Calling

Jim Goodmann

Regional Director, Calling Congregations

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March 01, 2009

The Way the World Works

Drawing on the title of one of our books in review, I want to offer a theme for this issue—the way the world works, for individuals and for congregations attentive to the movements of God. As each of our features will attest, none of this is an automatic process but requires our intentioned looking for the face of God in the members of our communities, in those who come to us with questions, and those to whom we pose our questions, as well as in our individual lives. Catherine Brunell states, in our main feature, that the particular challenge we each face in the heavy lifting of discernment or “finding our way” is openness. Openness to God, she says, is the place where we will spend most of our time, perhaps because we are apt to un-learn some presumptions about the way the world works and the ways in which God continues to speak. We may move closer to the processes of nature, which uses everything, even death (think of seeds), to generate new life and growth.

An obscure seventeenth century poet, John Norris, a parson of Bemerton (whose predecessor was renowned priest and poet George Herbert), has a very un-ironic Hymn to Darkness wherein he lifts up the places of not-knowing and absence in our lives by referencing darkness as that “sacred venerable thing…from whose pregnant universal womb all things, even Light thy rival, first did come.” The spiritual journeys of individuals, of congregations, of the human family will sometimes have recourse (willingly or unwillingly) to that “universal womb” if only to see that we are not without Divine company but that it is available to us in ways we could not expect or anticipate. Great adventures await those courageous enough to ask the question, “Who is God?” or “God, what would you have us know about you and about us in relation to you—right now?,” questions similar to those raised by God’s people in other times and at other turns in the road. It turns out that we thrive in our questions, perhaps more than we do in our confident answers, because we remain in dialogue with God and with one another in God.

This issue of Calling is devoted to honoring the questions and the dialogue that takes our questions seriously. Our features include a couple of reviews about the future of the church and how we are challenged to re-imagine what we so easily claim to know. We also include some coverage of the Calling Congregations annual conference which presented numerous occasions for dialogue and imagining how the world might work if and when whole congregations are committed to the question of vocation. In Calling Congregations, we find that our work encompasses both light and shadow. It covers both the great things that churches are discovering about their own calling as well as the accompanying questions about how to remain alive both to the good news and the challenges that persist because of necessary change or what Buddhism refers to the permanent impermanence of everything. Nevertheless, there is the constant companionship of the risen Lord whose presence does not fail—especially in the midst of the liminal—and whose invitation to a new creation is constant.