Pastor John Wright

Today I finally have gotten around to working on the conclusion of my upcoming book for Intervarsity Press, now officially titled, Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation. The book will soon be proceeding to the copy editor as soon as I write the conclusion. I waited to write the conclusion once the body had passed through all editorial stages.

I thought that I would post the draft of the introduction to my last chapter today -- since I've been working on it amidst the heat today. I do so, not only to elicit comments, but because it comes to the core of the mission of, not only my work, but local congregations, particularly our congregation at Mid-City. I think that it describes some of the tensions we sometimes experience because of our commitment to the poor and because, unlike so many Nazarene and evangelical churches, we refuse to allow the social, political, and even theological agenda of the conservative evangelicals guide us.

We harken back to a much older Christian tradition than that which divides so much of the contemporary North American Christianity, a division that is based actually on a much deeper commonality that rends the difference in certain ways. Thus, we just as distant from Jim Dobson as we are from Jim Wallis; from Pat Robinson as we are from Michael Lerner. If we are just as distant, we are also just as close to each as well. Yet the goal is never to react to these various poles determined by presuppositions that they share in common, but to act from the presupposition of the Triune God's creation of all things good in the very image of the Triune God and the restoration of this creation through Jesus Christ and the on-going life of the church.

I have found myself recently drawn to Augustine, both as a theologian, biblical scholar, and pastor, because he was profoundly all three, even as he was only one person. He provides a model of the unity of these vocations, that have become split by modernist institutions. Of course I cannot simply return to these days -- nor do I so desire. Yet there is something crucial in his life and witness for us to recover today. It is thus to him that I am looking for the conclusion of my book.

Chapter 6
Conclusion

Two fundamentally different approaches to the mission of the church have arisen in North America in recent years. One approach looks first to the world to determine the agenda for the church. The givenness of the world allows the church to refashion its inner resources and spiritual life to meet more effectively the world’s needs as determined by the present age. The other approach looks first to the inner resources and spiritual life of the church and then to the world. The church learns to engage the world from within its own inner life so that the witness of the church might call the church herself and the world to a profound conversion arising out of the faith given to the saints through the ages.

These two different approaches can overlap in practice at key points, depending on particular traditions and particular cultural and social contexts. Both agree that we should not insulate the church from the world, nor that the church should abandon its own resources and traditions. The two understandings can even approach each other in specific areas according to the relative weight that one puts on the church’s inner resources and/or on the contemporary setting. Yet even as these approaches can and do approach each other in practice, a deep underlying fault nonetheless remains.

If we look closely, we can see that this difference runs throughout North American Christianity in its evangelical, mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic manifestations. Evangelicals tend to dispute this difference in their assessment of the church growth movement, its application, and underlying theological convictions. Mainline Protestants dispute the issue in terms of liberationist or confessional agendas, between liberal or postliberal theological convictions. Within Roman Catholicism, one experiences this difference in disputes between those seeking accommodation and influence within their contemporary national environment versus those in the new religious movements such as Communion and Liberation who seek a type of catholicity that transcends the merely locality of time and space in a communion of the saints under the bishop of Rome.

This book enters this on-going dispute. We have argued that preaching must first and foremost call people into the inner life of the church in Christ to guide congregations to witness to the world, to call the world, and individuals within it, to God in and through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. To allow the North American culture, history, presuppositions, and institutions to form the fundamental categories of our preaching is to sell the farm before putting it on the market.

In many ways the church has always functioned within this tension for its mission. To conclude the book we would like to look at a master theologian and preacher who wrote the first “preaching manual” in the church – Augustine, bishop of Hippo. Augustine did the bulk of his theological work as a pastor. Amidst his letters, one even finds complaints concerning the mundane busyness of overseeing the church that kept him from the intellectual and spiritual tasks that he preferred -- complaints to which any contemporary pastor could add a hearty “Amen!” In his preaching Augustine deeply engaged the rhetoric of his age; yet even as he did, he redirected the goal of preaching, much as we have argued, so that his congregation, and all Christian congregations, might find themselves as characters participating in God’s redemption of the world through Christ and the church.