how to turn the government’s ear on these matters (and I don’t know that they are able to listen) but I can speak to the church.
I am critical of the church because I am hopeful of what is possible in the church. These are not grand theological hopes of how the church will fulfill the desire of all nations. It is not a statement thinking that the church can do these things better than other organizations or religions. This is a hope in the living out of the Lord’s Prayer which calls for the distribution of daily bread and the forgiving of debts. The church will not replace society and we need to continue to hold those in power accountable as best we can but the reality is that unless we commit to supporting the church and calling the church to free up and equip those with the calling and gifting to share and even demand good news then we will have to settle for the daily news of demands for short term profits without regard to future consequences. So give generously to the church and help the church remain faithful to its calling to give a generous message of good news.
Dismantling supremacy and hearing good news
I continue to get some feedback from my piece on mission at Anabaptist Witness. I would like to continue to clarify some things to the extent that it may be helpful for further conversation or understanding.
Continue reading “Dismantling supremacy and hearing good news”
For the cross to be the cross sometimes it will not be the cross
In a recent comment exchange regarding a post I wrote about the supremacist elements in Christian missions Tom Yoder Neufeld made a familiar Anabaptist move gesturing towards the particularity of Christ when he states,
“I think the mission of the church is about being the body of the one who made peace not with no-name healing and hope, or a generic just peace, but by the specific act of creating in himself a new human, destroying the hostility between us and our enemies and between us and God through the cross. That mystery is supreme over any and all of our efforts to articulate and live it; and it stands in perpetual judgment on our profound betrayals of it.” [emphasis mine]
I want to start by addressing the first half of that statement while hopefully coming to comment on the second half. By and large I agree with the move to particularity when it comes to talking about the content of our faith and thought. What I think Neufeld is critiquing is the notion that we can arrive a neutral or even secular criteria for ‘healing’ or ‘justice’ when it fact such notions come loaded with their own sets of assumptions and values that often go unnoticed. So for instance the liberal western notion of individual freedom often does not take into account indigenous claims to the land on behalf of an entire people group. These two notions of justice are at odds and one must, consciously or not, side with one particular notion or the other. I acknowledge and support such a critique.
Neufeld, however, wants to move this particularity under the category of ‘the cross’. The cross, however, was not a theological abstraction but a particular event from which particular believers were formed in their thinking and acting. I want to suggest, though, that perhaps the Gospel is actually much more generic, actually does arrive as one with no-name. That, and I hope I will understood here, for the cross to be the cross sometimes it will not be the cross. It seems that, according to the Gospels anyway, Jesus was not really concerned about the name under which ‘messianic’ or ‘kingdom’ elements were brought under. When asked by John’s disciples if he was the messiah Jesus asks them to simply tell John what they see. Jesus tells the disciples that they will be serving the king when they attend to the realities of the nameless marginalized. And most specifically Jesus clarifies that naming our lives and actions under the title ‘Lord, Lord’ gives no special place of status.
I know Neufeld is aware of all these things. I expect that his expression is at least somewhat in agreement with them. However, I still wonder if the ‘mystery’ in the second half of his statement should actually offer more judgement over the way we recuperate any possible notions of mission or gospel within our existing theological categories, even if those categories are as broad as ‘the cross’.
There is no question that the image of ‘the cross’ has been appropriated in all sorts of ways. Many expressions of the cross have been easily taken up into dominant cultural modes whether in outright superstition or just gaudy consumerism. So I want to suggest that for ‘the cross’ to have any integrity in theology or missions it will of course remain particular to the Gospel accounts but the Gospel itself should actually be much more generic. The Gospel has no-name other than the ones that emerge from those testifying to their encounter with it. This is its power and its vulnerability. And it is precisely at those intersections of deliverance, testimony, fellowship, and discernment that we all must be open to having our thoughts and actions laid bare for the unmaking and remaking of our lives.
David CL Driedger 