One Theologian's Take on General Assembly Resolutions

Six years ago, my home denomination last held its global gathering, at which we discuss and vote on several issues, ranging from small to large changes. Sometimes, we have trouble seeing what is small and what is large. For example, it was at our last gathering that we voted to change our statement on The Lord’s Supper, moving us from a Zwinglist ‘memorial’ position (Christ is not present at the table, but we ‘remember’ or ‘memorialize’ him there) to something far closer to Luther’s affirmation that Christ is really and truly present in that sacrament. It was a huge win for theological coherence in our tradition, though there wasn’t a single question asked or word of debate raised, signaling to me that the delegation wasn’t quite aware of how theologically monumental such a vote was. I’ve spoken on this several times in the years following, and the response is largely the same: “I didn’t know we did that! That’s a huge change!” Indeed, it is!

This time around, I thought I’d offer some brief reflections on the theological issues at stake in our resolutions. To be clear, this isn’t my advice on how anyone should vote, but having a clearer picture of the theological issues may help inform us. I’m also not a voting delegate (our district considers only those members of the clergy who are serving as senior pastors, so full-time professors usually aren’t considered for election) so, as the saying goes, “I don’t have a dog in the fight.” Well, except for the burning desire for a church I love to reflect the kingdom Jesus establishes more faithfully! This is just one theologian’s insights that I hope you’ll find interesting or helpful. I can’t touch on them all, and I’m sorry if I didn’t get to one of your favorites, but I’ll update this post with more as I’m able. If there’s a particular resolution you’d like me to discuss, feel free to let me know and I’ll do my best to speak to the theological issues it touches. Let’s get to it.

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This resolution offers a wide-ranging change to the Covenant of Christian Conduct, bringing it into harmony with a Wesleyan vision of the human person, a life filled with love, sin, and the holy life. Its setting of ‘behaviors’ within the motif of new creation is

the theological key to this resolution. One of the central themes of Wesleyan theology, new creation is more than an update of an outmoded world. It is, rather, the affirmation that God is active in the world, making all things new in accordance with God’s purposes for creation.

Importantly, the language expands from a fairly (and narrowly!) personal view of morality, situating moral behaviors within the larger narrative of God creation and redemption. “Scripture begins with God good work of creating, though the appearance and ever-increasingly devastating effects of sin followed.” In this sentence, our behaviors aren’t only abstractly ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things but are caught up in the theo-drama of creation, fall, and redemption. A reference to one of my favorite biblical passages follows: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old is gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17-19), and with it, the theological table is laid: this is about new creation! Or, perhaps, it signals that this is a statement more about God’s new creation activity in the world than it is about our willing ourselves to make moral choices under our own steam.

Vitally, the proposed changes use the word ‘response’ multiple times, a word that doesn’t appear at all in the original. What does that mean? It means that whatever behaviors it names will be understood as “commitments and choices in response to God’s transforming grace.” Those italics are mine, because I want to highlight how vital this is for the Christian life in the Wesleyan tradition. John Wesley’s lively image of the human heart being filled with love, excluding sin comes to mind, as does the entire vision of Mildred Wynkoop’s A Theology of Love. Flowing in the same stream as Wesley and Wynkoop, this language refreshingly reminds us that we don’t will ourselves to the kind of life described in this statement; it is a gift of grace. Or, to put it another way, this isn’t a list of rules that allow us to live a holy life; this is what a holy life looks like as it’s being transformed by God’s grace. This language moves the Covenant to become more descriptive than prescriptive, such that the behaviors it names flow out of a heart gracious filled with love for God and neighbor. In other words, while taking moral behaviors seriously, it theologically locates them in a way that makes the life of holiness one of joy, rather than a legalistic set of rules to be followed. To my reading, this statement is summoning us to take another step down the pathway toward theological coherence, making our central message even more joyful.

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Should someone be baptized if they are to be taken into local church membership? To my knowledge, this has never been a requirement for membership in the Church of the Nazarene’s history, though it does have a longer historical precedent. Some of the earliest documents we have (I have Hippolytus’ On the Apostolic Tradition in mind here) describe baptismal practices that call for three years of preparation, largely because for the early Christians, baptism was far more than a ‘spiritual’ sign that left the rest of our lives unaffected. Hippolytus described the jobs people would have to leave to be able to enter the waters of baptism and the allegiances that must be shattered. In essence, anything that stood in opposition to the lordship of Jesus had to be denied. Only then would someone be considered a full member of the church.

The early church took these vows incredibly seriously because being a follower of Jesus was a way unto itself; it wasn’t compatible with other commitments. It wasn’t possible to be a good Roman and a good Christian because being a good Roman involved vows to Caesar as lord, and to walk in the ways of Rome. We modern people don’t have a category for this kind of religious life, because nearly everyone reading this was born into a world where being an upstanding citizen came with the territory of being a Christian. Our earliest ancestors in the faith, however, couldn’t perceive of life like that, and so when one was baptized, it signaled a death of the old life (political, national, economic, etc.) and new birth into a completely different way of life. That way of life was membership in the body of Christ, the church.

Many of these practices live on today in various forms of Christianity. Orthodox communities, for example, still follow this ancient pattern, dividing worship into the liturgy of the Word (which anyone can attend, usually involving the reading of Scripture), and the liturgy of the faithful (where only the baptized are invited to partake of the Lord’s Supper). This might sound offensively exclusive to contemporary ears, but it’s meant to help us steward the treasures of the faith well, and to create a community in which faith isn’t treated like an extracurricular activity, but is as the core of who we are, commitments and all.

What, then, does this mean theologically for Nazarenes? On the one hand, it moves us more toward a sacramental approach to membership. That is, membership isn’t simply a ‘voluntary association’ like joining the Lions Club or a softball team. In this resolution, we are saying that there is divine activity undergirding membership in a local congregation. Ecclesiologically (having to do with the study of the church), this moves us away from volunteeristic visions of church life where we think of ourselves as making up a church because we’ve decided to join, and more toward embracing a theology where the church is a miracle of grace, because we are a body who have entered through the waters of baptism, where we were really and truly met by God and transformed by grace.

On the other hand, many ‘baptism first’ traditions are far more comfortable in practice with infant baptism than the Church of the Nazarene has tended to be. Though our Manual names infant baptism as a valid form of the sacrament, a strong majority of our congregations lean in practice toward ‘believer’s baptism’ in which the person being baptized actively confesses faith in Jesus. There is, of course, a theological question to be asked: Is baptism more about my public testimony to God’s grace, or God’s grace that has acted before I was aware of it? Put more succinctly, is it about what I’m doing, or is it about what God’s doing?

A Wesleyan view of this sees it as both, that God acts first in grace, and we humans respond to that grace. This is why I’ve long said that for congregations who practice infant baptism, we should also take very seriously the need for humans to actively respond to the grace they received in their baptism. Often, that looks like something called confirmation, but considering this resolution, I’m wondering if church membership could take on the shape of offering people the opportunity to respond to the grace at work in their baptism by joining a local body that God is gifting to the world as an expression of new creation.

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A statement on the goodness of creation is a welcome addition to the Manual, especially, since the Bible begins with its own affirmation of the goodness of creation from the first two chapters (Gen. 1, 2). I strongly suspect this resolution will be headed for referral to a study committee to work out some of the finer theological points, as is the case with most of these kinds of resolutions, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time parsing its language, but there are some important considerations.

First, the affirmation of the goodness of creation is a vital theological move and will help across the spectrum of doctrines. Additionally, it’s truer to Wesley’s own vision, as evidenced in one of his earliest sermons, “The New Creation,” which opens with an affirmation of the goodness of creation.

Many of the most challenging moral and theological questions of our time stem from whether or not we think creation is good. There are many Christians who consider Genesis 1 and 2 as an interesting and truthful backstory, but ultimately affirm that creation and humanity really is essentially described in Genesis 3. But the Wesleyan tradition (tracing a line of thought going back to early Christianity) encourages a view of creation where the effects of sin are real and eating away at the goodness of creation. In other words, creation really is good, but it’s being afflicted by a disease: sin and evil. Creation itself isn’t evil, but it is being afflicted by evil. This resolution helps us see that theological vision more clearly.

I’m also struck by the opening sentence, stating, “the Triune God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them out of nothing but love.” Historically, the Christian tradition has affirmed creatio ex nihilo, mean ‘creation out of nothing.’ It was a philosophical and theological safeguard against a vision of the universe that begins with ‘God and something else.’ That is, if we affirm that God created out of nothing – real nothing! – that we are on different theological ground from the other religious traditions of the world (particularly those in the ancient near east around the time of Judaism’s rise) that made meaning of their world by telling creation stories about gods who create out of a struggle against one another. Rome’s creation myth, for example, does a lot to tell the Roman people who they are by saying that they are the product of divine conflict between gods. Israel, by contrast, wanted to tell a different story altogether about the One God who has no rival and creates by speaking.

More recently, some theologians have suggested another approach to understanding creation, namely creatio ex amore. This is to say that the Christian doctrine of creation is better understood as God creating out of love, rather than out of nothing. The former, they argue, is a clearer reflection of the biblical narrative (what was that ‘formless void’ God spoke to if there was nothing?), and better sets us up to see God’s activity through the rest of the biblical story.

I’m risking going back on my earlier claim that I wouldn’t parse the language of this resolution too carefully, but the wording is like philosophical and theological catnip. What, exactly, would we mean by “nothing but love”? My friend, colleague, and former professor Michael Lodahl has done a lot of this work in his 2004 book, The God of Nature and of Grace: Reading the World in a Wesleyan Way, and you can look there if these questions interest you as much as they interest me.

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Dealing with the theological beauty and complexity of the Atonement is far more than I can do in a few meager paragraphs. The resolution before us, adapting our Article of Faith on the matter, touches on a host of theological issues, most of which I won’t be able to engage adequately in a blog post, but several points of particular interest jump out.

First, the theological theme of new creation finds its way into the language, locating the Atonement in the larger theological narrative of redemption than simply reducing it to the suffering of Jesus. That is, Atonement is more than Christ’s suffering.

Additionally, the language of reconciliation, absent from the current version, represents a step forward toward theological coherence for Nazarenes. ‘Atonement’ is one of the few words in theology that stems from English roots. Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are the usual sources for the language we’ve used to describe God and God’s activity, but the term ‘atonement’ is, at its etymological root, ‘at-one-ment.’ That is, it has to do with making one of something that has been separated. In this case, Christ’s work of Atonement reconciles the broken relationship between God and creation, renewing creation by connecting it to its source. The fact that reconciliation language is absent our current Article is a tad troubling on that front, and so I’m glad to see that shift in this resolution.

Finally, I’ll mention that our Article is broad enough that it doesn’t overtly endorse a particular ‘atonement theory,’ as we often refer to them in theology. The various atonement theories seek to describe what was happening, especially with Jesus on the cross and his suffering. Interestingly, the global Church (across denominations) has never agreed on one theory that sufficiently describes what was happening in Jesus’s crucifixion, so there is a wideness open to Christians on the matter. Some gravitate toward theories like penal substitution, in which the punishment for sin is taken on to Jesus, shielding us from it ourselves. Anslem’s satisfaction theory generally frames Jesus’s atoning work as restoring the justice between God and humanity that was violated by human sin. Gustaf Aulen’s Chrisus victor approach names the Atonement as Christ winning a victory over sin, death, and evil as the primary substance of Jesus’s atoning work, decentering ‘punishment’ motifs in favor of God’s direct engagement with evil.

Nazarenes aren’t overtly called to endorse any of these (or the others I haven’t named). For the sake of theological coherence, however, I usually encourage Wesleyans to consider which of these theories resonate with the God we have come to know in the person of Jesus. In other words, what kind of God is revealed to us in the whole life of Jesus? What if the crucifixion wasn’t Jesus shielding us from a God bent on retribution, but the very revelation of divine nature? Genesis 15 tells the story of God’s willingness to endure the consequences of Israel’s eventual breach of faithlessness, rather than inflict those consequences upon Israel. In entering into covenant with Abraham, God’s own presence ‘walks the gauntlet’ of splayed-open animal carcasses that the weaker of two parties usually would walk, signaling their own willingness to end up like the animals if they violate the covenant. It can shock us, then, that God is the one who walks the gauntlet, having to Abraham in a deep sleep. God is willing to endure the consequences of Israel’s potential violation of the covenant.

To my reading, this resolution – through its appeal to reconciliation, new creation, and resurrection language – helps us approach the Atonement through God’s self-sacrificial love.

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I teach an entire course on the content of this Article, both at Trevecca and our denominational seminary, so needless to say, a few observations aren’t going to cover everything issue that surfaces in this wide-ranging rewrite of what Nazarenes often refer to as a cardinal doctrine. Gladly, this resolution is accompanied by an extended and thorough phrase by phrase commentary, offering historical, biblical, and theological background on this particular proposal. Rather than repeat any of the fine work that’s been done there, I’ll simply mention that this resolution offers a vision of entire sanctification that resonates deeply with John Wesley’s own synthesis of eastern and western theological themes.

It’s too simplistic to paint the eastern and western streams of the Christian tradition as starkly distinct, though there are themes that each offer. The western metaphors are the ones we tend to be more familiar and comfortable to us: legal themes of guilt and pardon, stemming from Augustine and then being passed to us through Luther and Calvin. This is the stream of the tradition where we get terms like ‘original sin,’ which is a phrase used in the current Article, and it's the stream that usually tended to give us notions like original sin as being basic to the human being, such that we’ll never be free from it in this life.

The eastern stream, dating back to the work of Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna – and then later developed in the work of the so-called Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus), tends to draw upon metaphors of healing to describe Christian salvation, and what we’d refer to now as entire sanctification. Gregory of Nyssa, more than his older brother Basil, or Gregory of Nazianzus, emphasized a kind of dynamic and constant growth in grace. Extrapolating this metaphor for our current context, we could say that the life of entire sanctification is responding to God’s grace with one’s entire self, such that there is no part of is that is not constantly growing in grace. It doesn’t mean we’ve ‘arrived’ at a kind of static place precisely because there’s limit to divine grace – it carries us deeper into the infinite.

The resolution before us reaches back into the western and eastern streams, just as Wesley did. To my reading, it gives more careful biblical and historical attention to what we’ve come to refer to as ‘entire sanctification,’ helping us to see that this doctrine isn’t something that was invented in the 19th century, but has deep historical roots. Of course, since the Church of the Nazarene’s inception, there has been a contingent that appeals to the vision of sanctification that emerged in the 19th century, often referred to as American holiness, which tends to work out of western metaphors. Whether our global body will embrace this synthetic, historically rooted resolution will be interesting.

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Another change to one of the Articles of Faith is bound to get attention, and rightly so. The Article under consideration here catches my attention on a few points.

First, this resolution sets the final coming of Christ within the larger narrative of God’s creation. I often remind students that there are two ways to end something. You can either stop it in its tracks, or you can bring it to a fitting conclusion. When we talk about the ‘end of the world,’ Weselyan theology wants to do so in terms of a good and fitting conclusion, rather than stopping it in its tracks, and this resolution goes a long way toward that theological goal.

The theme of new creation is here as well! “As the Triune God first created the heavens and the earth,” the proposed language states, “God will renew them in the new creation where He will dwell eternally with his redeemed people.” Not only is this precisely how Revelation 21 and 22 portray the fitting ‘end’ to creation, but it also renews theological emphasis on new creation, which is helpful on a number of fronts, including how we understand the goodness of creation, the purposes of human redemption, and so on.

Finally, this resolution appeals to the words of Scripture to conclude not only this particular Article, but the Articles of faith since this is the last one. “God, who in the cross triumphed over all evil powers, will complete His loving purposes for creation. There will be no more suffering, injustice or death, and God will wipe away every tear.” I’m struck by the theme of Christus Victor in this wording, which isn’t explicitly present in the resolution on Atonement, but is, to my mind, largely consistent with a Wesleyan approach to Christian theology. This language also concludes the Articles of faith by reflecting the way the Bible concludes, with an image of God dwelling with creation in a communion that is uninterrupted or uncorrupted by sin, evil, and death. It not only helps our Articles reflect Scripture’s narrative more fully, but it also allows us to proclaim the good news more consistently, precisely because this helps us be more theologically coherent from creation to new creation.

What Does Doctrine Have To Do With Ethics?

I’m setting out to unravel a knot, hopefully so that I can tie it again. One strand in this knot is doctrine, and the other is ethics. The way these two relate to one another has recently been thrust into denominational debate among my fellow Nazarenes. The debate has revealed that we might need additional reflection on how doctrine and ethics are related, so while I’m not offering comment on the ruling at the heart of the controversy, I do want to try to tie these strands back together in a way that is true to the Wesleyan spirit that breathes through our little global body that I love.

The tricky question of doctrine’s relationship to ethics largely stems from the way modern Christians have understood those things to be separate from one another. I hear it named in various ways: ‘theory or practice,’ ‘doctrinal or practical,’ ‘theological or pastoral.’ It is the notion that we think and then we do. In this approach, doctrine largely is about beliefs or principles which inform what kinds of actions we take in the world, making doctrine a ‘first order’ form of theology, while ethics is a ‘second order’ reflection of doctrine. In other words, we have come to think that ‘ethics’ is simply what flows from doctrine because doctrine comes first. This is an approach that has left us in the lurch and is the issue, I believe, at the core of our current dilemma.

A Bit on Doctrine; A Bit on Ethics

My former professor Tom Noble’s recently released Christian Theology offers a helpfully corrective integrative approach to theology, rightly linking systematic, biblical, and practical theology. ‘Dogmatics’ is the name Noble chooses for the historic confessions of the Church, “the most comprehensive for of the core conviction of the Christian faith” (Noble, Christian Theology, 1:1, 9). These core convictions also sometimes go by the name ‘doctrines,’ which means ‘teaching’ (and doctors, therefore, as those who teach). The term ‘doctrines,’ Noble points out, now carries the distinct disadvantage of connoting abstract principles about God “rather than on the living God we actually know in Jesus Christ” (Noble, CT, 1:1, 9). It’s a disadvantage he’s out to correct.

This is one of the reasons I’m glad for Noble’s contribution: he is helping us beyond the doctrine/practice divide that has festered like a rot at the root. His integrative approach is healing a wound the church has endured for at least a generation and is manifesting in our current debate. In what Noble offers, doctrine and ethics are being tied together again. But how? The kind of knot we tie determines how we are held together. I want to be sure the knot we tie is used as a bond of unity and not to choke our common life together.

I like the way Stanley Hauerwas puts it as he reflects on the relationship between doctrine and ethics: “Once there was no Christian ethics simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and their behavior. They assumed that their lives exemplified (or at least should exemplify) their doctrines in a manner that made a division between doctrine and life impossible” (Hauerwas, Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine).

In another essay (that I require my theology students to read every chance I get), Hauerwas affirms the vital connection between theology and ministry. The crux of his argument is a reminder to know the story that makes sense of our actions.

Trevecca’s campus features a beautiful water fountain and pond called The Cascades. I ask students what they’d think if they ever saw me standing in the fountain, dunking one of their colleagues under the water. “Oh, that’s easy,” they’ll often say. “A baptism!” Of course, that answer only makes sense inside of the story of Christian faith and practice. Take away that story, and my role in it as an ordained minister, and we have the behavior of an unstable or violent person who probably needs to be stopped by campus security. In other words, the story makes sense of the action. “Christians have lost our concepts because we have lost the story that is necessary for our concepts to work,” Hauerwas writes (Hauerwas, The Work of Theology).

Tying The Knot

Here's where I want to tie the strands back together: the relationship between doctrine and ethics is vital because the doctrine tells the story that makes sense of our ethics. We could flip it the other way: Christian ethics (what we do) only makes sense inside of what we confess about who God is and what God is doing in the world. Let me take it from one more angle. Apart from the story that roots them, moral positions make no sense. For the earliest Christians, practices like martyrdom made no sense apart from the story of Christ’s own death and resurrection.

The story that renders Christian ethics sensible is nothing short of the gospel. It is the story found in Scripture and carried through the worldwide family tradition of the classical and orthodox Church. We Wesleyans love to remind our brothers and sisters in the worldwide Church that part of that story is God filling the human heart so full of love that it excludes sin. Sin, as we often discuss it, is whatever moves us away from the life-giving relationship with the God who breathes life into us. Personal, original, social – all of it chokes out the life God’s Spirit is breathing into creation. Sin is the negative space that opens when we shut down the dynamic relationship we need to be fully alive as human beings – the kind of relationship that we see on fullest display in Jesus’s relationship with the Father. In the face of this reality, let’s name the good news: God’s grace is on offer to return us to unobstructed relationship, making us fully alive in the likeness of Jesus. It’s on offer for all of humanity and the rest of this creation that God loves. Often, we talk about this offer in terms of new creation, an image we borrow from Revelation 21 and 22, where the flow of life is unobstructed and free because God and creation are united. That, friends, is the story that makes sense of our ethics.

Here’s the challenge: When we hold doctrine and ethics too far apart from one another, tying them loosely through the false dichotomy of the theory/practice divide, doctrine becomes a set of ideas from which we might distill some more positions or principles, but that is short of participating in the story morally. It’s why, as I argue in my recent book, that Christian ethics don’t apply to your life. That is, they aren’t supposed to be layered on top of an already formed life. Christian ethics are the shape of how we live our response to the gospel. If we think we need to ‘apply’ ethics, the knot is probably too loose.

On the other hand, when we conflate ethics and doctrine, making them the same thing, we don’t leave enough room for us to evaluate whether a moral position is made sensible by the story doctrine is telling. The knot we need to tie allows doctrine to speak the story and ethics to be linked up in vital ways. It also needs to give us the capacity to continually evaluate the faithfulness of the arrangement. Are the practices of our lives a faithful embodiment of the story of God making all things new? Is this practice a participation in God redeeming all things?

Let’s Knot Move Toward Legalism

Let me, then, be clear about the alternative. Upholding moral codes apart from the story of the gospel is legalism. Notice I’m not critiquing any particular moral position. What I am saying is that upholding a code without being neck deep in the story that makes the code sensible is nothing short of legalism. For those who follow in Wesley’s footsteps, we must remember his lively description of what happens in our redemption. It is that our hearts are so filled with love that it excludes sin – the gap is closed. Do we see how the work of God and its moral consequences are related? Do we see the joyful proclamation that God’s activity makes possible a full expression of human life? For Wesleyans especially, Christian ethics is not willing ourselves to adhere to moral principles, but joyful, responsive participation in God’s work of making all things new, including us. Ethics is simply what happens when we are caught up in the grace-filled story.

The poison pill of legalism flips this dynamic on its head. It begins with moral positions and commands. It seeks adherence before the story. It expects behavioral conformity before it tells the story that makes sense of the behaviors. Again, these moral positions may not be objectively bad; they just aren’t sensible outside of the story.

Retuning to Hauerwas’s argument for a moment, I think he has it right when he points out the earliest Christians couldn’t see daylight between doctrine and ethics because what they taught was that God was making the world new through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and they lived in the overflow of that story. They lived what they taught and taught what they lived. Their lives, as they saw it, were in the flow of new creation. Or, as Paul puts it, “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17).

How Shall We Tie the Knot?

How, then, do we proceed? My constructive suggestion is that we pour our energy into telling the story vigorously and joyfully. As we tell that story, we also need to leave space, as the church has since its beginning, to discern what kinds of moral positions are descriptive of a life that is made alive in that story. We need to continually ask, “Is this moral position a faithful description of how we participate in God making all things new? Does it faithfully reflect what we see in Jesus, the fullest expression of humanity?” Discernment is a vital component of Christian ethics, and there’s more on that in this previous post.

For Wesleyans, there is a vital moral component to life, precisely because we are being renewed by God – that is our doctrine! But our doctrine also reminds us that this renewal is our participation in the dynamic of redemption, our participatory response to God’s grace. And that, it seems to me, makes all of this a story worth telling, teaching, and joyfully living.

The Art of Ministry in a Technological Age

If you serve in ministry, do you think of yourself more as an artist or a technician? I'm more of a 'both/and' person than an 'either/or' on questions like this, but the world we inhabit has made it increasingly difficult for these two identities and approaches to meet in the vocation of ministry. Taking a quick survey of the landscape around me today, there's a lot of pressure on pastors and others to think of themselves as technicians and train themselves as technicians. In this short series of posts, I'm going to engage this issue, not only to raise the question, but also to hopefully infuse some joy into the vocation of ministry. Burnout usually follows closely after ministry losing a sense of joy. If doing ministry like a technician has been squeezing the joy of ministry, maybe it's time to tap into the artistic side of our calling.

A Technological Culture

I'm no enemy of using technology, but I am becoming more and more aware that we are living in a technological world that shapes our imaginations on just about everything, including ministry. Not only are our imaginations technological, but our identities were technological. In our eating, our drinking, our waking and our sleeping, we are technological people.

​Being a technological people may have a lot to do with how many times we pick up a cell phone to send our kids a text message rather than walking upstairs to tell them that dinner is ready, but it probably has more to do with the way in which our technology has shaped us to see the world. The technology that we began to use – things like gas engines, interstates, air travel, assembly lines, computers and the internet – started to tell us that the world was under our control. No longer were nature, distance or ignorance things which had power over us, but now, we began to be able to shape the world, to use our technologies to make it less of a wilderness, to iron out the wrinkles that make life difficult, and to enjoy the incredible promises of advances in transportation, medicine and information sharing.

Even our worship and ministry bears the benefits of technology: you don’t need to know Greek or Hebrew when preparing a sermon anymore, because there’s Bible software that will know it for you. The absence of a forgetful parishioner’s tithe check doesn’t ever have to be a problem again, because the funds can now be automatically withdrawn from her bank account each week. Busy members of our congregations who travel for work on Sunday don’t need to miss your sermon because they can download it as a podcast and listen to it in the car on the way to their Monday morning appointment. Undoubtedly, technology brings with it incredible benefits, but every benefit comes with a cost. Perhaps this is why George Grant, a philosopher who studied technology, was so fond of the old Spanish proverb: “Take what you want, said God – take it and pay for it.”

What are the costs of being a technological people? Arguably, one of the biggest costs may be that we are a people who have been so shaped by the technology we use that it has robbed us of our ability to see the beauty of our vocations – even ministerial vocations. If we look back at the roots of the word ‘technology,’ we see that it comes from the Greek word techne, meaning art or craft. In the ancient mind, techne was the kind of thing one did for the sake of the beauty in performing the task. Think of a sculptor sitting in front of a piece of marble, chisel in hand. The sculptor looks over the rough surfaces of the raw stone, runs one hand over the rock, and carefully begins to apply the wisdom of his craft. He knows how the marble will react to his tools, he knows just which tool to use to bring out the desired effect, and he knows all this because he is deeply familiar with his craft. Only after a deep familiarity with the art of sculpture can he do the work of unveiling the beauty that hides inside the stone, and in unveiling the beauty of the sculpture, he also reveals the beauty of his craft, of his techne.

​But in the time of technology, techne took on a different meaning. On the lips of a deeply technological people, the word became ‘technique’ rather than ‘art’ and this began to shape our imaginations so that what we once thought of as artful vocations are now seen as technical jobs. For example, whereas politics was once understood to be the art of governing justly, it might now be said that politics is more about using the right techniques – slogans, sound bites, slander and opinion polling – to be elected; the good politician is the one who can use the best technique. The business leaders, I fear, are not formed to think of their work in terms of creatively and imaginatively introducing new services to new markets, but understand their work in terms of using the right technique to achieve outcomes. As a technological people, we have come to be shaped by the technology we use, to understand that we are good when we can apply the best technique, so that those things which were once our tools now suggest to us that they have the ability to make us into better politicians, business leaders and pastors. The problem is that tools can only get you as far as technique – they can’t make the user into a more imaginative artist.

Could it be that pastors in a technological world are subjected to the same kinds of pressures? Could it be that ministry in a technological world is now defined in terms of simply using the right method, skill or technique? I wonder sometimes if our technological vision of the world has transformed the vocation of ministry from an artistic and creative call to preach the good news of Christ into a mere job in which ministers of the gospel are seen as good pastors if they simply employ the right techniques. The deluge of best-selling pastoral ‘how-to’ books, blogs and articles may provide an answer to my wondering.

Pastoral Identity in a Technological Age

The implications of ministering in a technological age also apply to questions of identity. In our imaginations, do we understand ourselves to be pastoral artisans, or achievers of technique? If your congregation is anything like mine, you can probably recount the ways in which our people have been formed to think of pastors as those who need to execute the right techniques: to preach the right way, to counsel the right way, to administrate the right way to achieve proper outcomes. Fulfilling one’s responsibilities is certainly a good thing, but I wonder how much the techniques we use in ministry begin to tell us who we are as pastors.

In a technological world, technicians are the masters of their machines. They can replace, operate and tinker until their machine does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But the irony of the situation is that the machine actually becomes the master of the technician, for the technician’s skills and knowledge are only valuable in relationship to this particular machine. Refrigerator technicians are only valuable if they can make a refrigerator refrigerate. If, after a visit from a technician, your refrigerator does anything other than refrigerate (even if it now makes toast or dries your laundry), the technician’s vocation can be called into serious question. The value of a technical vocation is rarely novelty.

Artists, on the other hand, do not command their materials as much as they work with them to bring out the potential of beauty that the media suggest. The media with which artists work also don’t make any kind of value claim on the artist, because the artist’s vocation isn’t necessarily found in forming the media in only one particular way. Unlike the refrigerator technician, artists are not charged with making their media do only one thing or act in only one way, but are instead freed to bring new expressions of beauty into being. The value of an artistic vocation often embraces experimentation and novelty, especially when those expressions spring out of the particularity of the artist’s location or context.

What might vocational identity look like in a technological time? It’s not that we must use the latest and greatest technology to be good pastors, and it’s not even that using this technology means that we are selling our souls. It’s more that we need to see technology for what it is – a useful tool. When technology becomes the tool, pastors can be the artists.

In part two, I'm going to make a few suggestions for the way a ministry vocation can be artistic and joyful. If you'd like to be notified when it's available, you can sign up here.