Calling

Jim Goodmann

Regional Director, Calling Congregations

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October 01, 2007

THE CHURCH OF OUR BEST IMAGININGS

In our Vocation and Culture feature, Patricia Hendricks asks pastors and other leaders to imagine what it might be like to engage young people in discussions where they, not we, supply the agenda. This, she posits, is where the Spirit of God is leading the church. Perhaps imagination and surprise are things most needed in our life today as the body of Christ. More than anything, we seem to be aware of the dilemmas and double binds that dog us, individually and collectively. We feel a great need to pass on the treasure of faith to young people, but, instead, they come to us bearing their own story of spiritual pilgrimage and asking us to recognize the Christ already active in their lives. We who thought we were the bearers of treasure are asked to recognize its presence in someone else and in an unfamiliar idiom. Yet, as Thomas Keating suggests, double-binds are opportunities or invitations for transformation, personal and corporate. John the Baptist, Keating explains (The Mystery of Christ) was attracted to Jesus, to his care for the poor, his healings, and to his message about the kingdom of God but wondered if, in Jesus, he had the right man after all. It didn’t quite jive with his “blood and fire” apocalyptic vision. Similarly, we are attracted to the energy of young people who appear to have a new and engaging message for the church. But we are anxious about actually letting them be leaders – maybe because this letting go is a reminder of our own mortality. At the very least, some of their thinking does not coalesce with our concept of what the church should be.Perhaps what feels like us dying – our intimations of mortality – needs to be turned inside out. We are, after all, a people for whom dying and coming to new and unknown life is the paradigm of paradigms. Perhaps then, this “dying” lies in giving – giving space, giving time and giving hospitality to those younger than us who are asking us what it is to be truly alive. As young people unfold their story to our patient listening, Patricia Hendricks insists, they also wish to know ours. Perhaps the dying is more like familial patterns of passing on and receiving life – a seeking on the part of the young to be connected to what has gone before them and a seeking on our part to participate in the transmission of new life to the church of the future. We are not rivals, anymore than John was to Jesus, even if we are called on to “decrease” in the face of their “increase.”