We live in a cultural context, particularly in American Protestantism, that has abstracted the life of the church from the history of a people in order that it might be adjusted better to the market conditions of the contemporary society. We live amid a tradition that forces human beings to have no history, to abstract their lives from the particular histories of family and church so that they might be made part of a “universal project” of a particular nationality. Within this setting the education project forms us to be “autonomous individuals” capable of “choosing our identity”—and I hope the irony of that phrase strikes you. If it is not accomplished in primary and secondary education, university education should finish off the job to teach us that life is about “our choices”, not our histories. Education has to confront to “shock” young adults out of their local networks of family and church so that they might be made to fit within the rationality of the market place and the nation-state. Within such a context, the history of a particular church becomes part of its marketing project for those who would so chose.

This week I’ve been reading The Risk of Education: Discovering our Ultimate Destiny by Luigi Giussani, the founder of the new religious movement, Communion and Liberation, that arose within Roman Catholicism following Vatican II. I think that there are profound historical parallels between the Church of the Nazarene and such new religious movements. In contrast to the educative project to form consumers, Guissani argues that education must begin by initiating the young into a tradition: “the whole structure of values and meaning into which a child is born” (p. 52). He states, “Only an educational approach that introduces human and cosmic reality in the light of a hypothesis presented by a history or a tradition can systematically prevent young people from making false starts. It prevents them from becoming disconcerted and fragmented as a result of the inconsistent and flawed manner of presenting ‘truth’ which, lest we forget, is the correspondence between one’s self and reality, the meaning of existence” (p. 57). At this point, a person must “be stimulated to personally confront his own origin” (p. 67). Thus “a true education will especially want to teach students the habit of comparing their positions not only with those of others but especially with the tradition they have received” (p. 68). In this way, we lean to “test all his encounters and all his needs against the ‘hypothesis of meaning’” (p. 73) that one has received. Thus, education requires a community. Guissani writes, “Few words are uttered as frequently and understood and lived as poorly as this one. A community is a deep union born from a life shared together, which arises from the recognition of a common structure. In our organizational fixation, we tend to confuse associations with communities. We believe that a community can be created by a coming together of people from the outside, the result of an agreement to reach certain goals. But because it is a sharing life in its very essence, a community is an inner dimension at the source of our thoughts and actions. Otherwise, instead of a community, we have a calculated choice. A community is a way of conceiving life, a way of facing the problem of being, a way of studying history, and a way of living love” (pp. 74-75). The family thus comprises the first line of the educative community. It is in this confrontation, the testing, that one finds the appropriate risk of education, for here we open up to true human freedom, not the ability to choose, not ‘autonomy’ but the openness with the reality, in its fullness of the world as it confronts us.

To tell the history of the Church of the Nazarene, to own our placement in a tradition as a tradition, is necessary if we are to confront the fullness of Reality to understand ourselves and others – to open ourselves in dialogue with ourselves and with others. Guissani again helps us see the importance of this dialogue, and its true nature. Guissani writes, “A dialogue is genuine only if it is lived as a comparison between the other’s proposal and the awareness of the proposal I offer, the proposal I am; otherwise it is not a dialogue. To express it in a different way, it is a dialogue only insofar as I am aware of myself in my maturity. For this reason, unless a crisis—the commitment to sift and sort out tradition—precedes my dialogue with the other, I will remain blocked by the other person’s influence or my rejection of the other will make my position unreasonably rigid. Therefore, it is true that a dialogue implies openness toward the other no matter who he is, because he will always introduce an interest, experience, or aspect that otherwise I would have failed to notice” (p. 94). Such dialogue requires maturity. Without maturity, as Guissani notes, “we run the serious risk of confusing dialogue with compromise” (p. 95) or we get caught up in reaction, not interaction -- for reactions merely reproduce the problem of a tradition in its inverse form or we confuse dialogue with compromise.

In the coming weeks I will argue that the tradition of the Church of the Nazarene, the depth of its history, is found as a movement within the church catholic to renew the church catholic in the holiness of its witness, personally and congregationally through our commitment to the evangelical, orthodox, and catholic faith and the practices of the works of mercy, devotion, and the Sacraments. This understanding of the Church of the Nazarene stands in contrast to the predominant understanding of the Church of the Nazarene, by lay, clergy, and administrators alike, as a Protestant denomination that provides an alternative congregational and doctrinal option when compared to other “denominations” or community churches. Embracing the fullness of our history, a history that goes much deeper than a mere 100 years ago, opens possibilities for mission and witness into the future.