First, the Church is trying -- trying to be Christian in the most profound sense of the word in its witness and mission. The Apostles Creed was confessed in this morning service; the Lord's Supper was attempted to have been celebrated. Jim Bond's morning sermon was by far the most faithful of the weekend. He spoke from Matthew 16, Peter's confession, with its call to self-denial, that Dr. Bond linked with the cleansing of inward sin (not exactly his words) that is necessary in the Christian life. One profound phrase that he gave, that in some way summed up his message, "Holiness must begin with taking into account the hard words of Jesus." For the first time in the weekend, rather than "experience of the Spirit" being central for the life of the church -- a sort of existential experiential reorientation of empowerment, Dr. Bond held up the Christological center of the faith. Jim ended his sermon by speaking of a Christological-type of obedience witnessed amidst the church in Ethiopia, a persecuted church. As a token of the service, book marks were passed out with a chalice and bread and a towel. We will be bringing them home to Mid-City as a token of our solidarity with the Church of the Nazarene throughout the world.

Other points were interesting in the two services of the day. This morning's prayer asked for forgiveness and cleansing from any racism, as well as acknowledging the horrors of war, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. While it was not acknowledged that the United States was the aggressor in these wars, the congregation was led to pray for peace. Finally, tonight it was announced that the Church of the Nazarene has officially opened in Iraq. After the service, I was able to get the card of the main person in charge of church planting there, so that we might directly get food and medicine to Iraq as a witness of God's kingdom amidst the atrocities being engaged within by the Iraqi resistance and the United States occupational army.

Yet the day also showed how "trying" the Church of the Nazarene is --it can be "trying" to maintain faithfulness to this church, despite its good intentions. First, the morning service was a suburban white mega-church service. There were only 4 people of color on the platform; it was entirely in English. The music was white, generic evangelical therapy with some 20th century hymns. I later found out that three of the persons of color were there at the request of Dr. Bond for the communion service -- to stand at the Table with seven others. Yet I heard that even this was controversial -- some leadership did not want any persons of color on the platform. Tonight's service was little better for signing the catholicity of the church in today's world. All was in English; only 2 on the platform were of color -- one who prayed whose native tongue was not in English. The sermon by Talmage Johnson was a long, long rendition of the white man's burden in which it was obvious, as my wife Kathy said, that those in the congregation were very glad to send people to those non-American parts of the world in order that people everywhere might be "saved", but that those seated around us wanted no personal contact with such people at all. The announcement of Iraq, in which it was acknowledge that "military action is not the solution, Jesus is not the solution", nonetheless seemed to be received by the congregation in a way that (and this is my subjective interpreation) seemed to say, Isn't it great that Iraq has opened to the Church of the Nazarene as its 150th country -- and never was the military occupation and destruction of the people explicitly tied to the United States. It almost seemed implied that this was the good result of the illegal invasion and occupation. It seemed that the Church leadership (with no one except people from North America on the committee for the services) is determined to keep the white, suburban, Anglo-American culture as central within what the church understands it witness to be.

Even in those things that were attempted to sustain the catholicity of the church's witness, the leadership has left catholicity so far behind that they don't have basic competency in the practices to signify the church's catholicity. The Apostle's Creed dropped out the "he descended into hell" phrase, and in its public recitation (although not in the written version), they dropped "catholic" out of "one, holy, catholic church". As much as I love and respect Jim Bond, whose witness inspires me, the Lord's Supper was not a legitimate sacrament. He paraphrased the call to the Table from the Manual, but offered no Eucharistic prayer -- no anamesis (remembrance), no words of institution (on the night our Lord was betrayed), no epiclesis (calling the Spirit to sanctify the elements and the congregation). Instead, he actually asked the congregation to break the horrible little wafers on the sealed juice cups to see their own self-denial in the breaking of these wafers. The Eucharistic remembrance of Jesus received an anthropological focus for our self-denial rather than a re-membering of the body of Christ in the world.

So the church leadership truly wants to be catholic Christian, but ultimately is entrapped within its American cultural commitments and does not have recourse to the underlying language to sustain the witness that it desires -- they have forgotten much in their rush to win the world for Jesus (who seems to be a very American Jesus). Rather than the body of Christ physically present in the world as a sign of God's present-and-to-come kingdom, the general Church of the Nazarene seems to want to peddle certain types of intense personal experience, initiated by skilled incubationists of experience. The great promise of the church is that it is trying to be Christian; its great bane, for which we must all repent for we are they, is its loss of memory of basic language and practices that this entails.

Yes, a trying day.

Tomorrow morning we get up and leave at 8:00 am to begin the trek home.