Danielle Shroyer

This Monday morning’s Moltmann outtake comes from The Church in the Power of the Spirit, in the chapter of that same name:

It is necessary to reflect theologically on the mission of the community and every individual Christian, and on the congregation’s order and special ministry for before anyone actually speaks and acts in the church or in its name, the church has already spoken and acted through its very existence, its visible organization and its public functions. The form of its fellowship and public functions, and the shape of its order and its ministries, are not merely externals and inessentials; they are no less important than the word and the sacraments. The church’s institutions and its traditional congregational forms can become a stumbling block for many people, even if–and especially if–they do not thereby make the things of Christianity itself a stumbling block. People demand the ‘witness of existence’– and rightly so. Through its order, its ministries and its organizations the church either confesses or denies the thing that it has to represent. So it cannot leave its visible form to the power of the state or the requirements of its particular social order, if it wants to be recognizable as the church of Christ as as the people of the coming kingdom. It is of course true that every historical form the church takes also bears the stamp of its particular environment. But that is not a reason for accepting that stamp passively and for leaving it to external influences. As the church of Christ, the congregation with all its own powers has to realize the social, political and cultural potentialities of a particular period in a way that is in accordance with the cause it maintains; so that through its physical and public profile as well people will be confronted with the freedom of Christ and will be invited to the messianic kingdom.

- p.290

When as a seminary student I read the sentence I put in bold above, I felt bowled over by all its implications for the Church today.  I felt at the time, and I still do to a large degree, that the current forms and ministries of the Church more accurately confess particularly American markers- extreme individualism, a corporate definition of success, a monetized form of popularity, and a charity-cloaked form of selfishness.   I say this not to berate (or at least, not entirely) but to stand in front of the mirror that is the American church landscape and allow it to reflect honestly back.  Regardless of whether some of these assumptions or conclusions are false or oversimplifying, they have become part of our “image” and they are, therefore, our concern.  For our task, as Moltmann reminds us, is to reconcile all the potentialities of our particular period in a way that manages to live in accordance with the cause of the messianic kingdom.  If our image is reflecting otherwise, we have work to do.

As a pastor, that one sentence is enough to keep me up at night.  Through Journey’s structure and gatherings and events and small groups, we are either going to confess or deny the very thing we seek to represent.  And I’m certain there are plenty of places where we’re denying it, despite our deepest intentions to the contrary.  This is where our only recourse is to pray for boldness enough to face the mirror, to have a posture that allows you to acknowledge your own reflection, and to have the guts to change what needs changing.

One of the traits I love most about Moltmann’s work is that he has the unbelievable knack of turning a question on its head.  I tend to call these moments “WWF smackdown” moments, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere.  In reframing a question, Moltmann puts on his superhero cape and rescues us from the tangled mess of stuck theology and gently places us down in a clearing where everything once again makes sense. This morning’s WWF smackdown moment comes over the navel-gazing argument many theologians have had over how wonderfully supreme the Church is and how the Church will singlehandedly save the world. OK, so perhaps that’s exaggerating a bit…but some ecclesiology does tend to place the Church upon a pedestal that seems far too high in my opinion.  The pedestal becomes most obvious and most dangerous when the Church attempts to speak in a totalizing voice, as if only we are allowed to speak with finality about the universe.  In more benign forms, the Church (or more usually, the little “c” local church) lets the pedestal keep them from seeing their own brokenness, and that isn’t exactly following the cross, either.

Much of this debate begins at the question of the role of the Church in history.  Moltmann discusses in thef The Church in the Power of the Spirit his understanding of the Church’s place and role in history (both past and future) in light of the person of Jesus Christ.  Moltmann distinguishes from the onset that the church’s history is a Trinitarian history.  In being so, the church’s history is not abstract (Barth would, no doubt, concur here) but is grounded in the revelation of Christ, as well as the overarching work of God and the Spirit in and through the world.  The church participates in the ongoing movement of God, and therefore knowledge cannot be seen as fixed but as partaking in this divine movement.  (As I quoted last week, ours is a tradition in which it is impossible to rest.)  So here comes the WWF smackdown question.  Rather than trying to search history to find examples of how the Church has saved the world  (“Does the salvation of the world come through the church?”) Moltmann rather asks, “Does the church come through the salvation of the world?”

In my opinion, there is a “rightness” in asking how God’s work in the world actually beckons the church into its very existence.  We are BECKONED, you see, all of us, when we see the salvation of the world poking out from under all the rubble.  We are called.  But we cannot be so bold as to think we are the only ones who have received this special calling, or that we have received it in a higher form than anybody else.  (No totalizing ecclesiology, people.)

The church is to see itself as a vehicle for God’s mission for the world and as a proclaimer of God’s action within the world.  Moltmann writes, “If the church understands itself, with all its tasks and powers, in the Spirit and against the horizon of the Spirit’s history, then it also understands its particularity as one element in the power of the Spirit and has no need to maintain its special power and its special charges with absolute and self-destructive claims…We cannot therefore say what the church is in all circumstances and what it comprises in itself.  But we can tell where the church happens…The church is present wherever ‘the manifestation of the Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:7) takes place” (64-65).

I also really love the shift from “what” church is to “where church is, don’t you?  Isn’t that a MUCH better question?  A less navel-gazing, we-are-so-important-and-nobody-else-can-do-what-we-do question?  The Church comes where the salvation of the world is taking place, and that can be- and often is- in the most unexpected locations.  No need to make every place look the same.  (Isn’t this the primary argument of post-colonialism?) Trust that the Church has come, is coming, and will come where God is working out the salvation of the world.  No need to own it or control it or domesticate it.  Just point, joyfully join in, and say “Amen.”