WE STAND IN OUR OWN WAY

WE STAND IN OUR OWN WAY

HANS JOCHEN MARGULL

I

There is hardly a church in the world which is not discussing and working at reforming itself. Different names are given to this but the key-word is always “renewal” - the renewal of the church in her faith and her structure, her witness and service. Ours is a time in church history which would like to be called the epoch of renewal.

In this world-wide discussion certain questions are repeatedly raised in a great variety of situations. There is right at the beginning the question of whom we have in mind when we think about church reform. To put the question more precisely : Who are the people for whose sake we seek church reform? Two answers are usually given to this question. Each one determines the direction the discussion will take. In the first answer one has in mind all those who are still maintaining their relation- ship to the church. One of its advocates in my own congregation once said : “Why worry about the others, they won’t come anyway.” Church reform understood in such a way clearly aims at those who still come. Its practical aim is that they should come more often. This kind of church reform is easily achieved. - A second answer to the question of whom we have in mind points to a much wider circle of men. It points to the world, to the whole world, and starts with those who are far away, who have never, and will never, come to church, “because they do not know what good it is.” In our discussion here at the Kirchentag we are con- fronted exactly with this second answer. It had to be given, and it led us into difficulties as usual. For here we are not able to talk in the first place about the coming of people ; rather we shall have to speak about the going of the church. And here we shall first have to speak about the gospel before we are able to speak in a new way about the church. At this very point church reform becomes a very serious matter.

In this world-wide discussion another question is raised which refers to us who are the church. This question asks : What are we really after? The answer usually starts with a useful reminder of the heritage of our

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church. According to the faith of our fathers, the church lives under the cross by word and sacrament ; the church is nothing in herself, she has nothing for herself and therefore should seek nothing for herself. It is a church which is commissioned to proclaim her Lord to the whole world. This, we rightly say, is our aim ; there is nothing we want for our church. But as we attempt to translate such an affirmation into concrete terms we discover that we, as a matter of fact, do want something for our church. We realise this when we get anxious about our church, secretly, but continually, refusing to give our anxiety expression. We are anxious that as a result of our church reform we shall have the people back whom we once had in church on Sunday morning, the people near to us and also those now so very far away. We are anxious that the reward of our efforts toward church reform might not be those full congregations which would encourage our efforts and confirm us in the conviction that we are the church. We want people, not only to hear the word of God, but to be with us. Nobody should say that he cannot understand this anxiety. It is very understandable. It is understandable if we think about our ministers and those who are faithfully committed to our church, a church which wants to proclaim to men the most vital of all things, and when we think of the investment made day after day in body and spirit, going many hours beyond people’s normal capacity, and sometimes reaching the point of fatigue and extreme weariness.

But the anxiety to have a full church on Sunday mornings is a great temptation, just as it is a great temptation to calculate anxiously the number of people we would like to have with us as a reward for our efforts and for taking upon ourselves the risk of church reform. Is this the aim of church reform? No. We must not think about the church first, even though we love her. We must not think of ourselves first. Otherwise our witness has no authority. Here we have to prove the truth of all that we know and teach about the church. Here we have to stand the test before those who do not believe what we keep saying about the church, namely that the church does not want anything for herself, that her origin and her final goal is the Lord who wanted nothing for himself, who was the manfor others. We have to remind ourselves : What we do is not done for ourselves. It is meant for others. The church exists for the world. That is why we do not simply call people to join us, but rather we speak to everyone about God. Whether people come and join us or not, it is our task to proclaim, to question, to call people to move ahead. There is no church for us. The church is a church for

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others. There is no congregation for us. The congregation is a congrega- tionfor others. If there is anything for us, it is the others. If we have anything it is a commission. And this commission is to witness.

Our aim is reform for the sake of witness. Though elsewhere we may be allowed, or even commanded, to look

back at the history of our church, here we have to overlook it. Here we must have our history, and particularly the history of full churches, as if we had it not. For it is tempting to recall earlier times : churches without empty pews, churches exercising influence and power, and a Sunday filled by the church. Here we have to become one-sided. Here we have to meet the temptation and overcome our anxiety. Here we have to face the fact that our witness is not trusted because of our claims for the church. Here we may never look back ; we can do no other than look forward. Here it is better to reckon with the possibility that our churches will not become fuller and our congregations will become no larger and that Sunday, instead of being the great day of the church, as hitherto, will both today and tomorrow be only one among other ordinary days. Here it is better to think in terms of our going to meet people rather than of their coming to us.

Looking forward, I said. But this does not mean looking toward something unknown, vague, dim. I thought of the promise ; I thought of the hope. I had in mind the question which certainly can be raised, which certainly must be put, of where our Lord is leading us now. For he has led us from Jerusalem to Samaria and to the ends of the earth ; from the witness of Boniface before our forefathers, the heathen, to the stand of our fathers in the confessing church. And does the Lord not lead us further? Not that he leads us over the same path, but that he leads us on, even though we cannot clearly see where we are going. Our way is opened bit by bit. It begins with questions, and a discussion about the right question, and then with some initial steps into the territory of our post-ecclesiastical era - a territory hardly known to us. This is, however, a way on which our Lord stands at the turningpoints. And on this way there is a turning point from our church as we know it to a new church, a church in mission. He so sets the guide-posts that we cannot see them before we start out, but only while we are on the way. We can see only at a time, but this is sufficient to show us where we must go today and where we must go tomorrow. He is our hope. He is our future. Jesus Christ will have the final word concerning the whole world. Why worry ?


Thus our aim in church reform is not to make the church again what it was once upon a time in our country. We are counting on the possibility of a new church, for we are aware of the provisional nature of that which was and will be given to us. We are on a way. As I said, our aim is reform for the sake of witness.

I1

Now we have no longer to face only the question of what is to be our witness in speech and action, in our life and hope, but where such witness is to take place. The question where witness is to be borne is just as important as the question what our witness is. These questions are bound together in such a way that neither can be answered without the other. It is just beginning to dawn on us that our uncertainty concerning what we are to say is deeply intertwined with our ignorance of where we are to say it. A church which today concentrates her witness in her pulpits has focussed on a place far away from public life and is necessarily becom- ing uncertain about the contents of her witness. When, then, as it says in Matthew 10, you find yourself in public life, “do not be anxious, how you are to speak or what you are to say ; for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour.” What word ? That throughout the ages it has been Jesus Christ who overcame death and who is our freedom in things great and small ; whom we await today and tomorrow ; whom we follow ; who sets us on our feet and puts us on our way ; who moves the whole world and towards whose future world history is moving ; who is the hope of the world, the great hope of humanness, of justice and peace, of the ful- ness of life, the only hope. But where, in the present and in the future, can this word again become public? Where can it be ever newly arti- culated, how can it be appropriately expressed ?

We need to be convincingly present in a world in which we are appar- ently no longer so present. And if you would ask me now what, in one word, the aim of church reform is, I would answer in one word and say presence.

In Washington, D.C., a small congregation intended to start visita- tion evangelism in the city’s housing developments, but it did not do so. Its members didn’t want to go out only every now and then to those around them, but rather wanted to be present in an essential area of contemporary public life. Someone discovered an empty shop near the main street ; all the money available was put together ; a large sum was borrowed ; then the shop was bought and turned into a coffee house.

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Several teams of twelve members each were formed, and on six evenings each week one of these teams served in the coffee shop after their daily work. The team on service meets at seven in the evening and the coffee shop opens at eight. When I was there we sat together around the tables studying the Bible between seven and eight, discussing a problem which was not of our own devising but the problem of those who had been in the coffee shop yesterday and those who would come tonight : the problem of loneliness in high-rise apartment buildings, the problem of frustration, the problem of continually trying to find meaning for life in our harassed society, and the problem of the long free evenings of our time. Just before eight I was looking into the street and the people stood there waiting for the shop to be opened and looking in at us through the broad windows. A bit of the church in the world, I would say. The shop was soon crowded and the team began to serve. Those who served at table were, I would say, celebrants. Soon the team also sat at tables and dialogue began. Those who have lived under the cross and learned to see the world as it is will be able to listen. Those who have received the gift of hope will be able to communicate hope. Those who live out of the justification of their sin will seek service and dialogue. To listen, to hope, to serve and to enter into dialogue : this is witness. Someone in this congregation noted : “Through this coffee shop we say to the milling thou- sands of a great city, ‘We will serve you. We will just be there where you are. We will be together with you in the way in which you naturally gather. We will be with you for six days and six nights a week. And if by chance you ask the reason for the hope which is within us, we will talk to you. But the talking will come at the end.’ ” Those who are present and those who leave themselves open for questions will receive the words that need to be said.

We may also think of other attempts at “presence” in the world: Riesi in Sicily, the Little Brothers of Jesus, the worker priests, the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York, hospitals in Africa, and missionaries - both the old missionaries who crossed the seas and the new missionaries who cross other frontiers and live beyond the narrow con- fines of our congregations. One thinks of the industrial mission at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, of diaconal engagement in situations of need all over the world, of teams engaged in the “Aktion Suhnezeichen,” teams involved in telephone counselling, of groups of Christians involved in the American race struggle, of all those different service groups which respond to the various problems of our world, of koinonia groups, of


individuals in dialogue with atheists or with their colleagues at work, of house churches, of afternoon ten-minute worship services in the centre of some of our cities, of service in new housing projects, of the evangelical academies, andjinally of our ministers in the service to the sick, in con- firmation classes, at funerals, and in the pulpit.

I said “finally.” Why “finally” ? I find it hard, and we often Iack the courage, to admit that our ministers today can only be present in a very limited sector of our life. This is by no means to be ascribed to a lack of good will. We ministers suffer from the circumstances of our situation as hardly any generation of ministers has suffered. It is not the ministers’ fault. It is due to the way in which their work has been structured. For centuries their work has been set up in such a way that it corre- sponded to the whole of public life. Its aim was the presence of the church among all men in their particular place in the world. This place has become larger and more differentiated. Modern men are moving ; they do their work in one place, live somewhere else, spend Sunday in the countryside (which they deserve after a hard week’s work), and spend their spare time at the stadium or in clubs. Men are engaged here and there, some according to their interests, others in responsibility for our society. Only very rarely can a minister share their life, encourage and comfort them and speak to them in a way which they understand.

But the church must really be close to man. God became man. This is the witness of the church. This must be spelled out in her structure. Different experience has shown that communication between men and even the communication of the Gospel itself will happen only if a missionary is really “present .” We have experienced again and again that we can only talk with others about themselves once we have talked with them about their job and their daily problems - and in so doing have served them.

The purpose of our attempts at “presence” is to live with Christ among men. We seek to realize this presence in the ever-growing territory in which there is no longer, or in which there has never been, witness. And we try to speak a language which corresponds to the various situations in this territory. We try to find forms for Christian life and structures of the church which in themselves help make our witness. For we know that the structure of the church “speaks,” just as objects and events speak even before the church herself has spoken at all. And we know that the structure of our churches in many places contradicts their words.

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What do we discover in these attempts at presence? A group of people whom I would like to call a congregation, flexible enough to meet the needs of a particular situation : a little congregation serving men in their different situations, in dialogue with men in their various places, in dialogue between man and man, and at men’s disposal, reconciling and pointing the way ; a little congregation, a congregation of hope which has hope for all - the hope for the world which is God’s creation, a creation which has not yet come to an end. Such a little congregation can infect men with hope.

These various attempts indicate an answer to the question of the “where,” of the place of our witness. In the midst of faults and weak- nesses we discover guideposts - some of the guideposts by which God shows us the way for the whole church to take in our time.

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How can we in our congregations follow these guideposts ? A passage from the report of a house church in Aachen reads : “To be quite frank, in most cases we just did not have the courage simply to say, ‘Come and join in our Sunday service’.”

Let us not pass judgement in this connection. Let us rather think about how we can best be thankful for and make full use of that which is given us. One biblical passage on Christian worship reads as follows : “Suppose you are praising God in the language of inspiration : how will the plain man who is present be able to say ‘Amen’ to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying?” (I Corinthians 14. 16). Let us never forget this ! Let us do everything in our power to insure that our worship services again become intelligible acts of witness - intelligible not only for those who are not able to say the ‘Amen’ at the end of our hymns and prayers, but intelligibIe also for us, since we want to pass on what we have heard. From Monday to Saturday we want to spell out for ourselves and for others what is going to happen with us on Sunday morning. A minister in Karl-Marx-Stadt in the DDR wrote recently: “God became incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth.. . We would despise God’s incarnation if we proclaimed the Gospel in a language which is not that of our time.. . We would despise our non-Christian fellowman if among Christians we would communicate in a language which he cannot understand.”

Let it also be clear that worship is not an event between the church and God but between the world and God. It is in the midst of the whole


world that we confess that God is its Lord, and it is on behalf of this world that the church prays to him, therefore it is an event between the world and God. The world is not outside worship and no one should try to keep it out of it ! We are not to monopolize God - making the Lord of the whole world merely the Lord of our temple. In worship we offer ourselves and with us the whole world to God. Therefore let us, in the confession of our sins, in our praise and intercession, bring the real world before him who is its origin and its end. Let us bring before him the whole world with its needs and expectations in the five continents, the concrete world, quoting, if possible, names in intercession. Let us raise up to God in our prayers the present world - in which man travels not only by sea and by land but also by air, a world with problems of labour, of economic and political power, in which men are ruled by ideologies and frightened by war and which many men want to save through their small or great sphere of responsibility.

Our worship on Sunday morning should, therefore, have the character of a dialogue. It should enable us to be in dialogue among ourselves and with our fellowmen during the week. For the Gospel must not be proclaimed in a monologue and certainly not in blunt assertion, but rather in dialogue as Christ himself proclaimed it. Law does not know of dialogue. Dialogue, or the freedom for dialogue, is witness for the Gospel. We will never achieve church reform unless we look for possibilities of dialogue as witness, and witness in dialogue. How can we enter into dialogue throughout the week, whenever and wherever possible, if our worship does not have the character of such dialogue ? Could we say that our sermons are a help for dialogue in every day life? An elder once said “I have to think the sermon over again, but I would have been grateful had the minister at the end repeated in three sentences something that I can pass on to others.”

IV

We all hope that we can make progress in this regard in church reform. But some say that this is not sufficient, that it is no more than a starting point - one starting point besides others - and that we should worship not only in churches but also, and above all, in our residences, especially where we are attempting to be “present” in our contemporary world. And these people are saying that from such attempts we should learn how to worship today. Such worship would be very simple, perhaps only a few words ; it would be the worship of men who are freed from cultic

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acts by him who had become man that we might become men. Let us therefore not think that our most important act of witness is our Sunday morning worship service in our church buildings. This Sunday morning service had led us into a great dilemma. The picture of the church which men have today is the picture of the church on Sunday morning, aloof from labour problems, from revolutions great and small, from any change, and thus, eventually, from man himself. With this picture in mind - or rather because this picture portrays the predominant reality of the church - the church itself becomes a stumbling block for our fellowmen and prevents them from reaching the real stumbling block, the scandal of the Gospel. If what I have said so far is true, then by concentrating on witness on Sunday morning the church stands in her own way.

But how is the way to be followed? Where are the guideposts? There is an old guidepost which has taught, and still teaches, the church that she herself participates in the scandal of the Gospel. The church is nothing cheap and easy ; but the church has learned that she comes under judgement if she herself becomes the stumbling block. Churches have perished in the past. Now there is a new guidepost, at least a guidepost new for us. It is the guidepost given when we discover the reality of the church outside the Sunday morning service. This guidepost, if I may say so, is labelled “the people of God.” This is the correct label, not “laity.”

Years back we wrote into an ecumenical document the following paragraph :

“The real battles of faith today are being fought in factories, shops, offices, and farms, in political parties and government agencies, in countless homes, in the press, radio and television, in the relationships of nations. Very often, it is said that the Church should ‘go into these spheres’, but the fact is that the Church is already in these spheres in the persons of its ‘laity’. There is nothing new in this conception -for our Lord said ‘Ye are the salt of the earth.. .’ - but it is a truth which has been obscured over many periods of the Church’s life.”

We have to restore this truth. The chance for witness rests with the whole people of God. The whole people of God was given the command to witness ; for the whole people of God the promise is valid : You will receive strength in the Holy Ghost and you will be witnesses of the Lord of the earth “in Jerusalem and in the whole of Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth.” We speak about and we desire renewal. But renewal begins, and always began, when this promise and command is taken seriously. The people of God is today the most important thing in


the church. In our congregations we must discuss both now and in the future what it means to be the people of God in a post-ecclesiastical world ; what it means in our situations and in other situations ; where the difficulties and the purported impossibilities are. First of all, if we really want to hit the point we must talk about these “impossibilities.”

Our ministers complain that they have to go around begging for the cooperation of members of their congregations. But might it not be that they have to resort to such begging because they are merely looking for hod-carriers to pass on the bricks with which they alone build the house ? This is wrong. The whole people of God is at work, and ministers per- form only one part of this work - an important part, but all parts are equally important. The people of God is endowed with gifts which go far beyond what we think possible. We have to bring these gifts into the light of day. We have to put forward the question of the commissioning of the whole people of God. Right now nothing seems more important than to speak in specific terms with the people of God about this commission and to equip them to fulfil it. Let us drop minor things. Let the “Reverend” become a brother in the midst of the congregation, enabling him to be a teacher for the people of God, a celebrant for the celebrants, a pastor for the pastors, a witness for witnesses.

Such a step would involve a profound change in the structure of our church. We live in a church which has in the past shaped itself around the witness of the minister. We are looking now for a church which finds its form as it engages in the witness of the whole people of God. The atten- tion which we have so far paid to the witness of the minister before the congregation should now be directed to the witness of the congregation before the world. The energy which has hitherto been invested in church buildings would then have to be used to enable the churches to be present in those parts of the world in which they are not now present. The com- mitment, the love, the labour which we have employed in liturgical reform would then have to be directed toward equipping the people of God for their witness in their own everyday world.

In ecumenical discussion an African said : “This will be achieved by nothing less than prayer and fasting.” What does fasting mean? It means giving something up, abandoning a cherished habit. Fasting in this respect means leaving behind all those things which prevent our being present in the world. It means specifically that we can no longer concentrate the major part of available gifts on Sunday morning. How- ever, this will be possible only if in each place we ask ourselves what we

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are willing to abandon and leave behind. We must really be ready to set out and move ahead. At the beginning of his mission the missionary will fast. We too will only achieve something if, trusting in the possibilities of God, we allow the church to grow and become the church for others, to be present, and if we are not afraid of losing our way in the world. Such a fear would only prevent us from following God’s way.

Let us in closing deal with two questions concerning the form or structure of the church and its witness. One of the questions is : What are we supposed to change? The answer is to be found as each church engages in finding its particular way in diverse situations. We should, however, keep three things in mind as we recollect our discussion of church reform.

First : According to Reformation doctrine the structure of the church is always open to change. The Gospel, however, is ever valid and never subject to change. The form of witness of the church, in other words, are open to change but the commission is ever valid unchangeable.

Second: According to Reformation doctrine the form of the church is to be placed entirely at the service of the Gospel which breaks through to mankind. The shape of the church, the organization of its congrega- tional and supracongregational life, must be formed in such a way that it guarantees and furthers witness in each place and situation. Under no circumstances may the structures of the church narrow its witness or hide it from men. And if this does happen then the structure must be changed at any cost for the sake of witness.

Third : According to Reformation doctrine the structure of the church isprovisional. If it is to serve to witness, the structure must be appropriate to the time in which the witness is borne. So we could say that no structure is fixed for ever, no structure is eternal or sacred. A structure which was valid yesterday can be inappropriate today. A structure of the church is always right if it is appropriate for that part of the way on which the church finds itself at a given moment.

The other question is : Are we willing? Are we willing to be present in our world? The answer rests with you.

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WE STAND IN OUR OWN WAY