The Servant Church

CHRISTIANITY

(See Cover)

Behold, I make all things new.

--Revelation 21:5

In Bethlehem of Judaea, most probably between 9 and 6 B.C., a son was born to a carpenter of Nazareth and his wife. For 20 centuries men have proclaimed this event to be the turning point in the history of the world--that God mysteriously became man in the lowly person of an itinerant rabbi whose life ended in crucifixion, a death reserved for slaves and rebels, on the orders of a despotic Roman procurator.

Scripture says that Jesus Christ, this carpenter's son, triumphed over death's dominion by his Resurrection, and through his teachings revealed the way to eternal salvation. Thus each year, with Christmas trees and carols, tinsel and toys, his followers commemorate the moving and gentle story of the crib in a Bethlehem stable. It is a celebration of eternity's intersection with time and of Christianity's living faith in the promise of Jesus: "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age."

A Pre-Reformation Spirit. For many, the most convincing proof that the promise is being fulfilled rests in the churches that bear Christ's name and pay him homage. Divided and fragmented, they yet remain the most durable of man's institutions--together constituting the "ever-reforming church"' that in crisis finds within itself the means of rebirth and renewal. And as in the days of Augustine, Francis and Luther, signs show that a renewal is taking shape in Christianity. "There is a kind of pre-Reformation spirit running through the church today," says the Rev. Don Benedict, director of the experiment-minded Chicago City Missionary Society. "It looks as though Christians of today stand on the threshold of great changes in Christendom," adds the Rev. Roger Lloyd, vice-dean of England's Winchester Cathedral. "The prospect of a new Reformation is clearly in sight."

That reformation is most spectacular in Rome, where the Second Vatican Council has unleashed a passion for aggiornamento in the most tradition-encrusted of churches. Catholicism's vitality shows in the new liturgy, and in the zest with which a generation of "open church" priests and laymen are calling for more reforms of outdated rules (clerical celibacy, for example), institutions (the Index of Forbidden Books) and teachings (birth control). The renewal at the Vatican has also had a striking impact on the sister churches: it challenges the Reformation faiths to re-examine how reforming they still are. "The ecumenical breakthrough in Catholicism has changed the climate of the times," says Dean Samuel Miller of Harvard's Divinity School.

To many Protestants, ancient divisions now seem so irrelevant, compared with the need for unity, that the churches of Britain, at a historic conference in Nottingham last September, could confidently set a target date for their organic union in 1980. Catholic-Protestant cooperation, the dream of prophetic scholars a decade ago, is becoming so firmly rooted in parish practice that there is neither surprise nor scandal when Roman Catholics join Episcopalians for a service at Cambridge's Christ Church to celebrate the first Sunday of Advent. Liturgy is also bringing the churches together, as Catholics switch to the vernacular and Protestants increasingly restore ceremony to their services. And the big branches of Christianity more and more make common cause in facing the world; last week the Santa Fe Archdiocese announced that it would join the New Mexico Council of Churches--the first time that a Catholic church ever chose to affiliate with the Protestants and Orthodox in the federated National Council of Churches.

Besides ecumenism, two strong catalytic events are changing the chemistry of Christianity. One is recognition that the postwar religious revival in U.S. churchgoing was to an important degree a numbers game--a peacetime reflection of foxhole faith. Justifiably, many critics within the churches wondered whether the Sunday-morning crowds indicated much more than conformism born out of fear of "the bomb." Many of these same critics are now analyzing the evidences of a new spirit of Christian responsibility that is transforming many suburban churches, both old neo-Gothic and new fish-shaped. One sign is the number of Christians who form study groups to read the Bible and such avant-garde works as Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God and Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology. And taking Christianity seriously often leads to grappling with contemporary social problems--most notably, the other catalytic issue, civil rights.

Today, says the Rev. William Schram of Huguenot Memorial Presbyterian Church in Pelham, N.Y., "the suburb is the most exciting place for a minister to be." In Wilmette, Ill., the First Congregational Church has formed a financial and spiritual partnership with a downtown Chicago parish revived by Don Benedict's Missionary Society. Members of the congregation also welcome underprivileged children from Inner City churches into their homes for summer vacations, are working in the community to pass open-occupancy covenants. "We broke the barrier of involvement on race," says the Rev. Hugh Saussy of Holy Innocents' Episcopal Church near Atlanta.

New Pentecost. The spirit of Christian renewal in 1964 is searching, questioning, critical--willing to challenge every doctrine and institution of the church. If worship may perhaps be better expressed by folk singing, modern dance or drama, the churches are ready to try. Yet a considerable body of Protestant and Catholic radicals, ranging from bishops to informed laymen and seminarians, believe that the present vitality of Christianity is simply a kind of spiritual Indian summer. Convinced that most of the structures of the church have outlived their usefulness, many of these all-out reformers want a new Pentecost--"a return to the womb and a new birth for the Christian community," in the words of David Edwards, editor of the Anglican SCM Press.

They foresee a day when there may be fewer Christians but more dedicated ones, and when the church will be built around the active cell of believers rather than the territorial parish. It will be a church seeking to identify the sacred in the midst of the profane, attempting to build the Kingdom of God by transforming the organisms of the secular city. In sum, the new church will be a return to the Biblical notion of the "salt of the earth." Germany's great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner argues that Christianity is already "in diaspora," as the triumphal mass church of Christendom's past evolves into a sectlike community of the dedicated, dispersed throughout the world.

The radicals who predict the disappearance of today's institutional Christianity do so with great equanimity. "I cannot imagine a more enjoyable time to be a Christian," says British Journalist Monica Furlong, herself a convinced Anglican radical. "For while the holocaust is sweeping away much that is beautiful and all that is safe and comfortable and unquestioned, it is relieving us of mounds of Christian bric-a-brac, and the liberation is unspeakable."

Prophets & Persecutions. Such churchly radicalism has the best kind of historical precedent. "Christ was a revolutionary figure," insists Dr. Roger Shinn of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. "He was as unconcerned with institutions as anyone could be." Time and again through its turbulent, long history, Christianity has heard the voice of its own angry prophets denouncing the established disorder--St. Paul complaining about the immoralities of Corinth, St. Francis rejecting the pomp of the medieval church, Luther fulminating at the luxury of Rome, Kierkegaard howling vainly against the placid orthodoxy of Denmark's Lutheranism. Time and again, also, Christianity has undergone revolutionary second Pentecosts, and survived by adopting radical new forms of life. The Christian cell of believers, worshiping in the catacombs, brought the church through centuries of Roman persecutions. In the Dark Ages of the 9th century, the fortress monasteries of the Benedictines saved the faith of Europe--and the culture of its Greco-Roman past--from the triumph of marauding barbarians.

The reformers of today believe in total renewal because, in the words of Dr. Harvey Cox of Andover Newton Theological School, "the existing pattern of the church is no longer in touch with real life." One sure sign is that Christianity is not keeping up with the growth of humanity. In the U.S., 57% of the population claim membership in Christian churches. But the rate of increase for most denominations today is somewhat below the general population growth, and many church leaders wonder how many of their faithful are the occidental equivalent of "rice Christians"--those who would abandon their faith the moment membership involved real commitment or risk.

Elsewhere in the world, the prospects are even worse. By the year 2000, estimates the French Catholic demographer Adrian Bouffard, only 20% of the earth's population will be Christian --compared with 35% in 1900. Moreover, the churches' very existence is threatened in areas where growth is most rapid. In Africa and Asia, for example, the young churches must brave the resurgence of such non-Christian faiths as Islam and Buddhism, the enmity of freedom movements that would eradicate the "white man's religion" as a vestige of the colonial past.

Behind the Iron Curtain, an atheistic authoritarianism has forced many churches back to the catacombs. In Western Europe, church leaders wonder how to evangelize post-Christian pagans for whom towering cathedrals are museums rather than centers of a living faith. Warns the German philosopher and publisher Gerhard Szeczesny: "One good salesman, endowed with a sufficient gift of gab and versed in the more recent theological adaptations, might well be capable of converting the European masses to Islam."

The World Come of Age. But the greatest challenge to the churches--one that knows no national borders--is secularization. Dutch Theologian Albert van den Heuvel, head of the World Council of Churches' Youth Department, defines the term as "the process of ever-growing independence from any transcendent control." What it amounts to, in the blunt phrase of Friedrich Nietzsche, is "God is dead."

In a sense, God--the personal, omnicompetent deity of Christendom--has been dying for centuries. His lordship over the world has been threatened by every scientist who discovered a new natural law of organic growth, by every invention of man that safeguarded him against "act of God" disaster, by every new medicine that tamed a disease and solved another mystery of life. But it is the 20th century, the age of technological miracle, that has seen the triumph of the Enlightenment and the apparent banishment of God from the universe--even, thanks to Freud, from the human soul. Writing from his German prison cell in 1944. the anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer defined it as "the world come of age." in which "man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis."

Theologian van den Heuvel warns that there is no turning back from the reality of secularization. "The human mind has exegeted God away out of the open questions of existence, and man in growing up has more and more chased the various gods out of their positions of control of human affairs. Mankind will not go back to the Old Testament for governing principles of how the world was made, but we will go on to trace its physical mysteries with X rays and microscopes. The world in which we live is forever without a God who plays the role of the continuous and sovereign Controller of mankind, without whom we could have no bread, no health, no safety."

The church of the future, say the Christian radicals, must be prepared to cope with the implications of a totally secular society: the disaffection of millions who want salvation in this world rather than the next, and who see the church as irrelevant to their concerns; the end of such traditional church rights as tax exemptions; the prospect of finding new ways to speak about divine revelation to the world that scorns the supernatural and cannot hear the voice of Christianity's "dead" God. To prepare for the future and to build the new church, many Christian thinkers are first pondering what their answer should be to the ancient question: "What do you think of the Christ?"

Messiah & Magistrate. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews declared that "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever." True enough, but every generation has shaped its own unique understanding of the Saviour. To the first Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, he was primarily the Messiah spoken of by Isaiah and the prophets. The Christos Pantocrator of Orthodoxy was as royal a governor as any Byzantine emperor. Calvinism emphasized the stern lord of the Last Judgment, a magistrate who could govern the theocracy that was Geneva. The most painted figure in the history of art, Jesus has been portrayed in countless forms, from the fat-legged infant in the laps of serene Renaissance madonnas to the majestic risen Lord of Graham Sutherland's tapestry in Coventry Cathedral.*

"If to the seeker after Christ," says Anglican Theologian Harry Williams, "you preach a 4th century Christ, or a 16th century Christ, or a 19th century Christ, you are still giving him a stone instead of the living truth." For many churchmen, the Christ that must be preached to this century was defined by Bonhoeffer: "The man existing for others." The Jesus for now is not so much the Son of God but the Son of Man, not so much the risen Lord of Easter as the suffering servant who agonized in near despair on the Cross, who died that the world might live. The Jesus for now is the Jesus of preaching and of the Passion.

There is nothing unBiblical in this conception of the Christ. After all, notes Lutheran Theologian Martin Marty, "when they asked Jesus what it was all about, he told the story of the Good Samaritan." St. Paul informed the church of Philippi that "Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant." According to Matthew, Jesus warned his disciples: "The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve." And he wished that the church follow in his path. "I have given you an example," he told the Apostles (John 13:15) after washing their feet before the Last Supper, "that you also should do as I have done to you."

Serving Society. One implication of this servant Christology is that the church will also be "for others"--ministering to the world, not standing aloofly in judgment against it. "In the 21st century," says Theologian van den Heuvel, "the church should serve society, which also predetermines its form and shape. In the new world, the church should really live the contents of the Gospel, living out its messianic ministry, communicating with society, gearing itself to its needs."

Servanthood calls for a new understanding of the nature of the church: not the "repository of the saved" but what Editor Stephen Rose of the Chicago monthly Renewal calls "a community of people, no better than anybody else, but who are trying to be the light of the world." It is a church, Rose adds, that must seek, through service, "to become the center of life, rather than what it now seems to many: a peripheral institution."

The service that the renewal theologians have in mind is considerably more selfless and anonymous than ladies-aid society bazaars, for example, or the impressive relief programs carried on by denominations. One of the most unsettling convictions of modern church thinkers is that Christianity, in a secular society, is far from being the only instrument of divine action. In fact, God may well be more apparent in a purely nonreligious organization or movement --such as the civil rights revolution or the fight against poverty and hunger in the world--than in the actions of the churches.

It is equally possible that the most profound insights into the nature of man and the meaning of life may appear in the work of an atheist rather than a committed theologian. "We know," says Canon Lloyd with dry realism, "that God could do without the Church of England, the Methodists, or even without the Church of Rome."

In an era of what Secretary-General Willem Visser 't Hooft of the World Council of Churches calls "socratic evangelism," Christianity must seek to identify these secular currents of divine action and join them. This, primarily, is a layman's task, and Dutch Dominican Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx argues that Christians must "draft with vision the blueprints of tomorrow, designed for the dynamic shaping of a temporal society worthy of man." Too often, he adds, the church has refused to become incarnate in the world, with the result that "everything connected with the world's development and progress was left to the people whom we call infidels and unbelievers."

The Four Worlds. In nearly all thinking about the future of the servant church, says Chicago's Don Benedict, "the structural problem is basic." Explains Francis Ayres, director of the Parishfield Community, a training center for Christian laymen near Detroit: "Everyone recognizes that the local congregation is a limited instrument designed for earlier times, and cannot cope with modern society." The reason for the obsolescence of the geographic parish, says Benedict, is that it serves only one of the four "worlds" inhabited by modern man--the world of his residence, where the churches effectively minister to man in his personal relationships. But urban man also inhabits "the world of work, divorced from the residential world, with its own ethos and structures. Third, there is the public sector. Last, there is the leisure world--the second home, spare time." Somehow, argues Benedict, the church must enter all these worlds--as it did, for example, in the Middle Ages.

But how? One answer is the creation of functional rather than territorial parishes--the so-called "guild churches" that would unite a few hundred people with a common interest. Instead of belonging to one church near his home, a man might be a member of three or four worshiping units. Another new instrument of the church is the Christian "cell" of men and women who gather, at work or at home, to study the Bible or discuss the problems of their work. Stephen Rose suggests that the church of the future will still have its cathedrals, as places where the tradition of worship could be preserved with integrity. "Then outside them," he says, "in smaller churches, in houses, in storefronts, there would be centers of outreach, each with a specific function. There would be theaters, galleries, youth clubs, political centers, many of these voluntary and self-supporting."

Restructuring the church means changing the roles of minister and laymen. Many theologians believe that most present-day distinctions between pastor and people will wither away, and that the Pauline notion of the priesthood of all believers will become a living reality. One reason--which Mormons and Pentecostals understand already--is that all Christians will be called to witness in the world. Another is that many clergymen are dissatisfied with the limitations of a ministry that puts them on the fringe of life.

Roughly one-third of U.S. divinity students display little interest in entering the parish ministry--and some of those are intellectually no match for the college-bred among their congregations. Many ministers envision the day, and a few have already achieved it, when they will support their parish work by full-time jobs in secular occupations, emulating the worker-priests of postwar France.

"If the church is to travel sufficiently light," argues Bishop John Robinson, "and to be flexible for a mobile society organized on functional lines, then it must be free to deploy most of its manpower not for servicing units of ecclesiastical plant but for serving within the structures of the world."

Changed Rhythm. According to Princeton Theologian M. Richard Schaull, worship ought to be "an expression in symbol and sacrament of what God is doing to make human life human." Many clergymen, and laymen too, question whether existing patterns of worship are suited to the church of the future. The long weekend and the five-day week have already changed the rhythm of life that made Sunday morning the natural time to pay homage to God. In the 21st century, liturgies may be celebrated--as they were in the early church--in homes or places of work, and rarely on the day of the Lord. David Edwards argues that preaching is on the way out, and that in the future the word of God will be expressed by dialogue rather than monologue: instead of sermons, study-group discussions between ministers and laymen. Already, some ministers and priests are experimenting with unorthodox liturgies. In California, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Methodist ministers have congregated at Communion services in one another's homes. Some U.S. priests have presided at Last Supper-style Masses, following the forms used by 2nd century Christians.

Even more archaic than the form of Christian worship is its language. Says the Rev. Robert Raines, pastor of the First Methodist Church of Germantown, Pa.: "Liturgy is an expression in language of our life before God. We have hymns of the four seasons, of the earth, the sky and rural life. But how many hymns are there about God in the factories? In the city slums? We are living on hymns that are an articulation of life in another term."

The Common Task. When they consider the teachings of the churches, many theologians today are inclined to ask themselves the question put to Ezekiel: "Can these bones live?" How, in the secular era, can the church proclaim Christ in words that the world will hear? There is no easy answer, although many churchmen agree on some qualities that any theology of the future must have. It will be ecumenical. "Renewal is the invitation to a common task," says the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Kueng. "Everything today is interdependent." It will be existential. "Theology is overdeveloped in systems and arguments," says French Dominican Pierre Liege, "and not rich enough in concrete applications to existential problems. As it progresses, it will turn more to the questions of the significance of human life and the application of the Christian message to the existential circumstance." It will also be open to the insights of science and non-Christian faiths, even to the humanist values--a deep concern for other men's welfare, an intelligently empirical approach to moral issues--of contemporary unbelief.

Beyond that, there is no widespread agreement about how the servant church is to rearrange its cargo of dogma for the hard sailing ahead. Many Roman Catholics and Protestants feel that the primary theological task is re-translation of traditional concepts into contemporary accents, and that to toss doctrine overboard is to betray the faith. Yet an influential minority of Christian thinkers is willing to do just that. It is an unarguable axiom for the Marburg Disciples of Germany's Rudolf Bultmann that Christianity must de-mythologize--that is, translate the essential elements of the New Testament proclamation into terms that relate to man's existential conflict today, while doing away with nonessentials as so much historical ballast. Advocates of Paul Tillich's method of correlation, which attempts to find theological answers in the Christian message to the existential questions posed by modern philosophy, are content to ignore dogmas that do not relate to contemporary man's ultimate concern.

Not all the radical theologians who want Christianity to travel light are in the seminaries. Two of the most persuasive are consecrated bishops of the Anglican faith: John Robinson, the suffragan of Woolwich, and James A. Pike of San Francisco. In his bestselling (750,000 copies) Honest to God, Robinson proposed, among other near heresies, that Christianity substitute Tillich's concept of God as "the ground of all being" for the old notion of a transcendent personal deity "out there." In subsequent writings, Robinson has carried on his theological demolition work in other areas. Christian Morals Today argues for a flexible ethic in which the only commitment is to act out of love for God instead of absolute adherence to an objectively valid set of divine commandments. And in a series of lectures called "The New Reformation?," Robinson argues that when its basic truths are at stake, Christianity should preserve an agnostic silence about certain doctrines--heaven and hell, for example, or the devil and the angels--since "these cannot be painted with the assurance or the detail on the wide canvases beloved of our forefathers."

Packaging v. Product. A similar demand for doctrinal caution is voiced by Pike in his recent A Time for Christian Candor. He argues that the church keeps the treasure of its revelation in "earthly vessels," and that it is idolatry to accept as eternally true what is only historically conditioned. He suggests that Christianity abandon the notion of the Trinity, which has now become a pagan tritheism instead of what the church fathers intended to say. To avoid confusion of the "packaging" with the "product," Pike would do away with all spatial images of God, everything that suggests a distinction between the sacred and the secular.

When will the church of the future be born? "We're in it now," exults Jean-Paul Meyer, director of Paris' International Protestant Students' Center, and he may well be right. Every church today has its share of experiments looking ahead to the 21st century. In Germany, for example, the Protestant Evangelical Academies bring Christians together for weekend seminars to discuss, on a thoroughly professional level, such secular issues as urban planning and traffic problems. Mainz-Kastel is the center of Lutheran Pastor Horst Symanowski's yearly industrial seminar for ministers, who divide their time between working on assembly lines and learning the sociology of the factory. The spirit of the worker-priests lives on in the Anglican priests of the Sheffield Industrial Mission, the Japanese Christian industrial evangelists, and in Roman Catholicism's Little Brothers of Charles de Foucauld, laymen under vows of poverty who "shout the Gospel with their lives" in the slums of Paris, Buenos Aires and Santiago.

Put Up or Shut Up. In the U.S., every major city has one or more experimental Inner City missions, many of them modeled on the interdenominational East Harlem Protestant Parish, where Holy Communion is often celebrated around a kitchen table in an apartment, and a team of laymen and clerics spend most of their waking hours combatting the apathy of public officialdom and a poverty-stricken community. The National Council of Churches is supporting an ambitious new program of Christian involvement called "the Delta Ministry." In 15 Mississippi counties, council staff workers and volunteers will be working with Negro organizations on voter registration drives, seeking to reconcile the white community to civil rights, establishing community centers to train adult illiterates, advising sharecroppers on agricultural techniques. Justifying the project, Bishop Reuben Mueller told the council: "Our day is saying to all of us in the field of religion: 'Put up or shut up.' It is just as challenging as that."

Faith of the Future? Without question, most Christians are not ready to proclaim the death of the church or to embrace the skeletonized faith of the future that some modern-day reformers propose. The World Council's Visser 't Hooft notes that the much-questioned territorial parish has proved to be a valuable instrument in Soviet-bloc countries, where it remains the one autonomous institution in a would-be omnicompetent state. Roman Catholic Layman Michael Novak warns that even if the institutional church withers away, another will eventually take its place, and that "there is no way of so organizing life that holiness and vitality are guaranteed." He also points out that those who talk of the militant church for the chosen remnant tend to sound a trifle holier-than-thou.

For Lutherans, the very notion of a servant church raises a fundamental doctrinal question: What is the place of salvation by faith in a Christianity devoted to good works? And what is to prevent a church "seeking to lose itself in the world" from becoming just another humanitarian agency? German Theologian Helmut Thielicke feels that contemporary efforts to demythologize the Gospel may produce "overintellectualized" theologies comprehensible only to doctoral students in philosophy. Other churchmen question whether the theological striptease proposed by Bishops Robinson and Pike amounts to anything more than the rediscovery of classic Unitarianism.

"Either we experiment in faith, or else we fossilize," answers Canon Lloyd, and Don Benedict argues that in order to re-establish its credibility in the secular age the church must emphasize the ethical rather than confessional aspect of Christ. But today's renewal theologians are far more realistic than the Social Gospelers of the first decades of the 20th century who assumed that the church could guide the world on a path of easy progress toward the spiritual transformation of economic life. Christian reformers, says Rose, "take very seriously the sinfulness of man and are skeptical of any pat solution to the tragedy of human existence." Thus they willingly admit that even the most promising of today's ecclesiological experiments are at best interim solutions, and may be doomed to failure.

Failure and sorrow are inevitable ingredients in the drama of human existence. "In the sacred history of man on earth," wrote French Author Leon Bloy, "it is still, alas, Good Friday." But Good Friday was, and is, the prologue to Easter. As usual, it was Bonhoeffer who best expressed the millennial hope for the coming of God's kingdom that lies behind the theology of renewal. "The day will come," he wrote from his prison cell, "when men will be called again to utter the word of God with such power as will change and renew the world. It will be a new lan guage, which will horrify men, and yet overwhelm them by its power."

When will that day come? All that the Christian can know is that the church must ready itself to proclaim the event. Summoned to discipleship, Christianity will be its true self only when it exists for humanity, following the example of the suffering servant who was its Lord and founder.

* Measuring 72 by 40 ft., Sutherland's Christ In Glory, shown on this week's cover of TIME, pictures Jesus surrounded by the emblems of the four Evangelists. At top left, the man (Matthew); at lower left, the ox of St. Luke; at top right, the eagle of St. John; at lower right, the lion of St. Mark. To the right of the seated Christ is the figure of the archangel Michael, patron saint of the cathedral.

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