A nice conversation is happening in the comments to Bill's previous post. Here's where I weigh in (I wanted to do it in comments, but typepad kept puking on me, presumably because I typed too much...)
First: Who knew anyone who didn't live in Sherman between 1996 and 2003 would ever read this?
Second: To all involved in this conversation: thanks for having it.
Third:
To Bill #1:
Your comments resonated with me (but you could have predicted that.) To Bill #2 and Bruce, a bit about me:
I'm a 29-year-old software engineer who happened to do undergrad with Bill #1. I grew up in the United Methodist Church but encountered what I can only (briefly) label a definitive call to a different faith during our time at Austin College.
Through the religious life programs at Austin College, I discovered a faith that was alive in a way that I hadn't encountered before - a faith willing to question itself. It was a faith willing to be deconstructed, examined, and reconstructed - and to trust that work to the Holy Spirit. It was a faith willing to call others toward the same resurrection - and a faith willing to accompany people on that journey.
When I graduated Austin College, I moved to the North Dallas suburbs. There, I joined a Presbyterian Church that I had developed some connections to during my time at Austin College. I was excited to continue the reformation.
And what I found - in largest part - was not that.
I found a tradition with deep roots and great love for each other. And despite what others have said (and continue to say) - a church with great love for God's creation and for those around them. I found a church that was even more diverse than I previously believed it to be - even if that diversity isn't necessarily ethnic or racial. I found a church that feeds hungry people and clothes naked people and shelters people who don't have a place to live.
But I also found a church whose world had changed around it - and the church didn't even realize it. I found a church that moved their physical campus 7 miles, and found themselves in a whole new world (6 years after the move, they still refer to it as the "new neighborhood.")
I found a church which was built around God's past faithfulness and who genuinely wanted to share God's faithfulness with the new context they found themselves in.
But I found a church that (wrongly) believed that God's faithfulness was put on display only in the ways in which they had seen it in the past. It was (and still largely is) a church that only knows how to make God's faithfulness known in the ways that they have known God's faithfulness in the past.
Their lack of other action is not from an unwillingness to change or an unwillingness to attempt to be relevant to their context. I do believe that their (our) lack of other action comes from two primary sources:
1. Fear. God has been faithful to this congregation in the past - and that faithfulness has been lived out in wonderful ways. We might very well mess things up if we monkey with them. I was once in a Worship Committee meeting where these words were literally said, "We don't want to get too many people in here - if we have too many people here, parking will get bad, and then I'm afraid noone will show up again." Oh, for that problem!
2. Ignorance. The church would love to know how to operate in its new context. It would love to know how to do ministry in the "new neighborhood." But they find themselves - for the first time in their history - as "strangers in a strange land." Oddly enough, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless - those are all things they are good at.
Helping a 29-year-old single male navigate the waters of career/faith balance, ministering with 28 year olds who still can't afford to move out of Mom and Dad's back bedroom, and teaching the 20 and 30-somethings about faith as a _way of life_ (as opposed to a system of beliefs)....those are things they don't know how to do. Ministering to the latch-key children of middle class suburban parents who work two jobs to keep up with the Jonses... Those are the things that their new context calls for - and those are the things they haven't figured out how to do.
Those of us who live in that world (which, I believe is the world of most Presbyterians today) thirst for the world of Broad Street and Mission Bay. We thirst for a deconstructed world of blank canvasses, exciting challenges, and freedom from preconceived notions of Church and community.
We thirst for a world where the physical needs of other people are literally on our back doorstep.
We thirst for a world where 2 loaves and some fishes (or $8k and an inspired vision) just has to be enough.
We thirst for a world where the Holy Spirit's work will be obvious and clear - because clearly that is the only way that BSM and Mission Bay would still be around.
We thirst for a world with a lower cost of failure - or at least a lower perception of the cost of failure (had BSM or Mission Bay failed, noone would have pointed to it as the death of a mainline denomination or as evidence of the failure of God's catholic church...but that is precisely the fear in the hearts of elders throughout the PCUSA.)
We thirst for blank slates, clear visions, and the excitement of newness.
And we fail to recognize that God's continual reformation and continual recreation and continual resurrection can and does bring just that.
We don't want to belittle your work. We don't want to pretend that it's not hard, or difficult or scary. We believe strongly and firmly that the Holy Spirit is at work in, around, amongst, and through you.
And we hunger for the Holy Spirit to be at work similarly - right here.
And if we weren't so afraid. And if we weren't so clueless. And if we weren't so...
...but God isn't afraid or ignorant or clueless. And God has been faithful in the past, and will be faithful in the future. And the hardest part to say is this: God is (somehow beyond our understanding) being faithful right now.
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