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Thirteen
Summary Theses for the Magnet Church Consultation Allentown,
Pennsylvania April 7,
2000 1.
In the early church the call for all who would follow Jesus was to discipleship,
not membership. Baptism was a radical act, for one tied oneself to a
not legally recognized religious cult. The church’s strength came not
only in enthusiasm for the message of the Christ but also in the
close-knit form of social organization. Meeting the house churches, the
early Christians helped each other learn and stick to the meaning of
following Jesus. Membership standards were high, and this allowed the
small community to have a disproportionate impact on the surrounding
culture, which eventually attracted many to membership in the church. 2.
The growth and organizational success of Christianity were spectacular.
Within the lifetime of the first apostles, the movement had spread
throughout the Roman Empire. By 325AD Christianity became not only legal
and powerful, but the official religion of the Roman Empire. This was too
good an opportunity to pass up, and yet in important respects the
church never recovered from this success, from the influx of new
Christians and the loss of effective models for formation in faith and
life. The baptism of whole tribes in Northern Europe in the following
centuries compounded an already existing problem. 3.
Already by the second Christian century some felt that the path of living
in the world was too much of a compromise. In the Egyptian desert and
throughout Christendom individuals and communities set themselves apart
for a higher discipline. These communities of monks and nuns, along with
the regular clergy, became the great strength of medieval Christianity.
Their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience represented the “higher
road” of Christian discipleship. Throughout long centuries wave after
wave of renewal (such as the Franciscans after 1209) witnessed against the
compromise and the worldliness of the church itself and the low commitment
of many Christians. 4.
The Reformation, especially under Luther, challenged this two tiered
Christianity. He taught that the real religious call came in baptism to
all Christians and that the highest vows were not those taken by members
of religious communities, but the virtues of faith, hope and love which
should be practiced by every Christian. It was possible to serve God in
any calling, and in fact the farmer might drive his manure wagon more to
the glory of God than the priest who stood at the altar saying private
masses. Each Christian had unique opportunities to be Christ to his or her
neighbor. In the lands of the Lutheran Reformation, and in much of
Northern Europe, the monasteries were closed (sometimes as in England
forcibly) and the call went forth to the whole people to take up this priesthood
of all believers. 5.
“Did the Reformation aim too high?” asks Stephen Ozment, Professor of
History at Harvard University. Already within Luther’s lifetime he was very
disappointed about the low energy for Christian discipleship among his
followers. People seemed to use the new freedom from church regulation as
an excuse to do as little as possible. Luther was so bitter at the
Wittenbergers by the end of his life that in the summer before his death
he refused to come home at all to this town where such teaching seemed to
have been wasted. Lutheranism itself quickly became two-tier, with the
clergy in the dominant role. The limited success of the high reformation
goal of a whole community of disciples confirmed many Catholics in the
rightness of the old ways. It also stood in sharp contrast to groups like
the Anabaptists and Mennonites who gathered close-knit communities with
high membership standards that were set over against the world. 6.
In the 500 years since the Reformation the most important renewal movement
was Pietism, which began with the work of J.P.Spener in 1675 and
soon spread throughout Protestant Europe. Pietism stressed feeling over
doctrine, the need for better teaching, for small groups where the faith
could be shared. John and Charles Wesley (influenced by the Moravian
pietists) began the revival in England that came to be known as Methodist.
Pietism had a great influence on the New World, through the strength of
the new Methodist denomination on the frontier, and also because the
Lutherans who came to America from both Germany and Scandinavia were
influenced by it and by lay-centered movements that followed from it. (The
religious music of J.S.Bach is an effective synthesis of the orthodox
tradition and new pietistic elements. One could see Bach either as a
church worker or as a lay person sufficiently grounded in his faith for it
to infuse his whole life work). 7.
Even to our time the kind of two-tiered Christianity which the
Reformation tried to root out continues in the Lutheran church. Symptoms
include the widespread tendency to see the clergy as the professional
Christians, to see them as responsible for the mission and witness of the
church, and to put most renewal hopes in better or different training for
them. This continues despite powerful lay renewal movements in several
churches, especially Lutheran, Episcopal / Anglican, and the Roman
Catholic Church, where the “rediscovery of the laity” was a central
theme of Vatican II (1962-5). 8.
Any vigorous future for our church depends of building an expanding
core of Christians in every congregation--clergy and laity working
together--who are deeply enough grounded in the faith that they can make
effective public witness in the world. But for this to happen, in a
society where Christianity is no longer the official religion in either a
formal or informal way, local congregations must develop a new seriousness
about teaching adults. It is hard to make an adult witness to the
faith if you only know the story in a childlike way. 9.
Though that witness is played out in many arenas, including family and
local community, the workplace is the major opportunity for the
sharing of Christian in our time. This witness is complicated by the
religious diversity of folks that we encounter there and by our aversion
to intense evangelical forms of sharing faith. Today most people work in
systems--whether business, government, education, health care, social
services, even the church--in which one feels constrained both to do as
ordered and not to speak up about matters like religious which are seen to
be private and therefore inappropriate. 10.
Though the strength of the Christian impact comes powerfully through
individuals, the church also has a corporate responsibility to witness
to grace and love and service in our world. It needs to find ways to
proclaim its message boldly and clearly to those who have only experienced
legalistic Christianity. It needs to engage in some direct service to the
poor, rather than completely passing these off to the State. It needs to
speak out (as Lutherans have been learning to do in the last fifty years),
but with greater shrewdness about where and when its voice is credible and
strategic. 11.
Discipleship today is a serious calling that requires renewed study and
commitment. One special need in the pluralistic setting where we live in
to develop a Christian bilingualism.
Such disciples can speak the deep, “in-house” form of the
language of faith among fellow believers, but also knows how to share that
faith with seekers, and to make moral arguments for common causes with
people of good will who do not share the Christian faith. 12.
To make all this possible new structures and programs will be needed at
the local level, especially support groups where people can come
together to practice sharing faith and to work out vocational dilemmas in
a supportive environment. Congregations that make the task of discerning
the mission and empowering witness the chief priority of the governing
board are most likely to be effective. 13.
Past renewal efforts have floundered on the ebb and flow of clericalism
and anti-clericalism. In our time an effective future depends on a new
degree of lay and clergy collaboration and a fresh assessment of
the allocation of tasks within the church. One could take inspiration from
the ways in which the success of the Reformation was due in large measure
to its teamwork. It depended not only the brilliance of Luther’s power
of communication, but also on Melanchthon’s careful theological work, on
Bugenhagen’s care of issues of polity and pastoral care, on Cranach’s
woodcuts and paintings, and on the work of Spalatin and Chancellor Gregor
Bruck with the Saxon Electors and other princes. May we forge such fresh
coalition in our time and be strengthened by the friendship and
differentiation of task toward a common goal.
The Saxon Electors: Frederick the Wise, John the
Steadfast and John Frederick the Magnanimous were among the key lay
persons whose support made the Reformation successful where other
challenges to tradition had failed. Lucas Cranach the Elder (another of
those key lay persons) from about 1535. President
Timothy F. Lull (not for circulation without permission of author: president@plts.edu)
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