I enjoy the benefits of technological change and business efficiency along with everybody else. What bothers me is the nearly total domination of our culture by this myth of progress, and its often uncritical adoption by churches. At what point do we ask what Christian traditions have to say to contemporary life, and not just the other way around?
Witness Redefined
It is common to speak of the “witness and service” of the church as a way of addressing its central purpose. I need not belabor further the way the term “service” connects with the lay activist mentality. But our dominant mode of understanding “witness” has also become one-dimensional. By the witness of Christians, particularly in evangelical Protestantism, we have come to mean what Christians have to tell the world. “Witness to your neighbors and coworkers,” many churches admonish the laity; “tell them about Jesus Christ.”
Many lay people have become convinced that this is mainly how their churches expect them to connect faith and their everyday working lives – by telling others about Jesus Christ and all the neat ways to learn more about Jesus through the programs of “my” church. Laity should support this verbal witness through ethical behavior in the workplace, following the “Golden Rule,” being honest, adhering to the Ten Commandments, and so on. The churches have been inarticulate about any other way to think about connecting who we are in church and who we are in the places where we spend most of our time – at work, in school, at the mall, at home.
“Witness” has a much richer meaning than its reductionistic form of “telling.” Witness means at its most basic to be present – to pay attention, to notice things, to be aware, to see. Nothing is more difficult in a society of constant motion and upward mobility than to be where we are. Nothing is more challenging in a culture of television, e-mail, cell phones and continual distractions than to pay attention. But we are here to witness – to attend to the good earth God has given us, to notice with compassion what is going on in the lives of our families, neighbors, friends, and communities. We are here to witness – to see the signs of God’s Reign of wholeness, justice, and peace in this world.
A second sense of witness embraces the ways in which we bear witness. Through our presence, our way of being in the world, our sense of who we are and who we are called to be, we bear witness to who God is. Who we are and how we are present in our homes, workplaces, communities, and churches, is a sign to the world of who we trust God to be and how we trust God to be present in the world.
Only then, I think, do we come to the moment of witness that has to do with saying what we have seen. Here we need to tread lightly lest we fall back into the mode of telling – telling others what to believe, telling others how to behave, because we are so excited about what we know. Instead, we need to find ways to show how the divine may be incarnate in this world, so that others may look for themselves for signs of the creating, redeeming, and sustaining God, and together we will bear witness.
We are generally not accustomed, at least in evangelical Protestant culture, to thinking in these terms. Didn’t Jesus call disciples and send them out? Isn’t our model the sending of the seventy into every town and village to tell the good news? But here we need to step back and notice that Jesus did not send out everyone, much less send everyone on the same mission. Many of the people whose lives Jesus touched, especially through healing, he sent back home. He told them to go back to their everyday life – being present, bearing witness to the Reign of God in the world, in the place they have been given.
Mission Redefined
Our monolithic sense of lay ministry degenerates into a kind of literalism that forces everyone into the same supposedly “biblical” model. A vivid instance of this in many of our churches is the very popular form of lay programming, the “mission trip,” in which groups of youth or adults go somewhere else to build a church or clean up a park or paint a school. It’s not that this kind of work and commitment isn’t admirable. But isn’t it a little ironic when groups of church people load up their vans to go on a mission somewhere else when their own communities are typified by strip malls, traffic congestion, long commutes, families that stay in the neighborhood only two years, no sidewalks, no front porches, materialism, kids wanting $175 shoes to go to school – huge disparities between the standard of living for the service employees who pick up the garbage and put out the hamburgers over against those who expect to be served? I have to wonder what might happen if such a congregation truly attended to its own place, acknowledging the displacement in its own community, looking for ways in which it can model the wholeness of life in God’s love and justice.
In order to realize the fullest vision of the laos, we must reconceive mission as the presence of the people of God in each place, witnesses to the incarnation of a creating and redeeming God in each place, a community of those who offer signs of God’s love and justice that are transparent to all who want to see what God is like.
Nurturing Imagination
Churches have rich and deep resources for nurturing imagination for this ministry – the narratives and symbols of scripture and of the communion of saints across the ages, the forms of the Christian year as a way of organizing and imagining time, participating in the sacraments and the disciplines of prayer and meditation that shape patterns of attention and basic dispositions.
These are the very resources whose significance for the laos is diminished in a false exchange for the utility of lay activism. But they are present in some way in every congregation. One of the most promising ways to enliven the witness of the laity is for them to explore and draw deeply on the culture of their own congregations – the story of how a particular church came to be where it is, the narratives of lives that shaped it, the episodes through which it has borne witness to God, the qualities that enable it to endure from generation to generation. As the laity attend to this culture they are enlivened in their own imagination, and can see how their local witness is an embodiment and extension of larger symbols and narratives of the people of God in the world.
If we are to move the ministry of the laity from a dominant focus on a narrative of productivity to a deeply shared narrative of presence, we will want to imagine freshly what we mean by equipping the laity for ministry. One way to think about this is that as educators we want to make a space in which we can imagine together. We want to teach by paying attention ourselves, attending to the ways the divine is incarnate in the world – the eternal in the moment – and bearing witness with each other. As Garret Keizer, himself a lay pastor in an Episcopal church in Island Pond, Vermont, reflected in his memoir A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, “all I can hope to do is to remind [the congregation] of what they know, to enliven what they know – that is, to make it more accessible to their imaginations, and thus to their faith.”
If we can continue to discover ways to make faith’s symbols and narratives more accessible to the life situations of the people of God, and their life situations more accessible for bearing witness to God in the world, we will have come a long way toward realizing a more holistic vision of “the ministry of the laity.”
As congregations and as persons formed in the symbols and narratives of churches of many times and places and of each one’s particular place, the people of God will realize the fullness of their vocation. In their gathered life as congregations, in their homes, their workplaces, their schools, their errands and their leisure, they will be present as witnesses to God’s love and justice. The breadth and power of this witness is a gift of God for the future of the church.
Thomas E. Frank is Associate Professor of Church Administration and Congregational Life Candler School of Theology, Emory University. Recommended reading: A Letter From Christ to the World. An Exploration of the Role of the Laity in the Church Today (available through the World Council of Churches).