Articles – Page 241 – Religion Online

Finding a Place for Emotions

Pastoral counselors’ bookshelves are filled with works that promise to translate Christianity into mental health terminology. Approaching theology and emotion from a psychological viewpoint, these writers focus on particular problems of the emotional life (e.g., inappropriate guilt, uncontrollable anger) and perceive Christianity to be the solution to such distress. They depict Christianity as only consoling, never challenging, and do not consider emotions an integral part of faith.

However, the tradition begun by John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards offers a perspective on emotions and theology that predates the psychological approach. These theologians’ explorations of religious affections have inspired new efforts to understand the place of emotions in Christianity. Such thinkers steer clear of the platitudes which are rampant in some of the popular literature on emotion while also avoiding the deep ruts that the existentialists left in this territory.

Wesley’s investigation of emotions and Christianity was an expression of his interest in perpetuating genuine Christian experience, a concern he shared with Edwards. He abridged and published five of Edwards’s works, showing that even the major disagreements between these men regarding humanity’s free will and predestination did not outweigh this common interest. The last of these five abridgments was the Treatise on Religious Affections, Edwards’s most widely read book. This work impressed Wesley with its twofold attempt to show that the "heart" and its affections play a central role in Christian life, and that this role is limited. Ironically, these two men are often caricatured as promoting a religion of wild emotional excess, when in fact they took pains to insist that a life of love and joy does not rule out reasoned reflection or active social involvement.

The United Methodist Church is continuing to examine Wesley’s work in this area. At a theological consultation held recently at Emory University to celebrate the church’s bicentennial, a group studying "Religious Affections and the Knowledge of God" explored the implications of the historical Methodist emphasis on the religion of the heart. The group’s chairman, Don E. Saliers, professor of theology at Emory, has for many years investigated the philosophical as well as theological nature of emotional experience; many of his views on the topic appear in his book The Soul in Paraphrase: Prayer and the Religious Affections (Seabury, 1980).

Saliers is quick to acknowledge his indebtedness to Edwards’s Treatise on Religious Affections. Both recognize the various cultural and theological biases against emotion. In some circles, people talk of emotion in a theological context in terms of a dichotomy between emotion and "reason" or "doctrine," or some other "objective" force. But both Saliers and Edwards maintain that such dichotomies do not withstand close scrutiny.

Relying on both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, Saliers asserts that emotions have a grammar or logic. This logic inextricably links emotions to judgments and beliefs. The specifically religious emotions (Edwards’s "affections") are considered conceptually dependent on beliefs (religious and otherwise) and the capacity to judge oneself in light of particular stories and descriptions of the world. For instance, the Christian’s sorrow in repentance is conceptually related to stories about God and human sin. Thus, Saliers doesn’t sharply distinguish between reason and emotion, but allows only the relative judgment that some emotions are more or less reasonable, depending on the history and circumstances of the individual embodying the emotion. Saliers is not interested in reasonable emotions in general, but wants to clarify the logic of the specifically Christian affections.

Saliers focuses on four basic Christian affections: gratitude, which is not obsequiousness but a willing and happy dependence upon another; holy fear and repentance, which is not terror, but respect and humility, and grief over one’s sins; joy, which exists even in the midst of suffering; and love, from which spring all the Christian affections. These emotions or affections are not merely feeling states but also function as dispositions to treat our neighbor as ourselves and God as our creator and redeemer.

These specific affections relate to specific objects. Therefore, Christian affections are not generic emotions; their distinction comes from the objects they take. Believers give thanks for and take joy in what God has done for us through Christ; they are called to love not in some vague and general way, but to love God and their neighbor. Both the objects it takes and the character it engenders determine whether or not an affection is truly Christian.

Relating this understanding to the nature of prayer, Saliers calls prayer the rule-keeping activity of the language of the heart. Prayer ensures that the religious affections’ grammar is followed and not violated. It keeps certain religious emotions in place in the believer’s life. The affections arise and develop through disciplined assimilation of the Christian story, and Christians remember and express that story primarily through the liturgical act of worship. The believing community both engenders and expresses its deepest emotions through prayer.

In a later work, Worship and Spirituality (Westminster, 1984), Saliers describes how worship develops the affections:

Think of the baptized life as one in which Paul can command certain deep emotions: ‘Rejoice in the lord always’; ‘Give thanks in all circumstances’; ‘Remember your baptism and be thankful.’ Here the focus is upon emotions that characterize a life received from God.... There are specific times of intense feeling and particular points of repentance, release from guilt, sudden and overwhelming assurance, convicting sense of God’s presence. At the same time, living out our baptism into Christ means the manifestation of long-term passions for God and neighbor. Our love for God may have its ups and downs, fits and starts. But God’s love for us is not dependent upon the ups and downs and fits and starts of human interiority. One of the ironies of pietist traditions may be not that we have stressed experience too much but that we have not stressed the deeper meaning of experience enough! [p. 69].

But Saliers’s concept of "religious affections" is not strictly a Methodist phenomenon. Paul Holmer, a Lutheran, has worked with Saliers and contributed much to this discussion. His book Making Christian Sense (Westminster, 1984) contains his most specific published treatment of the relations between emotion and Christianity. One of his earlier works, The Grammar of Faith (Harper & Row, 1978), had in its background a concern with emotion, but focused mainly on how the nature of theology has been misunderstood. In Making Christian Sense, Holmer proposes that "making sense in a Christian way can be done by fashioning distinctive Christian emotions, by considering new virtues, by finding a new power and shape for the will, and also by making a kind of sense in thought and belief with the new mind available to us in Christ Jesus" (pp. 20-21). Holmer’s understanding of the emotions gives them a certain integrity in themselves while closely relating them to thought and action. He sees the emotions not as mere appendages of the person, but as pictures of the human personality. "Emotions are not acts, not episodes, but ways that people learn to respond to a very complex and puzzling world" (p. 48).

Focusing on hope and despair, Holmer indicates how a Christian can and must make theological, not only psychological, judgments about emotion. Emotions are linked to belief and doctrine, Holmer states. Therefore, Christians are not entitled to despair, for "how can we despair if we remember that God made us and loves us?" (pp. 58-59). The Christian is not merely condemned to accept and learn to live with painful emotions like despair. If Christians understand and embody hope, then despair will no longer reign. Where despair does reign, the grammar or logic of Christian hope has been violated and needs to be corrected.

Understanding that emotions take objects and are dependent on beliefs allows us to see that we can to a large extent pattern and form our emotional lives, and that we can—and should—choose between those emotions which the world encourages and those to which the Holy Spirit leads us. Holmer and Saliers discuss the concepts of formation, development, nurture and training while describing how emotions are generated. Christian affections are not part of our inherent nature or received wholesale in a onetime conversion experience; we need to grow into them.

Robert Roberts, a Presbyterian theologian, also emphasizes the need for discipline in the Christian’s emotional life. Roberts begins his book Spirituality and Human Emotion (Eerdmans, 1982) by stating baldly:

Whatever else Christianity may be, it is a set of emotions. It is love of God and neighbor, grief about one’s own waywardness, joy in the merciful salvation of our God, gratitude, hope and peace. So if I don’t love God and my neighbor, abhor my sins, and rejoice in my redemption, if I am not grateful, hopeful and at peace with God and myself, then it follows that I am alienated from Christianity, though I was born and bred in the bosom of the Presbyterian church, am baptized and confirmed and willing in good conscience to affirm the articles of the Creed [pp. 1-2].

Consistent with Saliers and Holmer, Roberts defines emotion as a construal of one’s circumstances (p. 15). All three see emotions not just as feelings but as something linked logically to belief or appraisal. The "doctrines and stories of the Christian tradition" form the Christian emotions.

Unlike those who offer psychological studies of religion and feelings, these thinkers do not focus primarily on particular problems of the emotional life, but instead provide a broader theoretical understanding of emotion and a positive vision for the role of doctrine in the emotional life. In Christianity they find not just an ointment for our wounds, but also a call to enter into suffering, to pattern our emotions and motivations to favor the cross and shun glory, honor and comfort. The Christian life has emotional consolations, but they are not what the world might expect.

George Lindbeck’s recent analysis of religion and theology provides another way of appreciating the important and distinctive contributions of these theologians of the affections. In his book The Nature of Doctrine (Westminster, 1984), Lindbeck lists three ways of defining a religion. First of all, one can differentiate among religions by comparing their cognitive assertions and belief systems, and by defining absolute religious truth in propositional statements. One could also judge religions on the basis of how well they express a presumed single religious impulse of humanity, assuming that there is one universal experience which is expressed in a variety of ways. Lindbeck’s third method defines religion as a set of linguistic and behavioral practices. This option takes seriously the real differences between religious communities.

At first glance, one might tend to classify the religious-affections scholars into Lindbeck’s second category, in which he places the existentialists who speak about a universal "depth-dimension" uncovered in certain experiences of "authenticity." But the affection-centered views of Saliers et al. are best placed in Lindbeck’s third category, the cultural-linguistic. They see Christianity not as the welling up of an instinct, but as a disciplined form of life distinguished by a certain pattern of affections. Unless belief engenders a specific set of affections, and leads to certain kinds of behavior, these theologians would say, the gospel has been misunderstood. Opposing both rationalism (assent to correct beliefs) and pietism (Christianity as a matter of felt experience), these thinkers aim to show that theological integrity and a rich emotional life are connected.

This is not to say that the writers would defend excessive emotionalism in Christianity. They would commend our seeking control, comprehension and insight amid the chaos of modern life. But they also recognize that because Jesus commanded us to love, because Paul called joy a fruit of the Spirit, we therefore need to take seriously the role which these "affections" are to play in our lives. As Augustine made his "heart" a dramatis persona in his Confessions, so must we consider the soul’s motions, say these thinkers, if we are truly to embody the faith. In this way these theologians are taking up the challenge which Wesley and Edwards faced: to show the centrality of the affections in the Christian life while also making clear the linkages among emotion, belief and action.

James Fowler has said that Holmer’s and Saliers’s work on Christian virtues and affections, especially its refreshing freedom from dependence on modern psychology, is sorely needed today (Practical 7heology [Harper & Row, 1983], pp. 160-161). They believe that affectivity does not easily fit into the university’s artificial structures, but should not be left exclusively to psychologists and counselors. The theologian must see that the emotions have definite implications for the Christian life and that the Christian story has important implications for the affectional life. These authors demonstrate that a concern for emotional reality is neither merely a dispensable feature of hothouse revivalism nor just a regrettable artifact of the "me" generation. The emotional life is one of the essential bases of Christianity.

What the Mainline Denominations Are Doing in Evangelism

Evangelism in the U.S. today, as practiced by the denominations, is a very different thing from what it has been in the past -- and it is constantly changing.

In recent months I have served the Evangelism Working Group of the National Council of Churches as a part-time consultant, compiling a report on what the denominations are doing in evangelism today -- and what they are not doing. The working group has an extremely broad constituency, including not only member communions of the NCC but also the Christian Reformed Church, two of the Churches of God denominations, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the American Lutheran Church. The United Church of Canada has also participated.

A word of caution is in order: the materials used for this study -- a two-foot-high pile of manuals, textbooks, pamphlets and memos -- came from denominational secretaries of evangelism. Many denominations, do not have separate evangelism departments but expect those to whom evangelism is assigned to work closely with people in other departments of church life. That one denomination’s approach seems more holistic than another’s may not in fact reflect the actual degree of holism. It may simply mean that in that denomination evangelism is a separate function -- and therefore needs to develop a holism of its own -- or that the materials sent me represent a larger slice of that denomination’s life than what others would call “evangelism pure and simple.” Even when the constellation that different groups have in mind in speaking of “evangelism” differs, what they say about it is revelatory of how they conceive of the communication of the faith and the church’s relationship to the world.

I

The first question raised by a reading of these materials is: In what ways do they all agree? What is accepted by all may not be talked about as much as what people differ about, but it is often more significant. Is there a common Gestalt to the evangelism practiced by these denominations? I found seven common characteristics.

1. Proclaiming the Word. Again and again I encounter evidence of the conviction that this is a time to emphasize “naming the Name” and calling people to discipleship. There is a suggestion that the past decade or more was a period during which the proclamation of the word was insufficiently emphasized. Some denominations express the interrelation between word and deed by speaking of “word-and-deed,” “word-in-deed,” or “doing, being and telling.” This is not merely a trick, a way of convincing diehard social activists (“We’ve got to talk about the deed in order to bring them along”), but rather a way in which the gospel is conceived. The phrase “the whole gospel for the whole person” recurs time and again. Every denomination stresses the importance of social concern, of a gospel that affects life.

2. Emphasizing the local. Likewise the literature is constant in its affirmation of the centrality of the local congregation to evangelism. “The goal of evangelism,” says the Reformed Church in America’s Equipping the Evangelist, “is not decisions, but incorporation into the body of Christ.” Let’s place this feature within a historical context. A decade ago, the catchwords were “the church inside out” and “the church for others.” In the current literature I detect not a rejection of those earlier slogans but rather an affirmation that, unless there is a church, there cannot be a “church for others.” The vision of a church that serves has by no means been replaced by the image of a self-serving church. But there is a new appreciation of the importance of the gathered congregation. One cannot become a member of Christ’s body without relating to a particular congregation of believers. The church, as it engages in evangelism, apologizes for this fact or sidesteps it at the peril of its own institutional survival and at the peril of the new believer’s life in Christ.

3. Renewing the church. That the foregoing is not simply a matter of institutional survival becomes clear when we consider the third characteristic the writings on evangelism have in common: a recognition that the church itself needs to be renewed.

The literature of the denominations emphasizes our learning of the Story as we prepare to share it with others, our becoming the people of God as we go out to invite others to join God’s people. This understanding squares well with my own experience. Whenever I’ve led evangelism workshops in recent years, the church people who have studied the word they are to go out to spread have heard that word as if for the first time. My assumption that we were simply reviewing an old, old story has been challenged by the freshness with which it hits them. Over and over again, when people are asked to strategize for evangelism, their first thought is to turn to those in their own congregation -- active members in most cases. “Let’s have an evangelism retreat in which they can participate,” they say, or “Let’s have a series of meetings in our church for the members to learn the Story.”

There is a real danger that no evangelism ad extra will take place at all if this impulse is followed too strongly: the church will spend its whole time doing evangelism ad intra. Nonetheless; if we heed what the Spirit is telling the churches these days, we will recognize the importance of church renewal. Only renewed communities can be agents of renewal.

II

4. Methods. Several characteristics that come under the heading of “methodology” seem to be shared by all the churches, and they show that the emphasis on dialogue and interpersonal relations during the past decade has had a profound effect.

The first is the overwhelmingly negative connotation attached to the word “manipulation.” To manipulate, all seem to agree, is dehumanizing and demonic. Evangelism must not become a form of religious manipulation. The Church of the Brethren lays down this principle:

Let our evangelism respect the integrity of individuals. No matter how reasonable the claims of the gospel may seem, many persons will exercise their God-given right to say No. There is no place in the gospel for manipulating the response of people, for forcing a decision or for requiring a commitment that does not honestly represent a free response to God’s invitation to life. God does not twist our arm. He respects our need to be ourselves even as he offers to help us become more than we are. . . .

Second, there is an affirmation of the importance of relating to those we wish to evangelize instead of merely preaching at them. Therefore, the denominations tend to “sit loose” with packaged programs. They are open in most cases to a variety of styles, all of them to be related to the actual people to whom the evangelizers go.

The Reformed Church in America warns those using its evangelism training manual against the temptation to think of the program as a mechanical formula to be followed. Our Western penchant for technology makes us want to try to program the Spirit, say the writers, but the Spirit works rather in freedom. To use a manual slavishly makes it become “a burden on our backs holding us down rather than wings helping us fly.”

“Gimmickry” is another word used pejoratively throughout the literature. There is a general suspicion of campaign and crusade evangelism. “Relational evangelism” is rather what people look for -- evangelism that leads us to become involved with the people to whom we go. An important consequence of this attitude is that we ourselves are vulnerable. D. T. Niles’s dictum that “evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to find food” is quoted in the documents almost as often as the Great Commission itself! “Do not hesitate to speak about your weaknesses, doubts, and fears,” Arman Ulbrich counsels his Missouri Synod readers. “The more ready you are to reveal yourself to them, the more likely they will be to confide in you.”

What it all adds up to is authenticity. “You need to say what’s true for you,” the Brethren counsel prospective visitors in evangelism, “and you need to use words that are yours.” This is clearly a new phase in the, history of American evangelism. No longer is evangelism a top/bottom type of thing, whereby we “preach down” to others from a position of superiority and invulnerability. The attitude that “I’ve got the answers and your task is to get them from me” -- which characterized the social action movement at its worst as much as it characterized evangelism -- has been replaced by a new relational approach to people from within a sense of common humanity.

Many persons have been critical of the “I’m OK/ You’re OK” message of transactional analysis. But if that word results in a less imperialistic approach to evangelism -- if all the talk about dialogue and relationship-building, the use of group process and small-group support, have led us in the direction of a vulnerable, open style of evangelistic communication -- then the effort has, not been just a fad. The church has been changed.

III

5. Telling the Story. It was a surprise to me to discover how far the churches have moved in common toward a new paradigm for expressing what we do in sharing the gospel with others: storytelling. I suspect that its usage stems for the most part from the work of Gabriel Fackre, whose books on evangelism have circulated far and wide in this decade. The United Church of Christ evangelism training manual, which he helped design, distinguishes between what we have to do to “get the story straight” and to “get the story out.” The Story is defined as “the drama of God’s deeds with its central act in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.” Louis Almen, writing for the Lutherans, gives a good description of how verbal witness is conceived of:

Evangelical outreach centers around the telling of the story. There are actually three Stories. The central story is the story of Jesus, the Christ. This is “his story”! But “my story” is also important, particularly as it relates to his story. The interrelationship of his story and my story provides the substance of my personal witness. How his story relates to the story of the person to whom we are witnessing (your story”) is crucial. Effective witnessing is my telling Jesus’ story in a way which is relevant to the listener.

The storytelling model is exactly the right one to help the church along with a relational, non-manipulative methodology. Storytelling is a mode of communication that yields nothing to preaching in its faithfulness to Scripture, but avoids the Bible-pounding dogmatism that characterizes many evangelistic sermons.

For too long laypersons in our churches have felt that their stories were second-rate and inferior, that they could engage in evangelism only if they learned some “authoritative” version of the gospel and could communicate it, step by step. In lay-witness missions earlier in this decade that notion was challenged. But the lay witnesses may have erred on the side of emphasizing the personal, the existential, too much; at some of those events the attitude was that “I’ll communicate my high to you in the hope that you’ll get a Jesus high, too.” Now storytelling has come along as a way of integrating the Story with our stories as we relate to people who have their own stories. It seems made to order.

A word of warning, however. Whereas Fackre has enough sense of history to make clear that it is never just a matter of the sum of our individual stories constituting “our story” -- but the story of a people in time as God works his purpose out historically -- there is the danger that others will not be as historical-minded. A church which has been over-existentialized for a quarter of a century now, which dotes on “sharing” and “personal growth,” often to the exclusion of any meaningful sense of the corporate, will need to be reminded that such a dimension exists, and that if we do not tell the story of the Confessing Church and the Uganda martyrs, of Selma and Vietnam, we are telling a truncated version.

6. Intentional planning. A further common feature of most of the evangelism programs is their use of the planning process in organizing the church to communicate the faith. In some denominations there is a high degree of sophistication, with desired outcomes carefully prioritized and strategies designed to achieve -- insofar as possible in as Spirit- dependent an activity as evangelism -- measurable goals and objectives. There is a recognition that a conscientious evangelism program depends on making what have been rather inchoate dreams more explicit and more a matter of conscious planning in which many people participate. The wide use of the planning process in other aspects of the church’s life over the past decade has made people suspicious of revival and crusade strategies which spring full-blown from the pastor’s head. The pastor is now more a part of a parish team -- a leader still, but at least as much a group facilitator as a charismatic operator.

7. Ecumenism. It was with considerable joy and surprise that I discovered how negative the practice of “sheep-stealing” has come to appear in the minds of the denominations. One detects in the literature a sense that those who ought to be reached are not members of another denomination but rather those outside of any denomination. This “hands-off ecumenism” seems to extend even to Roman Catholics (for perhaps the first time in American church history). Those who are already related to Christ through another body are considered “off-limits” for all of these denominations. There are enough unreached people and inactive members of our own churches that we do not need to take someone else’s sheep.

There is still another positive sign of ecumenism: the high degree of ecumenical borrowing evidenced in the manuals. There has been much good material put out by the churches in the past decade, and denominations seem no longer to feel that they must reinvent the wheel in order to provide their own original materials on every aspect of evangelism. In some cases this means that a church leaves a particular aspect of evangelism untreated and recommends to its leaders a good resource in that field available from another denomination. In other cases it incorporates approaches from other bodies into its own materials.

Perhaps such features are the necessary step on the way toward greater ecumenical cooperation and joint action. It may take several more years of getting to know one another better before we can engender the trust necessary for joint strategic planning and action to reach the unreached.

IV

In addition to those characteristics that mark all, or almost all, members of the working group, there were a great number of things which two or more of the bodies held in common.

1. Defining the term. Regarding the relationship of evangelism to other aspects of the church’s ministry, there were two discernible groups. One -- consisting of the Lutheran Church in America, Episcopalians, Missouri Synod Lutherans and, in some ways, Reformed Church in America -- wants to define evangelism clearly as a separate category of the church’s ministry. The term is not, they insist, a catch-all for everything the church does. Another group, which includes United Methodists and Southern Baptists (not yet part of our working group), defines evangelism more broadly.

Wayne Schwab, evangelism ‘and renewal officer of the Episcopal Church, writes:

Everything the church does is not evangelism. Evangelism is an identifiable, unique activity. It centers, in the presentation of Jesus Christ (encounter with him) and the response of faith (commitment to him and responsible membership in his Church). Liturgy, education, social ministry may have evangelistic elements but they are not evangelism. The Episcopal Church tends to mistake ministry to persons in need and work for social justice as evangelism. These must be done but they are not evangelism. We seem to have lost confidence in the power of the message to stand on its own. While it must always be lovingly presented, the Gospel does always go beyond whatever works of love and justice we do in its name.

Some denominations distinguish between evangelism and witness. They include social action in the latter category. The LCA, in an attractive little pamphlet, “Evangelical Outreach and Social Service,” puts it this way:

Evangelical Outreach is one way of witnessing to the Gospel. Social ministry or social action is another way. One cannot happen without the other. Unless social ministry is done within the context of a clear proclamation of the evangel (gospel), it lacks the dimension that makes it ministry. By the same token, unless Evangelical Outreach is done within the context of a clear understanding of its implications for serving others in the name of Christ, it lacks the dimension that makes it evangelical. So they are both part of a whole ministry and must interact and support each other at every step of the way.

A good test of this interrelation, the writers believe, is what people see when they look at the congregation: “Do they see things going on that are predominantly designed to maintain the institution? Or do they see activities that clearly demonstrate what it means to be the salt, light and leaven in society?”

The other group would probably agree with what the Southern Baptists write:

One can hardly separate “ministry” from “evangelistic ministry.” All Christian ministry is evangelistic ministry, or it is not Christian. In the life and ministry of Jesus, there was no separation of doing good and doing God’s will. There was no division between life and life with God. The early church “went about doing good” in the name of Jesus Christ. . . . Laypersons who are Christians must go to the marketplace where men are and minister in Christ’s name.

Because of their different conception of evangelism, the Southern Baptists can describe it as the task of “every child of God.” The Reformed Church in America, with a narrower definition, expects what the church-growth school teaches, that only 10 per cent of any congregation is likely to be gifted in the ministry of evangelism.

2. Focus on church growth. The big news of the past triennium is that the church-growth approach, originating in Fuller Seminary, has been sweeping the mainline denominations. Some, responding to grass-roots pressure to reverse membership declines, have appointed new staff executives who are inclined toward a membership-growth approach. In other cases the existing evangelism staff has been attracted to church-growth theory and practice; some staffers have gone to workshops at Pasadena or have otherwise gotten hold of the insights of the movement’s theoreticians and incorporated them into their programs.

In still other cases certain catchwords and theories of the church-growth people appear in a denomination’s literature, but they are either so poorly integrated into the total approach or so changed from what movement theorists Win Arn and Donald McGavran write about that one wonders why the terminology is even used.

In any case, the denominations have a choice when it comes to church growth. The recent technologizing of it by McGavran and Arn has stamped church growth with a marketing mentality that many who are concerned for increasing the number of servants for the Kingdom find distasteful. In addition, the theology of the church-growth school -- and in particular its ecclesiology -- is very different from that of some of the denominations that employ it. There is no need for any historic denomination to become neo-revivalistic in order to adopt approaches and insights the church-growth people put out. As William G. Weinhauer, the Episcopal bishop of Western North Carolina, pointed out after attending a church-growth course:

Let us use the tools and strategies helpfully shared with us by the Institute for American Church Growth, but let us contextualize them in biblical and Anglican forms. . . . Further work needs to be done in relating “conversion” to our doctrine of sacramental initiation in baptism. The difference in theology is reflected in Dr. McGavran’s distinction between “brought to Christ” and “brought to the Church.” An Anglican would have to expand this and qualify these phrases greatly.

The United Church of Christ and the Reformed Church in America have sought a more holistic approach to growth. The American Baptists agree that “we should be a growing fellowship,” but they disagree that this in itself is a worthy end. “We need to be a faithful and expanding witness for Jesus Christ.” When I asked the director of the American Baptists’ Evangelizing Community program why a denomination that has involved itself so deeply in the planning process has projected no measurable goals for numerical growth, he said: “That’s an insight we got from the General Conference Baptists: all we can in faithfulness measure is the number of attempts we will make to confront people with the gospel -- the Spirit gives the increase.”

V

3. Well-developed training schemes. A number of communions have done for evangelism what for too long has been done only for Christian education and stewardship: provided extensive training processes, with all the hallmarks of sound pedagogy, insight into personal and social psychology, and good biblical hermeneutics. I am particularly impressed with the United Church of Canada’s training guide, Telling My Story, Sharing My Faith, and the Reformed Church’s Good News People: Growing, Nurturing, Proclaiming.

4. The pastor’s role. Here again there are two prevalent points of view. Some denominations continue to see the pastor as the key evangelist, as the sparkplug of all recruitment of new members, as the one eminently qualified by training to direct a program of evangelism. Others tend to emphasize the centrality of the congregation as the evangelizer, with the pastor in a facilitating role. Yet even these latter groups, no matter how much they may scorn what they call the “Big Daddy” or “Herr Pastor” model, recognize that the pastor is a key person to be reckoned with, one whose sense of turf is not to be discounted, and whose ego, if not provided alternative gratification, can get in the way.:

5. Awareness of developmental psychology. A number of denominations have gotten away from the “oblong blur” view of society, in which children are seen as little adults, to a more sophisticated view of how persons develop. The writings of Erikson, Maslow and others have not gone unheeded; indeed, they are quoted. Just what can we expect in the way of a “decision for Christ” from children? teen-agers? young adults? These are questions several of the denominations are asking. A book sent out by the Presbyterian Church, U.S. -- John Hendrick’s Opening the Doors of Faith (John Knox, 1977) -- is probably the best example of the application of developmental psychology to evangelism.

6. The medium and the message. One would, of course, expect that it would be from Marshall McLuhan’s Canada that the strongest affirmation of the importance of the process of evangelism should come. The process, according to a United Church of Canada publication, is not only a means to the communication of content, but part of the content. “You may get very impatient with the process we are using in this manual,” those training for evangelism are told. “However, the point of going the long way around is to help you form your own answers from your own experience. You are going on a journey of true personal and community insight into the nature of faith -- and that is never a quick, easy or neat process.” Those trained in such a way will, it can be expected, conduct themselves as evangelists in similar ways, and the process by which they evangelize will be part of the message they convey.

7. Action/reflection modes of learning/doing. It would be a matter of some surprise if action /reflection models had permeated the field of evangelism as thoroughly as the planning process and relational approaches have. Evangelism has, sociologically speaking, always been on the right wing of mainline denominations; action/reflection has been on the sociological or political left, associated most recently with liberation theology.

“People learn,” the UC Canada manual nonetheless postulates with regard to evangelism, “by reflecting on experience. It is often said ‘Experience is the best teacher.’” And so that denomination’s manual is designed to help those being trained to reflect on what is happening to them and what they are doing.

8. The importance of listening. Evangelism, has often been regarded as a matter of our communicating with or to others. It is a new age in which those training others in evangelism feel called to stress the importance of listening. The American Baptists and the United Church of Canada have reprinted in their materials a piece on listening in which Masumi Toyotome says:

It would be a great thing if Christianity became a listening religion more than a talking religion, if each Christian became a practiced listener rather than an habitual talker. If the church became known as one place where anyone with a burden on his or her heart would be sure to find listening, understanding, and acceptance, that would be quite a reversal or reformation. God gave each of us two ears and only one mouth. In his encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus spoke 175 words and the woman 122. For us, who have far less to say than Jesus, the ratio of listening to talking should be far more than half and half.

VI

9. An end to the Christopher complex. St. Christopher was never, the church now knows, a real saint, but a legendary character. He was supposed to have borne Christ across the waters of a raging stream; hence his name. Christopher lives on in the countless missionaries and evangelists who imagine they also bear Christ, transporting him to places where he has never been. Evangelism literature of the churches testifies to the continuance of the Christopher complex in current evangelistic efforts. It also bears strong witness to a rejection of that idea. In Lifestory Conversations, a helpful little booklet on visitation evangelism from the United Presbyterians’ Good News Evangelism series, Roy Fairchild writes:

Let us not arrogantly conceive of ourselves as “bringing Christ” to those we visit. God in Christ has been there, working in that life, long before we came on the scene! Our task is to recognize with the “two or three” where God has been active in our lives and what he seeks to do there, within our journey. It is a humbling experience to be present when a person recognizes that God is with him or her; when God restores a soul!

10. The cost and the joy of discipleship. The church-growth school has elevated to a “scientific principle” the distinction between inviting people to accept Christ and nurturing their life in Christ; the first part of the process is called “discipling”; the second, “perfecting.” We are not responsible, they say, to communicate to our hearers everything the Christian life entails -- that will come later. Now we ‘crnly have to sketch its general outlines, dwelling on the meaning of ~ personal relationship with God in Christ. According to the basic church-growth approach, new believers can come to Christ without knowing that they are called to resist racism, economic injustice, and the principalities and powers of this age.

The Presbyterian Church, U.S., is a good example of those denominations that refuse to separate Kingdom issues from evangelism. It rejects what it calls a “truncated gospel” that does not deal seriously with the gospel’s demands: “When we invite folks to accept the promises and blessings of the gospel, without also facing up to the cost and demands of the gospel, we not only do them a disservice. We also do what Jesus explicitly instructed us not to do!” We cannot, say the Southern Presbyterians, disguise the fact that the radically different nature of the Kingdom of God sets it over against the kingdoms of this world.

11. Ethnic churches; It is old hat to speak of the “suburban captivity of the churches,” but probably not out of date. To find evidence that the evangelism offices of the denominations are trying to undo that captivity and deal seriously with the cities and the ethnic minority populations that live in them is not easy. This emphasis appears in the literature only rarely. It is seen most strikingly in the Southern Baptist materials. Among the members of our working group, it seemed that the UCC and the RCA have developed the most conscious plans for the establishment of non-European-type churches.’

12. Early warning systems. A number of denominations have taken seriously findings indicating that the ranks of inactive and lapsed church members are filled with persons who gave signals no one heeded that they were disenchanted with the church. Had the church recognized these signals, it could have done something to keep the person active. Evangelism departments are alerting churches to this phenomenon and giving them ways to deal with it.

13. Training of evangelism associates. It’s a long way from the denominational headquarters to St. George’s by the Grange; even when a denomination has middle judicatory staff in evangelism, it is hard for a limited national staff to respond to all the calls on its time in the synods and conferences. A number of denominations have therefore sought ways to train associates in evangelism. Generally these are local people already fully employed as pastors or in the secular world who can arrange ‘to free up’ some time to respond to calls from churches in their home areas to do evangelism training or carry out preaching missions. In some cases they function on a voluntary basis; in others a modest stipend is provided. It’s an eminently practical approach, avoiding the excesses of professionalism in evangelism while still recognizing that many congregations will need outside resource persons to help them.

VII

Finally the literature reveals interesting thrusts and unique features which only one denomination offers.

1. Ministry of the laity. The American Baptists continue to stress the importance of the ministry of the people of God in the secular world, seeking to penetrate and transform the structures of society with the leaven of the Kingdom. The materials deal with support systems for such ministry in an extremely helpful way, with the ABC’s usual expert approach to group process.

2. Evangelism and the Kingdom of God. Only the Reformed Church and the Presbyterian Church, U.S., seem to speak of the Kingdom, and it is only in the PCUS literature that I find the Kingdom spoken of consistently as a historical, transpersonal reality, breaking into human history. “It is not enough to say that. ‘God loves you and has a wonderful plan for jour life,’” they comment. “The New Testament teaching is much more than that. It is that God has a plan in Jesus Christ . . . to make all things new.”

3. America’s role in the world. The American Baptists seem to be the only ones to have related evangelism to global economics and environmental concerns. Under the code word “Eco-justice,” the Baptists seek to relate evangelism to the relations of the have and have-not nations, and to America’s role in the world today. “If we are truly to be an evangelizing community,” they say, “we must have a global perspective and a concern for the welfare of all humanity.” The United Methodists, through their New World Mission program, have sought to stress global interdependence by bringing Christians “from abroad to evangelize” and witness in the U.S. World interdependence does not, however, seem to be a very popular emphasis these days.

4. Youth. Almost as rarely considered in the literature is the evangelization of youth. A provocative pamphlet from the Lutheran Church in America (“Youth and Evangelical Outreach”) shows an understanding of the current mentality among youth that bodes well for designing strategies for reaching them. Youth are regarded not only as those to be reached, however, but as part of Christ’s body who are there to do the reaching of other young people.

5. Modern versions of the story. Fifteen or 20 years ago it wouldn’t have seemed unique to have creative retellings of the Christian story in rather existential, secular and modernized ways. Only the Christian Church (Disciple’s), however, has gone in for this approach as a major part of its evangelism training. Its “Adventures in Evangelism” weekend manual suggests that creative retelling of the story is something we ought not to get too far-away from.

6. The small church. The United Presbyterians have put together a booklet on evangelism in the small congregation -- The Vital Signs, by Wesley Baker. I know from my travels as a resource person that small churches in other denominations as well feel that most membership recruitment and evangelism programs are not designed for them. Baker has studied ten UPC congregations of differing location, economic class, ethnic origin and style of ministry -- congregations which show real vitality -- and his book describes the sources of that vitality.

7. Alternative congregations. The United Church of Christ has developed a new. approach in church extension -- “liberation churches” for persons who, largely, have been turned off by existing congregations. These are churches gathered around issues of common concern; the project is reminiscent of the house-church emphasis, but it is done from a liberationist perspective.

8. The disabled. Only when I saw reference to it in the United Methodist literature did I recognize that I had seen little or no mention of ministry to shut-ins, handicapped persons and the ill. The Methodists Visitation Evangelism: A Relational Ministry offers a sensitive, helpful approach to the shut-ins (and shut-outs!) of society, one which does not shy away from the difficult question of healing.

VIII

Part of my task was to tell the working group what none of the denominations were doing. I discovered two areas that no one seems to be taking seriously. The first is the relationship of the family to evangelism. The Brethren speak of the family but don’t raise the immense problems involved here: How do we relate evangelism to the changing family structures of America? Are there ways in which families can evangelize?

It would seem that part of the problem will be that families with young and teenage children are among those most absent from our churches today. While singles accuse the church of being too family oriented, statistics show that people in the 15-45 bracket are those we’re least likely to find in church, and a sizable proportion of them are persons with children. The church has spent a long time dividing its membership up into age and sex groups. Perhaps it is time to bring the family back together. The Families for Justice movement among radical evangelicals would seem to be one model that is attractive to many. With all the property churches have in camps and conference centers, it shouldn’t be difficult to find places to bring families together for evangelism, evangelism training and consciousness-raising.

The other area in which I saw nothing being done and detected no questions being raised was that of communication. The Archbishops’ Commission on evangelism in the Church of England has been asking these questions:

1. With whom do we communicate when we communicate in religious language? By using such language do we restrict the range of our communication unduly and determine that we will not reach many of the unreached?

2. How many people can we communicate with when we rely on the print media for communication? Is there a whole universe of people whom we never can hope to reach when we rely on print? Is our evangelism hopelessly biased toward the functionally literate?

Perhaps someone in the mainline churches is doing the kind of research that could give us answers to these questions; but if so, the evangelism departments of the churches seem not to be aware of it, or else are not willing to take the leap into the unknown which an acceptance of their probable answers would entail.

Growing Together in Spirituality: Pastor and Parish Have a Check-Up

Parish clergy today are caught in a dilemma with regard to their role as pastors. Some voices are urging us to forsake entirely the use and connotation of the nouns "pastor" and "flock," arguing that such conceptions have no place in a world come of age. Yet the understanding of the clergy as guides in matters of faith and morality persists. Also, attempts over the past generation to dispense with the pastoral model in favor of a therapeutic one—in which the minister is one professional alongside others—have been unsatisfying.

All mainline clergy could cite examples of persons who have left their churches—where clear-cut "answers" rarely are given—for fundamentalist churches where authoritarian pastors rule. We in the mainstream tend not to fault ourselves for what has happened, rather, citing Erich Fromm or other notable critics, we attribute the departure of these church members to their inability to accept freedom. We blame them rather than ourselves, saying that perhaps they are attracted to authoritarian personalities. We remain content with the image of "laid-back" pastoring, contending that it is appropriate to the modern world.

It may be, however, that we need to re-examine our own pastoring. To my mind, the modern, "nonauthoritarian," "take-us-or-leave-us" style of pastoring owes more to the liberal world view—with its concept of the autonomous individual—than it does to any theological perspective. Christians believe—or should believe—in theonomy, not autonomy.

As we continue, in many areas, to move beyond the modern into a post-modern era, we need to re-examine our images of clergy and congregation. We need to challenge the individualism of the modern world view.

Last summer I initiated a program of spiritual direction in my congregation—one that I believe strengthened the congregation and broadened and deepened my ministry. Acting on a clear need, I did something hitherto uncharacteristic for me: I conceived of a program, announced it and conducted it. Although I solicited responses from our consistory and Ministry of Care and Fellowship—and would reluctantly have accepted a veto—I did not seek the congregation’s approval. I carried out the program because I sensed that the congregation needed it—and it would have taken a lot to deter me.

Let me explain. Though I’m identified by many in my congregation as a "social-action minister," surely I have been called to a pastoral as well as a prophetic ministry. I endeavor to preach wholistically and to develop a worship life, educational program, and initiatives for action that respond to the whole gamut of human existence. My parishioners expect to see my name at the end of letters to the editor on U.S. foreign policy and local social needs, but they also expect me to pop in to visit them, whether they are sick or well. I’m known to encourage individual spiritual reading and prayer during Advent and Lent, and I see to it that the congregation offers opportunities for group disciplines as well.

For some time now I’ve been dismayed by how few takers there have been for these activities. The small group that regularly participates in Bible-reading and prayer comes forward; they’re always ready for further suggestions as to what they might do. But only a relative handful ever adds to their number. Over the course of a year, probably less than one-fourth of the congregation avail themselves of these opportunities—and that is discouraging indeed.

Last year, overdue for a physical exam, I decided to go to a highly recommended young physician who had just opened a practice in my neighborhood. At his office his secretary handed me one of those questionnaires that medical doctors require patients to fill out nowadays. I dutifully listed my allergies and detailed my family health history. But this questionnaire didn’t stop there. The doctor, I was gratified to see, wanted to know whether I exercise regularly (I was proud to answer that I’m a runner). But then he asked, "Do you take an annual vacation?" and "Do you take a day off every week?" This was certainly a unique doctor! He went on to ask about time spent with spouse and/or family. The final question was: "Do you spend daily or weekly time in prayer or meditation?" That one blew my mind.

I got to thinking: If a medical doctor is aware that sabbath rest, prayer and meditation are good for patients’ health, and if he doesn’t hesitate to ask them whether they are following such practices, why am I, a pastor—professionally involved in what used to be called "the cure of souls"—so reluctant to ask such questions?

I then reflected further: If doctors expect people to come for regular physical examinations, why do we clergy not expect our parishioners to come to us for regular spiritual checkups?

I answered myself quickly: It goes against a liberal bias to have firm expectations of what people will or will not do concerning matters our society regards as "private" or "between the individual and his or her God." Heavens! We even hesitate to pray during hospital visits—how much more so when making home visits (unless, or perhaps even when, a crisis occurs).

This perverse attitude seemed to me a sign of our almost total accommodation—or capitulation—to the spirit of our times. but I could not by fiat undo a generation’s worth of cultural conditioning. What, then, was I to do? I decided that since I had been called by this congregation to "exercise pastoral leadership," I had a right—like the medical doctor in his field—to make it known that I would like to assist every member in having an "annual spiritual checkup."

Now several things were clear to me: (a) some people—the usual ones—would he eager to participate: (b) they were the ones who least needed a check-up." I was trying to move the others off the dime; (c) I could not demand such a session with anyone (any more than could the medical doctor); (d) I had too much respect for people’s right to privacy, for their freedom of conscience, and for their baptismal ordination to design a check-up in which I would be checking up on them.

What I wanted to communicate to the congregation, I concluded, was that, as a pastor, I believed it was spiritually healthy to reflect with a spiritual director of some sort on at least an annual basis. The checkup was to be basically a self-examination, though I would be available as a spiritual friend and—if anyone requested it—as a counselor.

The week’s epistle lection happened to be Colossians 1:9-14, Paul’s prayer for the Christians at Colossae. I was impressed by the breadth of Paul’s concern for their well-being; he wanted God to help them grow in many ways to be able to live their faith, to bear fruit in good deeds, and ultimately to come to salvation.

A great prayer! I decided to base my questionnaire on it. Preaching a sermon on "Paul’s Sense of Christian Wellness," I listed what Paul saw as "signs of health"—e.g., "being filled with the full knowledge of God’s will in all wisdom," "walking worthy of the Lord" "bearing fruit in active goodness of every kind," and "growing in the knowledge of the Lord."

These, I explained, are not things Christians ought to do—a list of obligations—but a composite of what we as Christians under the Spirit’s influence can be and do. Rather than lay a trip on the congregation, I sought to open their eyes to a new vision of what in Christ we could become.

I devised a 15-question inventory for people to complete—one based on a somewhat literal but sometimes reinterpreted or expanded version of Paul’s words. After a brief sermon I handed out the inventory, asking people to take five minutes to begin to reflect on it. Then I announced that I would like, over the summer, to go through the questionnaire with every member. In the next weeks I would try to schedule half-hour appointments with them.

As I had expected, few people volunteered. Generally it was I who took the initiative in setting a date. Only one person refused outright, though some people kept putting me off or, when I had scheduled a date, would call to cancel because "something has come up." If this happened twice. I didn’t press the matter.

What most surprised people was that, with very few exceptions, I refused to take their completed inventory. "I don’t have to check it"’ I joked. "This isn’t a high school exam! No one needs to grade it. Its purpose is to help you think of areas you need to talk about. On the last question, which numbers did you list on which you need some discussion or guidance?"

So many people failed to fill out that last question that it was obvious they didn’t trust what I’d said; clearly, I would need to look at what they had written and decide at what points counseling was needed. So I started to number that question, too, and I deferred speaking with people until they had completed it.

In only one instance did a parishioner say, "There’s really nothing here on which I have any questions or seek any guidance." "Fine!" I responded. "Let’s have a prayer and then I’ll go."

The majority of the interviews took more than half an hour, and by and large the participants really became enthused. I was excited and encouraged.

What were the interviews’ main findings? The questions that people most wanted to talk about were those concerning growth as a Christian, life goals, the mix of personal and corporate spiritual practices, how to understand God’s will in today’s world, how to make use of the Bible, and what it means to bear fruit for the Lord.

The respondents discovered; first of all, that they haven’t grown in the faith in a long time. That was predictable, since I had sought out people who seemed to be doing little more than going through the motions, who had settled down to a routine of occasional worship attendance, no religious reading or Bible study, only cursory prayer, and no discussion with other Christians.

Although I wasn’t surprised that they said they hadn’t grown, I was pleased that, when confronted with a range of options, they chose to rate themselves at the bottom of the growth scale and to ask to talk about that. To make such decisions might be the first step on the way to change. Long years of habit won’t be altered by one brief self-evaluation, but I do expect to see a number of the interviewees move in the direction of growth—if not this year, then next.

Quite a few of the respondents were actually surprised by the suggestion that one could or should have goals for one’s Christian life. "I recognize I have absolutely no goals," said a high-school teacher nearing retirement. "I’ve grown fat and lazy." We talked about how goal setting might help him recover intentionality in his life as he prepares for retirement, which he doesn’t want to be a "downer."

But the problem isn’t only the future. I’m burnt out," the teacher admitted. "I’m no longer as excited by the chance of influencing students as I used to be. And unfortunately I’ve grown to accept that."

A number of people acknowledged having an inadequate level of shared devotional practices with others. That was also a predictable response; after all, why does the pastor ask to talk with you if not to get you to take your prayer life and Bible-reading more seriously? Looking back, I think I gave in to a stereotype at this point. Though the statement, "I believe I have a good mix of personal devotional practices, and prayer and Bible study shared with others," might loosely reflect Colossians 1:9 and 3:16, Paul—or whoever wrote Colossians—would never have put it that way.

What were the results of the discussions about these matters? So far none of the interviewees has joined our prayer group or Sunday school. I still hope that a couple of them will take the dramatic step of placing themselves in a face-to-face relationship with other Christians for study or prayer. On the other hand, our well-supplied book and Bible table was rapidly depleted over the ensuing weeks. I’d like to think that more personal, and perhaps family, Bible study is going on now.

Some people blamed their lack of growth on their relationship to the church. Either they had changed or the church had, and they no longer found it to be meeting their needs. Some regarded it as an actual obstacle to faith. We explored the question of whether that feeling was likely to change or whether, in order to regain their devotion, they ought to look for another church.

A small but significant number of people flagged for discussion the question asking whether they agree with the statement, "I’m basically living at peace and in love with others at this point in my life." The interviews gave them a chance to grapple with this concern and see it as part of their Christian lives. We spoke about the problems they had experienced, the rebuffed attempts to bring about reconciliation, their unwillingness to forgive, or the way in which they and another party had drifted into a state of irreconciliation and didn’t know what to do about it.

We spoke of the help that prayer or journal-keeping could offer. In one instance I recommended that a person see a counselor. In another I suggested that, since it seemed likely that little could be done to bring about reconciliation—the other party had left the church—and since the church remained a source of pain because it had failed to minister when the crisis erupted, the person might consider making a fresh start in her Christian life by seeking out a congregation of another denomination.

Perhaps the most tangible result of these several conversations came when one of the participants approached me at church the following Sunday and exclaimed, "As soon as I left you, I called and we made up. She’s invited me over for coffee tomorrow!"

Up till now I’ve spoken of the benefits of the check-ups to the members of the congregation. But I benefited at least as much. The check-ups helped me realize how little I knew about the interior lives of many of my parishioners. My admiration for a number of people has increased a thousand-fold now that I am acquainted with some of their struggles. So many people are valiantly and quietly coping with major problems—emotionally disabled spouses or parents, intense financial pressures, intolerable relationships with adolescent children. "Pastor, forgive me," one woman said, "I’m in no position to consider growth. All I ask is to be able to survive." I know now how to pray intelligently for these people. And I have new understandings to guide my preaching.

For many, it turned out that the primary problem is intense loneliness, the bearing of difficult burdens in isolation. And these people don’t expect their circumstances to be otherwise. Our religion is so individualist, it seems, that few think they have any right to the support of Christian sisters or brothers. A look of incomprehension came over one woman’s face when, after she had disclosed grievous problems, I said, "It sounds like you could use a friend."

People don’t tend to view the church as constituting a supportive community. They think it a sign of weakness if they can’t cope on their own. Since the check-up interviews, I’ve taken steps to see that our church, through its Ministry of Care and Fellowship, provides more support to those who need it.

Finally, the interviews provided me with new insights about our church’s peace-and-justice ministry. Though we have an active program in these areas, only a minority of members become involved in social action. We’re inclined to think that the others are apathetic or uncommitted. But I was impressed by the number of people who interpreted Question 9— "I believe I bear fruit for the Lord, that I live a life worthy of Christ"—as saying something about social involvement.

"I’ve never been willing to take the risk of becoming committed and involved in action on behalf of others," a quiet, middle-level corporate executive told me. "What is your image of what it would be like for you to bear fruit for the Lord?" I asked. "I wish I could be like—" he replied, using the name of a congregation member recently arrested in a demonstration at the capitol!

Another person—who never speaks in church—revealed how bothered she is by her inability to influence people at her workplace toward making their lives more Christian. A third said that she always measures herself against one of our most dedicated members, who is always reaching out in love to others.

As the pastoral friend of these individuals, I intend to hold them accountable to their vision as time goes on. But what is critical is that the accountability be in terms of their vision, not mine—of their sense of how they ought to be growing, coming to understand the Word, or changing their relationships with others. I hope to meet with most of these folk after a year for a session in which they assess their growth in the interim.

Between then and now they will be given numerous opportunities to continue to move toward their goals—a New Year’s covenant renewal service, special Lenten foci, new course offerings, new outlets for Christian service or action. I believe that, because we have talked together, they will recognize opportunities as "having their names written on them"—ones they earlier might have let pass by. I also believe that I am now, as a result of having had these conversations, better equipped to prepare such programs in order to meet people’s needs and to challenge them where they are.

Does this kind of program offer a hope of moving my congregation beyond the individualistic approach to ministry characteristic of the previous generation—beyond the "autonomy of the individual member" that is basic to the liberal world view?

The program certainly does not move us rapidly toward a situation in which every member of the congregation has a "spiritual director" or "spiritual friend," much as I might hope for that. Nor does it move us in the direction of a basic Christian community, in which the congregation would be composed of face-to-face primary groups whose members reflect biblically on their engagement in society and support one another in daily ministry. Neither does it move us back to the authoritarianisms of the past, particularly those attached to the pastoral role.

But the program is, I hope, a first step toward the recovery of corporate discipleship in the postmodern era. And it is an approach particularly appropriate to a denominational church. Such a church is not "the company of the committed," nor is it a housechurch Christian community. It consists of people who have come into it by birth and by prior denominational attachments, as well as of people who have made a conscious choice of exercising their discipleship in it. No one, in entering it, takes a vow of obedience. No person has been "set in authority" over it. As pastoral leader I am one traveler on pilgrimage speaking to and caring for other pilgrims. I can be a spiritual friend and, if they wish, a mentor or guide. But I dare not let the limitations of pluralism—limitations I respect—keep me from exercising the pastoral role that God wants congregational leaders to exercise.

That’s different from the asking the members to accompany me on my journey. But it’s also different from the despairing attitude that says pastoring belongs to a past era. Ultimately we will all answer to God and not to one another, but along the way the Divine Pastor gifts the congregation with pastors who assist us in being accountable for our discipleship. I am trying to find a way to be such a helper.

Educating the Congregation

BOOK REVIEW:

Beyond Clericalism: The Congregation as a Focus for Theological Education. Edited by Joseph Hough, Jr., and Barbara G. Wheeler. Scholars Press, 151 pp., $28.95; paperback, $18.95.The relationship between the seminary and the church has all too often been characterized by tension and controversy. Is seminary teaching too liberal? Is it irrelevant to the life and needs of the parish? Does the seminary ignore or, even worse, condescend to the church? Are seminary faculty answerable primarily to the academy or to the congregation? Are faculty members too quick to assign ministerial issues to the department of "practical theology," thereby reinforcing the opposition between theory and practice? At a time when many congregations are losing members, when New Age religions and alternative sources of spirituality abound, and when the relationship between the "church" and the "world" is undergoing yet another crisis of definition, such questions are crucial.

In 1983 James Hopewell wrote an essay "A Congregational Paradigm for Theological Education." In it he questioned the emphasis of seminary curricula on educating the individual cleric. Adopting a phrase from Edward Farley, Hopewell referred to this tradition as the "clerical paradigm." Among its main consequences, according to Hopewell, are the dispersion and fragmentation of the curriculum and an individualistic understanding of the ministry.

Hopewell argued that the object of seminary training should be shifted from a clerical to a "congregational paradigm." The focus of seminary education is the life and faith not of the individual minister, he wrote, but of the congregation. Therefore, rather than focusing on the "cognitive and characterological" development of the student, the curriculum of a seminary shoul concentrate on the cognitive and characterological development of the local church. By making this shift, the seminary would be able to link theological inquiry to the "maturation of a community." This new approach would require students to understand the identity and the context of individual congregations. "Goals, rather than elaborated means, now justify this new paradigm," Hopewell concluded. "The goals are the corporate form of learned ministry, an education not once removed from the church’s embodiment, a.concurrence of church and academy in the struggle for specific redemptive community."

Hough and Wheeler’s book grew out of discussions between Hopewell and various theological educators, many of whom contribute to the volume. Part one analyzes the problems with and the possibilities for Hopewell’s propbsal that a congregational paradigm be adopted in seminary curricula.

Although all the contributors agree that seminary education must be relevant and applicable to the church, the ambiguity inherent in the concept of "congregation" raises a host of questions: Which congregation are we talking about? How do we define congregation? Could a focus on the congregation lead to the neglect of the church’s catholic or ecumenical character (David Kelsey)? Will a focus on the congregation come at the expense of the church’s role in a world mission (Letty Russell and John B. Cobb)? Do we have proper—that is, nonsexist—metaphors and language with which to discuss the relationship between the seminary and the church (Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki)?

Part two provides disciplinary perspectives on Hopewell’s proposal. Various specialists explore the congregational paradigm by asking how their own discipline might be taught in a ministry curriculum, the focus of which would be the congregation. The perspective of the historian is offered in the excellent essays by Jane Dempsey Douglass, Carl Holladay and E. Brooks Holifield. The volume concludes with provocative articles by Don S. Browning, Stanley Hauerwas and Beverly W. Harrison. These final essays are written from the perspective of practical studies, namely, pastoral care, Christian ethics and feminist liberation theology.

This volume should serve as an important source for analyzing and revising seminary education. It does not present one monolithic opinion or program, but is itself a discussion and debate about Hopewell’s proposal, a debate the reader is invited to join. However, because the book is so engaging and often convincing, it is important to raise some questions which, to a large extent, go unanswered in these pages.

According to Hopewell, a congregational paradigm would focus seminary training on the "development" and "maturation" of the congregation. But who defines "maturation" or determines the church’s "redemptive quest"? Who sets the agenda and who, finally, critiques it? This problem is, of course, inherent in a clerical paradigm, but it is not necessarily resolved in a congregational one. Hopewell wants the church to play a truly "generative role" in theological education, but I doubt that these essays alone will encourage such activity. Because they are written by educators, they inevitably give us a model of theological education whereby an agenda is presupposed, advocated and imposed on future congregations. Articles by Browning and Hauerwas are exceptions to this tendency and should serve to re-emphasize the importance of congregational self-determination.

The question of an agenda is crucial, however, for benefiting from and critiquing this book since it points out both the strengths and the weaknesses of the volume as a whole. In Russell’s and Kelsey’s chapters a recurring phrase sheds important light on the presuppositions governing these essays. Both authors warn against "ideological captivity." According to Russell, "ideological captivity" in theological education must be challenged "not only with pluralism but also with the claim that the community of faith must be joined by the community in struggle in interpreting the meaning of the gospel message and in setting the agenda." Kelsey agrees by urging as much diversity as possible among the churches on whom the curriculum focuses: "This diversity is important because it enables the curriculum to resist becoming ideologically captive. A curriculum becomes ideologically captive when it leads to an understanding of Christian identity, both communal and individual, that uncritically assimilates the interests and commitments of particular segments of society."

My concern with this book is that, in its own way, it too is ideologically captive. Seminary education is to serve as a challenge to various conservative opinions. To be free of ideological captivity is to "join the community of struggle," to oppose racism and sexism, to fight for human rights and women’s ordination, to engage in social action, to envision "holiness as justice," and to develop nonsexist language and imagery in order to "empower" and free the congregation to engage in the "struggle for liberation."

I support all of these noble goals. I greatly admire the churches described by Browning and Hauerwas. In fact, I am a certified liberal. I am active in the Democratic Party and Amnesty International. I campaigned for Dukakis. I’m even a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Yet all of this activity makes me nothing more or less than a quintessential 20^th-century liberal. In fact, this activity actually imprisons me within the 20^th century. It has nothing to do with being truly radical or prophetic, even in the midst of Reagan or postReagan conservatism.

That which is truly prophetic and radical is not that which challenges individual social and political realities (although these certainly do need to be addressed), but that which challenges our underlying worldview. In order to gain a perspective that frees us from the seductive and noble aspects of our own age, we must look to the past. Defining the "redemptive quest" and the "maturation" of a community of faith can really be done only in conversation with the tradition, a conversation that tests our assumptions and challenges even our most cherished and deeply held convictions.

As the essays in the first half make clear, this book addresses the issue of ecclesiology. But ecclesiology can be understood in terms of the current, living church with all of its pressing problems, duties and questions, or it can be understood historically. The latter approach takes seriously the present situation of the church but also envisions a congregation as existing over the passage of time. Douglass’s essay best addresses the need for a historical ecclesiology and, I think, points us in the right direction. Building upon the insights of this essay, I would argue that only an ecclesiology construed historically can truly free us from ideological captivity.

Robert Bellah has argued that the church should serve as a community of memory. Christian communities, preoccupied as they are with dilemmas posed by the modern world, frequently suffer from a stifling amnesia. The danger of such amnesia is that it allows the contemporary world and all of its assumptions to become tyrannical. Often the study of history reinforces the tyranny of the present. To become a community of memory does not mean that we address our 20^th-century questions to the past in order to glean ammunition for various courses of action, be they conservative or liberal. Rather than looking to the past for answers to our problems we must let the past start posing the questions and setting the terms, not in order to adopt such questions uncritically but in order to judge our own thinking. To be historically oriented, then, is to allow the past to

confront us in all of its strange and alien character. The voices of the past must be permitted to speak on their own terms, and we must grant them the ability to call us to account. We might even come to the startling realization that many of our questions are wrong.

The task of the clergy should be, in many ways, a "liberating" one. To be educated in today’s seminary is to study the Bible, church history, theology, pastoral care, homiletics and ethics. These latter three subjects should be team-taught from a historical perspective by historians of theology, exegesis and social history. That historical dimension should not be abandoned at graduation but should be brought to bear on the sermon, church school teaching and pastoral counseling. The pastor should play a prophetic role in the original sense of the term—namely, not by predicting the future but by recalling us to the past and reminding us that the community has no future without recollection.

Perhaps the topic of suffering is the clearest example of how the past can challenge the future. Why did so many medieval monks, saints and mystics inflict pain on themselves? Why did theologians argue that tranquillity and prosperity are dangerous to the soul? Why, in the eyes of the tradition, did biblical heroes so often suffer adversity? To understand the nature of suffering from the ancient, medieval and Reformation perspectives may help us to stop fearing pain and affliction the way we do. It may shed light on why ours has become, in the words of Jacques Ellul, an "analgesic" age. To see suffering as a test of one’s being, a possibility for spiritual growth and a means of freedom from addiction to the world, may help us to rethink the nature of pain, prosperity, adversity and, above all, happiness.

In short, the learned cleric is here not always to comfort but to shock, to challenge, to offer an outlook alien to our age. By fulfilling this role, he or she can open avenues of understanding and real, instead of illusory, change.

If ministers allow the church of the past to challenge our most deeply held convictions, we might learn that reality is not always political. We might realize that suffering, pain and slavery cannot always be reduced to issues of domination or oppression. We might discover that relationships, human and divine, cannot always be framed in terms of categories about "power," "disempowerment" and "alienation." We might even discover that freedom is not always the same as political emancipation. We might learn that those whose wisdom is born out of suffering can teach us an understanding of God and the world that transcends all political, economic and social categories.

The 20^th century has so politicized reality that we listen to other worldviews only with difficulty, hesitation or derision. Our tendency to manipulate tradition only deepens our enslavement to modern categories, questions and assumptions. As long as we cling to our own categories we cannot hear the voices of our tradition that speak about the importance of poverty and silence, that talk about the benefits of unjust suffering, that understand self-knowledge in terms of internal bondage, that depict human struggle in terms of solitude and self-abnegation, that speak of freedom in terms of self-denial and asceticism, and that perceive wisdom in terms of detachment and transcendence.

As they seek ways to redirect theological education, the authors of this book fear ideological captivity. This author’s fear is that they have, at times, failed to recognize how ideologically captive we really are. Not only must the voices of contemporary congregations be heeded as we train those discerning their vocation with the church, but we must listen to that "great cloud of witnesses" who call to us and challenge us from across the centuries.

Living with Chronic Illness: Why Should I Go On?

Everyone who lives with a long-term illness thinks about suicide at some time during that illness. My hunch is that these emotions usually come early in the disease, during the first struggles with the reality of chronic illness. The second most common occurrence of those sentiments comes, I think, at times of crisis in the disease, at times of reversals.

Though I have rarely seriously considered suicide in the 12 years I have struggled with Crohn’s syndrome, a digestive disorder, I have flirted with the feelings. During one particularly bad period of three months, when my symptoms were acute and seemingly getting worse, I sank into what can only be called a chronic depression. What joy is there in feeling bad daily? Each meal was surrounded with the possibility of painful aftereffects: cramps, diarrhea, chills and pain. Why then eat? And I ate less and less, losing weight continually until I reached a new level of thinness that frightened and shocked me as I saw my body reflected in the mirror. I had no energy, no zest. I often took naps and retreated into solitude. I rejected company, thus adding to my depression.

In that period I remember thinking more than I wanted to about death, thinking that it might not be the worst kind of experience if life continued as it had for these months. I never planned suicide, I just entertained the idea more often than at any time in my life before. What helped me recover? How did the spiral end? How can we move from such feelings to those more positive and hopeful? How can we go on when things are very bad?

First of all, the truth finally became apparent to me that I wanted to live more than to die. Life is filled with lots of certainties, one has friends, a lover, children, family, a task and dreams for a better tomorrow. The desire for life is just plain human and absolutely universal. On the other hand, death is always filled with mystery; we die alone, we leave all those earthly pleasures. We will never walk in the sun again, never taste a chocolate sundae, never smell spring, never talk to a loved one, never be touched, never make love (that reality always seemed laden with extra emotion for me!). I think one goes on because life is stronger than death: it is the most common universal value of being human.

Not so long ago I visited a dear friend of mine, a former colleague, a theologian, who was dying of cancer. I wanted to see Ken before he died, so I journeyed to Connecticut to visit with him only weeks before he died. I wanted to talk about death and life, about heaven and hope, about faith and doubt, about my love for him and my gratitude for wonderful memories. We spent the entire day remembering, telling stories, laughing and crying, and holding.

I shall never forget his words about dying and living when I pressed him about the Christian hope of heaven. He responded: "Steve, I am far more interested in the geography of earth than I am of heaven. "Those words said only weeks before he died, were words spoken after another surgical intervention to extend his life. He told me he wanted, as much time as possible, to see the flowers, to smell life, to be with his wife and family, to listen to music, and read more books. (His book orders continued to reach his home after he had died.) He knew about the strong living urge which is, I think, the birthmark of humankind. And he faced death with absolute certitude about the life to come. He had no doubts about resurrection, about the hereafter, about the future hope of a new life and a new being. But for that day, and each day until he died, life was a stronger desire than death. I think that is the first reason we go on when we experience bad times: because we want to live. Period.

Second, we live when things are not worth living for because of a certain innate courage, a will to live. Something inside us seems to call us to courage, to a persistent will to live in impossible situations. I have noted great courage in the midst of suffering in friends whose days are filled with pain and heartbreak. But their lives are filled with even more courage. They bear the primal sign of God in their life, a God who created and said of that creation, "It is good." Life also is good enough to be courageous, good enough to call us to valiant decision and heroic lives. What it means to be human is to have courage, and that quality of being, I think, is nurtured in illness, sometimes to a degree that is almost awesome. Courage faces the misery, faces death, faces despair, and still seeks to live. I think that is why people turn from suicide to life; they have courage, courage to hope, even if they never experience the reality of that hope. Such "nonsense" sounds like primitive gospel, to hope about a cross, a death, about suffering, and to find in those dying struggles courage to live yet another day.

There is yet another reason for going on when things become impossible. It has to do with others. All of us somewhere in adulthood learn the wonderful lesson of community. We are formed by others, even before we know our name. We exist because of an intimate community of two, and we grow in a family, a community of a small group. All our lives our identity is nurtured by others. We do not live alone, and somewhere in growing up, in becoming adult, we learn that others not only make life possible for us, they rely on us to make life possible for them. We exist because of our families and friends. And they exist because of us, even when we are sick. So somewhere in despair, when life appears not worth living, somewhere we remember others: spouse, children, those whom we love.

Choosing to die, or dying itself, is never a solitary decision or event. When one dies, others die too—not completely, but a little. So the person deciding to end a life ends a whole series of relationships, relationships that depend on that person. In the process of hoping and deciding to live, the person who is ill comes to the awesome insight that his or her decision is not private. Each death, each suicide, is a communal decision: that is, it effects all those who rely on our part of the human equation. We live because of them, and they live because of us.

I suspect that this is a basic, elemental Christian notion, that we exist for each other. "Love one another." Someone has said that the smallest Christian community is a community of at least two, one to love and one to be loved. So the Christian tug of reliance, the responsibility of connectedness, makes the decision about giving up, or giving in, a matter of importance for more than the one dying. We turn away from dying because we turn to those who have given life to us. We return the life; we live for others as they have lived for us, even if it means only a few more days or weeks or months or years.

Finally, there is one more reason why Christian sufferers turn from suicide, and that has to do with the Christian notion about what it means to claim something about the lordship of Jesus. A wonderful colleague of mine, a Hebrew Scripture scholar, once told me that he thought the most succinct statement of biblical Christianity was this: "In all things God works for the good of those who love him" (Rom. 8:28). That kind of faith has nothing to do with Santa Claus religion, but Christians are those called to trust the providential care of a compassionate God. It is the same notion that kept Luther focused on a loving God, on God as friend and not enemy. It is the same Christian conviction that we live under grace, gifted, and abundantly surrounded by God’s care and concern.

Not that the Christian always experiences this feeling, not that at all; it is often almost the very opposite. The Christian lives this conviction about God’s care in the midst of impossible situations. One lives dependently, held in the everlasting arms, arms that do not crush or smash or smother, but that hold and comfort. Arms of "Abba," our "Daddy" (Rom. 8:15). Life and death, Christians are convinced, belong to the creator and preserver of all. To believe that God created is to believe that God really cares about "the hairs on our heads," the "lilies of the field," the "birds of the air." And if God so cares about those mundane aspects of the cosmos, then God cares for me. That is the ringing hope of Christian faith, the "for me" aspect of the conviction. To believe that in all things God works for the good of those who love him is to live life in trust and hope, to give up on the perspective of personal control, and to give in to faithful dependency on God’s intimate care.

That conviction also conditions how we judge the case for or against suicide. When I was a child, the church stood firmly opposed to suicide. I remember the taboo vividly. Whenever someone would commit suicide, that person did not receive Christian burial. Suicide victims were judged to be outside the sphere of God’s care. In fact, such understanding of God’s care became a rule for not caring. This value was held by most Christian communities. The church’s ministry for the dead, "anointing" and burial, were withheld from those who chose to take their own lives. Such a position made the providential care of God a qualified care, only for those who met some specific criterion of faith. Those who vacillated or chose to end their lives were outside salvation; they died in their sin, like Judas of old.

My favorite story regarding suicide and Christian conviction occurred a few months ago in our chronic illness group at my church. One member, Sophie, was relating her feelings of the past month. She had once again experienced a recurrence of the dreaded disease. Remission had ended and the cancer was active again in her body. (Sophie suffers from cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and is handicapped by the removal of one of her legs by amputation.) This particular month Sophie had experienced reversals which could only be termed "bad times." She had been hospitalized a couple of times, received chemotherapy again, and those treatments were followed with the usual discomfort. If any one in our group deserved sympathy that evening, Sophie did. Sophie told her story and we listened quietly and anxiously. As she neared the end—and Sophie is not given to exaggeration—she spoke of recurrent thoughts of suicide. She was ready to give up and give in. These symptoms were uncharacteristic for Sophie. She was usually euphoric, abounding in energy, always challenging others, and generally happy. We all admired her courage and style. Suddenly the strong one among us was near defeat.

Various responses emerged. None gave much solace, and Sophie seemed unconsoled. We moved on to the person sitting next to Sophie, Louise, who has the long-term disease of atypical trigerminal neuralgia. Louise can’t talk much without pain. She leaned slowly to Sophie and said, "Sophie, don’t you dare commit suicide; when God wants you to come home, God will come and get you. Until then, you keep living and believe that God will take care of you. " We were all caught a little off guard. Louise’s words were strong and authoritative. Sophie smiled and we felt the bond of love between the two women. We all relaxed; the only word that needed to be said had been said, and said by the one among us who had authority to say it.

What Louise expressed is at the heart of the Christian faith, that "in all things God works for the good"; just that simple, and just that profound. Louise understood something of the power and love of God, and Louise became the sacramental presence of God that evening among us. She spoke of God’s love, of God’s time, of God’s choice and God’s prerogative. She expressed the Christian hope that we are surrounded by God’s care, and that fact holds us in faith when that conviction is most threatened.

We can’t let go of life, because we are held and needed until another time when letting go is God’s will for us. Dying is God’s call, not ours. And Louise’s saying the words had more power than any of our saying so, because she lived in that experience daily. She understood the weakness of the heart and the strength of faith. And she loved as love is spoken about in Scripture. She did what was needed that evening for Sophie, for us and for God. God’s presence was never so evident among us as when that frail woman leaned toward her sister, touched her arm, and anointed her with the "oil of gladness," with words which had power and compassion. Another time Sophie could let go—in God’s time, but not then, not this time.

The events of that evening remind me of an experience in the last years of my father’s life, a few months before he died, just after his century birthday. He was living at the time with my brother in Tucson. One evening Herb heard Dad speaking. As Herb neared the bedroom to see if anything was wrong, he saw that Dad was obviously in that twilight zone one experiences before the final slumber of death. He was agitated and his voice was powerful and animated: "Mother, my mother Mary, I see your candle, do you see mine? Yes, I see your light, do you see mine? No, I can’t come to your candle, you come to mine." Then a brief pause and the words poured out. "Dad, my father Conrad, I see your candle, do you see mine?" No, I can’t come to your candle, can you come to mine?" Again a brief pause and the final words. "Bertha [my mother, who had died a few years before], I see you, can you see me? No, I can’t come to you, can you come to me?" Herb entered the room and roused my father slightly until he seemed to waken. Dad almost shouted: "Herb, I am Henry T. Schmidt, am I not? Am I OK? Is that not who I am?" Herb assured Dad of his identity, and slowly, gently Dad fell asleep into a deep and wonderful rest.

My father almost wanted to die, but not just then. His words were about the economy of God’s time, and that time was not yet God’s time. So my father lived on past that evening, many months; his time had not yet come.

Why go on when things are very bad? Because we need to, simply that. There is something within the character of a person that calls him or her to courage, to relationship, and to others. Those convictions hold true even in difficult times. And another time, in God’s time, one will not go on. One will be called home, called by the compassion and love of others who have gone before and bid us come. One weighs the duty. For now our responsibility to our human community calls us to courage and faith; another time another community, the communion of saints, will call us, and bid us into mystery, eternity, heaven or, as Christians sometimes call it, home, that place where indeed the heart is.

Embarrassed by the Church: Congregations and the Seminary

Though seminary faculties like to affirm, in principle, a relationship between Christian theology and the life of the church, academic theology tends to view the ministering congregation as an addendum to the really interesting issues of ethics, philosophical and political theology, or social policy. The most pressing issue for seminary faculties is usually how to make courses in theology and ethics "relevant" to the actual work of the ministry.

In his 1984 presidential address to the Society of Christian Ethics, Tom Ogletree noted that most Christian ethicists do not see their task as that of providing moral guidance for Christian congregations. As a result, "such communities have come to have significance chiefly in the private sector, in relation to families and residential neighborhoods. Given this confinement, they have had little direct access to the great social questions of the day. . . [They are] encouraging nostalgic attachments to former ways of life . . . and abandoning the victims of social dislocation in rapidly changing urban environments. . . They appear more interested in maintaining secure spaces which can sustain them in their attempts to cope with the daily problems of living."

Ogletree argues that any constructive thinking in Christian ethics in the future will require an ecclesial context. "If we are to be interpreters of Christian ethics in our time, we will have to give fresh attention to the church as a community capable of sustaining a distinctive moral vision of the world." A community capable of sustaining that vision seems to be exactly what is missing.

But the source of the problem is not just that congregations have become bastions of middle-class respectability; it is also the presumption of ethicists like Ogletree that they already know what "the great social questions of the day" are and that their passion for "social justice" is less accommodating to culture than are the middle-class churches Ogletree deplores. Ironically to the extent that Christian ethicists and theologians have abandoned the church because of its suburban captivity" they too have had little that is interesting to say to our society. We hope to show that the church is much more than an abstraction for Christian theological and ethical reflection: it is the source and purpose of that reflection.

In hopes of avoiding the temptation to speak only about an ideal church, we propose to examine some events in a congregation where one of us was a member. The narration of these events is meant to serve not just as an example but as an implicit argument for how Christians should think, and how seminary curriculum should be restructured to take congregational life seriously. One of the criticisms often addressed to our emphasis on the centrality of the church for Christian thought is that it ignores the political and economic realities of the church. We counter such criticism with this account of an actual congregation.

Broadway United Methodist Church in South Bend, Indiana, is in one of those sections of town that began to decline about 20 years ago but did not quite hit bottom. In the early ‘60s, when a highway was cut through a mainly black area of the city, poor, mostly black, people began to rent in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is integrated, and many young couples have begun moving back into the area, since it provides reasonably priced housing.

The church has a large building, witnessing to its once large and lively congregation. The congregation now numbers about 100 members, with Sunday attendance averaging between 40 and 60. The integration of the church in the early ‘60s. coupled with a series of unsuccessful pastorates, nearly sealed the church’s doom. Denominational executives felt there was little chance of recovery.

However, in the early ‘70s a pastor was appointed to Broadway who refused to believe the church was doomed. What others saw as a problem, he saw as an exciting possibility. By visiting the sick, organizing the church and developing an urban ministry, the pastor imbued the members of the congregation with a new sense of confidence in their value to one another and, in particular, to the neighborhood. The members became determined to do much more than survive.

About live years ago, a board meeting took place at the church. The first agenda item concerned the leaky roof over the education building. Since the church no longer had an active Sunday school, the building was used primarily by the church’s Headstart program. The necessary repairs would cost at least $5,000 -- a huge sum for the church. After much discussion, the board voted to accept the most expensive bid because that kind of roof would last the longest.

What was remarkable about this decision was what was not discussed. No one suggested that the church ought to rethink its investment in the neighborhood. No one suggested relocating in the suburbs. No one even noticed that the church, by its decision, was saying that it would rather be a presence in this neighborhood than a success elsewhere.

But the neighborhood noticed. The machinery that pulled up to the church to do the re-roofing was a sign to the neighbors that they were not to be abandoned, at least not by this church. Of course, some might suggest that the church ought to have spent money on the emergency food pantry instead. But that was not a real choice, since the building had to be maintained first if the congregation were to show its commitment to being God’s people on the southeast side of town.

The next item on the agenda seemed to have more significant ecclesiological implications. The worship committee had suggested celebrating the Eucharist every Sunday. Because of its evangelical background, the church had a tradition of celebrating the Eucharist infrequently. The new pastor, however, had gradually increased the frequency until the church was now celebrating the Eucharist almost 30 times a year. The congregation had responded favorably to this practice.

This positive attitude toward the Eucharist was due, in great part, to the patient work of the pastor. He had always been candid about his desire to have an every-Sunday Eucharist, but he never forced his will on the congregation. Through his preaching, by taking the Eucharist to many members in nursing homes and those too ill to come to church, and in countless other ways, he had helped people see how the Eucharist made caring for one another intelligible. Some undoubtedly put up with the pastor’s "highchurch views" because they loved and respected him; but they also were learning that this type of pastoral care was determined by the Eucharist.

As the board prepared to vote on the proposal, it was shocked to hear the pastor, who tended to say little at meetings, announce, "You should not vote on this." The pastor seemed to have lost all political sense. A matter for which he had worked for years was coming to a vote, which he would win, and he would not let it happen.

He explained that though it is the tradition of the church, that the Eucharist be served every Sunday, the congregation no more had the right to decide how often the Eucharist would be celebrated than to decide whether it would say the Lord’s Prayer. Both were obligations it was invited to obey or, rather, they were privileges in which the church ought to rejoice.

He then suggested that he would announce to the church that there was strong sentiment in favor of having the Eucharist every Sunday, but recognizing that there might be some who strongly dissented from this policy, he would announce a time for people to express their disagreement. If many felt strongly that such a move would make it impossible for them to continue to worship there, then, he said, the church might have to wait a little longer. Not to wait, he suggested, would belie, the very unity of the Eucharist. The board agreed. Two meetings to air views on this subject were called. Since no one came to either, the church simply began having the Eucharist every Sunday.

Though it is generally assumed that Protestant churches that favor "high-church stuff" are affluent churches that

are more aesthetically than socially aware, such was not the case at Broadway. About three months after the board meeting, the outreach committee came to the church with a proposal. Unemployment had hit the city hard, and soup kitchens had sprung up to feed the city’s poor. But the committee felt that a soup kitchen, as much good as it might do, was not what the church needed to provide. Instead, the committee suggested that since the church had learned the significance of sharing the eucharistic meal together, perhaps it could share a meal with the neighborhood. Such a meal would not be the same as the Eucharist, but at least it would express the kind of community that that meal has. made possible. The proposal was that every Sunday after worship people be invited to come to lunch.

The proposal was approved, and the church was divided into five groups, each taking responsibility to prepare the meal for one Sunday. Often between 40 and 60 people appeared for the Sunday lunch. A few who shared the meal might come to church before the lunch, but the church gained no new members from the effort. The meal made it clear that the church was not simply another social agency doing a little good, but a people called to witness to God’s presence in the world. The presence that comes in the meal sustained the church’s ability to be present in the neighborhood, a symbol that all was not lost.

First, they indicate that the disdain many theologians and ethicists have for the "middle-class" church is unjustified. This story is not fiction. It is about real people, who work at the phone company, teach school, have babies, care for sick parents and take time to come to church and attend meetings. Neither they nor the church are unique. They were simply willing to trust that God is really present in his church.

Second, this story challenges some of the most cherished distinctions that have shaped theological reflection. Is the story an example of a "church" or "sect" ethic? Were the folk of Broadway being ".priestly" or "prophetic"? Their story reminds us of what we often forget -- that "church," "sect," "priestly" and "prophetic" are not descriptive terms but ideal types, heuristic devices that can help us better understand the empirical reality. In other words, they are tools to help us tell the story of congregations like Broadway, not the only forms congregational life assumes.

Too often we let such categories get in the way of how we tell the story. It would be a distortion of what was happening at Broadway to say that the members there were acting like world-denying sectarians. It is true that the members were not trying to develop an ethic sufficient to sustain an entire civilization; but neither did they see themselves as "withdrawing" from their social order. Many in the church understood themselves to be politically conservative and would have been shocked at any suggestion that they were social radicals.

Their understanding that their first task as a church was to be faithful rather than effective also calls for a reconsideration of Ogletree’s "great social questions of the day." Because the church was congregationally concerned, it was also active in the neighborhood, and that meant that, it cared about what was happening in city politics. The church knew that the diversity of neighborhood activities contributed to its own life. If the church was "sectarian," it was strangely so.

Yet, though all this may be true, these "points" may still not seem to add up to anything substantive for understanding theological education. After all, few theologians do their work by using examples like this one. Since the Enlightenment, examples have been relegated to the level of anecdotes: they don’t constitute real knowledge or evidence. Practical knowledge is ignored. To make the congregation a central concern for theological education, we need a new pedagogical strategy that assumes that theology is a form of practical knowledge.

What difference does this story make for theological education? It reminds us that one of the essential tasks that the theologian-ethicist at the seminary performs is to help pastors, and through them congregations like Broadway, to appreciate the significance of their common acts. The way we have told the story of the board meeting is not the way most who were at the meeting might have told it. They might not have seen the decision to reroof the education building as a theological statement.

We are not suggesting that every church needs to have a theologian to help it discover the theological and ethical significance of its everyday activities. Given the convictions of many contemporary theologians, churches, like some Indian tribes in America that threw out anthropologists because they felt that the scholars’ interpretative frameworks distorted their experience, might also have reason to throw theologians out. We are suggesting (with George Lindbeck and others) that it is the task of those committed to the theological enterprise to develop the linguistic skills that can help congregations better understand the common but no less theologically significant activities that constitute their lives.

We suspect that much of the difficulty of current church life, and our corresponding theology, is that we have not paid serious attention to how hard it is rightly to understand the common things we do as Christians -- such as pray, baptize, eat meals, rejoice at birth, grieve at illness and death, reroof church buildings. Lacking the ability to describe theologically the significance of these activities, we distort what we do by resorting to descriptions and explanations all too readily provided by our culture. Any explanation is to be preferred to no explanation.

This process occurs at both crude and sophisticated levels. When asked why they go to church, many people say that there they meet the kind of people they really like (people like themselves) or that the church helps their kids learn morals. No doubt such explanations are partly true, but they may also be formulas for self-deception, causing us to miss the miraculous fact that we are there to worship God. At a more sophisticated level, we have learned to use sociological and psychological explanations to "understand" (that is, manipulate and scientifically manage) the church. As a result, clergy are often more adept at giving sociological accounts of church life than they are at helping their congregations appreciate that it is the presence of God that makes their life possible.

It is not as if those who specialize in Scripture are more guilty than those of us who work in theology, ethics or liturgy. Indeed, we suspect that the very distinction between theology, ethics and liturgy reflects the seminary’s adoption of inappropriate academic models of compartmentalization and a failure to take seriously the liturgical life of congregations as central to our educative task.

It is a hopeful sign that many (Geoffrey Wainwright, Craig Dykstra, John Westerhoff and others) are attempting to recover liturgy as central to our theological work and that ethicists are discussing the liturgical shaping of the moral life. But we cannot be satisfied with this. Too often discussions about the relation of theology and liturgy become but another attempt by intellectuals to relieve their boredom with the scholarly paradigms that currently rule their discipline. A focus on the formative power of the liturgy may become but another "interest" of some intellectuals, which will have the usual short run at the seminary box office.

That is why the example of Broadway is important. That congregation was so formed and disciplined by the liturgy that an extraordinary social witness was possible. The congregation’s life belies distinctions between theology and liturgy, ethics and liturgy. The meal they prepare every Sunday for the neighborhood is not an expression of their social or ethical commitments in distinction from their liturgical life; the meal they prepare and the Eucharist they celebrate are parts of a single story. The theological task is to help us and them understand why that is the case.

We send seminarians out to do "fieldwork" presuming that it is good to move developing pastors from the ‘theoretical" to the "practical." We thus set up a false dichotomy between theological concerns and the ‘‘real life" of the church. No wonder many seminarians complain that their congregations fail to meet their theological ideals. Because seminarians have been trained by theologians who are more shaped by their graduate school training than by their ecclesial identification -- they see themselves as process thinkers or Barthians rather than as Baptists or Episcopalians -- we have seminarians who attempt to make congregations fit the images of their theological allegiances rather than trying to respond to the theological resources of the congregation.

Many seminarians will become pastors who are either cynical about the gap between the "true" and the "false" church or who quickly jettison their theology and settle down with "things as they are" in the congregation, offering the congregation no better interpretation of its common life than the mere need for organizational maintenance.

But what if we in the seminary do not know the questions that a "true" church should be asking? Does our theological education appear "theoretical" because we have neglected the most basic theological task -- to form a visible people who have listened to a different story from that of the world? That form of listening is a liturgical activity -- an active embodiment of and response to Scripture -- which defies separation into the "theoretical" and the "practical."

The emphasis on the congregation for rethinking seminary education, if it is to be productive, requires seminaries and their faculties to recognize that their legitimacy depends on how well they help congregations to eat and drink with Jesus. The seminary’s task is to tell seminarians the many stories of congregations, past and present, that constitute the table of Jesus. That may be why, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the study of the New Testament and of church history often provides the most practical long-term help for pastors. In studying those topics they learn about many a congregation’s life, and they learn too that there are alternatives to the merely contemporary and local stories of a church.

The task of theology is to help the churches tell and share their stories truthfully. Just as the people at Broadway learned that they must share their separate stories through their participation in the Eucharist, so those of us charged to be theologians must continue that task among the many churches. That does not mean that we are "just story tellers"; it does mean that without stories such as that of Broadway, all of the scholarship and intellectual skills of our seminaries make little sense.

Ministry as More Than a Helping Profession

Parish clergy and seminarians today seem content to have ministry numbered among the "helping professions. " After all, most professing Christians, from the liberals to the fundamentalists, remain practical atheists. They think the church is sustained by the services it provides or the amount of fellowship and good feeling in the congregation. This form of sentimentality has become the most detrimental corruption of the church and the ministry.

Sentimentality is that attitude of being always ready to understand but not to judge. Without God, without the one whose death on the cross challenges all our good feelings, who stands beyond and over against our human anxieties, all we have left is sentiment, a saccharine residue of theism in demise. Sentimentality is the way our unbelief is lived out.

If the ministry is reduced to being primarily a helping profession, then parish clergy will also be destroyed by the presumption that all sincerely felt needs are legitimate needs. Ministry will be trivialized into the service of needs.

This problem is compounded by the fact that ministers are often people who need to help people. They like to be liked and need to be needed. Their personal needs become the basis for their ministry. Underestimating how terribly deep other people's needs can be, they enter ministry with an insufficient sense of personal boundaries, and are devoured by the voracious appetites of people in need. One day they may awake to find that they have sacrificed family, self-esteem, health and happiness for a bunch of selfish people who have eaten them alive. Pastors then come to despise what they are and to hate the community that made them that way. The pastor realizes that people's needs are virtually limitless, particularly in an affluent society in which there is an ever-rising threshold of desire (which we define as "need"). With no clear job description, no clear sense of purpose other than the meeting of people's needs, there is no possible way for the pastor to limit what people ask of the pastor.

Some say the clergy should develop more self-esteem, be more assertive, learn to say No, demand a day off--in brief, become as self-centered as many of the people in their congregations. Our society tends to respond to the problem of lack of meaning and purpose by telling people that they will feel better if they more fully develop their egos. Go more deeply within for the solution rather than look outside yourself for help. In a godless society, where there really is not much outside ourselves but our own self-projections, this is probably the best advice one could expect.

But that is not how we find our meaning and purpose as Christians. What needs to happen among the clergy has to do with the church. When the church lacks confidence in what it is, clergy have no idea what they should be doing. Appropriate, realistic, interesting expectations for the clergy are derived from the purpose of the church.

Meaning in ministry originates in baptism, understood as a communal undertaking. This insight was revealed to one new pastor when, thinking that he had at last won enough of his congregation's trust to push through one of his programs, he suggested opening a day-care center. The Christian education committee met to discuss the proposal.

Gladys butted in, "Why is the church in the day-care business? How would this be a part of the ministry of the church?"

The young pastor patiently went over his reasons: it was a good use of the building, it would attract young families, it was another source of income, and the Baptists down the street already had a day-care center.

"And besides, Gladys," said Henry Smith, "you know that it's getting harder every day to put food on the table. Both husband and wife must have full-time jobs."

"That's not true," said Gladys. "You know it's not true. It is not hard for anyone in this church, for anyone in this neighborhood, to put food on the table. There are people in this town for whom putting food on the table is quite a challenge, but I haven't heard any talk about them. If we are talking about ministry to them, then I'm in favor of the idea. No, what we're talking about, is, ministry to those for whom it has become harder every day to have two cars, a VCR, a place at the lake or a motor home. I just hate to see the church telling these young couples that somehow their marriage will be better or their family life more fulfilling if they can only get some other piece of junk. The church ought to be courageous enough to say, 'That's a lie. Things don't make a marriage or a family.' "

The young pastor had been conditioned to assume that real ministry was about "helping people." Of course, Jesus helped people and commissioned us to do the same. The trouble begins when we assume that we already know what "helping people" looks like.

Gladys led the church to the task of interpretation. She did not tell the congregation what to do. Rather, she invited the pastor to make his case in such a way that the church had the opportunity to interpret itself in light of who God is. Because Gladys understood her baptismally mandated ministry to live in the world in the light of the gospel rather than by conventional social wisdom, she gave her pastor an opportunity to understand his ordained ministry: namely, to equip the congregation to live in the light of the gospel.

In questioning the church's worldview, she drove the church back to the communal and ecclesial question that is fundamental to the church's staying the church: what sort of community would we have to be in order to be the sort of people who live by our convictions?

One answer lies in the first real crisis to hit the young Jerusalem church at one of its meetings.

A man named Ananias with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property, and with his wife's knowledge he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostle's feet. But Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? ... You have not lied to people but to God." When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died.... The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him. After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter said to her, "Tell me whether you sold the land for so much." And she said, "Yes, for so much." But Peter said to her, "How is it that you have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? Hark, the feet of those that have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out." Immediately she fell down at his feet and died.... And great fear came upon the whole church . . . [Acts 5: 1 -11].

In ending the stark account of Ananias and Sapphira, Luke uses the word "church" for the first time in Acts. Here, in struggling to be truthful about possessions, the church experienced itself as a disciplined community of truthfulness. Peter accuses Ananias and Sapphira not of greed, but of lying. Their lies are quite natural, like the way we rationalize and excuse our own greed: "It's getting harder to put food on the table." But their lies are confronted in the church, in the person of Peter. To our ears, Luke tells the story in a harsh, uncompromising tone, and the image of Peter in Acts 5 clashes with our conventional pictures of the good pastor. Peter should have dealt more gently with Ananias and Sapphira. With a good course in pastoral counseling, Peter would have been able to see that, while Ananias and Sapphira may have been affluent, they had their own problems. Why didn't Peter enable them to find more meaningful and productive lives rather than confront them in such a way as to shock them to death?

Forsaking the socially acceptable vocation of helping people live just a bit less miserably, Peter confronted Ananias and Sapphira with a radical vision of the sort of church God had called them to be part of. Luke tells this story to hold up the manner of life God intends for us. We are therefore not to ask such diversionary questions as, How could a thing like this happen? Rather we should ask, What sort of community would we need to enable this sort of church (a church of truthful commonality) to exist?

We might say that we tolerate Ananias and Sapphira because we are called to a ministry of service and compassion, even when people are wealthy liars. In other words, we have more love than Peter had in Acts. We deceive ourselves. We do not believe in Ananias and Sapphira as much as Peter believed in them. We cannot imagine any means of breaking out of our materialism, so we dare not risk the truth-telling of Acts 5.

As pastors, letting ourselves off the hook by appealing to our sympathy for people's fragility and limits robs us of some of our most rewarding opportunities to confirm our ministry in a church that really looks like a church rather than a social club. Pastors too eagerly forsake the gospel story, a story that Gladys was not willing to forget. Pastors should insist that people linger long enough with the story to be thrown in the dilemma to which the church is the necessary response.

When they are being faithful to their vocation, pastors orient the church toward God. As Acts 5 shows, this is a terrifying task. The congregation may burst forth in exuberant spirit (Acts 2) or they may drop dead of fear (Acts 5). Through Peter's pastoral care, the church lost two of its more prominent members. Yet, at the same time, the church first experienced itself as church, first used the word ecclesia to describe what it was. In Luke's wonderfully laconic, almost humorous verdict, "And great fear came upon the whole church." It is a fearful

thing to realize how petty our definitions of "pastoral care" are when placed next to Acts 5.

Not long ago, in a Bible study for pastors on Luke-Acts, one of us told the story of Ananias and Sapphira. Some of the pastors laughed at the absurdity of people dropping dead and being carried out. Others were horrified that anyone could believe that God approves of killing people. The group was asked, "Has anybody here ever had to kill someone to save the church?"

"Yes--in a way," answered someone in the back. "I preached on the race issue in a little southern town. The schools were integrating. It was tense. I was warned by the board to tone down my preaching on the issue. When I didn't, five families left the church. Four of them never became members of any church again. My husband asked me, 'Is it worth alienating people from the church forever over one issue?’ Good question. Is it worth provoking a coronary in a couple over a little thing like a piece of real estate?"

Pastors too often learn to pacify rather than preach to their Ananiases and Sapphiras. We say we do it out of love. Usually we do it as a means of keeping everyone as distant from everyone else as possible. This accounts for why, to many people, church seems superficial. Everybody agrees to talk about everything here except what matters. The loneliness and detachment of modern life, the way we are all made strangers, infects the church too. The church is frighteningly dependent upon leaders like Gladys who enable the church to look toward God.

The church at worship continues to be the acid test for all parish ministry. In our worship, we retell and are held accountable to the story about what God is doing with us in Christ. All ministry can be evaluated by essentially liturgical criteria: How well does this act of ministry enable people to be with God?

Almost everything a pastor does can be an opportunity to orient people toward God. Visiting the sick can be much more than empathetic sharing (after all, anybody can do that, even people who don't believe in God) if seen as an occasion for orienting someone to God. Pastors would do well to examine their schedules and ruthlessly delete any activity that doesn't help people do that which they do in worship.

Our church lives in a buyer's market where the customer is king. What the customer wants the customer should get. With half a notion of the gospel, pastors who get caught up in this web of buying and selling in a self-fulfillment economy will one day wake up and hate themselves for it. We will lose some of our (potentially) best pastors to an early grave of cynicism and self-hate.

Pastors who determine to speak the truth--to reprove, correct, witness, interpret, remember God's story--can expect to be lonely occasionally. But it would be a loneliness evoked by being faithful rather than a loneliness produced by merely being overly accessible. To the extent that the church and its leaders are willing to be held accountable to the story which is the gospel, ministry can help to create a people worthy to tell the story and to live it.

Finding Nourishment and Encouragement

I made my first retreat in the winter of 1947. John Oliver Nelson, the Presbyterian minister who founded Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor, Pennsylvania, in 1942, had invited 15 seminary-bound college students to spend two days and nights in Kirkridge's farmhouse, keeping silence, walking the trails, studying the Bible and praying together. I was touched by the power of this experience and intrigued by the possibilities of retreat ministry. In seminary I was one of ten members of a spiritual journey group which met weekly for three years. In my first parish in Cleveland I explored koinonia groups and went frequently to Shadybrook House, a retreat center outside the city. In the early '70s I found myself in Columbus, Ohio, at a church which had its own camp where many retreats were held every year. My journey came full circle when I became director of Kirkridge in 1974.

For over 17 years I have observed hundreds of clergy' making retreat. While retreat centers differ in heritage and emphasis and though clergy needs and interests rise and fall, I've noticed four recurring needs that consistently motivate clergy to make retreat.

Clergy come seeking sanctuary. Often a minister will say, "I feel safe here." Clergy seek refuge from competition with other clergy, the monitoring presence of denominational superiors, the heavy expectations of parishioners, family tensions or professional frustrations. One minister wrote, "Kirkridge has become a sacred place for me, where I can be safe enough to shed more of my masks." A sanctuary is a place where no one is excluded. In its early years Kirkridge held an annual retreat for "square-peg" seminarians, those who didn't fit the mold. In the '60s and '70s we offered retreats for divorced people, who were still mainly condemned and excluded by the church. In 1977 we held our first retreat for gay and lesbian people of faith, a retreat held annually ever since. A lesbian clergywoman wrote, "I have found at Kirkridge--four times now--a special kind of sanctuary. It is my hope and prayer that one day the sanctuary Kirkridge offers me from a heterosexist church and an often antireligious gay community will no longer be necessary. In the meantime, it is that sanctuary which makes it possible for me to have hope for the church and to keep struggling within it."

Clergy come seeking nourishment. In New Testament Hospitality John Koenig writes of the centrality of the table ministry of Jesus evident especially in Luke. Table hospitality provided a context in which strangers became friends, guests and hosts exchanged roles, and angels were sometimes entertained unawares. Living in common housing and sharing common meals provide the occasion for whatever koinonia will be known. There is no head table nor heads of tables. There is one menu--one loaf, one body, one Host. In the breaking of bread we see and are seen.

At many retreat centers, Bible study is a nourishing staple. Walter Wink and June Keener-Wink have fed retreatants by the thousands at centers around the country and abroad. Phyllis Trible, Tom Boomershine, Walter Brueggemann and others keep feeding us. Poetry has become important food for some clergy in recent years. The familiarity of the Bible may breed a dull spirit, whereas poetry may take us by surprise and refresh our imaginations. Kirkridge has held retreats on the poetry of Blake, Yeats and Dickinson. Poets Denise Levertov, Robert Bly and Wendell Berry and authors such as Frederick Buechner have led retreats providing haunting words, wild images, strange metaphors, soul food.

Retreats often provide a much-needed opportunity to keep silence. It may be savored alone or together after the manner of Quakers. Sometimes people sit in common quiet listening to classical music. The Kirkridge unison prayer begins: "Almighty God, known in our silence and entreated in our hunger for Thee, nourish us now with the common bread of thy grace." A retreat invites us to nourish ourselves. An Episcopal clergywoman writes: "I listen so intently to so many people throughout the year that I need to be fed ... I come needing to be fed, needing quiet, needing to laugh and not take my job so seriously. I come needing the mountain and the rocks and a room of my own." A denominational executive sums it up: "When I think of the embodied spirituality of the retreat, I find it to have been substantive, like good hearty nourishing bread compared to the wonder bread pap so much of the church feeds on."

Clergy come seeking healing. Hans Kung once spoke of the commonwealth of God as God's creation healed. I prefer to speak of "God's creation healing" to describe what often happens to people on retreat. One minister wrote of his loneliness as a clergyman: "I have driven in the dark in my little silver Accord on more than one occasion, realizing that there is no one within 50 miles of where I live with whom I can share my deepest pain or joy, no place where I can experience the quiet exultation and peace of complete acceptance." Clergy need to find places and contexts other than, or in addition to, the parish for such healing. Retreats provide one such opportunity.

For 15 years Monon Kelsey and colleagues have led annual healing retreats. There are daily presentations, small group sharing, the Eucharist and a healing service on the last night of the retreat. At many centers, healing retreats are organized around the theme of addiction. Retreats for adult children of alcoholics are filled to capacity. Sexual issues, often difficult to resolve in congregations and denominational systems, can find both healing and appropriate justice at many retreat centers, where anonymity and freedom offer space to seek both.

Every year healing retreats for women at Kirkridge focus on such issues as finding one's own voice, vocation and justice. Annual events for men deal with fathers, violence, men's crippled capacity for intimacy and lack of male friends. As Dominic Crossan has pointed out, Jesus' acts of healing were always subversive. Biblical healing is not under the control of medical, religious or political authorities. It is available in the commonwealth of God to those who seek it in faith, fear and trembling.

Clergy come seeking encouragement. We need a community of people to remind us that our vocation is to be faithful, not successful; to bear witness, not secure results. It helps to gather and pray together. Wink writes: "History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being." Kirkridge's mission is to "picket and pray": to join the work for peace and justice with a serious effort to grow in relationship with God. Clergy are encouraged by reading our materials and meeting other retreatants engaged in justice work.

In 1978 Daniel Berrigan led his first retreat on peacemaking at Kirkridge. He has led one or two such retreats annually ever since. A year ago, as we gathered in the wake of the Gulf war, the grief in the room was palpable. Sharing anguish and anger, and learning that grieving is a necessary part of peace work, was a comfort to us all. Last fall a letter came from a clergyman in the Uniting Church in Australia. "In April 1989 I attended a weekend with Dan Berrigan and I look back on it with gratitude," he wrote. "Since that time, I have dug graves in highways, scattered ashes over Honeywell's offices, been to jail and spent three weeks camping on the Iraq-Saudi border between opposing armies. Not all of this flowed from the weekend--but it certainly must bear some of the responsibility!"

Clergy engaged in a lovers' quarrel with their parish or denomination can find sisters and brothers on retreat. A minister writes: "I honestly don't think I could have stayed 25 years in the ministry without retreat. I have always thought that I didn't really fit in." But on retreat, he said, "I have found soulmates and the strength to go on." Misfits for Christ, soulmates for the struggle, mavericks, square-peg seminarians--such folk are often at the heart of the work of the church.

Clergy who come on retreat are generally a healthy lot. They know they don't have all the answers and are willing to be challenged as well as accepted. They are able to speak of their failures as well as their successes. They're open-minded and not a few are eccentric. Few are pastors of large churches, bishops or denominational executives. Most are in the trenches. They know they need time out and have the wit to arrange it.

Retreats help keep the home fires burning. As Evelyn Underhill once remarked: "To go alone into the mountain and come back as an ambassador to the world has ever been the method of humanity's best friends."

Faith and Aging

Book Reviews:

Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, by George E. Vaillant. Little, Brown, 384 pp., $14.95 paperback.

My Time: Making tile Most of the Bonus Decades After 50, by Abigail Trafford. Basic Books, 273 pp., $14.00 paperback.

Growing Old in Christ, edited by Stanley Hauerwas, Carol Bailey Stoneking, Keith C. Meador and David Cloutier. Eerdmans, 344 pp., $24.00 paperback.

Life expectancy in the developed world has nearly doubled in the past century. By 2010 one-third of all Americans will be between the ages of 50 and 80. This phenomenon has raised a new set of questions. Should old age, like childhood, be regarded as a separate stage of life, one offering a distinct set of problems and requiring a distinct set of values? Are the added years a burden or a gift? What share of our medical resources should go to the elderly? Is old age a period of inexorable decline or of spiritual growth? Most reflection on these questions has been done by secular thinkers, but some work is beginning to be done in theological circles.

In Aging Well, George E. Vaillant, a psychiatrist who directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, offers models for "how to live from retirement to past 80 -- with joy" based on what is perhaps the longest longitudinal study in the world. Three cohorts of men and women (268 socially advantaged Harvard men born about 1920, 456 socially disadvantaged inner-city men born about 1930, and 90 middle-class, intellectually gifted women born about 1910) have been followed continuously for six to eight decades. Vaillant organizes his material clearly and writes without jargon, and he uses the stories of various participants as illustrations.

Vaillant devotes two chapters to questions of special interest to those concerned with religion. Does wisdom increase with age? It’s conventional to link wisdom with age and experience, but Vaillant finds the evidence mixed. Wisdom is the opposite of being self-absorbed, but old people can, like King Lear, be narcissistic. There is no evidence that the majority of older adults are wiser than the young.

Do people become more spiritual and religious as they age? Here again, the evidence is not clear. Vaillant’s research has led him to conclude that "the last years of life without hope and love become a mere sounding brass or tinkling cymbal." He expected that faith, the third element in St. Paul’s triad, would increase, but he found that many people move away from, not toward, religion as they age. This is especially true of the "fortunate old" -- those who are healthy and surrounded by loved ones, who have a spouse and a happy marriage, and thus less need for the social supports that the church provides.

In addition -- and contrary to the stereotype -- older people often become less dogmatic as they age and express less interest in the tenets of the faith that the churches preach. Most still acknowledge a power greater than themselves and they may have a deepened spirituality, but Vaillant concludes that ‘the presence or absence of’ either spirituality or religious adherence had little association with successful aging. It was hope and love rather than faith that seemed most clearly associated with maturity of defenses, with successful aging, and with generativity."

Although Vaillant’s conclusions are intriguing, they are limited. His sample group is numerically small and lacking in diversity -- Harvard men and intellectually gifted women are not typical of the population as a whole, and the inner city in the 1920s was largely white, as was Harvard. But his lively presentation and his method -- extensive personal interviews with people over a long span of years -- make this book a model for future efforts.

In My Time: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, Abigail Trafford, former health editor and now a columnist for the Washington Post, points out that Americans are enjoying a longer health span as well as lifespan. Many people now have ten more healthy years (or more) than people in previous generations, which makes 2lst-century Americans biological pioneers. This extra time has come about so quickly that neither society nor aging individuals are prepared for it. Those between 50 and 80 ask themselves: What do we want to do with our extra time? How do we "find new ways to live and love and work at an age when [Our] forebears would have been settling into a rocking chair?"

Trafford found, in conducting hundreds of interviews, that "my time" begins with a transition period similar to adolescence. It involves breaking away from former ways of living and experimenting with new activities in order to figure out what to do with the rest of one’s active life. But unlike teenagers, older people have no institutional structures to help them through this transition -- at least not yet.

Trafford concludes that those who age well are the ones who develop their creativity, find ways to serve their communities and help others, and, despite losses, keep and forge strong relationships. Having a purpose and being connected to others are essential factors for happiness and well-being.

In the chapter "Exploring Romance," Trafford relates a story that highlights the need for more rigorous ethical thought about what healthy use of "my time" means. A married retired man who finds his wife sexually unattractive tracks down a college girlfriend, a widow in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and the two begin a passionate affair. As her dementia advances, he begins to search for other former girlfriends to replace her. In reporting this, Trafford does not bother to question the behavior, or note that the capacity for self-deception and exploitation does not shrink with age.

Growing Old in Christ is billed as "the first serious theological reflection ever on what it means to grow old, particularly in our culture and particularly as a Christian." It comes close to providing a unified perspective on the subject, despite being a collection of essays. The writers draw on literature, philosophy and scripture as well as on sociological and psychological perspectives. The 14 essays are divided into three categories: "Biblical and Historical Perspectives on Aging," "Critical Perspectives on Modem Problems of Aging" and "The Christian Practice of Growing Old." A Christian theology of aging faces two obstacles. First, Jesus died as a young man, and so he gave us no model for how to age. Second, Jesus at times downplayed the significance of family connections and obligations toward the elderly. To a man who had to bury his father, Jesus said, "Let the dead bury their dead." To his mother at the wedding at Cana, he said, "Woman, what have I to do with you?" When told that his family wanted to see him, he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?"

Tackling the first problem, Richard B. Hays and Judith C. Hays argue that Jesus’ example of self-giving for the sake of others remains relevant to us throughout our lives.

As we grow old, "we should seek to discern how to give our lives for others." The biblical witness stresses the similarity rather than the difference between the young and the old. "All followers of Jesus are to practice watchful waiting upon Cod across the span of their years." This essay, the first in the book, sets out one of the volume’s major themes: the duty of the elderly to serve others.

D. Stephen Long changes the emphasis from the duties of the elderly to the church to the church’s duty to the elderly. He cites Jesus’ words on the cross commending his mother to the apostle John’s keeping as an example of care and concern for the old. Jesus remade the concept of family by creating the church, Long argues. Care of the elderly belongs not only to the biological family, society or individual, but also to the church. The welfare of the aged is also a problem of social justice.

Stanley hauerwas and his associates largely deal with one segment of the elderly population -- the "old old." Most seniors would agree that 80 is when true old age, with its inexorable decline and loss, sets in. This is the part of the aging population exhibiting the greatest growth. In the United States the number of centenarians has gone from 15,000 in 1980 to 100,000 at the beginning of the 21st century.

Since the old old usually need special help and care, writing about this age group tends to be gloomy. Growing Old in Christ is no exception. But the gloom is of a particular kind. These essays make a large distinction between the place of the old in society and their place in the church. Only in the church, the writers argue, do old people find their rightful role and place. But that role, as defined here, may not necessarily be welcomed by all old people. Growing Old in Christ is written by people not yet in the "old old" age bracket and with little input from them. It would have benefited from the kind of research that underlies Vaillant’s book and, to a lesser extent, Trafford’s.

Hanerwas and Laura Yordy claim that the most striking feature of growing old in America is loneliness. "Friendship with the elderly is almost unimaginable, as our very conception of what it means to be old is isolation." Old friends move away or die, and take with them "the confirmation of our identity." Memory, often a comfort, can just as often inflict pain by reminding us of what we have lost or have failed to do. New friendships tend to be shallow, focused on sharing superficial pastimes rather than on the mutual development of character.

This view of aging and the place of the church aligns well with Vaillant’s finding that organized religion is especially attractive for lonely old people, those with a tendency toward depressive illness and those whose childhoods were lacking in hope and love. But it’s noteworthy that Hauerwas and Yordy’s general view of the plight of the elderly in society is much darker than Vaillant’s, who based his conclusions on data and interviews.

Hauerwas and the other essayists are on firmer ground when they write of the importance of holding on to the Christian story, which gives meaning to individual stories and provides "rich resources to make possible friendship between the elderly and, perhaps most important, becoming and remaining friends with ourselves as we age." Since Christian communities live by memory~ and the church’s central feast is a feast of memory, the old have an essential role in the church. They are the keepers of the meaning, the repository and tellers of the story of the communion of saints.

Though Hauerwas and his collaborators realize that not all old people are wise, and that we cannot expect them to be, "there is no substitute for some old people in the church being wise. Someone must know how to tell the stories well." In our society, the experience of the old has little value; in the church, a community of tradition it has great value. Perhaps the most essential role of the elderly in the church, according to the writers in this book, is to be models for the young -- models of continuing growth in virtue, of aging as "an opportunity for a rich life of service," and of "how to grow old and die."

People who have led virtuous lives usually do die well, as Joel James Shuman reminds us in ‘The Last Gift." A good death, he says, "is finally nothing more or less than a death approached and performed in a manner consistent with a good, well-lived life . . . Dying well is a morally significant act insofar as it bears evangelical witness to our most profound theological convictions."

Unfortunately, Shuman’s essay is an example of a prescriptive tone in these essays that becomes bothersome. One wonders if all this talk of the old "performing" a good death is a way of placing a burden on the old, adding another anxiety on those already anxious about many things. Shuman also has a prescription for care: he suggests that the young old -- those no longer encumbered by raising children or meeting the demands of a profession -- should be the ones in the church to care for elderly people who need help. And, indeed, many of them already do so. But should we fault the young old when they want to travel or enjoy the pleasures of leisure? Hasn’t the church long insisted that people have different gifts, and that the faithful exercise of those diverse gifts, not age-based assignments, together builds the body of Christ?

Growing Old in Christ makes an excellent start at formulating a theology of aging and defining the relationship between the elderly and the church. One hopes that subsequent books on faith and aging will engage the social research, allow the old to speak more for themselves, and moderate prescription with description.

Happily Married with Children

The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts By Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee. Houghton Mifflin, 352 pp., $22.95.

The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart. By Constance R. Ahrons. HarperCollins, 301 pp., $23.00.

I am absolutely convinced that children need to be brought up in a family where they see a man and a woman in a good relationship together," said Judith Wallerstein in a recent interview with the CENTURY. Constance Ahrons would agree, though she argues that such a relationship is possible not only between married couples but between those who have achieved a "good divorce." Wallerstein and Ahrons are both psychologists with teaching and research appointments at major universities. Both base their books on what they consider pioneering studies of American families, as well as on their own experience. Amid the countless books and magazine articles offering advice on marriage and relationships, these works stand out for their emphasis on character and virtue.

Wallerstein (whose book is coauthored by journalist Sandra Blakeslee) addresses marriage and family life with a sense of urgency. Her earlier study of the long-term effects of divorce convinced her of the need to identify and describe happy marriages. She is engaged in a 25-year follow-up study of youngsters whose parents divorced in the early'70s, when American divorce rates began to rise. "A whole lot of them are saying that they have never seen a single happy marriage. That began to scare me more and more.

"Our culture has become skeptical about marriage. One of the unintended side effects of our high divorce rate is that many of our young people are avoiding marriage." Yet Wallerstein contends that as the stresses and demands of the workplace increase and people's sense of belonging to an extended family and to a community decline, people will need a happy marriage more than ever.

Her book is a strong counterargument to Tolstoy's dictum that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way -- as if unhappy families were more interesting than happy ones. Trusting the intelligence and sophistication of readers, she does not write a "how to" book, but rather presents case studies of good marriages, noting the commonalities and differences. Though Wallerstein is aware of the stresses on modem marriages, she sees this period as one of great opportunity. "People have a lot more freedom now to build the kind of marriages they want. They don't have to fit into their grandmother's traditional mode. I was surprised to find that very few of the couples I studied wanted marriages like their parents had had, even when they realized that their parents had been very happy in those marriages."

Wallerstein's conclusions are drawn from in-depth interviews with 50 couples from the San Francisco Bay area. All had been married for at least nine years (rates of divorce peak in the seventh year of marriage), had at least one child and had marriages that both spouses considered happy, lasting and good. She has been criticized because her sample is not only small but drawn almost entirely from the white middle class. Wallerstein replies that this is a hypothesis-generating study that can lead to further investigations of other groups-such as ethnic groups in which the extended family plays a larger role, or same-sex couples. Still, she thinks many of her findings will prove to be true across the board.

Wallerstein's conclusions upset a number of conventional beliefs. One such belief is that romantic love inevitably fades as couples face the realities of everyday life. About 15 percent of the people in her study had marriages that remained intensely romantic even after 20 or 30 years. In such marriages, partners continue to feel that their union is magical, that it transcends time-and their sexual relationship remains passionate and central. This finding will comfort those who have never been able to agree with such writers as C. S. Lewis, Erich Fromm or M. Scott Peck, who think it inevitable -- or, for Lewis, even desirable -- that romance and passion metamorphose into a steady, sober, everyday kind of love. (The compensation, they argue, is that one can then direct one's primary energies to other things: careers, friendships, improving the world, tending the garden.)

Wallerstein also challenges the notion that it is better for couples not to idealize each other. Idealizing one's beloved and holding high expectations of marriage are necessary, she believes, if people are to have the energy to build strong unions. Happily married people develop a double vision: they see each other realistically, as flawed and aging people, but also idealistically, as the wonderful beings with whom they first fell in love.

Such idealization must not be a form of self-deception. if, like Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch, one sees a pedantic old scholar engaged in useless research as the Milton of his age, one is bound to be disillusioned. But spouses who think of each other as good and virtuous people encourage each other to live up to that ideal. The first man Wallerstein interviewed had, before he married, been for ten years a single, affluent man-about-town involved with many pretty women. He talked about how he adored his wife because she had principles and a morality. People need to feel that both they themselves and their spouses are worth loving.

The "romantic" marriage is only one type of good marriage. "Companionate," "rescue" and "traditional" marriages can each be happy -- and each offers its own challenges. Conflicts are especially inevitable in the companionate marriage -- the most common form among younger couples -- in which husband and wife are both invested in their careers and try to share family roles equally. Many of the choices they must make defy compromise. It is impossible to live in New York for his career and in Chicago for hers, or to have half a child. Because people in this kind of marriage are often worn out by multiple demands and the difficulty of juggling all the aspects of their lives, these marriages are especially fragile.

For each kind of marriage, Wallerstein describes an antitype -- a particular way it is likely to go off course. Those in companionate marriages who do not give enough attention to maintaining their life as a couple can become more like brother and sister than spouses. They live amicably side by side, with little passion or romantic attachment. Traditional marriages, in which the man is the primary breadwinner and the woman devotes herself to childrearing, homemaking and providing comfort and emotional support, are still fulfilling to many couples, young and old. The danger here is that couples may focus so much on their children that they find themselves distant from one another and with little in common after the children leave home.

One of Wallerstein's surprising and encouraging findings was that even people who had suffered terrible abuse or neglect in childhood could still form happy and satisfying "rescue" marriages -- marriages that healed the hurts of the past and enabled people to raise their children lovingly and well. She describes two such marriages. In one the partners knew each other's story well and had great respect for the partner's suffering and strength in overcoming adversity. In the other marriage the partners fought frequently and vented the feelings that lingered from their distressing childhoods yet were careful not to physically hurt or lose their loving concern for each other. In rescue marriages spouses strongly identify with one another and help each other avoid repeating destructive patterns from their pasts.

Rescue marriages in particular illustrate people's capacity to learn, change and grow throughout their life-times. In good marriages of every kind, Wallerstein finds, learning often takes place intuitively. People learn to understand and feel with each other, and adjust their actions accordingly. Regarding the common wisdom that good communication is crucial to marriage, she says, "I would be annoyed if I had to constantly explain what I was feeling. If a man can't tell what I'm feeling, he should work at it."

Working at marriage means, among other things, negotiating a predictable series of tasks. Wallerstein provides a chapter on each: separating from the family of origin; building togetherness and creating autonomy; becoming parents; coping with crises; making a safe place for conflict; exploring sexual love and intimacy; sharing laughter and keeping interests alive; providing emotional nurturance; and preserving a double vision.

"When I sit down with a couple that's divorcing, the first question I ask myself is 'Was this ever a marriage to begin with?"' Wallerstein states. "Was there ever a capacity to identify with the marriage, or have these two people just been living side by side? People in good marriages have the ability, out of love, of empathy, of some imaginative quality that is high in young adults, to create what I think of as the third person in a marriage -- the marriage itself, as a separate entity worth considering and fighting for. When facing problems or decisions, the couple asks not just 'Is this good for me, or for you,' but 'How will this affect the marriage?"' Many people have never created this sense of marriage as a "we-ness" worth nurturing and protecting. Marriages without such a sense are seldom strong enough to survive the trials' and crises of life.

Wallerstein describes a husband and wife whose house burned down. Afterward, each behaved in ways the other considered bizarre. The wife wanted to bake cookies and to buy flowers for their dining room table, though both the kitchen and the table had been destroyed. The husband became obsessed with filing insurance claims. They fought more fiercely than ever before. But they saw what was happening to their relationship. "They said, 'My God, the marriage is going to be a casualty, like the house, unless we can stop.' And they did stop. They said, 'We don't want to do this to each other.' In contrast, the people I see in divorce keep scapegoating each other because they don't see the marriage as a separate thing that must be protected."

Wallerstein gives an example of this sense of priority from her own life. "I know that if we were in an earthquake, an explosion, or any other kind of disaster, my husband would find me before he did anything else. I and our marriage would be his priority. And this sense of family, rather than a mother living at one end of town and a father at the other, is what children need."

Good marriages, Wallerstein finds, can sometimes survive infidelity, but they can't survive love affairs. When the people she interviewed talked about infidelity, they talked about "one-night stands, on the road, far away from home. I think the conclusion to be drawn is that we've underestimated the consequences of doing a lot of business travel. One of the men in my study spent every other month on the road. The absolute priority claimed by the workplace and what that does to marriage emerged very clearly in my study. We've become aware of how the workplace cuts into the parent-child relationship, but we haven't thought enough about what it does to marriage. The people in my study became very upset if they discovered an infidelity, but they could distinguish a brief affair from what they regarded as the central importance of the emotional commitment of the marriage. They did recognize that people sometimes slip." She states, "In my book, I'm trying to present models of men and women who are friends and lovers, who respect and trust each other, who get mad and scream at each other and who settle their arguments and go on. You don't need to be a saint in order to have a good marriage."

Though Wallerstein's book does not talk much about religion, in conversation she expresses concern about the church's role in preparing young people for marriage and in helping people as they go through divorce. She suggests that churches evaluate their premarital counseling efforts by calling couples a year after their marriage to ask two questions: "What do you remember about what was said to you as you prepared for marriage?" and "What would you have liked the pastor or rabbi to say that wasn't said?"

"That's just the beginning of what we need to find out," she states. "We need to think about how we can prepare young people for marriage without scaring them away from it. I wonder if just before their wedding is the best time to talk to people about marriage. Should we begin talking about relationships earlier? Should we continue to offer counseling after the wedding?"

Wallerstein is also concerned about the reluctance of religious institutions to deal with divorce. "I keep scolding ministers because they don't visit divorcing families," she says. Adolescents especially need help at such times-particularly in dealing with the moral issues involved in their parents' divorce. "When a 15-year-old boy comes to my office and says he wants to talk about whether his father, who has left the family, is still a good man, he's in the wrong place. That's a question pastors, not clinicians, are trained to deal with. The churches have really not understood how lonely and in how much of a moral quandary people are during a divorce."

When Wallerstein told a meeting of professional women that she intended to write a book about good marriages, they responded with skepticism. Our culture often seems to view marriage as stifling for women and divorce as a necessary step of growth and self-fulfillment. In The Good Divorce Ahrons takes a very different approach from Wallerstein's, but it's one that also evokes skepticism. When she talks about how to structure healthy divorces, many people in her audience immediately wonder, Can divorces be good?

Ahrons argues that "good divorce" is not an oxymoron. She is convinced that divorce is normal, that it is here to stay, and that it follows predictable patterns. Only when we accept current divorce rates as she suggests, will we tackle the hard task of making our divorces "good."

Underlying this loosely written book is a simple argument: high divorce rates are inevitable in modem society; parents who divorce are capable of creating and maintaining a harmonious relationship with each other; therefore people must be encouraged to build, and society must validate, a new kind of family structure, the binuclear family. A binuclear family is one that has "split into two nuclei, two households, each headed by one parent."

Divorce is a normal response to changing social and economic conditions, says Ahrons. It is one of the ways in which our families are "trying to survive and evolve within a rapidly changing society." She cites many reasons for divorce: romance fades, and marriages built on love alone are inherently unstable; women's new social and economic freedom makes them unwilling to put up with abusive or uncommunicative spouses (which explains why between two-thirds to three-fourths of divorces in Western societies are initiated by women); people change and grow, and marriages that suited them at one stage of their lives may not suit them at another; and increasing life expectancy permits us "to live many incarnations within a single life span," making serial monogamy a sensible pattern. Since these features of life are not about to change, divorce will remain an intrinsic part of married life, marriage and family are no longer synonymous, and we must aim not so much to prevent divorce as to prevent divorce's "negative consequences."

Ahrons studied 98 families randomly selected from the divorce records in one Wisconsin county. She concluded that about half the families have "good" divorces. She types divorced parents "according to their style of communication and interaction" as Fiery Foes, Angry Associates, Cooperative Colleagues and Perfect Pals, and attempts to show how people can be Cooperative Colleagues. (Perfect Pals, she admits, is a category out of reach for most people who divorce.)

Two people who have a child together can never stop being kin to each other, she asserts. If they choose not to be married, they must nevertheless devote themselves to remaining a family for that child. Whether they can succeed in raising their children well depends to a large extent on their ability to form a good postdivorce relationship. Such a relationship requires learning to manage anger well and to develop empathy and good will toward one another. Even the most antagonistic couple, Ahrons contends, can learn to form a civil, friendly limited partnership for raising their children. A bonus for those who build such a postdivorce relationship is that they are more likely to have happy second marriages.

In the binuclear family that Ahrons envisions as the dominant family form of the 21st century, children will rotate between two loving households, and they will find the arrangement enriching. Their parents will be creative in finding satisfying patterns for binuclear family life. Mothers and fathers may spend alternate weeks in the family home. If a job takes one parent to another location, the children might live with their mother one year, their father the next. Parents who share custody will each keep a calendar of their children's activities on the kitchen wall. When parents remarry, children will benefit from a greatly expanded kinship network. When children graduate or marry, three or four proud parents may hold hands and celebrate with them.

Though Ahrons is well intentioned, this vision seems utopian. With all the good will in the world, blended families often do not function smoothly -- which is one of the main reasons why second marriages end in divorce more frequently than first marriages. Many children do not adapt well to moving back and forth between families and homes. And having four parents and endless siblings is likely to be as disorienting as it is stimulating to children. Ahrons herself admits that it took many years before she and her former husband could overcome their mutual hostility and anger so that they could function well together as parents. Years of their children's lives passed before they were able to become a good binuclear family.

Parents who divorce certainly should strive to understand and respect each other, and surely they should put their children's welfare first and cooperate to that end. But it seems dangerous to accept high divorce rates as normal, as Ahrons suggests. The divorce cases Ahrons cites give further cause for uneasiness. She refers to the man in his 40s who divorces his wife because her commitment to church and to gardening and her dislike of tennis make him doubt that she will be a sufficiently amusing partner to cheer his retirement years; a young mother who admits that her husband is her best friend, but who divorces him because she no longer feels very romantic toward him; a woman who marries someone she doesn't especially like because she fears she may never find anyone better and then, after having several children, does find someone more to her liking. Rather than accepting such divorces as inevitable, we might teach people to choose more seriously and wisely, and encourage couples to change and solve problems together.

Ahrons does not downplay the amount of emotional maturity and effort a good divorce requires. But this part of her argument raises another question: If people's love for their children can motivate them to make heroic efforts to be good parents after divorce, couldn't the same amount of effort be expended to make many of the marriages work in the first place?