I don’t often buy a Sunday paper any more. I’ve got RSS news feeds from digital news outlets and services all over the world that provide more than enough reading each week. But, yesterday I bought our local paper, The Tulsa World, and enjoyed getting newsprint on my fingers. I suspect many continue to enjoy the touch of the paper each and make time to read the daily or weekly in their community. In the business section this headline caught my attention, “Generosity Breeds Success.” The columnists, Harvey Mackay, was writing about the author of a new book and how he has “made it” in the sports marketing and memorabilia. Two things caught my attention about the author other than the title of the book, You Gotta Have Balls. Click here to read the article.
First, the author’s favorite saying, “If you want more money, don’t pay attention to the money. Pay attention to the thing that makes the money.” I wonder how that applies to the Church and to ministry with children, youth, and young adults. And the second is like it, “focus on relationships, not transactions.” That’s pretty much what Jesus did. He focused on the people that wandered into his life or that he called because they were important rather than focusing on a salvation that may occur after death. Too much of Christendom is about the transaction of salvation, confession of faith, or baptism. Too much of ministry with children, youth, and young adults has been based on a relational model that is based on that transaction. What would a congregation look like that thought about that first saying? If you want more members, do more outreach, more children and youth, don’t pay attention to those things. Pay attention to the things, stuff, relationships, that invite members, more outreach, more children, youth, and young adults. And, for my denominations seminaries that are seeking students the same is true. Why does the Church require a well educated clergy? Because of a well educated laity. That is what reforms the Church and Christendom. I think that is what the Emergent movement may be trying to do.
Unlike our obsession with “new” or “next generation” technologies when it comes to Christianity “new” or “next generation” rarely has many early adopters or early adapters, nor is something “new” or “next generation” ever acceptable without its embrace of orthodox theology. The Emergent movement, the concert worship experience, the mega-church mall, and video screens in the sanctuary are next generation technologies dispensing the old, old, orthodox story about sacrificial atonement, the death of one man to save the know world and the world to come, from an angry, but loving, deity. I’m a skeptic about Emergent Christianity and Church, because the more I learn about it the less I see theological evolution. Rather, it is a different delivery system for orthodox Christianity through a different social lens. Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini served as the Archbishop of Milan and two weeks ago he gave an interview to the Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily, where he noted the “Church was 200 years out of date.” As one about to, in the words of one Disciple minister I know, “claim the promises of his baptism,” Cardinal Martini did not fear the reprisals of his Church and spoke with clarity about what his expression of Christian faith had done to Christianity and to those that profess faith. Cardinal Martini, it seems to me, poses two questions for mainline Protestantism to digest. First, what have we embraced, passively blessed, and where has the Church been co-opted by culture that has “undermined its status as a moral arbiter?” Second, which of the Church’s rituals and theology on which the rituals are based is “200 years out of date?” In the Cardinal’s words, “Why don’t we rouse ourselves? Are we afraid?”
You can find the Corriere della Sera via web search and if you don’t read Italian, I don’t, the Google translation will give you a taste of the Cardinal’s interview. I found the article about Cardinal Martini on Huffington Post’s Religion section. Here is a paragraph or two. click the title to read more.
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, In final Interview Before Death Says Church ‘200 Years Out Of Date’
Reuters | Sept 1, 2012.
“Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our rituals and our cassocks are pompous,” Martini said in the interview published in Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
“The Church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the pope and the bishops. The paedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation,” he said in the interview.