AR&LW Convocation 2014Go, Therefore: Liturgy & Evangelism

Welcoming the Stranger: A Report 20 years later

Patrick R. Keifert

Professor of Systematic Theology

Luther Seminary

President and Director of Research

Church Innovations Institute

Saint Paul, Minnesota

Part II: Worship is Public

These congregations believe that worship is public; that is, it

is the interaction of strangers through a shared set of actions. As

obvious as this might sound, and most congregations we work with

will say we believe their main worship service is public, they

actually evidence a belief that worship is going to either get a

personal need, want, or desire met or a chance to express their

selves rather than the interaction of strangers through a shared set

of actions. For most congregational members in most

congregations, the gathering rite is of little or no interest because

they are there to get this private agenda accomplished in the

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presence, perhaps of strangers, but the relationships with those

strangers seldom gets mentioned.1 For most, the public into which

they enter in the Service of God is either empty of relationships or,

the other more common mode, the gathering of their extended

family.

Usually, this extended family metaphor works for a relatively

small congregation of under 100 in worship. Though, in fact, for

most small congregations the real size of interaction at this rather

intimate level is to a much smaller group, closer to 30, with the rest

watching them interact as an extended family. The rest tell stories

of watching the “family” do church or their own individualistic

acts.

The Family Home Model

1 For over twenty-five years we have gathered stories from thousands and thousands of persons regarding their most profound worship experiences and their own perception of their congregations worship. The pattern discussed in this paragraph dominates, this utilitarian and expressivity individualism. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart. In contrast, those congregations that, like the congregation described in the beginning of this chapter reports the importance of others, the ways they recognize in face to face and body to body safe touch, the presence of God in, with, and under these others and their shared actions. The phenomenal difference is striking when seen in stories of what happens in their different worship experiences.

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One can form a fairly simple sociogram of most

congregations, even some very, very large ones around a three

concentric circle model. The center circle is the family, the thirty

to sixty persons who interact informally during the week to

maintain the congregation. They tend to be the people who get the

majority of the maintenance of the congregation accomplished.

Whether they are in the governance group (session, vestry, parish

council, church council, deacons or elders board) usually is

secondary to their informal power grounded mostly in their

willingness to get the work done and interact with one another

upon their own initiative and relationships. This group actually

functions more upon the analogy of an extended family; they are

on a first name basis; they might be even multigenerational. They

are involved in one another’s lives in ways beyond the official

work of the local church. They are often humble, unassuming,

hardworking persons who, nonetheless, have significant power in

the local church. Their imaginations often define the de facto

vision and sense of mission of the local church. In most

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congregations they are likely to have never reflected on either their

imaginations regarding the vision and sense of mission of their

local church or, indeed, on the power they enjoy in the life of the

community.

The next circle is the inside strangers. In our research, they

reveal stories that have them outside the family. They watch the

church fights. They attend worship, perhaps regularly, but feel no

part in the shaping of that worship or other parts of the local

church’s ministry. They tell stories that have them observing,

usually by second hand, decisions in the life of the local church.

They might want to keep that distance or reveal a certain emotional

distance, disappointment, even resentment towards feeling like

they are outside observers.

These persons at one time or another might have been a part

of the family circle. Something in their life’s journey changed

their relationship to the group. We have often had stories where a

woman’s husband dies and she no longer is included in the

informal gatherings of the couples who make up the family. Or, a

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couple whose children graduate from high school and the couple’s

primary informal link to the family is broken. Or, a new minister

comes and over a time period replaces an existing family with one

more attuned to her sense of vision and mission of the

congregation and people find themselves as inside strangers.

Be that as it may, most members of most congregations, even

in the usual small congregation that worship under 100 members

experience themselves as inside strangers. In part, they maintain a

major portion of their social lives with relationships of people who

are not in the local church. Indeed, they are the most likely to have

strong, trusting relationships with persons who are Christian. They

are in effective missional churches often the bridge builders of the

bicultural bridge that becomes the future of the local church.

The third circle is the outside strangers. These are persons

that when the enter the worship space are usually clearly not of the

local church. They might speak a different language than the one

used in the Service of God; they might have a different color skin;

they might not dress, either because they can’t afford to dress or

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choose not to dress, like the family and inside strangers. At any

rate, as an observer on many local churches, it is usually fairly easy

to note them. The levels of subtlety of dress and the ways they

maneuver their way through the various ways the family and inside

strangers gather themselves becomes predictable to the observer.

One ironic example: One of the practices that many

congregations have initiated over the last 30 years has been the

hospitality hour, before or after the Service. Often this creates

little clutches, groups of people, mostly friends with their faces

turned in, their backs out, and their hands filled with coffee, tea,

and cookie. The outside strangers, and even many inside strangers,

have learned to maneuver their way through this gathering of

clutches without being noticed. Often the outside strangers desire

anonymity and inside strangers have become used to avoiding

these hospitality gatherings. In the most painful way, the

hospitality practices of most of our local churches become one of

the most inhospitable moments.

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Most congregations in North America have under 100 in

worship and this is neither good nor bad. The issue in missional

church terms is how they imagine themselves not their size. The

dominant form of local church through out the world today and

through out most of the early five centuries of the church is this

gathering of fewer than 100.

When the local church gathered in the city of Hippo in

northern Africa in the early 5th Century, they gathered in a space

that presumed somewhere between 60 and 100 persons, assuming

children present and accounted for.2 The president at that

gathering was a bishop, for in that time period before the

establishment of Christendom in the Latin West, a bishop was the

pastor of a large congregation (fewer than 100) whose primary task

was presiding at this weekly gathering around word, water and

meal and teaching the elders. We have ample evidence regarding

the teaching of this particular bishop since his teaching becomes

the dominant voice in the forming of Latin Christendom,

2 Conversation with Lord Peter Brown regarding Augustine’s congregation in Hippo.

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Augustine of Hippo. He spent his time teaching the elders, at least

12 by most accounts, who carried out most of the care and nurture

in the local church. In effect, they were the leaders of significant

relational groups, even households,3 within the wider community

of Hippo. Christianity flourished as a missional movement

through such large (fewer than 100) congregations and still does

through out the world.

Within the Christendom assumptions of North America many

see such congregations as threatened. Articles and studies report

such congregations as under threat.4 As best as I can tell, the only

threat to the future of such a congregation comes from assumptions

of European/American Christendom that their future depends upon

a fully stipended at middle class income minister as the president

of the Service of God. This minister is a graduate of a university or

school of theology. In short, we seem to have made the

3 Remember it would be a very recent “invention” of modern industrial society that would think of the household as a family of a married couple with two or so children. In most of human societies, including the Latin West, a household involved many different persons of various relationships in the household that usually represented the primary economic group of their lives. In Hippo, fully 1/3 to ½ of the community would be slaves. Households would involve singles, married couples, children, including orphans and widows, freed maidservants and manservants, in addition to the slaves.4 Cf. articles in The Lutheran

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assumption that this leader is the critical factor for the thriving of a

local church. This assumption involves biases that Scripture,

tradition, the church in all times and all places, much less good

reason find characteristic of a local church.

Poesis and Phronesis

Let’s return to our listing of components of capacity for

creating missional gathering rites. Bring to mind again the first

imagined congregation at the beginning of the chapter. Once again,

those who created this gathering rite worked within a Christian

imagination, they consciously constructed a space that welcomed

strangers and rituals that embodied the “welcoming one another

into the new humanity in Christ Jesus.” They engaged within this

poetic act in some very practical reasoning. How can we gather a

local church that has over have of the persons gathering children

unaccompanied by adults. How can we bring their everyday

world--school, report cards, and drive by shootings-- with them in

such a way that they act as persons who reflect the image of God.

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While we live in a society that places a high value on the

individual, we do not live in a society that values persons, at least

not in the sense that a Christian imagines them. Rather than

imagine with the dominant imagination of the Latin West that a

person is an individual with somehow a complete identity in and

for oneself, the church takes its clue for personhood from the

persons of the Trinity.

To my knowledge, Christianity is the only major world

religion that worships a God who is a communion, a communion

of three persons. We are the only major religion that says even

God only exists as communion. Each person of the Trinity is

formed in relationship with the other. A Father who has a Son, a

Son who reveals to us the one who wills his being, his only

begotten life, as the Father. In this Father and Son relationship

they reveal a Spirit who makes such willing of the Father in the

person of the Son reality. In this doctrine of God we have not

autonomous identities each forming a social contract, either tacitly

or overtly, but an eternal but always timely community of free

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love: Love freely given and freely received. This is a set of unique

relationships that creates a communion of real persons, each

unique but only as communion; there being is in communion. God

is love.

So when we gather into the Service of God, we gather

persons made in this image and destined to living into this same

communion with God that comes by the power of the Holy Spirit

from God’s future, a future promised for all those gathering.5 The

honor and respect6 to be shown these persons, no matter how

young and vulnerable, or worn and cynical, requires special care in

a society that imagines them as individuals gathering in a nearly

empty space, empty of meaning except what they bring.

Such a “welcoming one another into the new humanity,”7 the

new personhood of the body of Christ,8 involves a ritual

imagination. Rather than seeing true worship as something that

happens despite the body, indeed, that believes true worship is

5 This theme will be extended considerably in a later chapter. Cf.6 Richard Sennett on Respect7 Pauline texts8 Zizioulas on Capadocians article and Being As Communion

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somehow harmed, limited, corrupted by the body, this worship

sees persons as irreducibly body, bodies that have life everlasting,

not everlasting souls who will finally get rid of these bodies. In

reflection of the promise of having resurrected bodies like our

Lord, we attend to the creation of safe touch and interaction among

these persons gathered.

Public ritual is primally the bodily interaction of such persons

that displays, embodies, and forms such a public gathering. As

such it takes common bodily actions and shapes them within a

Christian imagination. As a result, these common bodily actions

become odd, not the way we ordinarily touch, move, greet, and

form a public. Ritual is an odd behavior that when we are

participating in it we forget its oddness, its not being ordinary,

rather than playing the rituals, they play us.9 We lose self

consciousness, or at least it recedes, and we are joined in

community with other persons in this shared odd behavior.

9 Margaret Mead, Ninian Smart; also Hans Georg Gadamer on play, Truth and Method

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A Christian ritual imagination and wisdom looks for the ways

that ritual (1) grounds and (2) articulates Christian community and

creates (3) liminality and (4) rites of passage for those gathered. In

the above description of a gathering rite one can see the ways

rituals do all these things, or at least point to their happening in the

rest of the Service of God. The gathering of the community

grounds itself in the rite of selecting buddies and seating

themselves. The community is gathered in the Name of the Father,

Son and Holy Spirit. The realities of the very down-to-earth

matters of their lives, grade cards, violence, are articulated within a

community that is reconciled to God by the will of the Father, in

the person of the Son, and by the power of the Holy Spirit. They

recognize their striving, failure, fears, even terror; they are invited

to confess and be absolved; they invited into a reconciling

community.

As the gathering takes place they move from an only

horizontal, immanent space to one that includes a richer vertical,

transcendent space. This space involves tension, even discomfort,

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strangeness, as the past and present becomes focused upon their

future made present. The tragedy of their lives, and their triumphs

and delights are brought into a space that announces, anticipates,

and trusts a “disputed power,” the power of the Triune God. This

is a liminal space, a space in time but a time now engaged with a

promised future. This takes an ironic imagination, an imagination

that sees tragedy overcome by the comedy of the messianic

banquet.

The open invitation to listen and absorb some of the terror

and pain of the young woman who describes her friend’s loss of a

“little one” not yet born and the threat to her life and to all their

lives begins the Christian rituals of grief. They are invited to be

persons joined in that rite of passage, one which each of them will

also experience as a part of their Christian journey.

In this entire gathering rite, those who lead, and many others

in the gathered community, understand they are making “a public

witness before a watching world.”10 To be sure, much of that

10 Cf. John Howard Yoder, and Treasure in Clay Jars

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watching world in which these persons gathered live each week is

not there to watch but some are. In a missional local church they

are accustomed and presume the space for the Service of God will

have a watching world present. Persons who are outside strangers,

or tangentially related to persons gathered, or even hostile

observers who might find this gathering at best odd, or an escape

from reality, or even dangerous to their lives.

All of this happening in this gathering rite, and much more

could be noticed and explored to much value for innovating

missional church, might well be collected into some simple prayer,

a direct address to God who gathers them in. This collecting prayer

might well draw the realities articulated in the gathering around the

primary word of the day, the place and time in the Church’s

seasons, so that the gathering can dwell in the word of God.

Dwelling in the Word

Since a full chapter has been given to this topic, and it

deserves much more, the length of this book requires a very short

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description of this central activity in the Service of God in a

missional church. Once again, I ask you to imagine a local church

with me. This one is in the Northwestern part of the United States.

The community within which it is located is part of the least

Christianized States of the US. Less than 6% of their immediate

community understand themselves to be active in a local religious

community. Unlike some parts of the United States, people freely

reject organized religion and can safely assume their neighbors

share their disinterest, distain, or disgust at organized religion,

especially its Christian forms. They might think of themselves as

deeply spiritual but they are more likely than not very articulate

even in their sense of spirituality. They might have a profound

sense of the beauty of nature and spend their weekends and as

much of their spare time as possible enjoying the remarkable

beauty of their surrounding environment of water and mountains.

This local church begins to extend their habit of reading the

lessons in the Service of God into the practices they have been

learning in their journey of spiritual discernment of their missional

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vocation. Rather than simply reading the lessons and moving

directly to a sermon; they take time in silence. They listen a

reasonably friendly looking stranger into free speech. Their

preaching minister then teaches and preaches at considerable

length, by the standards of most churches I know. The preaching

minister asks questions of the Scripture and of their listening that

imagines in very concrete, specific ways the challenges of their

everyday lives that often come forward in the listening one another

into free speech. The preaching presumes a community seeking to

be formed as disciples and apostles; that is, persons seeking

grounding and identity in the body of Christ and the components of

capacity to be sent out to the locations of their ministry as apostles.

Over a period of months dwelling in the Luke 10: 1-12 text,

listening one another into free speech, and doing the same with

persons within their network of relationships within their

community, their missional imagination helps them see some

things about themselves, their gathering and their sending, that

they have not seen before. Firstly, they come to realize most of

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their neighborhood does not even realize they are there. Secondly,

most of their neighbors, friends, coworkers, and even family

members have little sense of the member’s faith and values nor do

they have much of a sense of those same person’s faith and values.

Thirdly, when the members listen them into free speech, after some

reticence, their friends, neighbors, co-worker and family members

speak freely regarding faith and values. Fourthly, they have built a

place for their gathering that basically reveals their desire to

withdraw from the eyes of a watching world. The building is

hidden behind a forest of trees. When I first visited them I drove

by the corner my GPS indicated was the location of the church

three times before even seeing the driveway to go into the parking

lot that would get me to their place of worship. Further they had

built a worship space with no windows, perhaps to save money.

They come from a very frugal, not to say cheap, tradition.

Through the dwelling in the word, they began to see how they had

created a local church that truly did not welcome strangers and

wanted to avoid the watching world. When they gathered for

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worship they did not even want to see that world much less have it

look back.

This local church may be an extreme example but only

extreme in its success at accomplishing what our research shows is

a very common practice among local churches in the Northwest.

The very nature of their environment, naturally and socially,

creates an almost fearful, perhaps even shame-based, need to

escape the watching world. I find this pattern especially among

new church starts in old line denominations that for decades

purchased land deep in housing developments that appeared to do

everything they could to create this family home, private space

places of worship. It is as if the recognition of this new

environment that was not supportive of forming Christian

community actually created this intensification of the privatization

of Christian community.

Having seen this particular pattern in the Northwest, we have

been able to see similar patterns in many other social locations

where the loss of Christendom has caused this intensification of

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privatization of local churches. In New England, where the

dominant state religion had been congregational and its

descendants (American Baptists Churches), and to a lesser degree

Episcopal, even some Lutherans, the pattern of space reflects this

retreat to private space. Roman Catholics, as an interesting

contrast, have tended to maintain a more public presence in their

church buildings. Also in California, even in places where certain

megachurches flourish, most local churches have taken this hiding

from a watching world spatial pattern.

Be that as it may, the amazing pattern I want to observe about

this congregation is how its dwelling in the Word in its weekly

gatherings for the Service of God has transformed their

imaginations. They have not only seen how they have acquiesced

to this privatization of space but begun to discover ways they can

regain a sense of humble, confident public space for their

gatherings. This imagining has brought about very significant

change in their behavior when gathered and sent. They are

surprised by the number of “visitors” they have. They had not

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until this process even noticed much less counted their visitors.

They average around 9% visitors on any given Sunday. They

never kept data before the changes they have made so we don’t

know if this pattern of visitors is new or not.11 We do know that a

significant portion of these visitors are invited guests, friends,

relatives, neighbors of the members who have learned to listen

them into free speech. The change has created cross currents in

their worship life as they come to terms with the realities of this

post-Christendom culture that is showing up for the Service of

God.

One of the regular patterns of missional churches is this

increase in visitors, persons mostly watching, wondering, even

seeking. We live in a time of seeking. While the time from the

1960s has been very difficult for most churches formed deeply in

Latin Christendom, it has also been a time that some have called a

“nova” of spiritual awareness and exploration.12 Missional

11 We count what we value. If local churches counted their visitors and potential persons within their networks of relationships, conversations regarding faith and life, etc. as often as they count their money, they could be accountable to their missional identity. Much more on the practices of counting and accounting in a missional church in a later chapter.12 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

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churches have found ways of creating safer spaces for these

spiritual explorers and seekers. They are delighted to listen them

into free speech and welcome them into the presence of their local

church gatherings. Before exploring this phenomena a bit more,

one other practice needs attending to in the order of the Service of

God.

Back to God in Prayer

Having dwelt in the Word of God, been taught and having

heard a direct address from God by way of word and preaching,

the local church responds directly to God. The local church speaks

back to God in bringing its own lives to God in prayer. It brings its

hurts, hopes, intentions and desires for the world, the church, for

one another, and for themselves directly to God in rituals that

allow free speech without exposing persons to shame.13

In this regard I have been amazed at how many local

churches, who would think of themselves as non-ritualistic, have

13 Welcoming the Stranger, Dick Cavett principle

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reinvented ancient and time honored patterns of ritual. Many use

the laying on of hands during prayers for their fellow members.

How the listening one another into free speech and advocating for

what they have heard frees them to bring those persons before the

assembly of God14 in this setting. How much longer their time of

public prayer is than the usual old line patterns where the desire to

keep worship beneath the one hour limit seems to control.15 More

will be said on this later in the discussion of time.

I am surprised, even shocked, by the creative use of long

used rituals in settings where certainly few, if any, know their

original cultural setting. For example, one emerging local church

in our nation’s capital prominently displays the Stations of the

Cross and regularly uses them in the Service of God. None of the

church’s leadership came from Roman Catholic background;

indeed, most of the leadership came from no particular Christian

14 Assembly of God best translates the primal field of meaning for the word Paul, for example, uses to describe the church, ecclsia. Much more on this in the next chapter.15 One of the tragic, perhaps ironic, costs of gaining more ecumenical liturgical worship among oldline denominations in the past forty years is the extending of the liturgical practices in the Serivce of God and the shortening the place of public prayer. Generally this loss is due to the accepting the hour plus a few minutes limit to the public assembly. Much more on this issue of temporality in the third section of this book.

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background at all. Nonetheless, they have found ritual formed

around these representations of the moments in the life of Jesus’

journey to his crucifixion powerful. Patterns and practices of this

sort abound in these emerging churches.

The Doors, The Doors!

Some of the traditional liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox

tradition include the cry “the doors, the doors16 or ask the

catechumens to leave.17 This tradition in the liturgy follows from

the practice that after the service of the Word and before the great

entrance and thanksgiving, the prayer of thanksgiving surrounding

the meal, it was time for those who were in the catechumenate to

leave for their special formation as disciples. The catechumens

were those seekers who were learning the faith in anticipation of

16 ““The doors, the doors! In wisdom, let us be attentive,”17 From the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, “ Priest: All ye catechumens, depart! Depart, ye catechumens! All ye that are catechumens, depart! Let no catechumens remain! But let us who are of the faithful, again and again, in peace pray to the Lord.

People: Lord, have mercy.

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their choosing to be baptized and become members of the body

and be welcomed at the meal.

This tradition remembers a time when the church regularly

had the watching world among them and had a major part of their

Service of God designed around their presence, namely everything

up to this point in the traditional liturgy. We, of course, in Latin

Christendom have lost this sense of the watching and seeking

world. We have stopped having this journey of spiritual seeking

and preparing for baptism as a major part of our assembly. We

have presumed for centuries that everyone present is baptized, a

disciple of Jesus Christ. We make no provision, neither in our

imaginations, nor in our public gatherings for the central place of

making disciples.

We are in a very new time, a missional era that can take

lessons from the first centuries of the church, the Apostolic age

when the normative life of the local church was forming Christian

community. The forming of Christian community engaged the

entire community, in one form another, in this catechumenate. The

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first part of the Service of God was designed to be appropriate for

those seekers and not just for the disciples of Christ.

I realize that this ancient rite might not work in most local

churches in our times. So many things are different after

Christendom than before Christendom. Even though I agree with

those who speak of the “once and future church,”18 “ancient and

future church,”19 I also know that the future church in the missional

era must find way to innovate our public worship to both recognize

and provide for the special formation of catechumens, including

especially in the public assembly.

At the risk of being sounding out of touch with the different

realities, I still want to renew my proposal20 that local churches

design special opportunities to invite and instruct the seekers in our

public gatherings without presuming, projecting, and de facto

demanding that they act like disciples when they are not. We need

to discover ways that respect, honor, host, and delight in their place

18 A phrase popularized in the book by Loren Mead, The Once and Future Church (Alban, ).19 Robert Webber, whose work on this topic remains some of the best extant. Those who knew him and others who only read his work have a tremendous debt. Cf.20 Welcoming the Stranger

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on their spiritual journey rather than include them without

recognizing their desire to seek but not yet belong to the body of

Christ.21

Here, it is important to distinguish the dynamics of

hospitality to the stranger as revealed in Scripture from the modern

concept of hospitality, or worse, the modern concept of inclusivity.

The pattern of hospitality at work in Scriptures often involves God

being the stranger to be hosted, or angels. In Scripture the

disciples are sent into the world to depend upon the hospitality of

strangers, of the world, not the presumption that the church is the

host. Indeed, many passages in Scripture, like Luke 10: 1-12

presume that formation of disciples/apostles involves this ability to

extend the peace to strangers and depend upon their hospitality

rather than “include” them into the church. By my lights, Luke-

Acts describes a church sent, dispersed, even thrown into the world

21 It is reported to me by trusted friends that one Episcopal rector of a local church in Manhattan regularly says on Easter and other gathering where many might attend who do not frequent the Christian assembly, “We invite those who are baptized to commune with us. If you are not baptized but believe that you might like to someday participate in this communion, see me. We can do something about that.” Conversation with Blanch and Robert Jenson, October 29, 2009. This ironic humor appropriate captures the contemporary sensibilities and recognizes at least the dilemma local churches face in this time after Christendom. Would that it would not be so rare a tone for most of the churches practices of hospitality.

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in pairs, like sheep among wolves, depending upon the presence of

peace and hospitality by the strangers. This is, of course, a peace

already promised in the work of the Spirit of God in the world.

The future of the church in Luke and Acts depends upon the work

of the Holy Spirit in the hospitality of strangers to the church.

In contrast, so much of our church practice in North America,

at least, presumes the church is the primary host and we either

invite them to our private homes for intimate hospitality or we

include them in the Assembly of God, not as God-fearers, or

seekers, or watchers but as already included in the body of Christ.

This inclusive language follows more from a Christendom

imagination in which the church represents an established religion

of the general culture that deigns to include all. While surely all

are welcome and we seek to create safer, hospitable space for all;

this language of inclusivity requires a more critical examination for

its totalizing assumptions. I advise giving it up for the sake of the

stranger, God, the neighbor, indeed, the stranger that is oneself.22

22 Welcoming the Stranger and for those who want to take seriously the deconstruction of the very modern notion of the self the work of my teacher Paul Ricoeur, Having Oneself as Another and Charles Taylor, The

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More important still we must remember God is the host and

we are all strangers and pilgrims on earth depending upon God’s

hospitality. While some of us enjoy the brotherhood and

sisterhood in Christ, “no longer strangers but friends,”23 it is only

in Christ we have that brotherhood and sisterhood.24 We are not

inviting people to our family chapel, we are all gathering in the

Temple of the Lord, the Assembly of God, where God is host. We

remain as I Peter reminds us, resident aliens, today in ways more

obvious than in Latin Christendom, but still resident aliens.25 In a

culture of nomads, like our contemporary culture,26 the patterns of

biblical hospitality more readily fit our circumstances than the

principles of liberal inclusivity more appropriate for the democratic

State, and a church that presumes to represent a democratic State.

I would invite replacing the metaphors of inclusion by the

metaphors of the giving and receiving of hospitality reflecting

God’s presence in, with, and under the stranger. These metaphors

Sources of the Self23 Jesus in the Gospel according St. John, 24 Pauline texts25 I Peter . . . Cf. especially William Willimon, Resident Aliens and John Elliot, I Peter.26 Cf. materials from Craig Moran . . .

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of hospitality fit Scriptures, the place of the local congregation in

most locations in contemporary Western culture, and the diversity

of our contemporary nomadic society.27

With the recognition of a place of honor, respect, and

welcome for persons seeking, wondering, searching, and open to

sharing the Christian journey, comes a more prominent role in the

public worship as a place where discipling is taking shape. This

takes many forms. In some missional churches seeker services are

common. In others, special opportunities for learning designed for

those who have no idea about the Christian faith beyond vague

associations of televangelists or distant relatives are attached to the

regular public worship. In all cases, the missional church practices

within its public assembly the honored space of the catechumenate.

Imagine with me a local church of Roman Catholic heritage.

The church is located in a neighborhood no longer made up of the

original immigrants who had founded the parish. Further, the

27 Here, as elsewhere in this work, I use the term “metaphor” advisedly in the sense developed by Paul Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto, 1977); I still prefer the metaphor used in the French title, Le Metaphor Vivre.

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neighborhood has mostly young, urban resettlers. Some refer to

the community as a regentrified community. Most of the

members of this parish did not grow up in this congregation. Fully

half did not grow up Christian. Many of those who did are

“disaffected Catholics,” by their own description. The

neighborhood is multicultural and so is the congregation. Indeed,

no single cultural group dominates the congregation but its

members do share certain economic status as middle to upper

middle class professionals.

Fully twenty-five percent of the regular worshipers came to

membership in this local church through adult conversion. This

means hundreds of persons every Sunday have made this journey

in their adult lifetime. Since the parish has only one full time

priest, the pastor, who has served the early years of his ministry in

Guatemala and returned to his home diocese due to illness and the

need for special medical care, most of the ministry of the

congregation is lay lead. They practice a full blown form of the

Rite for the Initiation of Adults (RCIA) shaped by the Renew

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movement in the Roman Catholic Church in North America. As a

result, almost all of the RCIA journey is lead by lay catechists,

many of whom themselves came to the faith through this model of

discipling. The public assembly is regularly punctuated with the

ritual stages of the RCIA making abundantly clear the honored

place of the catechumens in the public assembly. Since large

portions of the congregation participated and are participating in

that journey, their imaginations are shaped by this basic

understanding of their church as missional.

While, as you have no doubt noted as a pattern in this book,

this local church exaggerates a pattern for purposes of providing a

strong example; it is not, however, so out of the norm for local

churches who have become missional. This local church is well

known as a public moral companion, a concept to be developed in

the next chapter, in their neighborhood and the greater

metropolitan area. They have become the source of inspiration and

learning for many other Catholic parishes and even a few

Protestant ones. Their journey began with first one or two persons

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committed to the RCIA but with a vision to transform the local

church’s life by this basic mode for forming disciples and apostles.

May their numbers increase.

The Meal, Eating the Word

Shifts happen. They happen mostly behind our backs, away

from observed consciousness, and they appear from “nowhere.”

One of the great shifts of the liturgical renewal,28 biblical

scholarship,29 and theological reflection of the 20th century30 and,

ironically, in many emerging local churches, is the shift to a

thorough going eschatology. Some have argued, to mind

persuasively, that the emergence of the doctrine of the Trinity,

from its rather long relegation to at best an assumed but unused

doctrine of the church, or at worst, a rejected doctrine in some

modern Christian communties, follows from the shift to thorough

going eschatology.31 Following Ingolf Dalfeurth, I think of this 28 Dom Gregory Dix; Future made Present Episcopal theologian29 Boussett, Johannes Weiss, Franz Overbeck, and Albert Schweitzer30 Karl Rahner and Karl Barth31 See a wonderful summary of this development of Trinitarian theology flowing from the renewal of the biblical thorough going eschatology, Igolf U. Dalferth, “The Eschatological Roots of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Trinitarian Theology Today: Essay on Divine Being and Act, Christoph Schwoebel (T&T

33

eschatological, hence Trinitarian, shift involving three features: “it

is divinely constituted; it is christologically determined; and it is

experienced as the break-in of radical newness in our life.”32

This shift to trininarian theology and thorough going

eschatology comes as a gift just in time for our missional era. One

might even imagine our missional era has also forced this shift.33

In connection with the Service of God within the missional church,

this shift encourages a renewal of the belief that the Assembly of

God is such an eschatological, Trinitarian, gathering. God

constitutes this gathering, not just as a repetition and remembering

of its instituting moment by our Lord Jesus Christ “in the night in

which he was betrayed” but as a constituting moment by the Spirit

of the Risen and Ascended Lord, by the power of the Spirit from

the future.34 With this shift our Assembly leans forward to this

radical in-breaking of the Spirit, the in-breaking of our future.

Clark: Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 147-70; hereafter, Dalfeurth,”Eschatological Roots.”32 Dalfeurth, “Eschatological Roots.” P. 160.33 I argue this case more thoroughly in a work yet to be published, The Return of the Local Church34 John D. Zisioulas, Being as Communion,

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Imagine with me a local church assembly in a township

community in South Africa. This assembly of Christians is one of

five gatherings of this local church in three different locations

every Sunday. This one gathering is in a barn that is weekly

cleaned up for this gathering, complete with stalls for classes in

Scripture for children, adults, for seekers and those preparing for

baptism. Those gathered work on this farm and do not have the

means of transportation to other sites for the other four gatherings

of this local church. The persons gathered are the descendants of

white Europeans, black Africans, and Indian and Malaysians.

Many are descendants of slaves or persons who worked at wages

and working conditions worse than slaves. Their bodies show the

realities of this past and present. For centuries, alas including our

own, they have been ignored or put into second class status to

those who thought themselves more clean and pure, both black and

white.

This assembly’s gathering rite includes the rites of AIDs.

The minister repeats the ABCs of AIDs prevention as a part of the

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gathering rite. This same minister will fill his Saturdays with the

burial of the dead from this modern pandemic. Those who are ill

are invited forward for prayer and a laying on of hands. This

includes especially those who are HIV+ or in full blown AIDs

Significant numbers of persons come forward. Many are assisted,

even carried forward.

They will then dwell in the Word, including a significant

period of silence, listening one another into free speech on the

Scripture, and a substantial, engaging, missional sermon. They

will turn to an equally substantial “concert of prayer.” This a

practice of small groups gathering to pray for one another and out

of their own needs to ask of God that abundant grace they so

depend upon.

The minister then invites them to gather around the table set

in the midst and begins to gather them explicitly, in very plain

terms, into the messianic banquet. He speaks of how our Lord has

promised a place for them at this messianic banquet where they

will cry no more and will be gathered in the presence of the Lamb.

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He often literally quotes from Revelations. Some members bring

forward bread and wine, wine from vines they have labored with

for years and generations. This is, often, wine too expensive for

many of them to purchase on their own. He will repeat our Lord’s

promises at his Last Supper and invite them to eat and drink this

foretaste of the feast to come. They do, in silence.

Then, when all have completed the eating and drinking they

break out in song that has a driving rhythm. The songs take up the

rhythms of walking, walking, walking; something they do a lot of.

These songs focus on walking, singing, even marching, in the light

of God, to the future of God. The very real burdens of their lives

get caught up in the rhythms of this walking into the future God

brings to them in this moment.

This rhythm from the future has been anticipated from the

moment of the gathering rite that began in solemn, feeble gathering

of the sick. It has been announced in the dwelling in the word and

grounded their response to the Word of God. It is power released

in their eating and drinking in their future made present. This

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eating and drinking releases their delight, praise, thanksgiving, and

hope for entering the new week. The sending follow quickly as a

part of this song.

This is another sharply defined local church story. It is

frought with the dangers of a white, middle class American’s

romanticizing, even consuming and using of these good people’s

stark reality that reflects the systems of colonization and continued

oppression that I depend upon to carry on my privileged life and

work. I must, however, risk and sin boldly, fully taking

responsibility for my societies sins, and my complicity and

privilege within them, because they ask me to do so. They reach

across these barriers and want their story told. I do so, also,

because what I see and report also has its own truth that goes

beyond the realities of sin, death, and evil. It takes the stark

circumstances of one location where the future of humanity is

being formed to me in horrifically dangerous, fearfully violent, and

wondrously hopeful ways. This forming however is within a

Christian imagination that we share, one that experiences the in

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breaking of the Triune God in very embodied ways. It is an

assembly that leans into God’s in breaking future.

This same walking into God’s promise future, the future of

the messianic banquet, we have as a foretaste and witness, belongs

to all Christian assemblies. So does the stark circumstances, if we

can allow these Christians in the barn outside a South African

township to uncover and reveal the truth of our own lives in North

America. Our Lord promises this in his instituting of his Supper

and in his promises following his Resurrection and in his

Ascension. Every Service of God has this promise at its trusting

and missional churches relish in it.

The Sending

Notice how in this barn assembly, the singing that ends the

supper, is also the sending song. Something about the missional

imagination, connects seamlessly the Supper of Our Lord, the

Messianic Banquet present as foretaste, into witness in the world:

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the walking, singing, marching into God’s preferred and promised

future.

Seamlessly, I say, not in the sense that there are differences

in the movement, or the ways that local churches will make this

move from table to world, but in the sense that the interior theo-

logic, the Spirit’s thrust from the meal is to the world. For it is in

the world that the church’s life in God’s mission is lived. The

church’s liturgy, its reasonable public service,35, is for the world.36

In point of fact, this local church assembly spends a good

deal of time talking, conducting church governance, doing Bible

study, and forming the various significant relational groups that

make up the rest of its life in the world immediately following this

sending. Since they will not have the luxury of driving to a church

council meeting (Kerkrad), they have them between the five

different gatherings in this congregation. Still they carry this

sending, its forward bending, trusting, anticipating the leading of

35 As with the word Paul chooses to describe the church, ecclesia, is borrowed from political, public discourse; so is the word leitourgia, often used in the Greek city state as the public service every citizen owed the polis. In the parlance of my youth, “The Draft.”36 Cf. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World :Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1970)

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the Spirit, into these gatherings and the rest of the week. They will

need it, as will every Assembly of God, for their work in God’s

mission in the world.

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