Stirring up Hope

This article was originally written and published forty years ago, in February of 1985(!), but it remains both relevant and true:

How would you go about rebuilding an ancient parish? I don’t just mean the bricks and mortar — although they are part of it. I mean the whole range of activities, services, and good works that characterize a living church. More to the point, perhaps, how do you rebuild a family, a family torn somewhat, prey at times to bad feeling and division, bearing hurts from the past but sincerely seeking a future? What can you do to help?

Do you start from scratch and just begin as If your day were the first day? How do you honor the past? Do you try to clean house, and blow out all the stale air? Do you sit tight — and wait and see? What do you do?

Here is a modest proposal for rebuilding a parish family. It emerges from two experiences of rebuilding in the Diocese of New York, one with Grace Church in Manhattan and one with St. Mary’s Church in Scarborough. It is not a chronology or schedule, nor is it a program or blueprint. It is just a setting forth of themes and convictions that have governed a personal strategy. They are set forth in the hope of arousing discussion, and stirring up real hope in situations that cry out for it.

For me, a strategy of rebuilding begins with a personal religious conviction. It is the conviction of God’s grace. This conviction says that the bottom line of human existence is the grace of God, or God’s unconditional love for humanity on the basis of the Cross. This conviction says that the warpedness of human experience lies in some form or another of judgment, perceived and actual; that the root of human anxiety is fear of rejection; and that God on the Cross has absorbed, on our behalf, the absolute totality of all our rejections and feelings of rejection. So you and I are free from demand. Such freedom from demand is the essence of grace-full living.

Such a conviction, of God’s unconditional love for humanity on the basis of the Cross, is not automatically accepted by the Church. To some, it seems to undercut the “need” for morality, and standards. Grace has at times sounded threatening to the religious community because it sounds like it could lead to what our ancestors called “lasciviousness’’ and what we may call permissiveness and self-indulgence. Grace is a threat to my need for control. It says I have no control whatsoever over my ultimate status and worth in life. It says that such worth is a gift, given by God by means of a transfer of moral perfection from Jesus Christ to us who look to Him. So if it is all a gift, then that undercuts my ability to control my worth. Does this then lead to amorality because of the absence of control? Does it lead to indiscipline and moral indifference? Not at all! It leads to overflowing thankfulness for what God has done for me in my lost and needy narcissism. The actual experience of Christians down the ages is that grace leads to holiness, and not the other way around.

To bring this down to earth, we seek, in everything we consciously do in a parish, to give out the word of God’s grace, which is His unconditional love on the basis of the Cross. We announce right from the start that any congregation where grace is preached is going to lose control. That may sound ominous at first, but when offered with a little humor, it is disarming. And reassuring. What a burden can be lifted down then! I cannot save my parish, nor can anything I do save my parish. But because of God’s grace, any parish can always be saved, and great things be accomplished. The grace of God puts the burden off you and me to do anything, and puts it squarely where it belongs. In the context of a non-judgmental relationship with God, I will be enabled to love other people non-judgmentally. And this fresh kind of loving will, in time, take varied, active forms in terms of service in the Church and to the world.

I believe this to be the cornerstone of a truly evangelical strategy of parish ministry. It puts first things first, and everything else second. It begins and ends the process of parish rebuilding with the Word of God’s unconditional love to us flawed people, and trusts the Holy Spirit to take over in terms of the practical steps to take. A classic example of this strategy occurred at Grace Church, Manhattan, in the mid-1970s, when many used to ask: What are we going to do? What programs are we going to start to revive and inspire this parish? “Nothing, as such,” we tried to say, “except to speak a word of God’s unconditional love, at every possible point of person-to-person contact in the parish.” When a church is seeking for a way back to vitality, a Vestry may actually bite — even on a strategy as non-programmatic as that. But the strategy worked. An unremitting emphasis on God’s gift, joined to a lot of TLC and personal outreach, created a situation in which, after a few years, the giftedness of that diverse congregation began to spill over; and everything from a shelter for the homeless, to a thriving ministry to artists, to increased outreach giving, to a remarkably loving and healing fellowship, emerged.

The same experience is developing, although in a very different setting, at St. Mary’s Church in Scarborough. The Good News there of God’s grace, presented at every possible opportunity, is having its day — and the results so far are increased giving, increased outreach, increased family feeling, increased confidence, and increased joy in worship. The giftedness of that suburban congregation astonishes me, and I start to feel like a ringmaster in a circus — or like Dr. Frankenstein, who has seen a creature come to life, who is now leading him rather than vice-versa.

A mission strategy of grace has a lot to contribute in terms of dealing with divisions within a parish. For one thing, the Law does not minister effectually to bad blood. In other words, I cannot exhort people out of their animosities. Just holding up the New Commandment is not for a moment sufficient to enable a parish family to give up its divisions. Exhortation may, in fact, cause people to feel even worse about themselves. The way to deal with chronic, inherited divisions is not to take sides, nor even to deal with the issue on its own terms. Rather, lift up the center, which is God’s grace and its life-altering power, and the other things will not seem so important. The brightness of the center will eclipse the rather dark light of all the other agendas. Divisions will always be latent within us, let alone within our parishes, but they lose much of their power to hurt and sting when the center is restored.

Another strategic pastoral implication of grace is that we are not perfectionists. Our view of human nature is realistic. (Realism is a modern word for apprehending the universality of original sin). None of us will ever achieve anything remotely like perfection so long as we are human. Therefore I cannot divide my parish, even in my own mind, into arrived and non-arrived people, spiritually minded and worldly, renewed and unrenewed, even liberals and conservatives. I will never cease to be surprised at who responds to grace, and who does not. I can never know the inward facts of a person well enough. So I address them all as believers, impute to them all the grace of God, and trust the Holy Spirit to do the convicting work.

A mission strategy built on grace will always be incomplete, because our practical, emotional gravitation towards the Law, and the feelings of rejection the Law inspires, are so strong. In other words, even while I speak of God’s grace, I am bound, in my humanity, to be hung up on Law, somewhere or other; and probably in a lot of places. But I know of no compelling answer, other than grace, that is so tailored to my need for an ultimate relationship with God that is non-condemning, hence freeing of my (and everyone else’s) personal giftedness. This strategy is descriptive, not prescriptive: it describes what God has done and is doing, and does not mandate what I ought to do by way of response. Let the Holy Spirit, then, inspire right action, within my new relationship of acceptance. This strategy of mission is realistic, not perfectionist. It discourages self-righteousness, and is not surprised by “what lieth within the heart.” But it asserts that positive change is always possible by the mercy of God.

This strategy is grass-roots, and not from the top down. It looks to God to inspire people to good works, within the transforming relationship of grace, and within a family of persons who mediate that relationship to our hurts. It is the exact opposite of priesthood being the spiritual arm of the sheriff’s office. And it helps us to grow in patience, insofar as God is so tenderly patient with us. This strategy of grace works: it rebuilds local churches and helps us all to live.