A very strange thing happened indeed this week. I actually finished a book! April was a crazy month full of Easter worship and District Assembly gatherings and online debates and very little reading.
So I decided to mark my return to grace by reading an especially wonderful author whom I have always quoted but never read, Walter Brueggemann. A friend at District Assembly referenced “Prophetic Imagination” several times so I downloaded it and worked my way through it this week. As is the case with many books, it spoke “prophetically” into several facets of my current experience. Or did it speak “imaginatively?”
Click to buy on Amazon
As many of you know, I began pastoring a new church two months ago. The transition forced me to ask myself the hard practical questions about what a church is and how a pastor should lead it.
At the same time my district gathered to elect a new Superintendant. In the end most everybody agreed we elected the right person. Still, the process forced me to think long and hard about who I want as a “pastor to pastors.” Do I want an executive with a plan? A leader with a vision? A friend with a shoulder to cry on? A prophet with an imagination? Or all of the above?
Likewise, as most of you know, I have been closely following three scandals in the Church of the Nazarene. One concerns our Publishing House. The other two concern our universities. There seems to be a failure in the upper realms of our leadership to really follow the dictates of love, justice and honesty especially when money is on the line. Where did this failure come from and why have we been so hesitant to be honest about it?
A key topic in all those discussions was the comparisons and contrasts between churches, businesses and universities. A friend of mine summed up those differences well in the chart below.
At the intersection of all this stands Brueggemann’s “Prophetic Imagination.” His brief but in depth discussion of the biblical prophets and holy communities illuminates several disparities between the church’s current state and our divine calling.
I could waste a lot of words fleshing out those discrepancies, but I will stick with a list Brueggemann gives in the preface to the 2nd edition. He mentions the key characteristics of a Prophetic Community:
1) The community must have a long and available memory that sinks the present generation into an identifiable past made available in songs and stories.
2) There is a sense of pain that is cited as a real social fact.
3) Hope (not optimism) is actively practiced.
4) There is an effective mode of discourse that is distinctive and richly coded in ways only insiders know. (i.e. a shared language).
The church I now pastor has quite a few families who now serve or once served in the US military. As I have gotten to know them, I feel a sense of humiliation for the Christian church because the US military does those 4 things way better than most congregations. They have songs and stories that root their identity in the great conflicts of the last 200 years. They have a coded language with scores of acronyms that I can barely keep up with. They have a real sense of pain and loss from living in a world where armies are necessary and they have a profound sense of hope that the US military can be the solution (or at least an integral part of it) to all the world’s problems. All of this encourages scores of otherwise helpless young men (and some women) to join up.
I am frustrated that the church struggles to garner the same enthusiasm. As Brueggemann argued convincingly, our insistence on catering to the powers and adopting their vocabulary has completely numbed us to our God given calling. Now we get together to figure out how to co opt the powers and as we do, we ourselves are being coopted.
But all hope is not lost. Brueggemann insists that the prophets in Scripture (from Moses to Jesus) did two things to awaken the holy community. First they led the people in mourning. Second they sang songs and told stories that energized faithfulness. To put it more simply, they called the people back to worship and led them in the same.
And this is where the prophetic imagination informs my questions about the church, its leadership and our current scandals. After all, it is no secret that the evangelical tradition has not done worship well. We have filled it with the words of our culture, not the words of our ancient faith. We have sung the narratives of the empire and not the songs of the redeemed. And we have shared in the anger of the people, not in the compassion of our God.
If that is the case, then it might be possible that after attending those numbing services for decades, certain denominational leaders found themselves closed off to the hope of the gospel. Instead of being emptied of all but God, they became filled with the edicts, deadlines and demands of the dominant culture. If that is true, when they became leaders of institutions (like businesses, universities and churches), they had no Christian hope to add meaning or depth to their work and so made the controversial decisions that landed them in the hot seats.
If that is what happened, it means that who we choose to lead us in worship is so incredibly important. Instead of vision casters, we need creative story tellers. Instead of institution growers we need professional mourners. Instead of money makers we need selfless givers. And instead of relevant hipsters spewing the modern lingo, we need Biblical scholars who can make accessible the rich language of our tradition.
That all sounds poetic up above, but I am reminded by Brueggemann that this all has to start with me in my own setting and context. After all, it is quite possible that I am currently leading a congregation that will include future CEO’s, University Presidents, Pastors and Superintendants. It is a high and necessary calling to sing the songs and tell the stories of our ancient faith every week so that they can be grounded in compassion and justice, not in power and money. Needless to say, the risk of failure is great.
Therefore, pray for me and pray for my church and I shall endeavor to do the same for you and your church. And I pray the God of all history continues to call up prophets in this time and place who will sing the right songs, cry the proper tears and energize the needed love.
Go-Before Grace 