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The building that was constructed by the church community that I helped to start is small but walled with windows that permit those inside to gaze out in all directions. Because the structure sits on the top of a hill, we could arrange our worship furniture to face virtually any point on a distant horizon.

Now imagine the horizon of Northrop Frye’s great circle of Western literature. Orient the genres of literature according to the cardinal points of a compass. To the east, with its promise of dawn after a dark night, envision works of comedy. Comedy, like the eastern horizon, manifests the regular return of light and renewal. Move around the circle through romantic comedies and comic romances until reaching the south and its pure romantic interpretations. In the bright sun and sharp shadows of a southern exposure, romance pits innocent good against obvious evil in high noon adventure. Then arrange the tragic romances and romantic tragedies on the arc between south and west. The pure tragedies meet the setting western sun. There in the inevitable decline of light occur interpretations that follow life to its certain obliteration. Put the ironies in the northern night and cold. What gives life in the ironic north is not cosmic certainty but a sense of common unheroic humanity.

Surrounding the congregational house is what Frye portrays as a total quest myth that circles from romantic adventure through tragic despair and ironic darkness into a comic dawn, there to begin the whole round again. Any single work of literature is a recognizable bit of the gigantic circle of human interpretation. No human being sees the whole. Each instead is oriented, by a story, toward some direction within the total horizon.

Congregations adopt a similar orientation. Were any of them to be situated in our windowed church building surrounded by the total horizon of the Western world’s literary interpretation, they would arrange themselves to face a particular point on the circle. Different congregations would face different ways.

I first became aware of the structure of the narratives that express world view several years before the discovery of my cancer, when I began during my sabbatical year to study congregations systematically. Part of my activity in the two churches I studied was to interview as many members as possible to determine what themes each group employed to organize the world. Almost immediately I found I had to discard several firmly held assumptions about the nature of parish world view. This chapter may help other students of the congregation to avoid my mistakes and to dig deeper into a field whose intricacy extends well beyond even the lines of inquiry and interpretation I finally adopted.

After only a few conversations it was evident that a catechetical approach -- one in which I would ask what an informant understood about some credal tenet such as the Trinity or salvation -- did not plumb the richness of that member’s perception of life. It was not that Christian beliefs were superficial aspects of the person’s world view. The problem rather lay in the way my questions were posed. When I would ask respondents to describe some theological topic in their working picture of reality, I translated their ongoing portrayal of life into abstract categories. Not only was abstraction a different operation from the narrative manner by which they usually interpreted their existence, it was also a game that I, their theologically trained interviewer, was by reputation better equipped to play than they. They usually answered questions about the nature of God and redemption in an embarrassed, defensive, or ingratiating way. When I decided to study congregations, I had imagined an idealized field scene in which native informants would satiate the anthropologist with information about the local religion. That never happened in my interviews. In a local church, members participate in religion more readily than they explain it.

I had to find an approach other than the catechetical one to encourage conversation about beliefs. What worked best, it developed, were sessions in which members recalled a crisis in their own lives and went on to tell what they suspected was happening "behind" the event. When members would talk about a death or a trying family circumstance, for example, they would often augment the account with other stories that, like the ones in my hospital room, interpreted the crisis by introducing other metaphors.

Most of the remainder of this chapter categorizes these interpretations, and the next chapter details the guided interviews and other methods I used to examine the setting of parish story. But before moving into these matters, I must confess the other mistaken assumption I had made about the nature of world view.

I did not adequately anticipate the complexity of the views that church members hold. I had once thought that I could employ a bipolar scale in characterizing belief, one that assumed that the views of persons might be located at some position between orthodoxy (or conservatism) and modernism (or liberalism). But those simple two-pole distinctions were not much help in my analysis of interviews of members. I needed four basic categories to differentiate the range of beliefs expressed in the interviews. Although one type, which I call canonic, did express a kind of conservative standpoint, and although another, which I call empiric, conveyed the outlook of many liberals, those two categories did not exhaust the interpretive options that members employed in their stories. I also found orientations that I came to call the gnostic and the charismatic categories. The four categories can be differentiated in the following manner:

Canonic Reliance upon an authoritative interpretation of a world pattern, often considered God’s revealed word or will, by which one identifies one’s essential life. The integrity of the pattern requires that followers reject any gnosis of union with the pattern but instead subordinate their selfhood to it. Characteris-tics of the canonic orientation are similar to those of Frye’s tragic genre.

Gnostic Reliance upon an intuited process of a world that develops from dissipation toward unity. The ultimate integrity of the world requires the deepening consciousness of those involved in its systemic outworking and their rejection of alienating canonic structures. Characteristics of the gnostic orientation are similar to those of Frye’s comic genre.

Charismatic Reliance upon evidence of a transcendent spirit personally encountered. The integrity of providence in the world requires that empirical presumptions of an ordered world be disregarded and supernatural irregularities instead be witnessed. Characteristics of the charismatic orientation are similar to those of Frye’s romantic genre.¹

Empiric Reliance upon data objectively verifiable through one’s own five senses. The integrity of one’s own person requires realism about the way things demonstrably work and the rejection of the supernatural. Characteristics of the empiric orientation are similar to those of Frye’s ironic genre.

Further themes and concepts that characterize each category are listed in the table on pages 70-71. Before we delve into these, it is important to ponder how the orientations were employed in actual discourse.

I found from the beginning that, though one of the categories might best describe an informant’s interpretation, that person was actually engaged in a more complex negotiation that used two or three of the types in different ways. The stories I heard were constructed in the manner that structural analysts of literature propose. Students of narrative semiotics, those who investigate the internal logic of a passage of literature, often use a "semiotic square" to describe a story’s relation to a series of four opposing propositions. They find that a text gains its meaning by rejecting one of the propositions, accepting its opposite and implicating a third assertion. I have not engaged in such studies and my four categories are not the deep structures that semioticians find in literature, but common assumptions about narrative structure probably prompt both their observations and mine.² In any case, a square of opposition gives dimension to the kinds of negotiation that people undertake among the four world view categories (see Figure B).

When persons are encouraged to address critical situations, they respond in narratives that tell of a complex negotiation among several categories of world view. The setting of their own story often gains its force of argument from an opposite position that is rejected, and is supplemented by reference to attributes of still a third standpoint. The negotiation once again shows how dependent personal belief is upon the larger imaginative process of humanity. One’s singular position expresses and requires the total struggle of humanity for meaning. It simply does not stand alone or outside, in judgment of the whole. One finds in any person’s world view, as does Frye in a single poem, the full range of human imagination. Using the actual words of church members recorded during my sabbatical year and after, the four categories as negotiations for world view are illustrated below.

The Gnostic Negotiation

A newspaper editor explains his ambivalent feeling about his church:

Having opposed his strict canonic upbringing, the editor’s story moves toward gnostic unity:

He recounts his consciousness of a world in which stress is resolved:

At another point in our interview the editor drew secondary support from a more charismatic argument about spiritual entities different from the gnostic flow toward unity.

Such a secondary alliance with a neighboring category exists in many accounts of world view struggle. Attention shall be drawn to it in the statements that follow, though my primary purpose is to describe the four types in themselves.

Reality in the gnostic negotiation is ultimately dependable. Narratives that relate a gnostic outlook usually begin with a depiction of estrangement but end with the integration of all that was once alienated. The critical point in the story is, of course, the reception of gnosis, the inner knowing, which confers an awareness of the way things really are. In the end the cosmos not only proves true to the reality revealed in consciousness but finally itself becomes that consciousness.

The gnostic journey begins in bafflement and first looks for ultimate meaning in the wrong places. This, said one person, is the source of fear: "At the time my dad was ready to die, he was almost totally paralyzed, but he had this terror-stricken expression. He knew that he was about to die, but I couldn’t figure out why he was afraid. I was already into reincarnation at that time and said to myself, ‘Why should he be afraid?"’ In this instance the gnosis that freed the respondent from the terror of death was his knowledge that the body, whether personal or cosmic, has an inner nature that cycles its way through time and death toward the blissful pleroma of all that is.

For many, the gnosis is nothing as exotic as reincarnation; it may be, rather, a sense of abiding power. Listen to a city church member committed to supporting the rights of the poor:

She states her opposition to the canonic and charismatic sides:

She speaks of how such a comforting idea impels her to work among the urban poor:

Many quite different scenarios support the movement toward cosmic unity. Over 20 percent of Americans, half of them churchgoers, today practice the gnosis of astrology as a method of self-realization. ³ And smaller numbers seek, or are influenced by, experiences of clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, and other extrasensory perceptions that provide clues to their views of the personal as well as the cosmic mind.⁴

A more pervasive form of gnosis today is the "possibility thinking" of Robert Schuller. Possibility thinking and its predecessor, positive thinking, set the world aright and promise a complete, harmonious life. Schuller’s television program is a tireless reiteration of the comic story of life that begins in frustration and discord but through enlightenment ends in beautiful harmony. The Crystal Cathedral, with its fountains and flowers, catches -- as other major religious television programs holding different world views do not -- the awareness that the world and its inhabitants are good and that in such recognition the world moves toward wholesome fulfillment.

As it moves from illusion through gnosis, the story line of the gnostic negotiation ends in a final order and solution to life.

The passages cited in this section are also characterized by their positive, optimistic tone, a tone less familiar to readers who frequent congregations with certain other orientations. Both gnostic and charismatic narrative can be distinguished from the other categories by what scientists call spontaneity. Its opposite is entropy. (Some scientists now find evidence for both forces in the universe.⁵) Gnostic and charismatic approaches assume the spontaneous inner energy of the known world, whether in the cosmos itself (the gnostic view), or by active spirit, as the charismatic view has it. At my bedside, the comic and romantic tales were stories of the cure to be found in the spontaneity of faithful life.

Most church members and physicists, however, think the world is moving toward entropy, its static equilibrium. Denying an inner energy in life, the tragic and ironic stories told about my cancer spoke instead of decline into the dissolution of death. Only a minority in mainline churches sustain a sense of the world’s spontaneity required to continue gnostic or charismatic negotiations of the world. But still the arguments of those categories are present, since the other positions, more common at least in the main line, are formed in relation and opposition to them.

The Charismatic Negotiation

A teacher:

That estimation of Spirit spontaneously active in the world is based upon personal experience.

Heroically the self in the charismatic negotiation works out a romantic, not a comic, story. The setting for the charismatic narrative is a more frightening and thrilling place than the gnostic world. The calm serenity of gnostic process disappears. The world instead gives paradoxical signals: souls are eternally damned in it, yet God does not fail those who trust in him. In a charismatic world, the source of integrity is not an evolving cosmos but the constancy of God. The world in which the charismatic lives is fundamentally equivocal and dangerous, challenging the believer to seek its blessings amid the peril of evil forces and events. God’s steady providence, however, accompanies the self who launches out toward God in an exciting, romantic adventure. Though like the gnostics their goal is a happy ending, charismatics distinguish their sense of empowerment by God’s Spirit from a gnostic trance in which the self gains mystic union with God. Charismatics maintain a persistent dualism of spirit and body.⁶ God surely enters and transforms the body, but does not merge with it.

What differentiates the charismatic and canonic approaches to the world from gnostic and empiric negotiations is their sense of transcendence. Both God and the human soul are ultimately distinct from the world. In contrast, the gnostic and empiric understandings find God and self ultimately embedded in the experienced world, finally indistinguishable from its nature. Figure C shows this two-way division, and the division between entropy and spontaneity, explored above, that crosscuts it.

The charismatic story begins with discomfort about conventionality. Routine, domestic life is judged inadequate, and the self yearns for a more immediate, direct experience of God’s power. "I wanted Jesus to be my Lord and not just my Savior," recounted one charismatic, noting characteristically that the redemption that all Christians can claim was only a first step in the "walk" of the faithful.

Oral Roberts, whose television programs typify the romantic world view, paraphrases Eliza Doolittle to express the disdain with which the charismatic approach views conventional Christianity:

Words, words, words, we’re sick of words. We’ve heard your theologies. We’ve listened to your sermons. Will you please now give us a demonstration. We want to see. Show us.⁷

Leaving behind daily routine, the self ventures into an uncertain world. As romantic hero, the self enters what Frye calls "the stage of the perilous journey."⁸ There it tarries, like the disciples in Jerusalem, awaiting the Spirit’s power. Audaciously the self lifts both its sense of personal importance and also its expectation of God’s invading grace. Evil is encountered, even demons themselves:

For many, the evil occurs in an affliction of the personal or family body. Dissatisfied with, or distrustful of, conventional therapy, the charismatic seeks evidence of Pentecostal power.

God rewards the search; the romantic adventure ends in the triumph of God’s love. The hero becomes the home of God’s Spirit. Evil is vanquished (7 percent of all Americans report that they have healed by faith¹⁰ ) but, even more important, the floodgates of God’s blessing are thrown open wide to those who venture beyond religious convention. In a second baptism the indwelling Spirit brings gifts, fruits, and miracles. The person directly experiences what one recipient called "the liquid love" of God poured through her, profoundly altering her sense of life and the sacred.

Glossolalia also mark the charismatic sense of a divinity that indwells yet nevertheless distinguishes itself by the act of language. Oral Roberts tells the story of tongues:

The romantic story culminates in the exaltation of the hero.¹² In the charismatic world view, the self is similarly honored, not by comic ekstasis but by the romantic enthousiasmos of indwelling spirit.¹³ An airline pilot’s wife tells her story:

As must now be evident, the charismatic orientation may be cloaked in the style of those groups which call themselves charismatic or Pentecostal, but it is important to note that the charismatic negotiation is primarily a structure and as such may give form to the world views of persons and groups that do not adopt any of the features or practices of what is conventionally called charismatic religion. Indeed, the charismatic outlook need not be dramatic at all. Here is a more cautious story but one that nevertheless hews to the romantic line of a charismatic world view:

The Canonic Negotiation

A businesswoman:

Like tragedy, the canonic negotiation asserts the inevitable decline of the self. The charismatic story portrays an escape from the conventionality of life; the canonic story claims instead the certainty of life’s pattern. Born in sin, one is capable of no career but failure, no other end but death. Only by realizing the certainty of one’s fault and by submitting to the total sovereignty of the God who controls life does one resolve the decline. And even that resolution is postponed until after death, in the next world.

In this negotiation, the controlling canon provides integrity, functioning here as dependably as does God’s providence in the charismatic negotiation and the harmonious cosmos for gnostics. For canonic Protestants the inviolable canon is God’s word, the Holy Scripture. The Bible in their canonic eyes is completely reliable and authoritative. Roman Catholics who are canonic may find a similar integrity in the church’s traditional teaching authority. In the charismatic outlook, God’s pattern is tested by the spirit within oneself,¹⁵ but for the canonic, the canon is the final decree. "Whether the context is Greek, Christian or undefined," says Northrop Frye, "tragedy seems to lead up to an epiphany of law, of that which is and must be."¹⁶ The canonic Christian beholds a world fated for catastrophe, fulfilling the pattern laid down in Holy Scriptures and ancient teachings.

Although the canonic narrative develops along a tragic course, its beginning may give no forecast of catastrophic outcome. The self initially glorifies itself, thinking erroneously that it is autonomous, perhaps divine. Its hubris, or arrogance, seduces the self to claim its own freedom and goodness. The error of that claim is, however, quickly exposed in both great tragedies like Macbeth and canonic musings like that of a Southern Baptist:

One is not free and good. One is lost and sinful, and one’s story develops the costly consequences of one’s depraved nature. If the self remains disobedient, refusing to recognize the sovereignty of God, then life continues to deteriorate and ends in hell. If, however, one repents and accepts the lordship of Christ, one takes on a different yoke, of suffering love and obedience.

As Jerry Falwell maintains in his tragic television productions (which stand in opposition to the comic presentations of Robert Schuller), society slips toward its destruction. The moral fiber of the nation is decaying; families, schools, cities, and entertainment are close to disaster. Only by a massive mission can this nation be saved. Churches must become obedient, "Bible-centered, Bible-believing, Bible-teaching churches."

"The Christian is characterized," says a local pastor, "by humility and willingness to serve in whatever capacity or place Christ has given him." Narrative movement in the canonic world view thus directly contradicts the gnostic, its polar opposite. The canonic story traces a self that declines tragically from a state misunderstood as apotheosis to total subordination, while the gnostic story elevates the self from a state misunderstood as bondage to union with God.

Accepting the cross and its mortification is, in the canonic view, a joyful and often exciting event, supremely important to life and happiness after life ends. That joy is based, however, in the knowledge that the self is submissive to God’s will and is following God’s plan. "Until people," reports a pastor,

Ultimate happiness is deferred to an afterlife "on the other side" of present existence. "Home" has a different connotation for canonics than for charismatics. In the charismatic world view, the Holy Spirit makes its home within the present body. In canonic understanding, the "blessed home" is "beyond this land of woe, where trials never come, nor tears of sorrow flow." The pattern for life in the present land is that of Christ, who was willing to take the cross and, in the words of the famous evangelistic hymn, willing to suffer all of life’s misery:

Willing to go to Calvary,

Laying his glory aside,

Willing to hang there on the tree;

Willing to bear the agony,

Willing to die for you and me,

Jesus the crucified.¹⁷

In canonic pattern, Christ lays aside his prior glory and accepts the tragedy of life. A canonic follower of Christ in a nursing home makes sense of her own story by that model:

Sin and its consequences rule the person, making it imperative to achieve personal faith in Jesus Christ as savior from that sin and also a commitment to Christ as Lord. The canonic story in its personal mode begins in hubris and its deadly effects. To avoid the hell of one’s own sin one surrenders to Christ, dying to self, to be born again, as today 48 percent of all American Protestants report they have been.¹⁸ The rebirth that comes from conversion, however, is not an antinomian release from duty but an entry into a new life controlled by the canon. "So much of our life has been out of control," reflects an older Baptist:

The Empiric Negotiation

A social worker:

Although empirical observations of the world can be reduced to scientific propositions, their form in community discourse is narrational. A story as emotionally compelling as the romances and tragedies of other world views can be told in the ironic vein of the empiric view. The story may begin with some example of numinosity and then show counterevidence of its absurdity. An affirmation of ordinary human worth provides the conclusion. The setting of the empiric story shows an often anomalous world in which signs of the sacred are belied by their link to folly and injustice. It is by repudiating situations in which spirit power is said to dwell miraculously that true human stature emerges. In contradicting sacred explanations, one finds within human community itself the true mystery of life.

Truth emerges in empirical observation, not in revelation. The world is perceived through the senses, and by means of the senses the world’s regularity is demonstrated. The charismatic world view romantically draws one away from the conventionality of life into the contention of the sacred and the profane. The empiric sense of reality moves ironically in the opposite direction, away from assertions about divine presences and powers and toward the scientific understanding of the world’s regularity. The integrity that other negotiations discover in cosmic wholeness, or in God’s providence, or in canonic Scripture, is suspect in an empiric understanding. Here alleged processes and evidences of spirit are investigated and subjected to rational scrutiny. Mystic wisdom and miracles must be tested. Holy Scripture cannot be accepted as revealed truth but must be analyzed as historical data. For the empiric, the locus of integrity is within human society itself. Only in rational observation of reality, observation that others through their own senses can replicate, can reliable indication of the nature of the world be found. And only as human society frees itself from a thralldom to concepts, leaders, and structures that draw on supernatural assumptions can that integrity manifest itself in honesty, justice, and equality.

No television preacher of national renown orients his or her program from a strictly empiric viewpoint. Coming closest to that outlook is probably someone like Walter Cronkite, who, with good heart and human fellowship, displayed the world’s anomalies -- starving children, wars, and crimes -- and then concluded his show with ironic summary: "That’s the way it is."

In local churches the empiric negotiation appears in a mitigated manner that Wade Clark Roof characterizes as "cosmopolitan religion."¹⁹ Thoroughgoing empirics tend to avoid organized religion altogether, but many whose outlook is dominated by this orientation are in fact faithful church members. As Roof points out, their religion affirms: (a) the centrality of ethical principles in their meaning systems; (b) a parsimony of beliefs, few attributions of numinosity; (c) breadth of perspective; (d) piety defined as a personal search for meaning; and (e) license to doubt.

An empiric story rejects examples of supposedly superior piety and proposes instead a reasonable loyalty to God and fellow human beings.

Contradicting a charismatic understanding of spontaneous divinity within the person, the empiric self opposes those who behave as if they were "holier than thou" and is anxious to deny any special sanctity conveyed in his or her person. "The main lesson," reports a woman troubled about religious hypocrisy,

An empiric person finds, having purged the self of spiritual presumption, how much one has in common with other persons, none now superior or subordinate, and all deserving love.

Empirically oriented literature, says Frye, "takes for granted a world which is full of anomalies, injustices, follies and crimes, and yet is permanent and undisplaceable. Its principle is that everyone who wishes to keep his balance must learn first of all to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut."²⁰

Congregational World View

A differentiation among the world views of various congregations such as I have laid out here is not widely employed. Most observers of the parish would readily acknowledge a bipolar categorization of congregations that distinguishes liberal parishes from conservative ones, and some differentiate parishes according to three interpretations (such as literal, antiliteral, and symbolic)²¹ of Christian doctrine. But few advocate a more complex typology, and thus my quadripolar analysis of parish world view is unusual.

In fact, the capacity of a contemporary congregation to sustain any unified, sharply defined world view has been more frequently questioned than confirmed in recent studies of church life. To many observers, the outlooks and expectations of mainline congregations evince a bland uniformity indistinguishable from that of their surrounding society. In their investigation of churches in a Midwestern county, for example, W. Widick Schroeder and Victor Obenhaus describe as a major finding the absence in each of "informing cognitive structures."²² Jeffrey Hadden has held that "Christians join together in a common experience of faith when in reality there is no shared consensus regarding the nature of that faith."²³ "It can be safely said," states Thomas Luckmann, "that within Protestantism doctrinal differences are virtually irrelevant for members of the major denominations."²⁴ And the suburban church proved for Gibson Winter to be a middle-class enclave possessing little capacity for coherent belief distinct from that of the society that holds it captive.²⁵

Investigators who cite the amorphous nature of parish beliefs base their findings on responses that parishioners give to lists of credal statements (e.g., "Jesus is the Son of God," with scaled responses ranging from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree"). They find that members of a parish, especially one with liberal leanings, show little uniformity in their replies. One member may prize an orthodox interpretation of faith; the next may hold a looser interpretation. My own investigation does not center on responses to credal assertions, because I find that members build their world views from many more materials than Christian doctrine. As I reported earlier, I found it almost useless to ask direct, "Do you believe in . . . ?" questions in the manner of Gallup. People are too ready to assent to anything that sounds worthy and to deny anything that might possibly be perceived as silly or disloyal. And the symbols employed in such questions themselves dampen thought. Symbols have great stopping power for the nontheologian. In effect they "say it all," do not encourage reflection, and instead command mute allegiance.

I therefore framed my questions around what Peter Berger calls the "marginal situations of human existence [which] reveal the innate precariousness of all social worlds."²⁶ My intention was to encourage respondents to ponder various crises so that I might understand their interpretation of them. The consideration of death, the uncanny, life crises, and nonsense should evoke a concept of world order, a world view that accounts for them.

What I found in Corinth (the name I have given elsewhere to the town whose two principal churches -- Baptist and Methodist -- I spent my sabbatical year studying) is that most of the stories I heard in a particular congregation were similar in genre. Their settings, in other words, were the same. In the Methodist church, most of the stories were empiric, though many were also shaded by a strong canonic tinge. Least often heard were tales that countered the predominant empiric view, that is, charismatic ones. By contrast, in the Baptist church a canonic view predominated, leaning somewhat toward the empiric. Again, any echoes of the gnostic view -- the structural opposite of the canonic position -- were difficult to identify in members’ accounts of crises.

In the next chapter, further ramifications of and conclusions about congregational world view will emerge. For the moment, I want simply to report that my research in Corinth and studies since strongly suggest that even mainline congregations -- the type most observers have had most difficulty distinguishing from one another -- do maintain distinctive world views. In Corinth the manner in which one congregation framed its understanding of reality differed consistently from the outlook of the other. Such differences were denied by the participants in these parishes who, if they countenanced distinctions at all, would confine them to matters of practice (worship patterns, frequency of Scripture reading, baptism) and not faith. The majority of members of each church, nevertheless, gave different meanings to similar events and crises, and each group treated evidence of evil or the numinous or nonsense in a distinctive manner. From this I conclude that world views reflect and give a focus to group experience, providing a map within which words and actions make sense. The setting of a congregation is the order by which its gossip, sermons, strategies, and fights -- the household idiom -- gain their reasonableness. What is expressed in daily intercourse about the nature of the world is idiomatic, responsive to a particular pattern of language, expressing a particular setting for narrative. Tales in a local church tend to travel in packs: one good story evokes another, one member’s account of an illness, for example, is usually reciprocated in kind. In comradeship and commiseration members top each other’s stories, building up the world setting that they together inhabit.

Notes

1. ED. NOTE: See pp. 78-79, where the author explains, as he did in oral presentations of this material, that his use of the term "charismatic" refers to a general orientation to the Spirit, not to the specific religious groups called "charismatics." He also frequently noted that "gnostic," as he used the term, referred to a general orientation, not to specific historical groups or their teachings.

2. Similar to the traditional square of opposition used in formal logic, the semiotic square is used in Algirdas J. Greimas, Du sens: Essais sémiotiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), 136-50, and by the Entrevernes Group, Signs and Parables: Semiotics and Gospel Texts (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1978). The square points two semantic axes of contradictories, permitting operations among four elementary units of signification distinguished as contraries. An inference of opposition marks the relation between semes on either pole of one axis, with implication for the other two poles in the square. Analysts of semiotics would not designate, as I do, the axes by four specific poles. Brian Wicker, The Story shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics: Some Variations on a Theme (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1975), designates the axes but not the poles; so do Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson in the analysis of discourse. In all instances, however, utterance gains its significance from the tension marked by the axes; and the pattern of rejection of one pole in a unit of signification accompanied by an assertion of relation between two others, used by the semioticians, is similar to the narrative expression of setting found in a local church.

3. Gallup Opinion Index, Religion in America: Report No. 145 (Princeton: American Institute of Public Opinion, 1978).

4. Morton Kelsey, The Christian and the Supernatural (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976).

5. Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1980).

6. Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), 581. Knox distinguishes the gnostic and charismatic approaches as two distinct types of enthusiasm. A similar distinction obtains in Quincy Howe, Reincarnation for the Christian (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 58.

7. Oral Roberts, The Holy Spirit Now (Tulsa: Oral Roberts Associates, 1976), 44.

,8. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 187.

9. Ken Sumrall, What’s Your Question? (Monroeville, Pa.: Whitaker Books, 1969), 33.

10. Gallup Opinion Index, Religion in America: Report No. 145, 52.

11. Roberts, The Holy Spirit Now, 63.

12. Frye, Anatomy, 187.

13. The charismatic experience is a "sensation of surrender to an immersion in a larger reality: an experience perceived as self-fulfillment and enhancement of individuality rather than the loss of it" (Luther P. Gerlach and Virginia H. Hine, People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970], 124).

14. Dee Feuerstein and Lew Feuerstein, "No Thunder, But Life Changed After Accepting Christ," The Episcopalian 147 (1982): 13.

15. Richard Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics: The Origins, Development, and Significance of Neo-Pentecostalism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1975), 111.

16. Frye, Anatomy, 207.

17. Floyd W. Hawkins, "From His Celestial Abode Jesus Came," in Triumphant Service Songs (Chicago: Rodeheaver Co., 1934), no. 16.

18. Gallup Opinion Index, Religion in America: Report No. 145, 43.

19. Wade Clark Roof, Community and Commitment, 182ff.

20. Frye, Anatomy, 226.

21. Sociological analyses of beliefs occasionally use a tripolar model of world view. The LAM scale (Liberal, Antiliberal, and Mythological) is demonstrated in Richard A. Hunt, "Mythological-Symbolic Religious Commitment: The LAM Scales,"Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (1972): 42 52. Andrew M. Greeley, "Comment on Hunt’s’Mythological-Symbolic Religious Commitment: The LAM Scales,"’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (1972): 287-92, proposes a fourth nonliteral but transcendent category for the scales but argues only for its legitimacy as an autonomous position, not, as I do, for its role in completing a quadripolar approach to world view.

22. W. Widick Schroeder and Victor Obenhaus, Religion in American Culture: Unity and Diversity in a Midwestern County (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 94.

23. Jeffrey K. Hadden, The Gathering Storm in the Churches: The Widening Gap Between Clergy and Laymen (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 8: Co., 1969), 34.

24. Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan Co., 1967), 34.

25. Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, 82- 104.

26. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 24.

Not long ago a tumor was taken from my chest and I was told that I carry an indolent but incurable form of cancer. What, I asked myself on my hospital bed, was a decent chap like me doing in such deadly circumstances? What on earth was going on? The threat of my death provoked for me an unprecedented search for meaning. I sought a plausible account of the world that explained my plight.

My friends joined the search. In the uncertainty of my sickroom we tried to find accounts that, in the face of dying, would disclose the point of my life. The accounts tended to be stories -- personal recollections, tales of similar happenings, hopes, prayers, and resolutions about the future. Woven into their telling was the Christian faith that I and most of my friends subscribe to. That faith, plus other perceptions about our personal lives and the course of human history, provided a dimension to our stories that I call their setting: the world the story sets in which story’s plot can credibly unfold and its character develop.

One of the major undertakings of narrative discourse is the establishment of settings, the conditions within which the events of a tale gain their reasonableness. Along with plot and characterization, setting is a principal element of storytelling. It describes the story’s universe. So important is the development of setting in the narrative of a local church that three chapters will be devoted to exploring ways to analyze and understand the meanings implied in setting.

In an ethnographic analysis of a community the setting is termed its world view. In Geertz’s words, world view is the "picture" a group shares "of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order."¹ A community over time develops a shared sense of what is really going on in the world. In traditional societies, world views may be more uniform and explicit than those we encountered in Western, technological ones, but the social need to construct a commonly satisfactory setting for our lives was also evident in the sophisticated encounters in my hospital room.

World views, both ancient and modern, are fragile and incomplete constructions, subject to damaging contradiction. No world view is irrefutable, even to its ardent supporters, and indeed it is often in conjunction with events that challenge its adequacy that it is most urgently expressed. It was when my own life was most pointedly threatened, for example, that stories about the world were told with greatest frequency. Both the strength and the frailty of setting are associated with crises that challenge its significance. Geertz describes the link:

Setting is a group’s cosmic construction that accounts for crises. This working picture of reality often goes unexpressed until challenged. Then, in that tension, the plot thickens, and world view as story is related, binding even in the light of its contradiction the self to the Other, the finite frame to the world’s outcome.

Anthropologists such as Geertz and Robert Redfield ³ make a distinction between the world view of a community and its ethos. World view indicates the universe that the group constructs; ethos, by contrast, reflects the values and dispositions that the group maintains. World view encompasses a community’s perceptions and suspicions about what is happening in life. Ethos instead comprises its preferences and valuations of that life. I make a similar analytical distinction between the setting of parish story and its characterization. Character corresponds to the story’s ethos, its wishes, style, and norms, elements to be examined in the next major section of this book. In the present section the focus is the setting of parish story, its world view.

One should not expect to encounter fully developed cosmologies in the settings of parish story. A congregation’s thick description of its universe is expressed in local metaphors, not universal propositions. And a world view is more likely to be manifested, as it was in my hospital room, in stories about a personal life than in accounts about the world at large.

A personal story nevertheless dramatizes the way a community views itself and its total world. Mary Douglas has demonstrated how perceptions of the self mirror a society’s interpretation of both its corporate nature and the larger cosmos. In her pioneering study of cosmologies of different peoples, she shows that the human body is our most accessible metaphor for figuring what we really suspect about our group’s and the world’s makeup. According to Douglas, the way a group perceives and regulates the personal bodies of members corresponds with their view of their collective body. The human body, for Douglas, is a "natural symbol" by which a people order the systemic nature of their corporate life.

How a group sees and treats its members depends upon concepts that also articulate its corporate nature. However the members contemplate, heal, discipline, develop, pity, and finally commit their personal bodies is likely to coincide with the ways they understand and act on the corporate body of which they are a part.

The way a group understands the bodies of its members and its corporate body is also consonant with the way it views its world. Groups interpret the world by the same code that orders their individual and internal social activity. Thus there is a remarkable congruence among the three levels of bodied experience -- personal, social, and cosmic -- that a group identifies as systems within which life occurs. The shape of life at each level, its significance, and the stages of its development are frequently analogous. Any exploration of congregational world view therefore requires attention to the way a church sees and deals with its individual members, its corporate body, and the wider world. Since the belief system of a parish includes not only its formal creeds but also the meanings it assigns to itself and its members as finite bodies, to learn about a church’s world view -- what it believes is really going on in life -- one must listen to the church’s stories about its own body and those of the members who constitute it.

Hospital Stories

The tales told around my hospital bed illustrate what Geertz and Douglas have taught about world view. The stories were told at a time of acute crisis, in a situation that challenged the very world order the tales projected but that also required their telling. Struggling with me to establish an explanation of life that incorporated the fact of my condition, my friends put forward their images and experiences, knowing that none resolved the inevitable approach of my death, yet knowing even so that their tales were essential to our mutual quest for meaning and love.

The tales revolved around human bodies and their treatment. Illness, its course and possible cure, provided the metaphor by which we characterized our communities and universes. Although a number of my visitors held graduate degrees in theology and philosophy, our discourse seldom focused upon abstract propositions. In the urgency of my situation we projected our concepts of society and world through our narration of personal experiences.

The narratives we advanced were, however, remarkably varied in their outlook. They conveyed different senses of what life is about. While the tales all pictured the form and process of the world, the description each provided of the nature of that world conflicted with that of the others. And although all the stories addressed the evil of disease, each revealed one of several diverse suspicions about what the evil meant and thus posited a different world as the setting for its account, the meaning of each tale depending upon the distinctive nature of that world. ⁵

To understand the interpretations of life and death proposed in our narratives requires an appreciation of the types of worlds those stories constructed. To distinguish these worlds I shall first use the four narrative genres identified by Northrop Frye.⁶ Frye has laid out all of Western literature in a great imaginary circle that has four cardinal points much like those of a compass. The four points that orient the literary circle are, in clockwise order, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. The structure of a literary work, Frye argues, places it somewhere on the circle, if not fully within a particular genre, then somewhere between two adjoining types. The settings of the stories told about my illness can be seen in relation to the same circle of interpretation.⁷

Comic tales

Some accounts, notably those offered by some hospital chaplains and seminary students practicing hospital chaplaincy, conveyed primarily a comic sense of life. The essence of comedy, here and elsewhere, is not humorous incidents but a happy ending. (By my bed the tellers of comic tales were quite serious; they related, however, narratives that ended in the positive resolution of difficult situations.) Comedy projects a world that ultimately integrates its seemingly antithetical elements. Its direction is opposite to the disintegrative course of tragedy; it moves from problem to solution. In comedies as diverse as Shakespeare’s and those on prime time television, life progresses from a state of crisis created by some illusion to a harmonious recovery brought about by discovering the true nature of the circumstances.

In countless situation comedies we enter a world that is at first misunderstood (e.g., a husband sees his wife with another man and mistakenly infers she is having an affair). The crisis deepens until the true knowledge, the gnosis, is uncovered (the husband finds out that the wife was using the other man to help buy the husband’s birthday present). Comedies end in unions -- pacts, embraces, marriages -- that symbolize the ultimately trustworthy working of the world. Created in misinformation and convoluted by error, a comedy is resolved by the disclosure of a deeper knowledge about the harmonious way things really are.

The comic sense in some of my bedside narratives was based upon experiences of friends who as chaplains had had the opportunity to counsel cancer patients and to observe cases in which persons in dire situations actually had recovered from their immediate plight. In their stories that summarized these cases, the initial illusion was the terror a patient had of the cancer. According to the chaplains and such well-known cancer therapists as the Simontons (whose recent book bears the comic title Getting Well Again),⁸ as long as the patient does not understand the relationship between person and cancer, the malignancy festers. As in comedy, a misunderstanding exists, here between one’s mind and one’s body. Not understanding their deep connection, cancer sufferers are unaware how their mental stress encourages the growth of disease and how cancer in turn affects their disposition.

What patients must discover is the gnosis, the deeper knowing, that can unite self and body and interrupt the malignant relationship. In the words of one of my chaplains, "You must get with your cancer." You must learn, according to the cover of the Simonton book, the "revolutionary life-saving self-awareness techniques" that envision the cancer and the manner in which the body overcomes it. None of my chaplain colleagues implied that I would live happily ever after, but their stories projected a longer and more harmonious life made possible by a comic gnosis.

Romantic tales

Other stories told at my bedside conveyed a romantic sense of the world. Like the comic tales, the romances foresaw my possible cure, but the way to recovery was not by new knowledge but through spiritual adventure. My friends who told romantic stories were charismatic seminary students and some members of my parish church. They saw in my sickness the opportunity, were I to seek it, for God to love me in a surprising and thrilling way.

In romance occurs a quest for the most desirable object -- the distant planet in science fiction, the beloved in gothic novels, the lawful community in westerns. The hero or heroine leaves familiar surroundings and embarks on a dangerous journey in which strange things happen but a priceless reward is gained. Good and evil are sharply delineated in romance, protagonists and antagonists clearly displayed.

In their charismatic understanding of the world my friends who told romantic stories beckoned me to leave behind my domestic religious routine and wholeheartedly yield to the promise of God’s healing love. Were I to believe that God really works miraculously within history, and specifically through that part of the world which is my own historical body, I would become a seeker, forsaking views of the world in which God, playing a more passive role, does not break into lives and circumstances to transform them. According to these romantic tales, God’s Spirit would fill and empower me in adventure. I would persist in the face of evil, and my body through the Spirit would receive God’s gifts and fruits, including the gift of healing. "The hero of romance," Frye writes, "moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance unnatural to us are natural to him."⁹ I would become a hero in romance, venturing into the unknown, battling the evil, finding the good, and in the end gaining the prize, which, in my case, would be the release from my cancer as well as an experience of God’s intimate presence. I would encounter God in a new, personal way, by the romantic indwelling of God’s love and power. The wonders of the Bible still occur to those who seek them. I could expect a miracle.

Not all of my visitors, however, told stories of a world that promised healing. Comic and romantic narratives that envisioned cure were counterbalanced by tales of tragedy and irony that depicted settings in which I was to accept my body, and thus the world, as it is. Tragedy and irony do not, however, perceive the world’s course in the same way. Tragic stories detect an underlying purpose in our setting; the ironies do not.

Tragic tales

Tragedy portrays the decay of life and the necessary sacrifice of the self before resolution occurs. The self in tragedy, as in romance, is heroic, but unlike the romantic hero, the tragic hero submits to a harshly authentic world. No deus ex machina breaks miraculously into the tragic scene. The divine is revealed largely as the eternal law or word made plain only to the self subject to it. In both great tragic works and tragic everyday life the protagonist submits to the Other. The fall of great tragic heroes is more monumental than our own, but final catastrophe is our mutual fate. One does not leave the familiar in a tragic plot. Without magic by which to escape, the hero is shaped by the pattern of the Other and is obedient to it in death. When portrayed as tragic hero, Christ accepts the cross, with the intervention of neither romantic miracle nor comic gnosis. Those who follow the way of Christ live their lives tragically in the shadow of the cross. They suffer; they die to self and gain justification only beyond, and through, Christ’s death and their own.

Tragic stories told in my presence generally were offered by family members and fellow ministers. They stressed the importance of being honest about my condition. I was to be reconciled to my life and lot and even more to my God, bending my remaining time to God’s will. I was not, as in a comic frame, to "get with my cancer," but to get right with God. My tragic friends and I would honestly mark changes in my life and track its heroic descent into darkness. Linda Bamber writes of the tragic world:

What my family and clergy friends emphasized in their stories was not the sweet fulfillment of our own desires but our recognition of God’s laws governing our own short lives.

In identifying ourselves with God’s will, however, we would be saved. The reconciliation holds little likelihood of miracles. Death advances, but so does the promise of salvation through death. The law of God is revealed not only in the course of life but also in Scripture. By faith in the cross one is named to life eternal. The tragic hero is not cured but saved, by an identification with the transcendent pattern of tragic life. "Tragic heroes," says Frye, "are wrapped in the mystery of their communion with that something beyond which we can only see through them, and which is the source of their strengths and their fate alike."¹¹

Ironic tales

My fellow faculty members were the primary purveyors of ironic stories. One is a hero neither in irony nor among faculty colleagues. In either circumstance, supposed heroes are shown to be all too human, and this sober incongruity marked the tales my fellow teachers told. In ironic stories, reputedly worthy persons come to naught and what seem to be good plans go sour. Irony challenges heroic and purposive interpretations of the world. Events that in other story genres have sacred significance in irony have a natural explanation. Miracles do not happen; patterns lose their design; life is unjust, not justified by transcendent forces. Trapped in such an ironic world, one shrugs one’s shoulders about reports of divine ultimacies and intimacies. Instead of expecting such supernatural outcomes, one embraces one’s brothers and sisters in camaraderie.

In an ironic setting one is freed only as one accepts the arbitrary working of life and reaches out to a humanity in common plight. The ironic tales related in my room recognized the absurdity of my situation and did not predict my cure. My visitors focused upon medical prognosis. We looked realistically at scientific therapies that might stave off death. We avoided the compulsory sadness of tragedy. Our sober assessment of empirical data was accompanied by an ironic defiance of any prescribed emotion. In our fellowship many touched me and some prayed. Their prayers were narratives that anticipated the skill of the medical staff and our emotional well-being. As a brother caught in an incongruous world, I was, by their efforts, loved but not led to healing.

Most stories in Northrop Frye’s great literary circle blend two adjoining genres and are therefore identified by such double terms as comic ironies, tragic romances, or romantic tragedies (the noun in each phrase denotes the dominant type). Only the combinations of polar opposites -- comedy and tragedy, and romance and irony -- are structurally impossible.¹² Their worlds are contradictory: comedy moves from problem to solution, while tragedy moves from solution to problem; romance moves the self to the supernatural, while irony removes the supernatural from the self. The opposition of these types was evident in the reactions of my friends to stories other than their own. Least understandable to them were the opposite stories. Ironic interpretations were shocking to the tellers of romance. The ironists, in turn, had least patience with the miracles of the romantics. A similar antipathy existed between the comedians and the tragedians. Each saw the other as taking a liberty with the pattern of life. The tellers of tragedy identified the comic view as a shallow, godless trick; the tellers of comedies were quick to find in tragic narrative a legalistic, morbid obsession.

Many stories, however, partook of neighboring categories in the circle, and, possibly in consonance with the tale I came to tell myself, most told me tragic ironies. In tragic irony the characteristics of an empirical interpretation of the world dominate, but there is also evidence of some underlying pattern. The world in my own story is not entirely limited to what was experienced through my five senses; a pattern of meaning, beyond my empirical grasp but nonetheless demanding my submission, also had a claim on me.

The Struggle

Sometimes I want this illness of mine to be resolved by miracle. My desire comes less in night darkness or times of anxiety; then death seems fitting. It arises instead in moments of obvious goodness, on the cool day that follows a hot summer, in laughter among friends, or in a crisp paper of a good student. Then I want my whole self to resound the promise the moment reveals. Then sometimes I hope for a miracle.

But what would make up this miracle? Here I wrestle among world view options, pulled toward each by my desire for continuing identity but checked by suspicions about their descriptive adequacy. Is, for example, miracle best portrayed for me by Friedrich Schleiermacher’s proposal that miracles are omnipresent signs that disclose the Infinite?

Were I to follow what I would call the comic or gnostic vein in Schleiermacher’s thought, I would gain the assurance that I, like any other single entity, am actually resolved in the eternal.¹⁴ All things, including my cancer, are really signs, miracles in themselves that signify the encompassing One. Instead of considering my condition a frustration of life, I could, by the gnostic negotiation, work to see the inherently miraculous nature of my state, and rest upon its indication of being in God.

Or I could accept an opposing, tragic understanding of miracle that identifies the world’s life itself, not its signifiers, as the wonder. Listen to Karl Barth:

My life is the object of God’s sovereign grace, not the sign of God’s reality. The marvel for Barth is that we exist at all, not that we reflect an ultimate Being. Were I to follow such an understanding, I would submit to the sure sign, the Word, that discloses the created nature of my life and its unapparent, unmerited, redemption. The miracle is not inherent in my illness; it is that my life depends upon a transcendent God who promises my eternal salvation.

Then there is the more individuated perception of miracle advanced by the romantic world view. Michael Harper represents the perception of those who witness personal encounters with a healing God.

Romantic miracles are both a gift and a sign from God. As the Spirit’s spontaneous gift, they are not the omnipresent metaphors of a comic world. Romantic miracles also differ from the tragic acknowledgment of the miracle of life itself. More than simply accepting my existence as miraculous, if I take the romantic part I might expect a charismatic miracle of specific healing.

Ironic world views also countenance miracles, ones that cause our senses to marvel. Willa Cather writes:

Miracle occurs when through love we gain the finer sense of things. In an ironic world those things require neither ultimate referent nor grand design. They exist wondrously in themselves, about us always, but usually obscured by our selfish, loveless blindness.

All four world interpretations acknowledge miracles, the wonders that refract the world in different figures, and all four views are to some extent available and attractive to me. My own need for cosmic order, however, cannot tolerate an acceptance of all their contradictory claims. Instead, I engage in a negotiation, in my case a primarily ironic one, that confirms my understanding of the inherently miraculous in part by rejecting a romantic vision of the occasional blessing. As much as I would welcome my personal release from my imprisoning illness, I cannot believe in a world that offers selective solace to a privileged few. Much closer to my sense of life is the proposition that it contains within itself the extraordinary. I gain a glimpse of its wonder, when, in a communion of love, the scales fall from my eyes and I am amazed by the intricacy of the ordinary.

But I hedge a bit. I am suspicious of the way an ironic outlook lyricizes the dull, given matter of life. And I am frightened of a position that promises no significance beyond the way things now are. I do not want to be merely intricate; I want also to participate in some pattern that transcends the course of my feeble life. I therefore supplement my essentially empirical understanding with what logicians call subalternation, by a secondary reliance upon a tragic viewpoint. My world displays, in Frye’s terms, a tragic irony.

The tragic irony that I tell about my mortal body reflects something of the approach I make to understanding the congregation. From neither bodily nor congregational habitation do I see miraculous escape, either by comic recognition that will give the church a special knowing at a higher stage of development or by a romantic quest that turns the parish outward into God’s undomesticated presence in the larger context. Rather, the setting of my story and the congregation’s portrays my own body and that of the local church essentially in human terms, but my factual portrait of the world is darkly shaded by the tragic inevitability of God’s inexorable plan.

In the following two chapters, I shall examine more precisely the various forms that parish stories assume and show how by observation and inquiry one can explore the setting of a congregation’s narrative. These steps are best taken with the giant circle of literary genres in mind. Within this circle are the local churches we know, each arranging its view of the world by stories whose structure links them to a certain section of the horizon.

Notes

1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 89.

2. Ibid., 107-8.

3. Ibid., 87-141; Robert Redfield, The Little Community (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), 85-98. Other anthropologists employ a third analytical dimension similar to what I call plot. Ethel Albert calls the three aspects the "focal values" of a group. For her, the three are the "entities" (objects, feeling states, situations, activities) that I would term the group’s setting; the "directives" (actions to be done or avoided) I term its plot; and its "character" (qualities of personality approved or disapproved, rewarded or punished) to which I give the same name (Ethel Albert, "The Classification of Values," American Anthropologist 58 [1956]: 251ff.).

4. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, 99, 93. See also Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1944), 23-26.

5. "We allocate conversations to genres just as we do literary narratives. Indeed a conversation is a dramatic work, even if a very short one, in which participants are not only the actors but also the joint authors, working out in an agreement or disagreement the mode of their production" (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 196).

6. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 158-239. See the use of Frye’s genres in analyses of historiography in Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973); of psychoanalytic method in Roy Schafer, A New Language for Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976); and of the growth of secularity in Robert W. Funk, Parables and Presence: Forms of the New Testament Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 124-37.

7. Mary Douglas is herself reluctant to transpose ethnographic categories into literary analogues, but her observations nevertheless invite literary interpretation. In her book Natural Symbols she identifies, for example, four distinctive attitudes toward the physical body that are remarkably similar to the narrative modes of Northrop Frye. In her typology of basic stances toward life that societies take, the body may be seen as essentially the organ of communication (and, hence, comically integrating all meaningful action), or as the vehicle of life (body and spirit romantically joining), or as purely spiritual (its life tragically awaiting its release), or as very practical (ironically defeating other interpretations). Persons in societies that reflect one of these representations of the body, moreover, certainly convey its image primarily by their stories.

8. O. Carl Simonton, Stephanie-Matthews Simonton, and James L. Creighton, Getting Well Again: A Step-by step Self Help Guide to Overcoming Cancer for Patients and Their Families (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1978).

9. Frye, Anatomy, 33.

10. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982), 22.

11. Frye, Anatomy, 208.

12. Ibid., 162.

13. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 88-89.

14. Ibid., 99-101.

15. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 54.

16. Michael Harper, None Can Guess (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1971), 137, 140.

17. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 50-51.

Most of us can probably remember participating, as student or teacher, in a course that died prematurely. I taught such a course, and I recall it here because from its ashes sprang the basic idea explored in this book. In the fall of 1977, Sammy Clark and I began work on a course designed to pursue an aspect of ministry in Sammy’s congregation, the gifted Trinity Church in downtown Atlanta. Although congregation-based courses of this sort can be capricious, we felt we had this one under fair control. I had taught similar courses elsewhere; Sammy’s experience in contextual training stretched back to his staff days in New York City’s East Harlem Protestant Parish. We took on the present assignment with the easy confidence of veteran guides provisioning a familiar tour.

The course was to address the relative absence of racial diversity in many of the age groups at Trinity. Though substantial numbers of blacks and whites were active in this church, one or the other race tended to dominate each particular level of Trinity’s youth and adult programs. Concerned about this layer-cake alternation, Clark as pastor and other church leaders decided to work with the seminary in which I was teaching to examine the problem and attempt some remedies.

My seminary accepted this responsibility because it believes that preparation for ministry requires participation in critical social situations. Therefore its faculty approved Clark’s and my syllabus. The outline bristled with good readings. It projected the course’s movement through phases of inquiry to those of theory making and experiment. We were careful to develop ways by which its twenty-four students -- twelve seminarians and twelve Trinity laypersons -- could themselves "own" the course and be supported in its stressful moments. Sammy and I felt that we had prepared for a worthy, sturdy undertaking.

The course began to disintegrate, however, in its first week. Several of the laypersons who had volunteered to participate never appeared; others soon dropped out; only four of the twelve persisted to the end. Their resistance paralyzed the course and puzzled the rest of us. Many of the same persons had collaborated fully in other courses that had dealt with difficult topics at Trinity. Why had this present course, then, provoked such massive truancy?

Those of us who remained in the course probed the resistance of our absent colleagues. As time passed, we became less convinced of the adequacy of the psychological explanations we had first offered. Instead, we began to discern in the words and actions of the truants a subtle and intricate pattern of values that seemed to transcend the motives of any single person. It began to appear that this course had violated a hidden code of worth and meaning that underlay the corporate life of this particular congregation. While each truant was a liberal Christian who gave private assent to the course plan, each was also a member of a body guided by a contravening set of norms and outlooks. As members, these persons guarded this corporate code by their absence, silence, and argument.

This code was embedded in what we came to call the "Trinity Story," the narrative that church members used to describe the recent history of their congregation. Founded before the Civil War and finally located across the street from Georgia’s state capitol building, Trinity grew, as one of its ministers wrote, in "prestige, power, and people, and [became] one of the most influential Methodist churches in the South."¹ Nevertheless it lost both power and prominence after the Second World War. Its prestigious members died or transferred to other churches closer to their homes in the new suburbs of Atlanta. As a recent pastor put it, Trinity became a tomb. Some members and leaders of the Methodist conference advocated its relocation in an affluent suburb to reestablish its preeminent position.

Instead, Trinity chose a more adventurous path. In 1967, the year that segregationists put Lester Maddox into the capitol building as governor, the church next door decided to stay where it was and to recruit black and poor persons in the neighborhood as members. That costly decision alienated still more of Trinity’s longtime members and aroused the anger of many outsiders. Fortunately, an exceptionally strong pastor was appointed to the church in time to guide it through its time of attrition and mistreatment. He remembers the bitterness of members when black teenagers began to worship at Trinity:

Trinity persevered through the corrosive attack, only then to be put to further tests of its will and capacity to help by the poor community itself. In response and at great cost, Trinity developed, in cooperation with some of its poorer neighbors, new modes of urban ministry: an employment project, a summer camp, an integrated high school group, a new parish house located next to the public housing project, visitation and food services for the elderly, a literacy program, parole referral, and overnight housing for the homeless. The high school group started a steel band which, to the group’s delight, further irritated conservatives in the neighborhood.

Eventually Trinity gained new supporters. Some strong black leaders joined, and a number of suburban liberals, happy to find a church that really acted on the denomination’s social principles, drove into town to work in Trinity’s new ministries. By the mid-1970s Trinity had become an unusual but substantial community of diverse people. It had gathered into common worship "college professor and prison releasee, maid and manufacturer, young and old, black and white, male and female."³ In late 1976 the church published its plan for a future ministry that would convey its experience to the wider church and society:

Older student and young adult members of Trinity who have since moved to other regions of the nation report that they carry on the church’s vision in their new location.

During our course at Trinity, I heard its story told by its members with all the urgency of fresh news. Anecdotes that reflected the sharp pain and triumph of the early years were often repeated. The Trinity Story reached its climax, as I heard it told, in tales of the union of the two races, worshipping next door to a state capitol whose own policies bent toward integration in the same period. Out of this union was born Trinity’s mission to witness human solidarity in a racist society and church.

The Trinity Story, however, contains not only a narrative of events but also a code that signals the identity and behavior of that congregation. The clue to that code, I believe, is the striking similarity of this story to a form of myth that has powered tales of many peoples, giving form to their self-concepts and strength to their standards. The myth is a very ancient story, one evident in the mythic patterns of many cultures and analyzed by Carl Jung⁵ and Joseph Campbell⁶ as the journey of the hero. Like the church that grew up around me, Trinity was an instance of a congregation working its way through a spontaneous and uncertain period of its life; yet it, like my own congregation, used structures of behavior and interpretation derived from the world’s treasury of religious symbols.

In Trinity’s case, the congregation’s adventure implicates what Campbell argues are the most pervasive and fundamental of human mythic patterns.

Campbell displays the sequence of the hero journey in a diagram shown in Figure A.⁷ The hero encounters a series of events that, though not all present in any single story, and though distinctive in their detail in each specific telling, nevertheless usually follow the sequence that Campbell outlines and function according to the purposes he describes. The pattern that Campbell found typifying hero myths thousands of years old is resonant in Trinity’s recent experience. Trinity seems to replicate Hero’s adventure. Trinity is Hero Trinity, following the sequence of episodes common to its own experience and, as an example, a sixth century B.C. religious figure.

a. The call to adventure. Before the journey, the once powerful hero is in a repugnant situation. In Trinity’s case, the congregation had fallen from prewar prominence into a neglected tomb and was searching for a way out. Drawing on the Jataka Tales, Campbell describes the similar situation of Gotama Buddha, who, once a protected prince, was shocked by signs of illness, decrepitude, death, and austerity. The Buddha fled his palace and all its prerogatives to learn what existence shaped by these terrors meant. Some potential heroes refuse such a call to adventure and live out dull lives. Trinity itself could have built another palace elsewhere. Instead, the congregation answered the call that plunged it into its city’s turmoil and suffering.

b. A protective figure. The hero is joined by a protective figure who sometimes appears as a guide or teacher. Representing the power of destiny, the figure brings amulets to the hero and accompanies the hero as protection against the difficulties about to be encountered. Trinity’s new pastor -- a big, hearty, pious fellow who did not frighten easily -- emerged as its protective figure. Though critical to developments in Trinity’s story, the pastor was not the hero. He appeared when needed and later left. The hero was the congregation.

c. The threshold of adventure. The hero enters a zone of great uncertainty and personal peril. Enemies attack; the hero comes close to annihilation, in battle, by execution or during journeys through water. (After Hero Trinity had passed beyond its own dangerous threshold, its pastor wrote, using marine imagery, "The troubled waters receded, the dry land of urban mission appeared, and the people walked out upon it in faith.") The threshold crossing may entail the pain of dismemberment, and many members of Trinity literally severed themselves when the church welcomed black and poor people. Antagonists ferociously beset the hero. The Evil One unleashed "nine storms of wind, rain, rocks, weapons, live coals, hot ashes, sand, mud and darkness"⁸ against the Buddha in his Great Struggle. Hero Trinity suffered strangely similar abuse from antagonists in both church and neighborhood.

d. Tests. Next the hero "must survive a succession of trials, . . . a favorite phase of the myth-adventure."⁹ The hero must agree to perform seemingly impossible tasks and must succeed in their execution. The suspicious, poor neighborhood that Trinity wished to serve offered such challenges. Hero Trinity had to prove that its faith involved not only routine domestic actions such as worship and fellowship but also unfamiliar, venturesome tests, the devising of programs to assuage hunger, despair, homelessness, and unemployment.

e. Helpers. Additional helpers come to aid the hero. After Buddha’s triumph, a seven-day storm is unleashed on him, but the king of serpents protects Buddha with his expanded hood. As Hero Trinity undertook its tests it began to attract different sorts of church participants: persons from both the poor neighborhood and farther afield who strove for the same goals as Trinity. Mothers in the housing project, university teachers and students, city singles, and liberal families allied with Trinity in a now more popular cause.

f. Sacred marriage. At the bottom of Campbell’s heroic circle is the goal of the quest, expressed in such images as atonement, deification, or the capture of a desired object. In his journey the Buddha here obtained supreme enlightenment. For Hero Trinity, the sacred achievement was a Christian union of normally polarized persons and classes, a coincidence of opposites. One pastor referred to Trinity’s worship as a common table around which God gathered a marvelously diverse collection of human beings: rich and poor, black and white, privileged and outcast.

g. Flight and h. Return. The hero generally ends the adventure by returning to normal life. Sometimes the return passage requires escape or rescue. In other cases the hero emerges with divine blessing. Throughout the 1970s a number of younger people -- college and seminary students, persons in their first adult jobs --were members of Hero Trinity. Now they have moved on to other places and tasks. Other persons blessed by the adventure have also departed. In fact, a standard rhythm of Trinity’s present ministry is to accept persons attracted to its sacred banquet and then to help them on their way to their own ministries elsewhere.

i. Elixir. The hero returns to the world with a life-giving boon. What the hero has gained in the quest is not a private possession but to be shared with all. Although the Buddha experienced the bliss of enlightenment, by its nature not transferable, he nevertheless spent the rest of his long life not in withdrawn contemplation but in teaching. He acceded to visitors who pled:

Hero Trinity likewise undertakes today a special mission "to our community and our city" to share its vision of God’s kingdom. Had the congregation refused to embark on its journey, remaining set in its former ways, no special boon to humanity would have resulted. But because it launched out on its heroic adventure, it now helps a wider community understand how society might be healed.

If our preparations for the course at Trinity had been more sensitive to the Trinity Story, we might have avoided some of the consequences. As the course was constructed, however, it constituted a point-by-point repudiation of the story and its code. Instead of Hero Trinity bringing its boon to the world, we, the outside world, were bringing the boon to Trinity. Instead of celebrating Hero Trinity’s sacred marriage of blacks and whites, we focused on their disunion. Rather than recall the congregation’s heroic tales of trial and success, we focused on their antonyms, avoidance and failure. Our course plan implied that the heroic adventure of Trinity Church was only beginning, that it did not already exist as a story and a code that generated value and outlook. From a rational standpoint, the course seemed necessary and appropriate, but deeper matters were at stake in this venture than the purposes stated in the syllabus. The lessons this course taught were primarily the unintended ones that I, the professor, learned.

The Functions of Narrative

Through these introductory chapters I have stressed the idiomatic nature of parish culture, its thick networking of construable signs to form a dialect of signals and symbols. The most important lesson I learned from the Trinity course is that most parish idiom conveys and implies narrative. Story expresses the intricacy of congregational life. Though widely regarded as merely a form of entertainment or illustration, stories are an essential account of social experience. From the Hero Trinity story can be elicited three features of the fundamental relationship between congregational life and narrative:

1. The congregation’s self-perception is primarily narrative in form. Trinity used story to provide an account of itself, to itself and to others. Though our course was intended as a technical probe into certain issues, Trinity members, when pressed to account for their remarkable interracial identity, responded primarily by stories that described their past history, or by anecdotes that depicted the present state of affairs, or occasionally by scenarios that projected various futures for their fellowship. In each instance they apprehended their corporate existence by means of narrative. They found no other adequate ways to communicate the richness and variety of Trinity’s life. Only in storied form did explanations seem sufficiently comprehensive. Stories were required, to adapt terms used by Stanley Hauerwas, in order to give connection to contingent events.¹¹ The elaborate wholeness of Trinity’s corporate existence, its passage through a thick diversity of events from past to future, required a narrative vehicle for its transmission.

A narrative can gather happenings that are not already substantively linked to each other. While formulas convey the regular sequences and synchronisms of actions, stories knit events that have a plausible but so far undetermined relation. The Trinity story is thickened by events that at first appear unrelated or are unforeseen. That is why, in listening to the story, we want to know what happens next: we cannot be sure what will next unfold. By building suspense through the incorporation of unpredictable actions -- what Northrop Frye calls story’s capacity to say "and then" -- narrative enables its tellers to claim the association of separate happenings with a single life, personal or corporate. How does Trinity embrace in its own identity events as diverse as insults, steel bands, and a mission to racist institutions? It connects them by story. Other writers have attempted to explain the capacity of narrative to summarize the complexities of self-understanding: "Narrative history of a certain kind," says Alasdair MacIntyre, "turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions."¹² Story is a device by which perceptions of corporate life are arranged in a telling way, but that is not its first or only function. Story is also the form by which corporate experience is in the first instance perceived.

In an intriguing if controversial article, Stephen Crites argues that experience itself is basically narrative in form, providing the essential order for human understanding.¹³ The storied unity found in life is not, for Crites, a secondary result of human culture. Story is in a much more rudimentary way implicated in experience itself. Crites’s argument is an attempt to account for human beings’ innate sense of continuity among past, present, and future times. Earlier and forthcoming times at the moment do not exist, yet they are essential dimensions of the experienced present. Crites proposes that experience of the lived present must have a narrative character, because it necessarily ties the perception of the moment to the memory of past events and to the anticipation of the future. Thus, through its narrative character, experience contains the sense of both before and after as well as the distinctions among past, present, and future, enabling us to comprehend our persistence through time. Why do we warm to stories? In Crites’s view, narrative does not merely order a chaotic world, it also provides the basic model that experience makes of life. Crites does not claim that reality itself is or has a story, but he places the presence of narrative at the very boundary of human knowing.

Story, then, may be more than a cultural response to prior perceptions. The awareness of personal and corporate existence is perhaps itself a nascent story. If so, to seek the story of the congregation, in its twists of plot and evolutions of character and circuits of setting, is to enter into the basic experience of corporate life. Story may be more than the mere play of children or the protoscience of primitives; it may relate the essential negotiation of the local church in realizing its own identity.

2. The congregation’s communication among its members is primarily by story. Not only does narrative convey the experience of corporate existence, it also characterizes the continuing form of symbolic interchange among members.¹⁴ The rich discourse that constitutes congregational life occurs almost entirely in story form. Members primarily tell, or allude to, stories. Congregational communication is seldom propositional. Members are less likely to speak in abstractions than in tales about their collective life. Think of the jokes, confessions, arguments, descriptions, explanations, memorials, objections, and intentions that compose parish discourse. Most are presented narratively. "We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative," says Barbara Hardy.¹⁵

Her point about the narrative nature of gossip is especially appropriate to an analysis of parish discourse. Gossip, the informal expression of stories about other people, constitutes a prevalent form of parish communication. Though conventionally viewed as destructive of community, gossip, Samuel Heilman demonstrates, is essential for corporate cohesion.¹⁶ Telling tales about other members, even maliciously, is an important way of identifying and characterizing the congregation. Heilman demonstrates the presence of four layers of gossip in the congregation. One layer is parish news shared with even the most casual participant. The others, each increasingly private and more potent, provide more privileged information. The most secret layer harbors the confidences of a few central figures whose circle often does not include the ordained minister. All layers of gossip function to fortify activities and relationships within the congregation.

Narrative gives structure to other kinds of parish communication. In Trinity Church, the history of a congregation is taught and learned in story form. Narrative also appears to influence sequences of group behavior, such as fights, campaigns, and projects. The congregation’s worship has a storied character. It comprises liturgical drama, formal metaphors, Scripture narratives, and sermons. In virtually every aspect of congregational expression, the discourse of members is in some manner narrative.

3. By its own congregating, the congregation participates in narrative structures of the world’s societies. The individual actions caught up in the Trinity story were each irregular or apparently spontaneous, but the overall narrative form of the story is a pattern of meaning so regular that we term the pattern a myth. Myths are the primal and still powerful schemata by which a society comprehends and signifies its corporate existence. They mark the essential structures of meaning and value in which that group participates. As Alasdair MacIntyre reports, "There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its original dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things."¹⁷ Myths provide the basic forms of signification by which a group perceives and expresses its identity.

The correspondence between the Trinity story and the hero journey does not necessarily argue for some deep archetypal reality upon which behavior and its signification is patterned. A more supportable claim is that the narrative behavior of a local church draws upon the treasury of symbolic forms that human groups have developed in all zones and eras to constitute themselves. In my view, the story that any particular church tells of itself necessarily participates in the imagination by which other societies have wrought their awareness of their own community.

The "house" (oikos) implied in the term "parish" ( paroikia) is a way of envisioning that symbolic construction. The same oikos also characterizes the whole inhabited world (oikoumené), suggesting the participation of the parish household as well in the structures that form all societies’ dwelling. Although "parochial" today usually connotes an ingrown narrowness, paroikia, when understood as a narrative construction, participates in the oikoumené of all groups’ stories.

The reason for this is that stories are structurally interrelated. Literature in the vision of Northrop Frye constitutes a "big, interlocking family" of all themes, genres, and characters."¹⁸ Any individual work, in Frye’s view, is to be understood as a disclosure of particular images that reflect the whole world of literature:

As, for Frye, the symbolic construction of a literary work is a microcosm of all literature, so a congregation reflects the imaginative struggle of societies everywhere to congregate. Thus the paroikia, the local manifestation of the structures of the oikoumené, emphasizes its participation in the frame of all social communication.

The congregation Trinity is also Hero because Trinity is a disclosure here and now of a narrative negotiation by which other societies have cohered. Human imagination as a whole provides the particular idiomatic construction of a local church story. The storied oikoumené substantiates, apportions, and links the full multitude of parochial stories. Parish mission in this light springs from a solidarity with the world of struggling communities. The story each tells of its own mission is as well the world’s story.

The Need for Narrative

Stories and their mythic structures are the primary means employed in a symbolic approach to understanding the congregation. The other approaches, those outlined in chapter 2, also make use of narrative description, but they rely less upon story than upon other ways to characterize the parish. Contextual portrayals of a local church concentrate upon demographic features ("urban, middle class, white, elderly membership"); mechanist definitions frequently provide numerical and functional facts ("250 members, with a $100,000 annual budget and a darn good Sunday school"); organicist interpretations feature interpersonal and emotional attributes ("a big, usually happy family that enjoys its occasional fights"). Only within the symbolic approach does narrative serve an essential role, and this book, rooted in that approach, will depend upon narrative both to examine and to explain the life of a local church.

An emphasis upon narrative is overdue. Despite the narrative character of almost all congregational perceptions and talk, the temptation is to employ other, more solemnly theoretical modes of expression to explain the local church. Like doctors over a patient, congregational analysts reduce the object of their investigation to technical terms and procedures. Phrases derived from the contextual ("urban, middle class"), mechanist ("$100,000 annual budget"), and organicist ("enjoy occasional fights") approaches seem more analytical and precise. These empirical observations abstracted from corporate experience often become more persuasive than the experience itself. My survey in the preceding chapter documents how scant has been the attention paid in the last quarter century to the congregation’s culture, idiom, or identity -- its storied dimensions. In a catalog I recently edited of devices and instruments for congregational research, only a small minority of the hundred or so entries is designed to explore a congregation’s narrative identity.²⁰ Most doctor of ministry programs continue the tradition: perusal of the theses and essays these programs produce strongly suggests that projects that employ contextual, mechanist, or organicist methods are more likely to be accepted than those that delve into congregational culture and story.

Crites speaks of our capacity to abstract ourselves from the ongoing press of corporate experience:

Essential as abstractions are to the analysis of the congregation, however, a greater use of story is today required to round out an understanding of the local church. Only narrative is sufficiently sensitive to amplify the unique accents of a congregation’s idiom, sufficiently intricate to explain the congregation’s constitutive power, and sufficiently comprehensive to link congregational events and meanings. As succeeding chapters of this book will demonstrate in detail, narrative underlies each congregation’s view of the world, its assumptions about the setting or backdrop against which its actions are sequenced, and its unique ethos thrown into visible relief. Narrative also sharpens and illumines that ethos -- the style, behavior, and values that constitute a congregation’s character. And narrative provides temporal form for its plot, the sequence of events it selects and retells to confirm its identity. Finally, narrative knits together all these elements -- setting, character, and plot -- into a storied whole. In so doing, it defies the capacity of other approaches in their extreme forms to reduce the congregation to a series of abstractions. Narrative further reminds the researcher or observer of the limits of outside expertise: no matter how disciplined or detached, everyone is formed by corporate experience and dependent upon storied discourse for the sharing of meaning. Learning the parts and presentations of parish story, then, is a way of reasserting the lived nature of social experience.

In these introductory chapters, I have examined the remarkable nature of the congregation, notable today less for its accomplishment than for its communal discourse that at once particularizes a corporate genius and links it to the symbolic structure of all societies everywhere. I have noted several different ways of understanding congregations -- as textures, machines, organisms, and idioms, all necessary approaches, and none diminished by the emphasis this book places upon the last image, that of the local church as a dialect. In the present chapter, I have argued that idiom is primarily conveyed in story form, as the parish apprehends its corporate experience and as its members communicate their common life and draw resources from the narrative structures of the world. I believe that telling such a story enables a congregation to comprehend its nature and mission and therefore I now set out to examine the major aspects of parish story: its setting, characterization, and plot.

Notes

1. Kenneth R. Jones, "An Inner-City Experiment in Family Ministry" (S.T.D. thesis, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, 1975), 117.

2. Ibid., iii.

3. Ibid., ii.

4. Report on the Desired Leadership Qualities for Pastor and Laity (Trinity United Methodist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 14 December 1976).

5. C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1956), 121-462.

6. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1956).

7. Ibid., 245.

8. The Buddha-Karita, translated in Lucien Stryk, ed., The World of the Buddha: A Reader (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1968), 39.

9. Campbell, The Hero, 97.

10. The Buddha-Karita, trans. Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959), 52.

11. Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations Into Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 75.

12. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 194. Note Northrop Frye’s similar estimation of the constructive function of narrative in Robert D. Denham, ed., Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 74-75: "Mathematics appears to be a kind of informing or constructive principle in the natural sciences; it continually gives shape and coherence to them without being itself involved in any kind of external proof or evidence. One wonders whether, in the future, when we shall know so much more about what literature says and how it hangs together than we now do, we shall come to see literary myth as a similarly constructive principle in the social or qualitative sciences, giving shape and coherence to psychology, anthropology, theology, history and political theory without losing in any one of them its own autonomy of hypothesis."

13. Stephen C. Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971): 291 - 311.

14. "Persons communicate and relate to each other by stories they tell.... There can be no community life, no consensus, and thus no common action without participation in a common understanding of the meaning of a common story, and without a common commitment to that story’s nature" (John Navone and Thomas Cooper, Tellers of the Word [New York: Le Jacq Pub., 1981], xxiv).

15. Barbara Hardy, "Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach Through Narrative," Novel 2 (1968): 5.

16. Samuel Heilman, Synagogue Life, 141-92. The function of joking, also often in narrative form, is described on pp. 193-209.

17. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 205.

18. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. 1966), 48f.

19. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 121. Frye depicts four levels of literary criticism, of which the most identifiably religious, the analogical level, conceives poetry in the manner described. Frye goes on: "Analogically, then, the symbol is a monad, all symbols being united in a single infinite and eternal verbal symbol which is as dianoia, the Logos, and, as mythos, total creative act. It is this conception which Joyce expresses, in terms of subject matter, as ‘epiphany,’ and Hopkins, in terms of form as ‘inscape."’

20. James F. Hopewell, ed., The Whole Church Catalog: Where to Get Tools for Congregational Study and Intervention (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1984), iv.

21. Crites, "Narrative Quality," 308.

Since 1960 over two hundred books and countless reports have examined either single congregations or their species, and any new work such as mine gratefully follows the tracks that many sorts of explorers -- consultants, management specialists, sociologists, psychologists, ethnographers, historians, and others -- have already laid down.¹ Prior to 1960 the investigation of the local church was more occasional, and except for a few books written to enliven parish programs² and the pioneering sociology of H. Paul Douglass,³ the analysis occurred primarily in Europe.⁴

All studies, including mine, follow lines that are curiously similar to the ways a family examines a house or an apartment in which it might dwell. There are four approaches from which one examines a potential dwelling: contextual, mechanical, organic, and symbolic,⁵ To consider seriously the capacities of either houses or local churches, in other words, is to view them as textures, mechanisms, organisms, and means of signification. While all four perspectives are in play in any single instance of inquiry, one of the four generally dominates.

Househunters look at the contextual nature of a possible dwelling. No house or apartment is entirely isolated; it is set in an environment that not only physically surrounds the building but also conditions all household activity. Househunters look at the manner in which its larger context creates the warp and woof of the dwelling’s living texture. They therefore inquire about local costs; they check out the neighbors; they examine the neighborhood -- its schools, services, climate, demographic trends -- to satisfy themselves that the context is suitable and the place secure. Viewed in this way, a dwelling is a texture whose weaving reveals the strands that originate in the larger context of the neighborhood. No matter how attractive the house or apartment itself, its textured dimensions may be sufficiently disadvantageous to persuade the househunter to look elsewhere. Or the neighborhood context may be so desirable that shortcomings apparent from other perspectives are overlooked.

Dwellings are also viewed as mechanisms, that is, implements that accomplish certain ends, such as shelter, protection, and the delivery of heat, light, and water. Sometimes an engineer is employed by the househunter to check out the mechanical dimensions of the dwelling: its structural stability, the efficiency of its systems, its capacity to withstand whatever undesirable forces the contextual perspective has discovered in the environment. Such engineers are not necessarily concerned about the neighborhood or about the symbolic and familial potential of the place; they seek instead to determine how well the house mechanically operates, how well it does its job.

The organic perspective of the househunter looks at how the dwelling enhances the life and development of its occupying family. Unlike the mechanistic approach that examines the physical work that the house accomplishes in itself, the organic view unites it to the biography of a particular family and focuses on the dwelling’s capacity to create for that household a "happy home." In probing a dwelling’s organic capacity, househunters envision the way their family would use the property, where and how gracefully the group would eat, sleep, and encounter each other yet each pursue his or her own interests. More the realm of the architect than the engineer, organic considerations include issues of familial style, cohesion, and social grace.

The fourth perspective, the symbolic, is also essential. A dwelling not only simulates its environment, performs tasks, and supports the life of its inhabitants, it also conveys meanings. Househunters examine the capacity of a potential house or apartment to reflect their character. Identity is often critically linked to the building in which one lives. What does this place, househunters ask themselves, suggest about who we are? What are we saying to ourselves and to visitors by the form and symbolic pattern of this house? As real estate brokers attest, it is frequently the image projected by a house that first attracts or repels prospective occupants and that finally clinches a lease or a sale. "This house is us!" cry some househunters when they find their choice, referring to its symbolic identity.

Congregational researchers also use contextual, mechanical, organic, and symbolic approaches to assess the local church, because congregations are also dwellings, but for a different kind of household. Sorting out research approaches according to the four categories throws light on the intentions of each study. It can also reveal the author’s attempt, present in most studies if only by implication, to correct what the writer feels is an overemphasis in the corpus of previous studies on another perspective.

It will be evident that particular categories have dominated certain periods and types of church life in the last twenty-five years. It is important to remember, however, that any congregational inquiry, like the househunt, of necessity employs all four perspectives and may acknowledge their utility. One of the four approaches nevertheless seems to characterize each single inquiry and to encompass its major findings.

Contextual Studies

The acceleration of congregational studies in the last quarter century sprang in part from fresh and troubling inquiry by sociologists who probed the parish as a social organization. Instead of replicating already familiar and usually benign survey analyses that counted and sorted churchgoers, researchers such as Joseph Fichter, Peter Berger, and Gibson Winter⁶ disclosed disturbing data about motivation for church membership and its relation to social behavior. Their critique coincided with the swell of the ecumenical movement, a formidable attack mounted by mainline Protestantism against parochialism in the church. Theological hesitations in the 1960s about the church in its congregational form were thus reinforced by both sociological conclusions and ecumenical convictions. In this climate a study apparatus of unprecedented scope for the examination of congregations was established by the World Council of Churches and its national counterparts. Working in groups in western Europe, North America, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, the study team produced and encouraged many papers and books on the problem of the local church.⁷ Naming as its focus the Missionary Structure of the Congregation, the study proposed that radically different forms of Christian assembly and witness be fostered within the secular context. No longer a protected shelter, the congregation was by ecumenical design to become present in the environment of the workaday world, in its cities, its dilemmas, and delights. Earlier writings of clergy in France and the United Kingdom, who sought to treat their parishes as mission fields, set the stage for this more expansive understanding of congregation as Christian corporate life best fulfilled in its larger secular context.

A remarkable feature of the Study of the Missionary Structure of the Congregation was its inattention to the internal aspects of existing churches: their mechanisms and organic and symbolic functions. The North American working group of the Study, declaring themselves frustrated with the Study’s defined scope, tried to avoid such topics altogether by making a clear but severe decision for a contextual approach:

Although their mandate directed them also to study "existing patterns of church life,"⁹ all the working groups were generally reluctant to consider the existing structure of the congregation with the same interest and skill they brought to probing its relation to its environment. Some church groups, such as the Lutheran World Federation, objected to the Study’s skewed focus,¹⁰ and the editor of one of the project books acknowledged that:

Such deliberate and thorough avoidance of the internal operations, processes, and symbolic structures of congregations reflected in part a simmering exasperation with parish hypocrisy. "How can we build a church that will not stand in its own way," begins one study report, "whose organizational structure is not forever contradicting what it says on the mystery of the church, whose budget does not make a mockery of what the church teaches?"¹² Members content with things as they are were warned that they practiced a "morphological fundamentalism"¹³ that prevented the church from revising its structure to assume a more faithful form determined by the needs of the world. Like their individual Christian members, local churches should live not for themselves but for service to their neighbors in crisis. As one book title put it, the congregation was to become "the church inside out."¹⁴ No longer should a church tend its inward processes; rather, it should turn outward to the larger environment that resources the strands from which its textured life is woven.

A congregation serving in a worldly context would not, of course, be primarily interested in an understanding of mission as the conversion of peoples to either doctrinal or morphological fundamentalism. Instead, the missionary action envisioned by the congregational studies of the 1960s was the participation of churches in the missio Dei, the all-encompassing act of God toward God’s full creation. One was to attend society¹⁵ in its struggle in the presence of God. One could not assume that the outcome of this missionary action would be new church members.

This thoroughgoing emphasis upon context raised questions about what would be the form of a congregation turned out to its environment. An analysis of how a church converted to the world nevertheless could remain distinguishable from it occupied George Webber’s God’s Colony in Man’s World.¹⁶ He conveyed images, which other works later amplified," of pilgrimage and poverty distinctly Christian yet subordinate to society at large. Toward the end of the decade a number of other studies, almost all directed to the ecumenically oriented sector of Protestant church life, also portrayed the church as transient institution. They argued that a renewed¹⁸ or reshaped¹⁹ congregation should respond to an era described as one of rapid social change.²⁰ The later studies drew their theory largely from earlier works, but they were designed by denominations to present to broader publics the contextual message. Several contained case studies of congregations considered unusually responsive to the challenge of their environment.

The proportion of congregations in the 1960s and 1970s that actually responded as prescribed to their contexts was in fact very small.²¹ As neighborhood populations changed racially, some churches whose physical and financial resources lingered after their former membership fled introduced service programs to assist the poor, but the adjustment seems in most cases to have stemmed from necessity or default rather than from deliberate reorientation and restructuring by members who themselves stayed on to be transformed.

The general appeal of contextual studies of the congregation waned rapidly in the early 1970s, leaving the contextual perspective once again almost exclusively to the sociologists.²² Reflecting the introspective tendencies of the period, Protestant Americans began in the 1970s to assert widely that "the local church is a lot livelier than most people think."²³ Church leaders turned from the environment to examine the interior processes of the congregation. Contextual procedures that in the 1960s had promoted the opposite view fell into disuse.²⁴ In part the shift reflected the increasing difficulty of the mainline churches in sustaining contextually oriented agencies and studies whose intention was to revise the church’s basic form of association. In addition, those who had labored for a contextual redirection themselves grew discouraged. The denominations that had earlier supported the missionary structure study and other liberal arguments became increasingly aware that they were losing both membership and financial support while denominations less ecumenically inclined that had avoided the contextual issue grew in size and power.²⁵ For all these reasons, a more traditional interest in the vitality of the congregation quickened, as the 1970s progressed, among church bodies that in the previous decade had promoted its restructuring.²⁶ That interest developed along two lines, one that explicated the congregation in mechanistic terms and the other that took an organicist approach. The more popular of the two developments was the analysis of the mechanical qualities of the local church.

Mechanistic Studies

A mechanistic examination of a potential dwelling uncovers how effectively the house fulfills its functions. Whatever the environment may tell a househunter about the house’s milieu, the surroundings by themselves give inadequate information about the specific condition of the dwelling itself. Only a look at the house’s actual mechanisms satisfies our concerns about its capacity to accomplish its purposes as a shelter. How well do things work? Is the house sound or decrepit?

Such concerns about the efficiency of a dwelling also characterize a type of inquiry about congregations that came to national prominence as contextual approaches receded. New emphasis was placed on the internal operation of the local church, as less stress was placed on its environment. Though aware of the social and cultural context of the church and the necessity of an evangelical engagement with it, advocates of the mechanist approach required that prior attention be given to the adequacy of the instrumentality that undertakes the engagement.

Mechanist approaches focus on program effectiveness. Of the several recent schemes that assess and promote accomplishment in the local church, the church growth movement has best captured mechanist hopes for competent congregations. "Growth" in the church growth movement refers to the effective numerical enlargement of the congregation. (Growth as the development of mature sensibilities is an organic Image, discussed in a later section.) Churches that are growing in size both signify and accomplish the work of the Lord. "We can learn more about the way God works"²⁷ when a congregation is studied by church growth principles. "Bigness" is, moreover, a "powerful evangelistic tool"²⁸ and provides the resources necessary for effective programs of worship and ministry.²⁹ The local church is here viewed as a mechanism with the capacity for greater or lesser efficiency in doing the work of God.

Principles for church growth were first devised by Donald MacGavran, who examined churches in the Third World³⁰ and later founded the Institute for Church Growth in Eugene, Oregon. An Institute for American Church Growth was founded by a MacGavran disciple in the early 1970s. The first book that built on MacGavran principles but was directed toward the United States was probably that published by the Episcopalian Boone Porter in 1968.³¹ In 1971 W. Wendell Belew published Churches and How They Grow;³² it was followed in 1972 by Dean Kelley’s ecumenical and provocative Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.³³ Thereafter the growth movement accelerated and many works appeared.³⁴ Studies critical of the movement³⁵ and sociological accounts of church growth and decline³⁶ followed. Several studies that countered the emphasis on growth by affirming the integrity and beauty of small churches³⁷ also emerged, but the number of such works is dwarfed by the prodigious literary production of the church growth movement.

Mechanist approaches operate according to rational principles. A chief spokesperson of the church growth movement, C. Peter Wagner, describes on several occasions the "seven vital signs" of a healthy church. They indicate the value the movement places upon the purposive effort of the congregation, noting the functions and faculties required to accomplish the Christian task.

Mechanistic images power most of Wagner’s points: dynamics, catalysis, mobilization, size, range, balance, unit, priority, and order.

The mechanist approach differs in both missiology and method from the contextual view, and in each case choice of method is related to missional stance. Contextualism discerned the saving activity of God primarily in the world at large and looked to sociology and ethics to provide information about the world and its requirements. The church growth movement, by contrast, saw God’s salvation occurring in individual souls and thus sought reliable formulas for gathering large numbers of persons into congregations. For dependable, sophisticated techniques it turned to organization science. Wagner compares the movement’s discoveries to a major scientific breakthrough:

What Wagner describes in his approach as "consecrated pragmatism"⁴⁰ would, a decade earlier, have been dubbed "morphological fundamentalism." By the same token, the contextual requirement that the church empty itself makes little missional or methodological sense from the mechanist vantage point. Why abandon an enterprise sure to succeed? "The principles of success are all here!" vows the outer cover of one mechanistic study.⁴¹ Contextual inquiry presented an ethical critique of parish life; mechanistic studies provided the engineering to empower parish life.

By the end of the 1970s, church growth had become for most denominations the most frequent topic of conferences and consultations. Advocates of the church growth movement now claim the substantial attention of churches throughout the country. Wagner notes that "although some overhang from the 1960s still persists like a pesky cough after a head cold . . .. by and large, church growth has edged up toward the top of the agenda in the churches across the board."⁴²

Church growth science is only one scheme within a much larger battery of methods that examine the congregation as a machine. The technique most relentlessly employed, of course, is the annual report prepared by almost every congregation. Although a few of these may refer primarily to other images, the average report portrays the congregation as a machine whose work is detected by quantitative measurements and program vectors. Data -- often crushingly dull -- about money, membership, and meetings make up most of the report of collective activity in the previous year. Statistics comparing this year with last are included to reveal the relatively greater efficiency of the parish mechanism; program descriptions attest the frequency and intensity of parish activity. A satisfactory account, by mechanist standards, reports the hum of increased funds and attendance expanded in programs that themselves turn like dynamos.

Many professional church consultants follow mechanist approaches that work to increase the effectiveness of congregational programs. Lyle Schaller, the best-known church consultant in America today, uses a model of intervention and planning that is essentially mechanistic in its pattern. ⁴³ Like most others who help the church professionally,⁴⁴ Schaller advocates the presence of a consultant to mobilize leaders to examine their potential and plan for a more productive future.⁴⁵ He eschews both the contextual approach⁴⁶ and situations where severe interpersonal problems require an organic solution.⁴⁷ Instead, he enters a congregation as a planner, to diagnose its internal dynamics. After examining the impact of such factors as physical setting,⁴⁸ size, tenures of staff, ages, roles, and religious intentions of the church and its members, Schaller tailors a planning process that recognizes the strength of the organization and encourages members to gain an understanding of their situation and alternative futures. He follows what he calls an ‘’affirm and build" model that acknowledges the working elements in the congregation and mobilizes their power for the purpose of the church.⁴⁹

Like householders who insist that a dwelling first possess efficient components and systems, the mechanistically disposed analysts of the congregation argue that, unless basic structures are sound and dynamic, any sort of parish goal is in jeopardy. Mechanists are not opposed to the intentions of service, fellowship, and interpretation advanced in other approaches. They anticipate and welcome such achievements, but to them the primary need of churches today is the rationalization of congregational process and the animation of social will to achieve results.

Organic Studies

A congregation may also be treated as an organism, a living entity given not to mechanical production but to sensitivity and maturation. In our househunting analogy, the organic inquiry of the seeker tests the capacity of the dwelling to develop household vitality and style. Whether the house works efficiently is less important to an organicist than whether it enlivens and harmonizes its dwellers. Is the place conducive to good relationships? Does it aid the development of a happy home?

Similar priority is placed on matters of style and fellowship in organic studies of the congregation. Unlike church growth science that works for an efficient homogeneous unit to mobilize the congregation,⁵⁰ organic approaches recognize the heterogeneity of members and their deep need to be reconciled in a common, if complicated, life. For advocates of the organic view, such as Robert Worley, a local church is "a gathering of strangers"⁵¹ whose members are alienated from each other in ways that mechanist approaches tend to overlook. Worley describes the present disarray of church members:

Gone from such accounts are not only ideals of homogeneous units but also any mechanistic disposition to employ a diagnostic process that might propel the church to greater efficiency. Organic studies of the congregation instead begin with the disparity of parts; they acknowledge breakdown; they embrace the perplexities of modern association. But they also offer hope that sensitive attention to organization development will create a new, more complex church body.

Organic assessments of the congregation assume its similarity to a living organism that can mature to stages of equilibrium and insight not evident in its present state. Such studies generally have three characteristics: they recognize in the parish a potential fellowship that can transcend the differences and conflicts among its parts; they employ organization development methods; and they encourage all members to participate equally in a congregation’s ministry.⁵³ Each feature deserves separate attention.

First, organicists view the whole of a congregation as greater than the sum of its parts, and they use the term "community" to express the special value and power of the whole. A social body develops through the purposeful interaction of often quite disparate members. "Community is a way to be together," declare Evelyn and James Whitehead, emphasizing the integrity that develops from the participation of parts. Community, however, does not, for the Whiteheads, imply uniformity:

In Wagner’s mechanism, the seventh sign of church growth insists upon priorities arranged in biblical order. The system advocates seem, in comparison, more at home in chaos, with its paradoxical promise of integrity.⁵⁵ How the change from disorder to wholeness occurs is the second characteristic of organic systems approaches: organization development. "The parts of the whole work together," Mansell Pattison relates.

Although organicists recognize the crisis inherent in discordant parts, they are essentially optimistic about the course of organizational process. A favored term of organic proponents is vitality,⁵⁷ used to describe robust interaction among members who, possessing different gifts and opinions, are synthesized to new corporate fulfillment.⁵⁸ Vital congregations are not distinguished by ordered accomplishment; they are lively, instead, by dint of the intensity of their community interaction.

A third characteristic of organic approaches is their emphasis upon full participation. "The systemic purpose is shared by all subsystems," says Pattison.⁵⁹ All parts count. They take on the common shape and intention of the whole and are responsible to each other for its future integrity. Worley summarizes the characteristics of an organic participation of all members within their congregation:

Leaders, in the organic view, have none of the singular authority given by mechanists to leaders of growing churches, who are "motivated by the assurance that they have understood the revealed will of God for world evangelization and that they are attuned to what God expects to accomplish through them."⁶¹ In the organic approach, all parts are responsible for the whole as full partners in decision making, as attested by a number of books that began to appear in the 1970s to promote the democratization of congregational leadership. Many of the books invite the holistic involvement of the congregation in a specific responsibility previously considered part of the clerical role, such as the priestly,⁶² prophetic,⁶³ kingly,⁶⁴ and pastoral⁶⁵ offices. In each case, the point is that the congregational body best performs its ministry by the collaboration of all of its parts. As an organism the local church grows, not necessarily to greater size and efficiency, but to a full ripening of its communal nature.

Symbolic Studies

Still another perspective illuminates the local church, one less frequently advanced, the one this book primarily advocates. The approach considers the congregation less a texture or machine or organism than a discourse, an exchange of symbols that express the views, values, and motivations of the parish.⁶⁶ While the other approaches explore, respectively, the context, effectiveness, and communal development of the congregation, the symbolic outlook instead focuses upon its identity. Identity mirrors the "we" of a church that persists through whatever changes environment or revised program or interpersonal growth may effect in its midst. Throughout such changes any congregation remains itself, irrepressibly recognizable to its members and other observers. The marks and patterns of that recognition are the symbols this fourth approach seeks to discover.

In househunting terms, the symbolic search is the one undertaken to find a residence that reflects the identity of the family, a place that expresses the self-understanding of its occupants and their transaction with the world. When househunters contemplate the symbolic language of a potential dwelling, they look at a quality different from its neighborhood, efficiency, or familial appropriateness. They ask: What, in any circumstance, does this place say about us? What does it express about our values and the way we engage the world?

Pastors frequently acknowledge congregational identity by speaking of the symbolic network of a congregation as its "personality." They note that parishes that have similar contextual, mechanical, and organic features display remarkably different personalities. The analysis in congregational literature of symbolic networks, or identity, has proceeded desultorily, not in a widespread or consistent movement like those which have propounded the other approaches. A few histories of local churches have examined the identifying cultural traits of their subjects, exploring the symbolic patterns that give a particular congregation its unique character, instead of the far more common topics of local church history, such as campaigns, catastrophes, and clergy. In 1967, possibly in reaction to the dominantly contextual interpretations of the time, three books appeared that probed congregational culture in other, nonhistorical ways. One was the work of a sociologist, Earl Brewer, who, with the aid of a theologian and a ministries specialist, sought by an extensive content analysis of sermons and other addresses given in a rural and an urban church to differentiate the patterns of belief and value constituting those two parishes.⁶⁷ The second was the inquiry of a religious educator, C. Ellis Nelson, who departed from a curricular definition of education to envision the congregation as a "primary society" whose integral culture conditions its young and old members.⁶⁸ James Dittes, the third author, described more fully the nature of the culture encountered in the local church. He called it intractable stuff:

Later a pastor, John Harris, likened the stuff to an iceberg:

In the 1970s the study of symbolic interaction in the congregation became increasingly the domain of ethnographers. As might be expected in a society in which white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are slow to recognize their own ethnicity, the first, and still the best, ethnographies of congregations are Samuel Heilman’s study of an orthodox synagogue and Melvin Williams’s description of a black Pentecostal church.⁷¹ Heilman and Williams conclusively demonstrate the power of even small, marginal congregations to generate among themselves a rich symbolic communication that gives each its meaning and cohesion. Only a single theologian, Urban T. Holmes, has given protracted attention to the culture of the local church and the symbolic implications of ministry conducted within its network of signs. Holmes’s several books on the ministry sought to counter the mechanist and organic orientations that guide works that view ministry primarily as social profession.⁷² Since Holmes, a few other theologians have explored, differently and far less extensively, the function of symbols in the life of the congregation.⁷³

The remainder of this book will offer various ways to detect the symbolic and idiomatic discourse of a congregation and to probe its significance to the church members who convey it. To introduce that effort, however, several characteristics of the symbolic approach to congregational study are here set forth that distinguish it from the other principal modes of analysis. The marks are its attention to a pattern of motifs, its use of a linguistic model, and its narrative dimension.

Critical to the cultural analysis of a congregation is the discovery of significant motifs, or themes, that through their conscious and unconscious repetition by church members sanction the world view, ethos, and praxis of the parish. Heilman explains how he established what motifs conditioned the life of Kehillat Kodesh synagogue:

Unlike the contextualist who endeavors to explain the congregation in the light of social ideas and forces at work throughout the larger community, the symbolist observes the structure of ideas and actions within the church itself that particularize its outlook and behavior. Note also in Heilman’s remarks the absence of the mechanist concern to modify congregational behavior in order to increase its efficiency. Organicists and symbolists do have in common a focus upon internal community, but for symbolists the task is a search among existing cultural data to discover the matrix of the community already existing, while organicists advocate a social process that develops a future community not now realized.

A second feature of the symbolic approach is its use of a linguistic model to depict congregational culture. Symbolic analysis demands on-site observation, usually for an extended period of time, to detect the signals that convey a church’s culture. The analyst watches, participates, listens, interviews, and reads all that occurs within the life of the congregation. The data the researcher collects must then be shaped in a model that gives it sense and coherence. The model employed is that of a language, the communication pattern Clifford Geertz calls "construable signs." As noted in the preceding chapter, the idiom of an individual congregation includes not only verbal and written signs but also gestures, smells, touches, and physical configurations. Viewing such data as part of a rich language that members express to each other as information provides the paradigm for ordering and weighing what is observed.⁷⁵

The third characteristic of the symbolic approach emerges from the other two. When an ethnography finds formal motifs or themes in symbolic discourse, it is disposed to treat the culture it examines in literary terms. Geertz in fact likens the work of an ethnographer to that of a literary critic, and Heilman deliberately sets his study in a dramaturgical framework, suggesting that the relation of empirical study to narrative art may be closer than usually believed. "To those defenders of quantitative social science who will denounce my tendency toward a narrative style," he writes, "I can only reply that, unlike the novelist, who seeks to make the facts conform to his art, I have throughout made my art conform to the facts."⁷⁶ Historians who offer a symbolic approach to the study of the congregation also employ a narrative style to depict their findings. My own understanding of the parish is decidedly narrative in its orientation,⁷⁷ so much so that the following chapter addresses that topic almost exclusively, and narrative categories will frame the remainder of the book.

So unexpectedly complex is the congregation that it requires comprehension from four quite different perspectives. It cannot be correctly understood without an exploration of the textural qualities that tie it to its larger context. Nor does its function become dear without analysis of the mechanist qualities that trace its dynamics and performance. Nor does this household of God come to life without organicist attention to its growth in community. And the observation of a congregation’s symbolic interaction discloses its identity and web of meanings. I will emphasize this final approach, not because of a lack of appreciation for the other three, but because to date it has been dangerously underrepresented in works that analyze the local church.

Notes

1. Carl S. Dudley, ed., Building Effective Ministry, contains an extensive examination of various approaches to congregational analysis and a selective bibliography of local church studies produced since the late 1950s.

2. Willard Augustus Pleuthner, More Power for Your Church: Proven Plans and Projects (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1950); and see Murray Leiffer, The Effective City Church (New York: Abingdon Press, 1955), which preceded plans of the National Council of Churches to study "the effective city church." Unlike the later contextualist interpretations of the urban church, an instrumentalist emphasis characterized studies and plans of the 1950s. Power was to be evoked, multiplied, and redistributed. Roman Catholic literature in the period follows the same motif but with considerably greater attention to the manner in which power is to be recognized and shared between diocese and parish. See Hugo Rahner, The Parish: From Theory to Practice (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1958); Leo R. Ward, The Living Parish (Notre Dame: Fides Pub., 1959); Casiano Floristan, The Parish -- Eucharistic Community (Notre Dame: Fides Pub., 1964); Alex Blochlinger, The Modern Parish Community (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1965).

3. H. Paul Douglass, 1000 City Churches (New York: George H. Doran, 1926); The Church in the Changing City (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1927); How to Study the City Church (Garden City, N.Y.: Doran & Co., 1928). An assessment of Douglass’s contribution both to sociological method and to the study of the local church is contained in Jeffrey K. Hadden, "H. Paul Douglass: His Perspective and His Work," Review of Religious Research 22 (1980): 66-88.

4. George Michonneau, Revolution in a City Parish (Westminster: Newman Press, 1950); Tom Allan, The Face on My Parish (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); Ernest Southcott, The Parish Comes Alive (New York: Morehouse-Barlow Co., 1956). Several of the Roman Catholic works cited in n. 2 appeared first in European editions.

5. Approaches to househunting and to congregational study resemble Stephen Pepper’s well-known typology in World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1942). Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, points out the consonance of perceptions that a people hold about their bodies, their society, and the cosmos. Similar isomorphisms about habitations—house, congregation, and world—seem to operate in the present instance. Pepper’s four world hypotheses correspond to house and congregational hypotheses in the following order: Contextualism employs the historical event as its root metaphor and emphasizes the pragmatic truth found in encounter. What is significant about the world is not its form or process but incidents in specific environments. Mechanism works from a machine as root metaphor and emphasizes the discovery of factors as agencies and the delineation of action. For mechanists, the world is a field of force whose properties are basically numerical and instrumental. Organicism develops from the root metaphor of an organism and emphasizes the systemic nature of occurrences. The world is basically a developmental process that works toward an ultimate unity or absolute. Formism builds upon a root metaphor of similarity and emphasizes the correspondence of forms between otherwise unrelated things and events. The world is imagined as certain persistent structures in which life participates.

6. Joseph H. Fichter, Dynamics of a City Church (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951); Peter Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1961); Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches. Fichter’s investigation of a New Orleans parish proved so disturbing to Roman Catholic officials and those of his university that he was prevented from publishing further volumes in what was to be a series entitled Southern Parish.

7. World Council of Churches Department on Studies in Evangelism, Planning for Mission: Working Papers on the New Quest for Missionary Communities, ed. Thomas Wieser (New York: United States Conference for the World Council of Churches, 1966); World Council of Churches, Concept, newsletter published by the Department on Studies in Evangelism, WCC; World Council of Churches, The New Delhi Report: The Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches, 1961 (London: SCM Press, 1962), 189- 91; World Council of Churches, New Delhi to Uppsala: Report of the Central Committee to the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (Geneva: WCC, 1968), 66-70; World Council of Churches, The Uppsala Report: Official Report of the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Uppsala, July 4-20, 1968 (Geneva: WCC, 1968), 33f., 200f.

8. World Council of Churches, The Church for Others and the Church for the World (Geneva: WCC, 1967), 61.

9. World Council of Churches, New Delhi Report, 189.

10. Herbert T. Neve, Sources for Change: Searching for Flexible Church Structures (Geneva: WCC, 1968).

11. World Council of Churches, Planning for Mission, 26.

12. World Council of Churches, New Delhi to Uppsala, 66.

13. World Council of Churches, Planning for Mission, 134.

14. Johannes Christian Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966). Cf. Colin Williams, Where in the World? (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1963), and What in the World? (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1964). Williams’s books, widely circulated, were guides that provided for laity a clearly argued theological basis for missionary structure.

15. In some study papers it was proposed that although the church might be of prophetic service in a variety of arenas of public life, the primary locus of church mission should be the urban community. Unlike the congregational studies of earlier decades that treated an urban context as, at most, an environment outside and distinct from the major business of the church, the literature of the 1960s projected urban society as the pervasive ethos of the congregation itself. Only insofar as the congregation as texture strengthened the fabric of urban community would it gain its true nature. See Walter Kloetzli, The City Church, Death or Renewal: A Study of 8 Urban Lutheran Churches (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961); Robert Lee, ed., Cities and Churches: Readings on the Urban Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962); Richard E. Moore and Duane L. Day, Urban Church Breakthrough (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); George W. Webber, The Congregation in Mission (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964); Gibson Winter, The New Creation as Metropolis (New York: Macmillan Co., 1963). See also Ezra Earl Jones and Robert L. Wilson, What’s Ahead for Old First Church? (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), and Gaylord Noyce, Survival and Mission for the City Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975). Published in the next decade, the works of Jones and Noyce are more centripetal in their focus, treating the city as surrounding environment rather than the total context for church life. Several books of the contextual sort also considered the suburban environment: Andrew W. Greeley, The Church and the Suburbs (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1959); Frederick A. Shippey, Protestantism in Suburban Life (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1964); Gaylord Noyce, The Responsible Suburban Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970); W. Widick Schroeder, Victor Obenhaus, Larry Jones, and Thomas Sweetser, Suburban Religion: Churches and Synagogues in the American Experience (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1974).

16. George W. Webber, God’s Colony in Man’s World (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960). See also Steven Rose, The Grass Roots Church: A Manifesto for Protestant Renewal (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966), which poses a more visionary structure of Christians organized not in congregations but in clusters for service and teaching.

17. Gerald Jud, Pilgrim’s Process: How the Local Church Can Respond to the New Age (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1967). Defying the different ecclesial tastes of the 1970s, George W. Webber also published Today’s Church: A Community of Exiles and Pilgrims (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979), which advocates a style of transience more radical than the one proposed in his earlier works.

18. Robert W. Long, ed., Renewing the Congregation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1966); M. Edward Clark, William L. Malcomson, and Warren Lane Molton, The Church Creative (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967); Waldron Howard, Nine Roads to Renewal (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1967); Wallace E. Fisher, Preface to Parish Renewal: Study Guide for Laymen (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1968); Gerald H. Slusser, The Local Church in Transition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966); Joan Thatcher, The Church Responds (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1970); William R. Nelson and William F. Lincoln, Journey Toward Renewal: New Routes for Old Churches (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1971); Anthony Wesson, Experiments in Renewal (London: Epworth Press, 1971).

19. Robert A. Raines, New Life in the Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1961); Reshaping the Christian Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); The Secular Congregation (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Rudiger Reitz, The Church in Experiment: Studies in New Congregational Structures and Functional Mission (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969); Eugene Stockwell, Claimed by God for Mission: The Congregation Seeks New Forms (New York: World Outlook Press, 1965).

20. Marvin Bordelon, ed., The Parish in a Time of Change (Notre Dame: Fides Pub., 1967); Grace Ann Goodman, Rocking the Ark: Nine Case Studies of Traditional Churches in the Process of Change (New York: United Presbyterian Church U.S.A., 1968). More recently, B. Carlisle Driggers, ed., Models of Metropolitan Ministry: How Twenty Churches Are Ministering Successfully in Areas of Rapid Social Change (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1979).

21. Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliott Wright, Can These Bones Live? The Failure of Church Renewal (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969).

22. Theologians such as Joseph C. Hough have since insisted that the congregation needs to be analyzed "in the light of the universal theological dialogue in the church about the mission and ministry of the church as the body of Christ in the world" (in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 112), but most theological studies of the church since 1970 do not analyze the local church. Sociological studies of congregational context since 1970 include Arthur L. Anderson, Divided We Stand: Institutional Religion as a Reflection of Pluralism and Integration in America (Dubuque: Kenda/Hunt Pub. Co., 1978); Thomas C. Campbell and Yoshio Fukuyama, The Fragmented Layman: An Empirical Study of Lay Attitudes (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970); James D. Davidson, "Religious Belief as an Independent Variable," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (1972): 65-75; James D. Davidson, "Religious Belief as a Dependent Variable," Sociological Analysis 33 ( 1972): 81-94; James D. Davidson, "Patterns of Belief at the Denominational and Congregational Levels," Review of Religious Research 13 (1972): 197-205; David R. Gibbs, Samuel A. Miller, and James R. Wood, "Doctrinal Orthodoxy, Salience and the Consequential Dimension," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 12 (1973): 33-52; William McKinney, and others, Census Data for Community Mission (New York: Board for Homeland Ministries, United Church of Christ, 1983), part of a denomination-wide study of census data relevant to each congregation in the United Church of Christ; David O. Moberg, `’Theological Position and Institutional Characteristics of Protestant Congregations: An Explanatory Study," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 9 (1970): 53- 58; Wade Clark Roof, Community and Commitment; Thomas Sweetser, The Catholic Parish: Shifting Membership in a Changing Church (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1974).

23. Edgar R. Trexler, Creative Congregations: Tested Strategies for Today’s Congregations (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), 9. Cf. James B. Sauer, Congregational Vitality: Foundation for Integrity in Evangelism (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., n.d.), 1: "The local congregation is a lot livelier than most people think."

24. Writing in 1982, after a decade in which the church as a whole had pursued the inner mechanisms of congregations, several sociologists reported as follows: "We share the conviction that in recent years congregational analysis has over-emphasized the internal dynamics of congregational life and has failed to sufficiently account for the influence of the social and ecological context of the church’s inner life. We argue, in other words, that congregational analysis should work from the ‘outside in.’ While we do not subscribe to a deterministic view, we believe that the environment both sets limits on and provides opportunities for a congregation." Jackson Carroll, William McKinney, and Wade Clark Roof, "From the Outside In: A Sociological Approach," in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 84-85. See also David S. King, No Church Is an Island (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1980).

25. Dean A. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

26. C. Peter Wagner, Your Church Can Grow (Glendale, Calif.: Regal Books, 1976), 43.

27. Ibid., 1, 28.

28. Ibid., 89.

29. Ibid., 87.

30. Donald A. MacGavran, Bridges of God (New York: Friendship Press, 1955); How Churches Grow (New York: Friendship Press, 1959).

31. H. Boone Porter, Growth and Life in the Local Church (New York: Seabury Press, 1968).

32. W. Wendell Belew, Churches and How They Grow (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1971).

33. See n. 25, above.

34. In addition to the works already mentioned: Charles L. Chaney and Ron S. Lewis, Design for Church Growth (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1977); Vergil Gerber, God’s Way to Keep a Church Going and Growing (Glendale, Calif.: Regal Books, 1973); Donald A. MacGavran, Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmanns Pub. Co., 1970); Donald A. MacGavran and Winfred Arn, How to Grow a Church (Glendale, Calif.: Regal Books, 1973); Donald A. MacGavin and Winfred Arn, Ten Steps to Church Growth (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Donald A. MacGavin and George Hunter, Church Growth: Strategies That Work (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1980); Donald J. MacNair, The Growing Local Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1975); Charles Mylander, Secrets for Growing Churches (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979); Wilbert R. Shenk, The Challenge of Church Growth (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1973); Ebbie Smith, A Manual for Church Growth Surveys (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1976); Bob Waymire and C. Peter Wagner, The Church Growth Survey Handbook (Santa Clara, Calif.: Global Church Growth Bulletin, 1980); C. Peter Wagner, Our Kind of People (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979); The Global Church Growth Bulletin (Box 66, Santa Clara, Calif.), published bimonthly.

35. Robert K. Hudnut, Church Growth Is Not the Point (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

36. Dean R. Hoge and David A. Roozen, eds., Understanding Church Growth and Decline: 1950-1970 (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979); Carl S. Dudley, Where Have All Our People Gone? (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979), a digest of material in the Hoge and Roozen volume.

37. Jackson Carroll, Small Churches Are Beautiful (New York: Harper 8z Row, 1977); Carl S. Dudley, Making the Small Church Effective (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1978); Bernard Quinn, The Small Rural Parish (Washington, D.C.: Glenmary House Missioners, 1980).

38. Wagner, Your Church Can Grow, 159. See also Wagner’s summary article in Hoge and Roozen, Understanding Church Growth, 270-87.

39. Wagner, Your Church Can Grow, 41.

40. Ibid., 31.

41. Robert H. Schuller, Your Church Has Real Possibilities (Glendale, Calif.: Regal Books, 1974).

42. Wagner, Your Church Can Grow, 27.

43. Lyle E. Schaller, "A Practitioner’s Perspective," in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 160-74. See also Lyle E. Schaller, Survival Tactics in the Parish (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1977); Assimilating New Members (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1978); Effective Church Planning (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979); Activating the Passive Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982); and many other works. Note the mechanistic approach of another consultant in Roy M. Oswald, Power Analysis of a Congregation (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1981).

44. Many consultants and others who study the congregation are listed in Elizabeth Whipple, The Study of the Local Church: A Directory of Participants (Atlanta: Project Team for the Study of the Congregation, Rollins Center for Church Ministries, Emory University, 1983).

45. Lyle E. Schaller, "A Practioner’s Perspective," in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 161.

46. Ibid., 162-64.

47. Ibid., 168.

48. "I have become convinced that the organizational structure, the size of the governing board, the frequency of their meetings, the nature of the room in which they meet, and the choice of who will preside at the meetings of the governing body have a significant impact on what happens in the life of a congregation. The design of the building has a great impact on the degree of ‘friendliness’ displayed by the members. In another setting I have argued that the importance of place may be the most neglected factor in church planning" (ibid., 164).

49. Some church consultants—for instance, those of the London-based Grubb Institute of Behavioral Studies—again use a mechanist approach to the congregation, but with more attention to organicist methods than Schaller employs. Bruce Reed, based at the Grubb Institute, and his American associate Barry Evans probe the psychology of members of a congregation and advance hypotheses about behavioral dynamics characteristic of a particular church to determine its "primary task—its normative function in the community" (Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 38). Though the congregation is also understood as an "open system" functioning developmentally, "the process of transformation is [itself ]called a ‘task’ which is susceptible to analysis and definition" (ibid., 39). Bruce Reed, The Dynamics of Religion: Process and Movement in Christian churches (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1978), analyzes a process of oscillation through which members and congregations regularly move. He also develops a theory of functional and dysfunctional behavior in church activities. The dominant image of the local church, the one that gives Reed’s and Evans’s findings much of their coherence and argument, is that of the congregation as a mechanistic field of traceable forces. See also Bruce Reed, The Task of the Church and the Role of Its Members (New York: The Alban Institute, 1976).

50. Wagner’s Our Kind of People is a protracted argument for a homogeneous congregation. See also his fifth vital sign, in Your Church Can Grow, 33.

51. Robert C. Worley, A Gathering of Strangers: Understanding the Life of Your Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976).

52. Ibid., 18. Worley goes on to clarify his use of "identity crisis," disclosing his organic bent by associating his use of the term with Erik Erikson’s discussion of identity formation in late adolescence.

53. E. Mansell Pattison, Pastor and Parish: A Systems Approach (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 6- 12, notes three aspects of systems theory—holism, open synergy, and isomorphism—that correspond to the characteristics I describe.

54. Evelyn Eaton Whitehead and James D. Whitehead, Community of Faith: Models and Strategies for Developing Christian Communities (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), 21, 32.

55. Loren Mead describes parishioners who "feel trapped, unable to free their congregation from its hang-ups.... In its corporate life the parish often becomes an institution of frightened people. It becomes defensive, self-protective—the very antithesis of loving freedom proclaimed by the gospel and believed by many of its members" (New Hope for Congregations, 22-23). But, for Mead and the Alban Institute that he directs, such situations when squarely faced contain the seeds for resolution. "Congregations can change.... Purposeful people can determine much about the direction of a congregation’s life" (ibid., 93).

56. Pattison, Pastor and Parish, 7.

57. James D. Anderson, To Come Alive!; John E. Biersdorf, Hunger for Experience: Vital Religious Communities in America (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); Paul Dietterich and Russell Wilson, A Process of Local Church Vitalization (Naperville: Center for Parish Development, 1976); James C. Fenhagen, Mutual Ministry: New Vitality for the Local Church (New York: Seabury Press, 1977).

58. Newton Malony describes how organization development enlivens the church body: "Organizations were hereby conceived as organic, systemic and alive entities that could be improved by intentional efforts. The goal is to improve the way they are organized, the jobs they provide and the relationships they engender, so that they function more efficiently and fulfill their members’ lives more fully. It is important to note that organization development consultation assumes that the ‘fulfilling of the members’ lives’ is just as important as increasing production.... More important, it assumes that participation in the organization is the way that the members’ lives will become more satisfying. It is a mutually dependent and necessary relationship because nowhere else in modern society is it possible to increase life satisfaction so fully as in organizational life.

"When the church is perceived through this systems approach, it is seen as a place where the importance of fulfilling lives is probably more important than any program the church may produce or any building it may construct" ("Organization Development: A Framework for Understanding and Helping the Church," in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 179).

59. Pattison, Pastor and Parish, 8.

60. Robert C. Worley, Change in the Church: A Source of Hope (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), 93.

61. Wagner, Your Church Can Grow, 30.

62. Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christian Initiation (New York: Pueblo Pub. Co., 1978); Gwen Kennedy Neville and John H. Westerhoff, Learning Through Liturgy (New York: Seabury Press, 1978); William H. Willimon, Worship as Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979); Walter Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Bible Study (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).

63. Don S. Browning, The Moral Context of Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); Thomas Downs, The Parish as Learning Community: Modeling for Parish and Adult Growth (New York: Paulist Press, 1979); Thomas H. Groome, Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Our Vision (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); C. Ellis Nelson, Where Faith Begins (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1967); John H. Westerhoff, Will Our Children Have Faith? (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).

64. Stephen B. Clark, Building Christian Communities (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1972); Speed Leas and Paul Kittlaus, Church Fights, is representative of several works on church conflict (see chap. 10, n. 8). See also Jones and Wilson, cited in n. 15; Douglas Walrath, Leading Churches Through Change (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1979).

65. Roger A. Johnson, Congregations as Nurturing Communities (New York: Division for Parish Services, Lutheran Church of America, 1979); Samuel Southard, Comprehensive Pastoral Care: Enabling the Laity to Share in Pastoral Ministry (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1975); Howard W. Stone, The Caring Church: A Guide for Lay Pastoral Care (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983).

66. James Gustafson, Treasure in Earthen Vessels: The Church as a Human Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), developed the concept of the church as a community of language, although he does not press the implication of language beyond its Christian symbols; nor does he argue that the community employing this language is either essentially or primarily the local church.

67. Earl Brewer, Theodore Runyon, and Harold McSwain, Protestant Parish: A Case Study of Rural and Urban Parish Patterns (Atlanta: Communicative Arts Press, 1967).

68. Nelson, Where Faith Begins. See also John H. Westerhoff and Gwen Kennedy Neville, Generation to Generation.

69. James E. Dittes, The Church in the Way (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), 41. Clifford Geertz uses a similar notion of "bodied stuff" to distinguish the object of culture analysis from the abstractions that form nomothetic observations (The Interpretation of Cultures, 23). Like Geertz, Dittes further relates stuff to narrative style, and he sees, as I do, the implication of idiom for understanding the struggle of society at large.

70. John C. Harris, Stress, Power and Ministry: An Approach to the Current Dilemmas of Pastors and Congregations (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1977).

71. Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life; Melvin D. Williams, Community in a Black Pentecostal Church: An Anthropological Study (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1974). Melvin D. Williams, "The Conflict of Corporate Church and Spiritual Community," in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 55-67, and Michael H. Ducey, Sunday Morning: Aspects of Urban Ritual (New York: Free Press, 1977), study white Protestant churches from an anthropological perspective. Suggestions to students of congregations who wish to begin an ethnographic study of a church are offered, largely in exercise form, in Dudley, Making the Small Church Effective, and in Neville and Westerhoff, Learning Through Liturgy, 71-88. See also William H. Anderson, "The Local Congregation as a Subculture," Social Compass 18 (1971): 287-91.

72. Urban T. Holmes’s most extensive analysis of congregational culture occurs in Priest in Community: Exploring the Roots of Ministry (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).

73. Don S. Browning, "Integrating the Approaches, An Overview," and David S. Pacini, "Professionalism, Breakdown and Revelation," in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 220-37 and 133-52.

74. Heilman, Synagogue Life, xii.

75. In his study of Zion, a black Pentecostal church, Melvin Williams observes: "The system of symbolic expression in Zion validates this church community; the communication code . . . allows the members not only to belong to this religious community but also to be carriers of the community content wherever they find themselves in interaction with other members of Zion.... The members identify with Zion and one another. They embody the stuff of community. They reinforce, identify, and conceptualize in terms of images of whom that community represents. Thus their communication code, full of references to food, the farm, the rural landscape, human anatomy, death, the physical world, and the supernatural, contains messages and is indicative of a system of symbolic expression that validates and identifies these southern Black rural (peasant) migrants apart from a wider society" (Community in a Black Pentecostal Church, 175).

76. Heilman, Synagogue Life, xii. Cf. Frederika Randall, "Why Scholars Become Storytellers," The New York Times Book Review, 29 January 1984, 1, 31.

77. Cf. James F. Hopewell, "The Jovial Church: Narrative in Local Church Life," in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 68-83.

Christian congregations took me by surprise. Although I had always been associated with local churches, my curiosity about them came late and unexpectedly while I was engaged with what seemed a quite different set of professional concerns. Twenty years of overseas missionary and ecumenical service had drawn my interest, first, to the traditional and Muslim faiths of Africa and, later, to the religions of Asia. I now teach about these religions in a seminary lodged in a university.

But something happened while I was pursuing religions on the other side of the world. Like Columbus in his search, I encountered an intervening territory that possessed its own riches and fascination. Of course, like Columbus, I was not this area’s original occupant. Christian congregations have attracted many investigators in recent years. I venture to add one more volume to the already lengthy list of books and articles about the local church because I think I see from my eccentric angle some aspects of the congregation that may make it for others the surprising new world that it has become for me.

Part of my recent wonder about local churches grows from my need as a professor of world religions to demonstrate how my courses meet concerns in the ministry that my students will enter. The close attention to such parish features as ritual process and the use of Scripture encouraged in my courses does indeed help forge links to other religions, but studying the congregation because it provides a rationale for courses in other faiths remains only a part of the reason for my interest. What proves more tantalizing are the ways in which the study of other religions gives me fresh access to the nature of congregations, enabling me to glimpse better how local churches particularize their religious behavior and concretely express the faith. A congregation, undeniably Christian, nevertheless uses forms and stories common to a larger world treasury to create its own local religion of outlooks, action patterns, and values. I have begun to see how astonishingly thick and meaning-laden is the actual life of a single local church. Ministry in even a small church occurs in a much more abundant world of signals and images than I and, I suspect, many others had assumed.

My interest in exploring the thick culture of local churches was first prompted by an unsettling experience. Beginning in 1975, a new congregation grew up around me. A group of Episcopal laity and I as their priest set out to form a loose fellowship that would meet for Communion each Sunday to supplement our participation in the community’s existing churches, none of which was Episcopal. Because of my university commitments I could give very little time to the group; in fact, I took great interest in keeping its activity as simple as legitimately possible. My behavior could be used by church growth advocates as a case study of unpromising leadership. I was unaggressive and nonauthoritative; I was more interested in intimacy than expansion; I avoided ecclesiastical trappings and tried to promote service to the neighborhood instead of the internal activities of an organized church.

To our first Eucharist, held in a bank, I brought the bare minimum: bread and wine, prayer books, and a card table. On the second Sunday, however, someone brought a cloth to cover the table. The following Sunday another person produced a cross and candlesticks, and at our fourth gathering still another announced that the women of our church would meet the following Thursday to plan the bazaar. Despite my style, our fellowship became a congregation. Within a few years it constructed its own building, grew to full parish status, called its own rector, and burned its mortgage.

What caused its growth? God gave the increase, but God used other means than its first ordained leader for its planting and watering. As the four years of my tenancy passed, I learned to appreciate the capacity of an ordinary group of Christians to bring to maturity a unique and vibrant congregation. That this culture developed, convoluted, and achieved a church around my passive if permissive leadership more and more intrigued me. Most of what constructed our congregation did not occur by deliberate planning or goal setting; rather, a particular language developed among the members, an idiom that came to bind their actions and perspectives. Though its terms were drawn from the vast world repertoire of religious and social imagination, they were particularized in a local language that expressed our own views, values, and actions. Together we wove a network of audible and physical signs that, informed by humanity’s symbolic struggles for community, now shaped our own. What was the grammar, I began to ask, of the new language that the members of this congregation seemed to create? What images and twists of phrase constituted their common communication? How did their common structures build them into a household of God?

Questions such as these began to nag me. It was fairly easy to identify elements in our local idiom derived from Christian and denominational sources, but much of what we expressed and meant to each other had other origins. I was struck by the resemblances between our growing church and bonding features I had earlier seen in African villages: the critical importance of narrative, a coalescence of world view, the link of myth and ethos. Could it be that here in suburban America there grew around me a church that partook of powerful religious forms that I had previously associated only with another continent?

At the next opportunity, a year’s sabbatical, I set out to pursue these questions. What I did on that sabbatical was to observe two ordinary congregations, both long established in the same town in which my Episcopal congregation had sprung up. By sitting sympathetically through a year’s worth of meetings, conflicts, services, and conversations, I sought to determine what their participants were saying to each other, what meanings they were sharing, what drama they as actors were together unfolding. By year’s end I was convinced that parish life, in these two local churches as much as in my own, was a rich and multilayered transaction that seldom got the description it deserved. The life of each was like a fascinating tapestry woven with distinctive values and outlooks and behaviors, each telling its own pattern.

I do not think these churches each had by chance an unusually rich character that oozed meaning. An abundant system of language and significance seems to come with any congregation, whether growing or declining, be it as flashy as the Crystal Cathedral or as lukewarm as Laodicea. At the end of the year I concluded that a group of people cannot regularly gather for what they feel to be religious purposes without developing a complex network of signals and symbols and conventions -- in short, a subculture -- that gains its own logic and then functions in a way peculiar to that group. That conclusion changed the course of my research and my career. My explorations along this new path, leading, I hope, to insight into the structures of expression in local churches, form the body of this book.

Idiom

What struck me first and most forcefully in these three churches -- the one I led and the two others I studied -- was the surprisingly rich idiom unique to each. As slight and predictable as the language of a congregation might seem on casual inspection, it actually reflects a complex process of human imagination. Each is a negotiation of metaphors, a field of tales and histories and meanings that identify its life, its world, and God. Word, gesture, and artifact form a local language -- a system of construable signs that Clifford Geertz, following Weber, calls a "web of significance"² -- that distinguishes a congregation from others around it or like it. Even a plain church on a pale day catches one in a deep current of narrative interpretation and representation by which people give sense and order to their lives. Most of this creative stream is unconscious and involuntary, drawing in part upon images lodged long ago in the human struggle for meaning. Thus a congregation is held together by much more than creeds,³ governing structures, and programs. At a deeper level, it is implicated in the symbols and signals of the world, gathering and grounding them in the congregation’s own idiom.

Most of us can recall several quite distinct manifestations of parish idiom. A pastor moving from one charge to another encounters strikingly different expressions of value and style in the new church. To communicate effectively within the new congregation the pastor must master its particular language. Moreover, potential church members, like househunters, do not find a wide range of acceptable habitations in a new town. They may search diligently before discovering a congregation that catches the intonations of their own language. Some give up the search and stay home. It is not that the churches they rejected were not reasonably pleasant and worshipful, and it is not, as hyperactive help books on the market assert, that better or different programs would necessarily lure them in. In hunting for a church, Christians are not only buying a product that must be attractively presented, they are also testing their own symbolic expression against that of the prospective church. Silently they ask of the congregation: What does this place say about us? What does it signify about our values and the way we see the world?

For both pastor and laity, entry into a new church is only the beginning of the encounter with its idiom. Parish communication constitutes virtually every parish event. Conflicts of any duration usually arise from different interpretations of parish idiom. Parents and education committees perennially worry about how the young are to learn the church’s language. Each week teachers struggle to relate standard curriculum materials to the information that the congregation’s members already convey to each other. Members of boards and committees map out campaigns and policies along lines of discourse that function to gather the congregation. The youth group strives to entertain the church’s sense of the absurd in its skit at the next parish supper. A recovered invalid chooses to express thanks to a helpful congregation in a manner authentic to its nature. The pastor spends much of the week weighing words -- phrases in prayers, terms in appeals, points in sermons -- so that they sink into the communicated stuff of parish idiom.

Later chapters will explore ways of analyzing the expressive nature of the congregation: how it views itself and the world, how it behaves symbolically, and how it communicates its character. To start, however, I want to call attention to examples of signals and symbols in parish idiom, the first feature of congregational expression to attract my own attention. So accustomed are all of us to conceive the church as an assortment of either consciously planned programs or irrational religious feelings that illustrations of symbolic interaction are necessary to warm us to the notion that congregations have cultures as well as activities, policies, and emotions.

Consider the church in which it has been the practice of the members to leave abruptly after the worship service. Appeals to conscience ("We are depending on you to help create a time of fellowship after church") or a planned program to attract after-church participation are unlikely to change the habits of most members. But suppose changes are made in the symbolic code by which worshipers may remain comfortably in each other’s presence after service, perhaps by giving each a doughnut. Neither provided nor consumed for the sake of nutrition, the after-worship doughnut (and the manner of its provision and eating) is, rather, intended as new bit of idiom that influences the tone, timing, and identity of life together. A doughnut might seem a strange example of congregational language, but it is a signal that conveys a message significant to the corporate life of the congregation. A congregation knows its specific meaning, which is an invitation to linger good-naturedly. Substances that express such messages, many only locally understood, are part of a congregation’s idiom.

Most available substances do not have idiomatic implications. To offer glasses of water in the church foyer after worship would cause bewilderment, as would the distribution of gum or grits. "What’s this for?" worshipers would ask, uncertain of the intended meaning. Some substances, nevertheless, as well as some sounds, gestures, and marks -- and even some smells such as sanctuary musk and kitchen spices -- do serve as signals within a congregation, which by the convention of its idiom understands each to stand for something else. Both universal and home-grown signals, their combinations, and the rules regarding their significance form the idiom of the local church. As many testify, idiom differs from congregation to congregation, subtly but insistently presenting in each its own character.⁴ Each idiom is a wondrously complex language, largely built of written and spoken words and phrases, but also including matter as tangible as doughnuts and mute as handshakes and pouts. Together the signals make up the idiomatic code by which a congregation communicates itself, enabling it to identify and integrate itself, to express its faith and love, to govern and sometimes to change its corporate behavior.

Within congregational idiom are special signs called symbols. We shall use "symbol" to refer to a signal that commands markedly higher recognition and respect from members as an element essential to parish life. As an East Coast pastor recently discovered, symbols are not tampered with:

An arrangement of sanctuary furniture for this congregation proved to be more inviolable than either its budget or its sermons.

Symbols differ from signals like doughnuts in another way: the meaning of the symbol is markedly less specific. Even young children know what after-worship doughnuts mean, but probably no member in the East Coast church, no matter how irate, could explain what the sanctuary arrangement precisely meant. That "multivocality," in Victor Turner’s phrase, is in the nature of the symbol.⁵ Members fight for its significance but cannot agree upon a single particular referent. Thus the meaning of a symbol is not easy to grasp because it abounds in meanings that touch many parts of a parish identity.⁶ The transformative power of symbols resides in the abundance of meanings stored in them,⁷ so members are quick to champion, but slow to explain, the symbols of their identity.

What an observer of parish symbols soon discovers is that a large portion of them are not specifically Christian in nature. Both signals and symbols in congregational idiom can arise from any source in the experience of the congregation’s members. Money is such a powerful, not specifically Christian, symbol. Though the disposal of a million dollars did not seem very significant to the East Coast church, money is frequently an emotion-laden metaphor that both expresses and provokes the identity of a particular congregation. Different local churches use the symbol in different ways. One parish develops an elaborate system for hiding its display, issuing awkward campaign letters that barely mention the subject, publishing no budget, and treating the Sunday offering as an embarrassing moment to be quickly concluded. But in another church, just down the road, the subject of money comes up in most conversations. There it functions as a potent expression of superabundance and fertility. Yet another church close by treats money as a principal adversary, waging a symbolic and sometimes ingenious guerrilla war against its power to dominate. And a fourth congregation in the vicinity uses the topic of its financial difficulties primarily to voice its disappointment with a world that, through changing population patterns in the neighborhood, seems to have drained that church of its membership and power.

Jesus’ insouciance toward money, taking it from the mouth of a fish, typifies the idiom of none of these congregations. Their seriousness about money comes from other sources. Such parentage does not mean that the ways they treat money are therefore sub-Christian, but rather that a household of God draws its idiom from its complex heritage of Christian and non-Christian sources.

Another world symbol in congregational idiom is children, also an emotion-laden metaphor. Different churches treat their children in different symbolic ways. One secretes them in soundproof rooms and becomes uncomfortable if too many appear in the sanctuary. A neighboring congregation, expressing its fecundity, arranges the public display of its children at worship. Another church close by devises creative campaign strategies to attract more young people and families with children, while yet another acknowledges the absence of children as it grieves its own aging.

As described here, there are similarities between the symbolic operations related to money and children. It is not the case, however, that a given congregation’s idiom would express a similar action or attitude in each matter. A congregation may flaunt its money and hide its children. The distinctive idiom of a church rests on such permutations of many symbols and signs. Its language is constructed from key verbal phrases, furnishings, rituals of conflict and conciliation, displays of technical competence, ways of showing care and worth, and much more. Given the variety of options available within any of the categories, it is easy to see that the idiom of any single church is necessarily distinct.

The local church suffers when it does not take its idiom seriously. If the congregation views itself as merely the repository of meanings better expressed elsewhere, it fails to appreciate its genius, its microcosmic capacity to reflect in uniquely lived form the sociality of humankind. When a congregation considers its own language neither interesting nor important it devalues its identity and thus its names for and before God.

Exploring Congregations

There are three further reasons why I and other students of congregational life invite a wider probe of the idiomatic local expression of church life. The first is that the image that many members now possess of their parish tends to embarrass them, and I believe that a deeper understanding would enable their greater appreciation of their congregation’s value and potential faithfulness. Second, a more acute sensitivity to a congregation’s idiom should increase the facility with which the gospel is proclaimed and heard in its midst. And, third, a perception of how the parish uses the cultural forms of other human communities should deepen its consciousness of its solidarity with peoples throughout the world in their mutual search for shalom. Each of these reasons requires more extended discussion.

1. Seeing beyond the embarrassment. Observers of congregational life today are more often chagrined than impressed: too often congregations deviate substantially from ideal concepts of Christian community. The charge of hypocrisy is made more frequently against church members than any other group of Americans. The contemporary local church, despite occasional enthusiastic advertisements and placid self-descriptions in annual reports, is often discouraged and sometimes cynical about ties that bind its members. An educated congregation these days knows more sociological and psychological explanations for its collective behavior than it dares, in its embarrassment, to apply. Moreover, the instances in which parish culture and structure are most evident usually hold bad news. As long as a congregation seems to surmount its problems of social interaction, it is easy to forget its congregational aspects and to view its members as free agents who spontaneously collaborate to practice high Christian precepts. When trouble strikes, however, the residual, structured, idiomatic household image of the parish becomes starkly visible.

Take a case in which church teenagers are caught using marijuana at a youth group party. The alarm system of the congregational household immediately alerts its members. Angry parents and others spread the signal. Their anxiety about the world of drugs turns to outrage when pot invades their corporate precincts. They may summon credal and biblical support as ammunition to defend their position, but their basic defense guards a more primal symbolic integrity. They raise questions about cultural identity: Who do they think we are? They recognize intrinsic values: Where do we stand? Where do we draw the line? Members also devise symbolic strategies: they formulate house rules to outlaw the behavior and adopt catchwords to belittle its perpetrators. The pastor plans a severe talk to the teenagers. Throughout the trouble the structure of the congregational household is painfully manifest to its members. They test and voice its boundaries. They employ its systems of value and communication. They display its purpose, and they use its resources to accomplish that goal. The pastor, prepared, does indeed talk to the adolescents, and several never return to the house.

What the congregation senses in the marijuana incident to be its own structure is doubly disappointing. Its culture first becomes clear to its members in a trying crisis and is, as usual, associated with social predicament. When revealed, furthermore, the form and character of their household appears all too common. Household actions are homely, made from human stuff. In their bout with marijuana, members use vulgar weapons -- gossip, pressure, threat -- to fight in defense of their house. They are also puzzled by the fact that their culture at least tacitly gives access to a drug and then expels its users. Neither feature seems Christian, and life in the congregation appears all too human, cramped, and predictable.

A common response to social crises like the marijuana incident is to look more to what the local church should be than to whatever in fact it is. Congregations that respond in this way often succeed in convincing themselves that the church is invisible or, at least, different from its local manifestation. Aided by judicatory and seminary personnel to whom the congregation seems more beneficiary than source of Christian praxis, local churches usually assume that a more definitive form of church life exists somewhere else. I gain the impression from some denominational meetings and seminary lectures that the real church can be located just outside the network of concrete parishes and might well function better without them. Caught themselves in their embarrassing finitude, local churches are also relieved to hear that superior church life occurs somewhere else.

But the thick gathering that constitutes congregational life is more substantial than is usually acknowledged. As I discovered in my early studies, the local church is a microcosm of human culture, an immediate instance of the world’s symbolic imagination. Its specific disappointments and predictable sins are real, but they are also the lot of humanity caught everywhere in a story of accomplishment and failure, of devotion and disobedience. Itself a potent example of the ambiguity of human association, the congregation nevertheless dares to accept its designation as the body of Christ and the household of God, proclaiming in its acceptance the incarnate nature of its God who took on servant form. The thick gathering of the congregation is much more than a hypocritical assembly; it is for Christians the immediate outworking of human community redeemed by Christ.

2. Hearing and proclaiming the gospel. Disappointed by the homely behavior of the local church and embarrassed by its parochialism, church leaders have launched major schemes, especially in the last quarter century, to convert the congregation into a fundamentally different sort of community. We have tried to turn the church around or inside out; we have introduced new programs and planning devices; we have sought the missionary structure of the congregation and plotted its numerical growth. The results have usually been disappointing. The reported size of the average non-Roman Catholic congregation in the United States in 1970 was 273 members; in 1980, 274.⁸ Despite massive deliberation and effort throughout the nation, the basic shape, size, and character of the local church remain essentially unchanged. Its worship may be more varied today than it was in earlier decades, and its leadership may now be more representative of its members as a whole, but the fundamental patterns of congregational culture that most of us encountered as children will probably cloak our aging and burial.

An analysis of both local congregational idiom and the way the gospel message confronts and yet is conveyed by that language would be a better starting point for efforts to assist the local church. Rather than assume that the primary task of ministry is to alter the congregation, church leaders should make a prior commitment to understand the given nature of the object they propose to improve. Many strategies for operating upon local churches are uninformed about the cultural constitution of the parish; many schemes are themselves exponents of the culture they fancy they overcome. For several centuries the gatherings of the dominant class in American society, white Anglo-Saxon churches have tended to assume that they themselves have no cultural particularity and therefore no reason to investigate their own ethos, tradition, and world view. These features were attributed to "ethnic" groups; the dominant white Protestant churches considered themselves beyond ethnicity, responsive primarily to universal precepts and revelation. Only recently has their cultural specificity been recognized.

To ponder seriously the finite culture of one’s own church, given the promise of God’s redemptive presence within it, opens up a vast hermeneutical undertaking. The congregation recedes as primarily a structure to be altered and emerges as a structure of social communication within which God’s work in some ways already occurs. The hermeneutical task is not merely the mining of biblical revelation in ways meaningful to individuals. It is more basically the tuning of the complex discourse of a congregation so that the gospel sounds within the message of its many voices.

3. Solidarity with the world. The congregation is a specific and available instance of human society expressed in symbolic activities that grasp society’s plight and hope. That is the basis for calling it God’s household. The local church is specific, with commonplace boundaries that prevent flights into generalities about the church, humanity, and the nature of the redeemed life. The congregation is also available, present to all for entry and inquiry; one need not seek some more remote or less obvious ecclesial home. The local church is, further, because it speaks an idiom of human language, an instance of human society that distinguishes itself from many other kinds of societies by the high proportion of language it spends on struggle and grace. The plight and the hope of the world are not entirely concealed in other forms of social grouping, but the idiom of the congregational household often expresses for Christians most persistently and poignantly God’s call and the human cry.

Servants belong to households. When Christ emptied himself, he took the form not only of a servant but also of the household that bound his servanthood. That house was at once the oikoumenê, the whole inhabited world, and all local households, all homely, and all served by the house servant Christ in their limited but imaginative form. Thus careful attention to a congregation’s domestic idiom yields a healthier self-image and a clearer sense of the gospel’s intonations in that congregation’s midst, but most important, a means of solidarity with the struggle of all human groups for survival and meaning, no matter how distant and strange the settings in which they are housed.

Characteristics of the Congregation

Before we elaborate the modes of congregational idiom and the narrative forms they assume, a task that will occupy all the subsequent chapters of this book, we must dispatch two preliminary matters: a definition of the congregation as one among several forms of religious association and some comments on the relation of the congregational form to specifically Christian witness and mission, a discussion that forms the last section of this chapter.

Common as they are in several religious traditions, congregations have never dominated the totality of the world’s local religious organizations. Human groups more frequently express their faith through corporate forms other than the congregation. Interwoven with familial, civic, devotional, and secular configurations that are structurally different from the local church, other religious groupings offer alternative patterns of collective reverence and incidentally suggest other ways by which Christianity might conceivably have spread among peoples. The congregation is not as inevitable as church members might assume. To study the congregation in any detail requires more precision about the way it differs from other pious gatherings.

My working definition of the congregation is this: A congregation is a group that possesses a special name and recognized members who assemble regularly to celebrate a more universally practiced worship but who communicate with each other sufficiently to develop intrinsic patterns of conduct, outlook, and story.⁹ We can sharpen our appreciation of congregational structure by comparing its thick culture with that of other religious associations.

One pervasive form of pious gathering occurs within the family. Whether the family is nuclear or extended, a twosome or a tribe, its propensities for reverence and ritual often express a religious process that relates home-grown myths, honors domestic symbols, and follows devotional sequences that intensify faith in that family and allegiance to its own images of ultimacy. While such piety might seem more evident among people who live in clans and who honor ancestors, it also characterizes family reverence in societies such as our own.¹⁰ Consider the motivation of the crowds that attend Christmas and Easter services in any local church. The absentees who appear on those occasions probably are present to acknowledge less the calendar of the church than their family’s own cycle of birth, childhood, life, and death. Out of loyalty to their folk they participate in events that briefly synchronize the pageantry of the Christian year with the consuming drama of kinship. To scold Christmas and Easter crowds as lapsed Christians may miss the point: that they are loyal family members performing their household rites of affinity.

A congregation differs from a family at prayer. The local church bears a distinctive name to indicate, even in eases where one family rules the parish, that the congregation is not synonymous with a particular bond of flesh. It is called St. Paul’s or Newtown Church, not often Smith Church even if the Smiths dominate the congregation. Moreover, the congregation identifies its own membership, initiating its catechumens rather than taking for granted their incorporation by reason of blood. The flesh and blood the congregation celebrates are not therefore those of a family but those of a universal Lord whose worship transcends the local church to embrace all assemblies that call themselves Christian.

Political units such as towns and nations exercise their own forms of collective piety. Ceremonies such as Memorial Day celebrations¹¹ and certain sporting events¹² express a corporate devotion to civic hopes and ideals. Again aggregates of people collaborate to recall mythic memories, to symbolize present accomplishment, and to project a final triumph often wrought from great peril. Robert Bellah has demonstrated how even a supposedly secular nation manifests a civil religion that provides for most American communities a powerful amalgam of Christian and patriotic images and values.¹³

Though congregations may be closely identified with specific political units, as were parishes in medieval Europe, local churches nevertheless resist total identification with their secular magistracy. Congregational sacraments, though they may support civic intentions, are rarely subsumed within civic observances. Even those who automatically are members of state churches undergo baptism and thereafter participate to varied degrees in the distinctive life of local churches. Such local groups are often deeply implicated in the piety of the state, but nonetheless each congregation retains a culture distinguishable from the pattern of the civil religion.

In Asia one encounters two other forms of religious assembly that are, again, structurally different from the congregation. One is the type of corporate observance that occurs within the precincts of temples, shrines, and other holy places. In these settings a small corps of priests or other functionaries, or perhaps a single religious leader, provides ceremonial proficiency and continuity for a larger lay populace whose participation, while not casual, tends to be more occasional and informal than the ordered activity of church attendance. Pilgrims and local devotees seldom attend regular services or expect to take their places in a fixed lay community. Most worshipers at a shrine on a single day do not communicate sufficiently with each other to develop the unique pattern of conduct, outlook, and story that distinguishes the local congregation.

A similar amorphism of the attendant community accompanies another form of religious gathering prevalent in East and Southeast Asia. Here the lay followers of the Buddhist monastic order, the Samgha, may gather in groups to perform meritorious rituals of devotion at the monastery, but their participation is individual and limited, unlike that of the congregation of monks whose corporate life they support.

As these illustrations suggest, congregations are only one of several sorts of collectivities by which human beings corporately express their religion. In Christianity, however, the congregation is the primary community by which the faith is expressed and perpetuated. Though organized into larger ecclesial units such as dioceses, denominations, and, ultimately, the worldwide church, the congregation is nevertheless the persistent and immediate form by which the church is manifested in almost every community. When people join the church or are ordained for ministry in the church, they almost invariably enter the culture of a specific congregation whose conduct, outlook, and story will occupy most of what their church membership entails.

How Congregations May Be Christian

So closely do local churches accompany the growth and perpetuation of Christianity that their structure may seem an apostolic invention, but the followers of Jesus founded only particular churches, not the pattern of the congregation itself. The apostles, in fact, grew up in congregations. For several centuries before it came to characterize Christian assembly, a congregational form of organization shaped the local gatherings of both Judaism and some Mediterranean mystery religions. This older pattern of pious community was adopted by early Christians to support and express their newfound faith. From its beginning the Christian church used social forms already common to other human groups.

The congregating of a contemporary Protestant parish reflects its complex parentage. Although it honors Christian precepts, it also inherits many other social codes that help it cohere and survive. Some of its structures and practices have obvious origins in Christian traditions; others, equally widespread and apparently necessary to Christian congregational identity, have murkier sources or explicitly secular ones. No congregation is a "pure gospel" church, composed solely of inarguably Christian practices; no living church escapes the contribution that a wider culture makes to its nature and continuing history.

This complex heritage may be evaluated from several different perspectives. One might consider much of what appears to be unidentifiably Christian as mere baggage, the social impediments that must travel along with the activity of recognizable devotion so that the church can persist through the many moments and circumstances each week during which members are not engaged in specific witness to their Christian faith. From this perspective one might be willing to tolerate large investments of parish energy in events whose sanctity is obscure, because they are functions needed to escort more obviously Christian practices. Fairs, elections, and building plans, for example, can be seen as the necessary but finally indifferent stuff the congregation creates to convey through time and space a more distinctively Christian ministry.

A quite different viewpoint, which I have already advocated, considers the total mix of parish life as the primary opportunity for members to see close at hand the struggle of human society through which the gospel is proclaimed. Instead of dividing the complex activity of a congregation into categories of sacred behavior and secular baggage, this approach sees God’s meaning as fully available only to members who perceive the entirety of social links that make their group whole. The worldwide toil to knit a human community out of disparate motives and symbols occurs in specific instance in the local church; the congregation, as was earlier suggested, is an immediate microcosm of all society’s attempts to associate.

In this view, the depiction of the congregation is more appropriately Paul’s image of the household than his metaphor of an earthen vessel holding separate treasure. The household is both container and treasure. The household works to coalesce its separate parts, like a congregation striving to incorporate various social forces and histories, like a world struggling to reconcile its different classes and peoples. A congregation’s appreciation of its own labor of embodiment, its recognition of its own attempt to fuse its many actions, can also, as I have said, deepen its sense of commonality with efforts of human societies throughout the world to gain their own shalom.

How a congregation views its institutional actions, moreover, is inextricably linked to its understanding of mission. One pastor, concerned about parish mission, notes that on the same day, her congregation celebrates Communion, fights over its music program, and fixes its plumbing. Were she to understand her church by the first perspective that extracts recognized piety from other behavior, she might identify Communion as specifically Christian and the other activities as the unavoidable, self-oriented burdens of corporate life. To prepare for mission, in this view of things, would require the members of a congregation to discount their self-serving stuff, attempting to slough it off in order to offer their more recognizably Christian hopes and actions, such as the grace and love witnessed in their Communion, to other people. Mission in such terms assumes the separability within the congregation of purer Christian expression from the general travail of corporate intercourse. In this view, the congregation communicates by word and deed what is uniquely Christian, in the hope that other sectors of society will receive the offering into their own community struggle.

Or the pastor, following a course similar to the one I propose, might ponder whether the Communion, the music dispute, and the plumbing repair were themselves interlocked in some more complex congregational configuration whose whole reflects the plight and promise of other communities throughout the world. The three events do, after all, involve breaks: one of bread, another of harmony, and the third of water. In each case the fraction can disclose the basic human imaginative working that through millennia has given form to primal sound and matter to render it Word and Sacrament, melody, and cleansing. Furthermore, each instance in some way depicts a community in trouble. Although the congregation knits itself together by inspired strands such as liturgies, musical programs, and water systems, each by the activity of the same congregation also corrupts its nature and threatens the congregation’s own life together. Death and betrayal, foretold in eucharistic action but belying that action’s intent, nonetheless continue to occur within the church. Strife tears processes apart; use makes resources such as plumbing fail. The events of Eucharist, broken pipes, and congregational conflict may seem to be atomized happenings of widely separated meaning. They are, however, the components of a larger human story whose themes embrace recurrent antinomies of saving and losing, hope and routine. The story relates a struggle throughout history for community leavened both by decay and evil and by the gospel of God.

Mission for a congregation conceived in images that embrace the totality of parish experience has a different starting point than that which extracts from the whole a designated piety. Such mission begins with a greater appreciation of a local church’s own finitude, its own ethos drawn from the world’s symbols but particularized in a cultural pattern specific to its own corporate life. Were it to recognize its own structured custom, a congregation might find in other societies, bodies in their own right, a strange consonance, distinct but bonded to that local church in a similarly symbolic toil for community. While congregations and other types of society possess obviously different intentions, they nevertheless work through analogous forms of culture in which a local church might recognize its deeper solidarity with other human groups.

Such a perspective for congregational mission implies that Christ is already present in every community struggle, not just churchly ones, and that the gospel the congregation witnesses to other groups is more likely encountered in those groups’ own setting than imported from our parish home. Given such a perspective, missional words and actions would spring less from a sense of extracting out of our social dross an identifiably golden Christian behavior for application elsewhere than from the promise that God is already in Christ reconciling the world of each group to Godself, including the territories, nearby or distant, that our local church is privileged to approach in mission.

My personal experience illustrates the difference between a parish missiology based on extraction and one based on discovery. After my seminary training, my family and I went to West Africa as missionaries. As with other new missionaries, my goal in 1954 was to bring Christ to Africa, a continent not dark but dusky enough in my view to need the light that shone more brightly in my American home. It was a case of believing that one area had what another lacked and of being at a time in history when I felt I could personally act as a bridge that permitted the transfer of that good from one area to the other. Traffic on the bridge, moreover, was to move both ways: concepts and methods of the gospel were indeed to flow from their American abundance to Africa, but in the other direction was to run the electricity of Africa to listless, self-serving churches in my native land. One realm which excelled in knowing what and knowing how could be linked symbiotically, it seemed, with another which instead had pointed energy, if only bridges were to span the gap between them.

I learned several lessons during our years in Africa. The first was that I could not to any significant degree shed my foreign character; thus my words about Christ and my, I hope, Christian behavior were saturated with the culture I had wanted to leave at home. Try as I might, I could extract no separate Christian word and deed. Second, I learned that I did not function as the primary expression of the gospel in an African community. The community itself did. What I came to discover in Africa was that Christ was already there and that, far from being the bridge for his entry, I, as my own dusk thinned somewhat, might have been a minor witness to his presence, already embedded in people’s life together. In the later 1950s, as I matured within the loving bonds of that society, Africa became for me not one side of a bridge but a whole sphere of redemptive life, sustaining within itself those features which earlier I had felt must come from outside.

The remainder of this book follows some implications of realizing that congregations everywhere are thick gatherings of complicated actions, each parish distinctive in its expression, each possessing its own genius yet incarnating in that peculiarity the worldly message and mission of Christ. We shall explore the congregation as we might a village, trying to learn the particular cultural patterns by which it attempts to make itself whole, but also finding within it forms by which other groups in the world coalesce, disintegrate, and yet manifest the gospel.

Notes

1. A survey of recent studies of the local congregations is the basis for chapter 2 of this book. In somewhat different form, the survey appears in James F. Hopewell, "Ghostly and Monstrous Churches," The Christian Century 99 (1982): 663-65.

2. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, chap. 1.

3. Wade Clark Roof, Community and Commitment, 178-79, takes issue with research that construes belief primarily from the credal statements of a church: "Theological doctrines are always filtered through people’s social and cultural experiences. What emerges in a given situation as ‘operant religion’ will differ considerably from the ‘formal religion’ of the historic creeds, and more concern with the former is essential to understanding how belief systems function in people’s daily lives."

4. "Individual congregations within one judicatory have very different ideological systems.... The difference between the extremes of the systematic value structure of congregations has grown tremendously" (James D. Anderson, To Come Alive! 32). "Congregations are unique. No two congregations are alike" (Loren Mead, New Hope for Congregations, 96). Sociological confirmation of the heterogeneity of congregations within a single denomination is found in the various articles of James D. Davidson listed in chapter 2, n. 22, of this volume; in Donald L. Metz, New Congregations: Security and Mission in Conflict (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 25; and in William H. Anderson, "The Local Congregation as a Subculture," Social Compass 18 (1971): 287-91.

5. Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 29.

6. Referring to what he terms their "multivocality," Victor Turner proposes that symbols condense within a single formulation a number of meanings and values significant to a people (The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967], 19-41). Cf. Turner’s introduction to Edward R. Spence, ed., Forms of Symbolic Action (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1970). Turner finds in each symbol a polarization of physiological referents and those which disclose a "depth world of prophetic, half-glimpsed images.... Symbols resonate with meanings."

7. Symbols perform, for Geertz, a synthesizing action that relates their stored meanings and depicts a social behavior they also evoke (Interpretation of Cultures, 87- 141).

8. Average congregational size is computed from statistics in the 1970 and 1980 editions of Constant H. Jacquet, Jr., ed., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville: Abingdon Press).

9. Congregations have received such casual analysis that few technical definitions of their nature exist. Mine builds upon Morris Freilich’s concept of community in his Marginal Natives, 520. As is already evident, I also use the terms "local church," "parish," and occasionally "church" to denote the congregation.

10. Gwen Kennedy Neville describes forms of "religious familism" and its tension with congregational character in John H. Westerhoff and Gwen Kennedy Neville, Generation to Generation, and again in their Learning Through Liturgy (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).

11. William L. Warner, The Family of God: A Symbolic Study of Christian Life in America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961).

12. Gregor T. Goethals, The TV Ritual: Worship at the Video Altar (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981).

13. Robert H. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).

James Hopewell died in October 1984, leaving a complete third draft of his only book. It is a complex work that reflects his varied career and diverse interests. The impetus for the research the book contains came from his assignment to develop a segment of the Candler School of Theology’s "contextual" curriculum. Another element of the curriculum, two years of supervised practice in clinical and social-agency settings, was already in place. Hopewell was asked to design a program to deepen students’ understanding of ministry in congregations. Since many Candler students serve local churches in pastoral roles while they attend seminary, the kind of field education program common in theological schools, a program that provided elementary exposure to the tasks of ministry, was not appropriate. Instead, Hopewell developed an array of courses of a new kind. Each was held in a congregation, was taught by a Candler faculty member and the church’s pastor, and took as its subject matter an actual issue or topic in that congregation’s life. The participants were lay church members and Candler senior students.

The aim of these courses was less to solve problems than to gain a critical and appreciative perspective on the dilemmas and strengths of local-church existence. Critical understanding requires analysis, and analysis requires the tools of theory. So Hopewell read systematically through the American and European literature on congregations and ministry of the last several decades, a survey of several hundred works that is recapitulated in this book’s second chapter and its extensive notes. His reading revealed that the field to which these works are assigned -- variously designated "practical theology," "church studies," or "ministry studies" -- is very diverse and imports much from the human sciences. At first, he constructed highly eclectic reading lists for his courses, attempting to cover the field of church studies with examples of its many parts and divisions. But soon he became convinced that the fragmented character of the field was undermining the intent to provide for students a deepened understanding of the nature of the congregation. The enormous variety in the literature notwithstanding, many of the subtleties and nuances of the lives of local churches remained unaccounted for, he felt. Even more serious, the literature neither reflected nor explained adequately how it is that congregations hold together in the face of strains and pressures -- a capacity that had impressed him in both the churches that offered Candler’s courses and in a congregation he had helped found a few years before. If this ability of congregations to persist was examined sufficiently, he reasoned, an approach might be found that would lend coherence, if not unity, to the great variety of ways congregations are analyzed and apprehended.

With this aim he devoted the sabbatical leave he describes in chapter 1 to the close study of two Protestant churches in a small Georgia town. Hopewell’s formal training had been in comparative religion, with a specialty in Islamics, and he drew from this training his principal research technique: participant observation, the method that ethnographers have used to gain firsthand information about religion and other features of non-Western cultures. He spent his sabbatical year, like an anthropologist in a primitive village, omnipresent in the two churches, attending meetings, worship services, and parties, talking to members, sifting documents and publications, observing patterns of community life.

As the year wore on, he made the discoveries this book recounts. The two apparently ordinary congregations had extraordinarily rich, dramatic textures. Though located only a block apart in a small town, each drawing members from the same social and economic stratum of the town’s population, the two churches were strikingly different from each other in ways their Baptist and Methodist affiliations did not explain. Each, he concluded, had a distinct culture, as unique and rich as those of the religious communities he had served and studied as a missionary in West Africa early in his career. Like those religious fellowships of Liberia and Sierra Leone, the north Georgia congregations conveyed their culture (later he used the more precise term "subculture") by means of distinct idioms, symbolic dialects constructed both to express and to maintain group identity. To understand the function of idiom (of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called a "network of construable signs"), he drew on the work of Geertz and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Prompted by these writers and especially by Victor Turner, he explored the special qualities of metaphors. This trail led to the work of Northrop Frye, and Frye’s theories of literary structure became the catalyst for what Hopewell regarded as the core of his theory of congregations: his contention that congregational culture is not an accidental accumulation of symbolic elements but a coherent system whose structural logic is narrative. As congregations first come into being, Hopewell argued, they construct a narrative that accounts for their nascent identity. They attract to their fellowship those who want to participate in the unique local drama enacted there. They maintain their integrity against incursions by reiterating their distinct local story. And they encounter the world by identifying similarities between its stories and their own.

The rest of Hopewell’s work was the elaboration of this major theme. He organized his prior research into narrative categories. The intricate world views and belief systems of congregations constitute the setting of their corporate narrative, while their traditional histories, the sequences of past events selected for retelling, correspond to plot. The ethos of a community -- a complex product of its natural conditions, inherited endowments, and considered decisions and choices -- become congregational character in a narrative framework. Hopewell used the structures of narrative not only to create his major categories, but also in a secondary way within each category. Thus the world views that constitute setting are arranged according to Frye’s system of narrative genres. A congregation’s traditional history not only represents one element, the plot, of its larger narrative structure, but also functions as a story in itself. And character, Hopewell provocatively proposed, is best grasped if studied in counterpoint with some mythic tale that "matches" a congregation’s style, tone, and moral posture, the features of its character.

In the light of this theoretical system, Hopewell developed the research techniques for probing congregational narrative described in chapters 6, 9, and 10. He studied closely several churches in addition to the original two and deployed students to probe several dozen more, whose stories now serve as illustrations throughout the book. He presented his material in lecture series, courses at Candler, scholarly gatherings, and seminars for clergy, laity, and church officials. Last, he began work on a monograph.

Shortly after the sabbatical year, Hopewell had summarized his findings and ideas in a series of essays which he shared but did not publish, since he felt that such a collection would not improve the fragmented state of church studies. He reorganized the essays into the first draft of a book that took as its organizing metaphor the congregation as body. Acknowledging an idea of Mary Douglas about expanding circles of metaphor, he suggested a correspondence among individuals’ stories about their own bodies, their corporate narratives, and their tales about the cosmos and its creator. Though this schema remains, in much reduced form, in the present volume, Hopewell found the central image, the body, unsatisfactory as a conveyance for his essentially structuralist arguments about congregational narrative. Stephen Pepper’s typology of world metaphors provided a new starting point. Hopewell recognized that his view was not organicist but, in Pepper’s term, "formist," an argument from similarity. Finding the structural images of house and household far more adequate, he wrote a new draft and then, in the year before his death, thoroughly rewrote it in response to criticisms and suggestions from the persons named in his statement of acknowledgment.

Despite the number and diversity of strands woven together in Congregation, the book is at base not a collage or collection. Like the congregation itself in Hopewell’s portrayal of it, the book is unified by its assertions about the power of narrative. It is further bound together by Hopewell’s strong theological convictions about how narrative functions as God’s work with congregations. In his service as missionary and later as director of the World Council’s Theological Education Fund, he had encountered and dissented from the notion that redemptive Christian norms and ideas transform culture by being imported into or imposed on it. In the course of his work on congregations, he came to believe firmly that the story that catches up and gives pattern to a church’s local culture -- its beliefs, its mission work, and its everyday administrative transactions -- also gives an account of God’s intention for that community of believers. Hopewell’s use of classical and northern European myths had led some early readers of his work to conclude that congregational story as Hopewell defined it described only the naturalistic, even pagan, stratum of congregational life, a layer that must ultimately be contradicted and transformed by the infusion of gospel principles. Hopewell rejected that view and adamantly maintained, in passages found in nearly every chapter of Congregation, that a church’s story, even when it recounts pedestrian and trivial activity, is the legend of God’s plan, if only its sounds and signs can be heard and read. Further, he insisted, a congregation’s particular story, because it draws from a treasury of narrative elements available to all groups of people as they struggle for survival and meaning, is its channel to participation in the worldwide mission of establishing God’s shalom. These theological convictions about how God works in the world through particular communities that contain in their narrative life the seeds of their own -- and the world’s -- redemption were the first source of Hopewell’s interest in congregations. They molded both the theoretical and the practical development of his work. In the composition of his final draft, they were summarized in the chapter "Christ and Eros" (chapter 11), which he regarded as the book’s pivotal section.

The draft that Hopewell left when he died was accompanied by notes for its final revision. I have followed his instructions wherever possible. Specifically, in consultation with Ruth C. Hopewell, his executor, I decided to limit my revisions to rearrangement of the text and editing for clarity and consistency. Where Hopewell’s notes dictated expansion, I complied only if I could find appropriate material in earlier versions of the book or in his unpublished essays. As a result, with the exception of a handful of sentences that function only to smooth transitions, nothing has been added to Hopewell’s own writing, though it has been, as he wished, substantially reorganized.

The major problem that the book has presented for its own reshaping is that it does not fall into any existing genre. Parallel efforts can be found in other fields. Some sociologists and anthropologists have begun to study community life from the perspective of narrative and dramaturgy. A few structuralist historians have used narrative genres (including Frye’s classification) to characterize historical periods. Theologians, philosophers, psychologists, and of course literary theorists are currently exploring the functions of narrative beyond literature itself. Hopewell’s book both draws and comments upon -- and at points advances -- these discussions in social science, literature, and theology, but it belongs in its entirety to none of them. Thus, with the assistance of an extraordinary editor, Davis Perkins of Fortress Press, I have made editorial decisions keeping in mind the serious but mixed audience the book may attract: social scientists interested in religion, theologians concerned about the church and its mission, and clergy and lay leaders who seek to understand their congregations at greater depth.

Hopewell wrote his acknowledgments of assistance and support in haste a few weeks before he died. Among his notes he left a much longer list of persons to whom he was indebted. Heading it is Elizabeth Whipple, who worked with him as editorial assistant as well as typist. Her knowledge of the project and meticulous work preparing the text were invaluable to me. This version could not have been completed without her. Also listed were many members of the Candler faculty and his two closest research associates, Mark Cole and Melton Mobley. Further, he had planned to express his deep gratitude to the congregations "with whom I have labored" and their pastors.

I want to add to this list my own expressions of thanks to those who made what might have been a difficult undertaking a rewarding one instead: Ruth Hopewell, who gave me the privilege of editing the book and consistently aided me in doing so; the Directors of Auburn Seminary, who granted a generous leave for my work on the project in Atlanta; Jim Waits and Elizabeth Smith, who anticipated everything I would need for the work to be done comfortably and efficiently; Lurline and James Fowler, who provided housing and friendship; Channing Jeschke, Candler’s librarian, who made available and helped to arrange Hopewell’s books and papers; Brooks Holifield, who worked with me on the last and knottiest problems in the text; and David Kelsey, on whose encouragement and sagacity I relied heavily when my assignment seemed most formidable. Finally, I must acknowledge a source of assistance often reported by those who have brought to publication the work of a writer who has died: a strong sense of the continuing collaboration of the author. Throughout, I have felt the lively cooperation of the man whose intelligence, courage, and love of God’s world are given form and expression in this book.

June, 1986

Barbara G. Wheeler

New York City