Bishop Kenneth L. Carder’s Inaugural Lecture

February 22, 2008

The Practice of Christian Ministry in Consumerist Culture

Inaugural Lecture by Kenneth L. Carder
Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry

Duke Divinity School

Preamble

First, I wish to express profound appreciation for the honor of being named to the Williams Chair. It is an exceptional honor and one that I would never have imagined receiving. While I have been the beneficiary of the gifts of distinguished scholars, many of whom are here this evening, I am under no illusion that I am an academic scholar. What I bring to this position are a life-long struggle to understand, live, and proclaim the Christian gospel; an ongoing love for and argument with the Church; and more than forty years of experience serving the church in various capacities, from my first job as custodian where I stoked the furnace, cleaned the floors, and mowed the lawn (including the cemetery) to more than thirty years as a pastor of churches of various sizes and twelve years as an active bishop. To have the honor of a professorship provides an opportunity for me to learn from a new generation of students and share with students lessons I have learned from countless laity and clergy colleagues, scholars, family, friends, and insights gleaned learned from my mistakes and failures.

The honor is magnified by knowing the origin of the Williams Chair. I was formed and called into ministry in a small rural Methodist Church in East Tennessee, a church like the ones served by The Reverend Atticus Williams, the late father of Morris Williams. This chair originated in Ruth and Morris Williams’ love and appreciation for the ministry of Atticus Williams and it demonstrates their commitment to the continuation of such faithful ministry. I have a special kinship to Rev. Williams. We both came to ministry from the farm. We both spent some time in Mississippi. We both were nurtured in small, rural congregations. Reverend Williams served almost all his ministry in Duke Endowment eligible churches, which means he served in communities with populations of fifteen hundred or fewer people. During his ministry, he received more than five hundred people into the church; and he did so without the techniques of “church growth.” As one who knew his ministry said, “He did it the old fashion way: faithfulness to the gospel and love for people and communities.” Morris once described his father as “a gentle man with a quick smile and few complaints.” I shall do my best to inspire students toward the faithful ministry exemplified by Atticus Williams.

I also pay tribute to my predecessors in this chair. Jackson Carroll and Peter Storey are valued friends, influential mentors, and treasured colleagues. Jack generously included me in the work of Pulpit and Pew and taught me much about understanding the church in its sociological as well as theological dimensions. Peter has been a hero and friend since I first met him in the early 1980’s. I claim the distinction of being the only United Methodist bishop to appoint Peter to a local church, when he agreed to serve as the interim pastor of Calvary UMC in Nashville prior to joining the Duke faculty. He called me “my bishop.” In reality, Peter will always be my bishop and my image of what a bishop should be! To be associated with Jack Carroll and Peter Storey in the Williams Chair is an unparalleled gift and honor of which I will strive to be a good steward!

And, I wish to thank Dean Greg Jones for inviting me to be part of the Duke Divinity School community. The opportunity to share in ministry in this place has been life-giving and a source of profound joy and gratitude! Thank you, Greg, for your trust in me, for your superb leadership, and for your abiding friendship!

Introduction

The Church in every generation confronts peculiar challenges to its distinctive nature and particular mission. History chronicles the Church’s persistent struggle with competing loyalties, tempting idolatries, life-threatening heresies, and ill-forming practices. Identifying the challenges, distortions, and threats and offering possible means of confronting them is one of the tasks of those called into the Church’s ministry.

Here is my thesis for this lecture: The practice of Christian ministry in the contemporary world, especially in the United States, requires confronting the pervasive threat of the logic and practice of market consumerism with the alternative logic and practice of the missio Dei revealed in the Exodus and supremely in Jesus of Nazareth.

It is not my intent to offer a critique of free enterprise capitalism as a viable and appropriate economic system for creating and distributing goods and services. Market capitalism with its free enterprise, innovation, and entrepreneurship has contributed significantly to the quality of life, greatly increased human agency, and accomplished important social and political purposes.¹ When kept in its servant role within society and guided by a larger telos, market capitalism can contribute to fulfilling God’s vision for the world.

But all systems, including capitalism, are only finitely good and when given infinite authority and influence they become idolatrous and even demonic. All systems are subservient to the Triune God, incarnate in Jesus who warned, “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Luke 16:13). Consumerism is the water in which we swim and my goal is to provide at least some modest suggestions as to how we may practice Christian ministry in this culture without being downed in the consumerist waters but rather might redirect the currents toward participation in the missio Dei, God’s mission.

Pervasive Influence of Market Consumerism on Contemporary Culture and the Church ²

The pervasive influence of the global market economy and consumerism cannot be over estimated. The economic market is the prevailing center of power and influence in the American culture. Of the three sectors of any community—governmental, business/economy, and civic/voluntary—the business/economic dominates. Political office and access to political power are increasingly economically dependent, as the current presidential election clearly illustrates. Voluntary organizations depend on the gifts of individual and corporate donors to survive. All segments of society are market dependent and determined—science, technology, education, the arts, medicine, and religion. The result is an economic determinism than often trumps the search for truth and the common good.

For example, the market determines the telos and direction of much scientific research and development. Several years ago I chaired the United Methodist Church's task force on genetics and ethics. Our efforts to develop a statement for the denomination included hearings around the country in which scientists, ethicists, bio-tech and insurance executives, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and people with genetic maladies offered input.  On one occasion in which a geneticist for a bio-tech company provided data from his research, I asked, "What is the telos of your research? What is the over-arching purpose that guides your research?"  He responded that the goal of scientists is simply to follow where the truth takes. A member of the task force, a bio-chemist, challenged the assumption that scientists are free to pursue truth purely for the sake of discovering truth. Rather, scientific research is expensive and, therefore, depends on funding; and much research is directed toward that which produces profits for the funding agency. This question followed: Which is more likely to get funding, research directed toward removing suffering, even if only a few persons benefit, or a product that can be widely marketed such as a cure for male pattern baldness?

Economic determinism is pervasive in education and theological education is no exception. With the church only minimally funding the education of its leaders, seminaries have become increasingly market driven with a growing dependency on tuition and grants. In some cases, though not at Duke, degree programs and curriculum are determined by market share more than preparation for missional engagement in a consumerist world.

Local churches are market dependent. The viability of churches is determined largely by economics rather than mission. There exists a “survival of the economically fittest” within The United Methodist Church. Churches in economically limited neighborhoods flee to the economically resourceful communities. Ministry has become another commodity purchased and consumed by the laity and evaluated by how well it meets quantifiable expectations. Pastors are deployed according to market forces and ministry follows the market in the same way as business franchises. Peter Storey said in his Inaugural Lecture that in his twelve years as a bishop in The Methodist Church in Southern Africa in no appointment did salary enter the consideration. In my twelve years as an active bishop in The United Methodist Church in the U. S., no appointment was made without consideration of salary!

But beyond the power of the market to determine the direction and agency of institutions, the market consumerist logic has more subtle and deadly influences. One of the most lethal consequences is the process of commodification, placing value according to the exchange dynamics of the market, severing realities from their history and story, and using those realities for market consumerist purposes.

The process of commodification is increasing at an alarming rate. All societies require a means of exchange of goods and services. Some things rightly belong to the commodity market forces. But increasingly life’s basic necessities are totally controlled by the market forces. Such necessities as health, water, food, shelter, education, beauty, mobility, and air space are available in accordance with what one has to exchange for them! Realities with intrinsic value are being treated as commodities available in the market place for those with money to exchange: the human body, human intimacy, ideas, beauty, relationships!

Laurence Moore, Professor of History at Cornell University, contends that what we usually mean by secularization has to do not so much with the disappearance of religion but its commodification.³ That is, religion has ceased to be the basic framework or logic through which we view the world; rather religion has become another optional commodity in which we participate depending upon our choices and how well it meets our self-identified needs.

Commodification reduces the doctrines, language, rituals, symbols, and practices of religion to their utilitarian function. Religion becomes an option among multiple options in the market place of products offering self-actualization, fulfillment, success, relief from suffering, and immortality. Profound symbols become trinkets or adornments, part of the advertising, or rhetoric by which we sell economically driven agendas.

Vincent J. Miller, a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University identifies two primary interrelated consequences of commodification on religion. First, Miller affirms, “elements of religious traditions are fragmented into discrete, free-floating signifiers abstracted from their interconnections with other doctrines, symbols, and practices.” And secondly, when abstracted from their origin—their unique and contextual story—practices related to their origin and story are separated from institutional and communal settings in which they shape the lives of practitioners.⁴ When abstracted from their origin and meaning, they no longer have sufficient power to change behavior.

The severing of central faith symbols from their story of origin and meaning was brought home to me during a renovation in a church I served as pastor. The entire sanctuary was redone, with newly designed Communion table, baptismal font, pulpit, and cross. We spent considerable time as a committee researching and studying the role of each liturgical symbol, especially the Table. We hired a well known architect and designer to work with us. The result was an exquisitely crafted Table as the focal point of the Chancel. Following its installation the trustees met to deal with a required handed down from the fire marshal. A fire extinguisher had to be placed somewhere near the Chancel and easily accessible. A member of the committee offered a solution. He suggested that it be mounted to the back of the Communion Table. After all, he argued, the candles represented the greatest threat for a fire and since the pastors and the choir were seated behind the Table they had quick and easy access to the extinguisher! I laughed because I thought it was a joke, only to discover that it was a serious proposal. The depth understanding of the Table had escaped the trustees! The Table was just a table, a decorative ornament with utilitarian functions! I facetiously suggested that we hang the extinguisher in the pulpit since there was never any fire there! But it was obvious that I had some serious teaching to do!

The doctrines, rituals, symbols, and practices of the Church have been severed from their theological/ecclesiological context and converted into marketing tools for church growth and institutional enhancement, thereby losing their power to impact our daily lives. The heart of the Church’s existence, worship of the Transcendent and Immanent God, has become part of the marketing strategy for numerical growth and thereby has bought into methods that resemble Disney more than Doxology. Evangelism, the proclamation in word and deed of the Good News of God’s salvation of persons, communities, nations, and the cosmos, has been ripped from the Gospel and made a survival strategy for a consumerist church. Mission and discipleship have become optional choices on a crowded menu of programmatic offerings of churches designed to attract the pious consumers to the ecclesial version of the shopping mall.

The penultimate has replaced the ultimate—the institutional church has replaced God’s reign of compassion, justice, generosity, and joy as the telos of the Church’s life and mission. Measurable, quantifiable statistical growth has become the sign of faithfulness to God, rather how closely congregations resemble the new creation wrought in Jesus Christ—how it practices justice and hospitality for “the widows, orphans, and sojourners” and challenges the principalities and powers that thwart God’s dream for creation.

Business structures and practices, forged in the market place for the purpose of yielding bottom-line profits, dominate the church’s life and leadership. The result has been the increasing bureaucratization of the church and the growing reliance on the business images of leadership and corporate modalities and processes for ordering the church’s life. Clergy increasingly understand that Order in the Ordination means “management and administration” rather than nurturing and shaping the Body of Christ within a congregation. Many ordinands understanding they are being ordained to “Word, Sacrament, and Management.”

That has been one of the most dramatic developments in my forty plus years as an ordained clergy in the United Methodist Church. The process of the bureaucratization of the American church has been long, as historian Clarence Goen, documents in an article with the provocative title, “Ecclesiocracy Without Ecclesiology: Denominational Life in America.”⁵ Ecclesiocracy without ecclesiology leads to vague faith with its accompanying anti-intellectualism, privatized piety, clericalism and lay passivity, the nation replacing the church as the object of loyalty, and “expansion by evasion”, that is, church growth at the expensive of prophetic witness.⁶

The bureaucratization has significantly changed the daily activities of pastors. When I began pastoral ministry in the 1960s, the work schedule consisted primarily of preparing sermons and Bible studies, pastoral care in the midst of sickness, grief, and crises; and engagement in the community, including visiting the local jails, retirement homes, and the unchurched. Preparing sermons for Sunday morning and Sunday evening and study sessions for Sunday school and Wednesday nights meant an average of five hours each morning in the Study

But gradually meetings of committees and boards took more and more time. Managing the complex structures of an institution began to cut into both the study time and engagement in the community. As the size of the congregations increased, so did the complexity of the structures and the management tasks. Substantive theological and biblical study now competed with learning management techniques, systems theories, and leadership principles. While the best principles and insights from business, psychology, and sociology can be instruments for ministry, we must be very careful that they not become the primary formational narratives of ministry.

Shortly after being elected a bishop in 1992, I began to realize how significant the weekly rhythm of preparing for preaching and teaching was on my own formation. When I was elected, I did not have to look in the index of the hymnal or book of worship for hymns and liturgical resources. I knew the page numbers. But within four years as a bishop, I no longer knew the page numbers of the hymnal and the Book of Worship, but I could quote the paragraph numbers in The Book of Discipline, especially those paragraphs dealing with clergy conduct, judicial processes, and denominational structures. The cadence of the liturgical year was replaced with the recurring cycle of clergy evaluations and appointments, annual conference sessions, and denominational agency meetings. The daily lectionary readings got sandwiched between statistical reports, organizational charts, pastoral profiles, and strategic planning processes. The daily practices and routines were shaping me into a CEO of an ecclesiocracy.

What are the alternatives to the consumerist logic as the foundation for the practice of Christian ministry and practices that sustain and guide pastors in ministry within a consumerist culture?

Missio Dei: The Alternative Logic and Practice

Here is the fundamental affirmation about Christian ministry: It is about God, a particular God we call Trinity! Practicing ministry in a consumerist culture requires clarity about what seems self-evident. But God in an economically driven and consumerist culture is another commodity available according to self-identified needs of autonomous consumers of piety. People shop for gods and churches the same way they shop for other commodities and the ultimate test of the reality of the gods is the ability to meet consumers’ self-defined expectations. Or, in an ecclesiocracy without ecclesiology, God is a vague presumption and a presumed God inevitability gets supplanted by the explicit gods of the prevailing culture. The Triune God, however, refuses to be supplanted or subordinated to any lesser gods, including the market, or what the Bible calls mammon!

Christian ministry begins, continues, and ends a narrative with a different telos and logic than that of market consumerism. It is The Story of a particular God! This God is revealed in two primal formative actions and stories from which Christian theology and practice emanate—the Exodus and the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian ministry is incorporation into, proclamation of, and participation in THE STORY of God’s mighty acts of deliverance and God’s new creation brought near in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and God’s continuing presence and power through the Holy Spirit working within community to bring to completion God’s new creation inaugurated in Jesus Christ.

The practice of Christian ministry in a consumerist culture requires, then, that we be explicit about the God who calls, shapes, forms, and empowers the Church. It is a God who delivered our forbearers from the slave economy of Pharaoh. The God whose very nature and mission were revealed to Moses: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I known their sufferings, and I have come to deliver them and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land…” (Exodus 3:7-8). This God is distinguishable from other gods in that Yahweh defends the orphans, the widows, the sojourners—those left out of the prevailing economies! This God leads the oppressed through the desert, replacing Pharaoh’s slave economy of scarcity reserved for the privileged with a manna economy of abundance available to all.

This God became flesh in Jesus Christ, who embodies God’s presence, mission, and power. This God comes among us as a vulnerable baby, born of an unmarried peasant teenager, in a cattle stall among those made homeless by the economic policies of Caesar, spent his early years as an immigrant in Egypt, grew up in a working class family. He went along the lakeside announcing, “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news.” He announced his mission in the words of Isaiah, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to announce the year of jubilee,” God’s jubilee economy (Luke 4:18-19). He welcomed the vulnerable and the outcasts, healed the sick, forgave the alienated, fed the hungry, spoke truth to religious and political power. He was executed as a criminal and he died with forgiveness on his lips. In the resurrection, God delivered an everlasting and cosmic “YES” to everything Jesus said and did! And God established Jesus as the firstborn of a New Creation and won the decisive victory over the principalities and powers that threaten God’s reign of compassion, justice, generosity, and joy!

That is the logic and narrative, in which Christian theology and ministry originate, is called forth, formed, and empowered.

The second component of faithful practice of Christian ministry in a consumerist culture is clarity about the distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate telos. The telos of Christian ministry is “the kingdom of God” or the reign of God’s justice and righteousness in the world, or what Paul calls the New Creation, and Revelation refers to as “the new heaven and new earth.” The church is called into being as a herald, sign, foretaste, and foreshadowing of the reign of God’s justice, generosity, compassion, hospitality, hope, and joy! The institutional church’s success or faithfulness is determined by the signs of God’s reign it erects and how closely its life and work resemble God’s new creation in Christ.

But those signs do not show up on most denominational reporting forms and evaluation processes, barrowed uncritically from market consumerist measures of profitable institutions. Ministry easily gets defined and affirmed in accordance with quantifiable measures of efficiency and profitability which, of course, would render the ministry of Jesus Crucified as utter foolishness and dismal failure and relegates the Cross to a pious abstraction with little power to transform life!

When the institutional church becomes the ultimate rather than the penultimate, the reading habits and routine practices of pastors change. Organizational structures and systems theory supplant Biblical and systematic theology as foundational resources for ministry; strategic planning processes and marketing strategies replace risking martyrdom in bearing witness to justice and peace in a violent world; and professional advancement up the denominational corporate ladder replaces faithfulness to the reign of God, thereby making pastors as hirelings who fleece the flock as they use them as stepping stones in career advancement rather than shepherds who know the sheep by name and nurture and preserve the flock for future generations.

Third, practicing Christian ministry in a consumerist culture requires self-awareness formed in grace experienced in community. Living and serving the reign of God brought near in Jesus Christ is counter-cultural and it requires a self-assurance and self-awareness firmly rooted and grounded in grace! The temptation to define ourselves primarily as a commodity and a consumer of commodities persistently dogs us and the power of those temptations is daunting. We are seduced to define ourselves according to our ranking with our peers—whether it be grades in seminary, size of congregation or salary as pastors, or tenure ranking in the academy! Educational degrees and ordination, therefore, can be subtle seduction of market consumerist ideology. Or the less tangible seductions of praise, affirmation, promotion, (being named to an endowed chair), and the opposites—criticism, failure, anonymity—have a way of invading our identity and becoming the primary sources of our morale and actions.

Christian life and ministry begin in baptism, God’s claim upon us as God’s beloved daughter or son, born in the image of God, redeemed in Jesus Christ, and incorporated into God’s mission of salvation! Aggie Hampton, the housekeeper in a church I served for ten years taught me the power of the imago Dei to counter the utilitarian anthropology. When Aggie was treated less that a person with dignity and inherent worth, as a commodity to be exploited or abused, she would say, “Now wait a minute. I am a child of God just as you are. I ain’t no better than you but I ain’t no less than you either! So, watch how you treat one of God’s children.”

Self-assurance and self-awareness grounded and rooted in baptism requires regularly practicing means of grace, that is, engaging in the practices that cultivate awareness of and participation in God’s presence and power to create, heal, forgive, reconcile and transform. We Methodists talk about the Wesleyan means of grace in two categories—acts of piety/devotion and acts of mercy. Or building on Wesley’s early class meetings, David Lowes Watson⁷ led to the formation of the Covenant Discipleship movement which calls for developing and living four basic components or practices as Christian disciples: acts of devotion (personal prayer, reflection, searching the scripture, etc); acts of worship including Eucharist and corporate worship; acts of compassion, aid to the poor, the imprisoned, the sick, the vulnerable; and acts of justice, intentional engagement of the systems that create poverty, injustice, and war.

Grace is experienced in community, community which both holds us in love and holds accountable to our identity as beloved children of God and our vocation to share in God’s mission. I have tried throughout my years to be part of two groups: one is a group in which living and growing as a disciple of Jesus Christ is the focus. There I am held accountable for practicing the means of grace and growing in my love for God and neighbor. The other is a group in which the focus is on vocational faithfulness. As a pastor that meant a peer group of pastors; and as a bishop it was a small group of bishops who covenanted to support one another in exercising the episcopal office.

Indeed, as John Wesley reminded us, there is no holiness apart from social holiness. Living our identity and calling requires community in which we practice the presence of God!

Fourth, the practice of ministry in a consumerist culture requires the recovery and enhancement of the teaching office of pastors and laity. As we noted previously, a consequence of the commodification of culture has been the severing of religious doctrines, language, symbols, and practices from their story of origin and meaning. The church has forgotten The Story that gave it birth, forms its identity, defines its mission, and gives it agency to act in the world. The church has a profound case of amnesia and an institution or an individual with amnesia depends on others to define identity and mission. Our identity and mission as the Church are contained in The Story contained in Scripture, the liturgies, creeds, and practices of a long Tradition of diverse people in multiple cultural contexts. The biblical stories and creeds and affirmations and liturgies have been ripped from their contexts and complex history of development and function as ornaments or marketing tools.

Therefore, the practice of Christian ministry today requires that pastors give priority attention to understanding, living, teaching, and forming communities that reconnect the doctrines, liturgies, and practices to The Story of God’s reign. Or as Vincent Miller contends, the church needs to develop tactics of “’embedding’ doctrines, symbols, and practices within their historical tradition and the ongoing life of the community.”⁸

Ministry in the 21^st century must focus on repairing and rebuilding the foundations upon which ministry is built. Foundation work is basic, unglamorous, and subterranean. Consumerism with its accompanying church growth strategies, structures, and modalities has won the day in this generation. We have an ever growing number of structures and strategies built on foundations of sand. What is necessary is laying a solid foundation for potential renewal, much as the Wesleys did in the 18^th century.

Rebuilding the theological foundation and “embedding” The Story” in the practices of the congregation requires that the pastors be deeply grounded and formed in those foundations. Serious study and careful teaching must be “embedded” in the everyday life and routine of pastors. That will require intentionality and discipline on the part of pastors and support from peers and denominational leaders. It means recovery of priority focus on preparing to preach and teach above organizational busyness. It means spending significant time in the Bible and commentaries, reading church history, grappling with complex issues with the deep theological questions and insights of the best minds, both ancient and contemporary.

More is required than mastering orthodox doctrine. Interpreting those doctrines in the contemporary world requires exegeting social contexts as skillfully as exegeting sacred texts! Here our United Methodist “Doctrinal Standards and our Theological Task” is helpful.⁹ Teaching requires knowing the basic doctrines that the church has agreed upon and that form the primary lens through which we view reality and provide the mooring from which we launch our theological explorations. But knowledge of ancient creeds and orthodox affirmations is insufficient. Those must be communicated, interpreted, and appropriated in diverse contexts. Therefore, theological exploration is necessary! Theologies provide lenses and tools for understanding and interpreting and communicating the story of God’s mission in the world.

I shall be forever grateful as one who grew up in a rigid, provincial theological context that seminary opened to me some new windows through which to view God and provided languages and images for communicating the gospel in diverse settings. I am indebted to Karl Barth but I am also indebted to Emil Brunner and Paul Tillich. The Personalism of Brightman, Knudson, and DeWolf enriched my understanding, as did the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, John Cobb, and Marjorie Suchocki. Feminist theologies have challenged my patriarchal assumptions and obliviousness; and liberation theologians have pushed me to examine my race and class privileges.

John Wesley once asked the question: “Why are the people under our care no better than they are?” He proceeded to answer the question: “Because we are not more knowing and more holy.”¹⁰ He then admonished the preachers to spend five of twenty four hours each day in searching the Scripture and serious study. This complex age demands no less of those called to practice ministry, lay and clergy, in a culture where the average congregation has escaped the knowledge explosion taking place in the culture.

But theological knowledge and insight must be connected with the issues of the world. Otherwise, we succumb to an ecclesial Gnosticism by which knowledge is divorced from issues and practices of everyday living.

My seminary education took place in Washington, D.C. during the turbulent sixties. Wesley Theological Seminary relocated in 1958 from rural Westminster, Maryland to the campus of American University with the intention of connecting theological education and pastoral ministry to the issues confronting the world. Most classes contained a component of what we call Practicing Theology in Ministry. For example, a course in the prophets included an assignment to sit in on the briefings at the Pentagon and State Department regarding the military build up in Vietnam. A course in the church and its community required visits to the Commerce Department and Congressional hearings as well as walking the streets of the inner city and talking with residents of the crowded public housing.

During my years as a bishop, I grieved the closing of churches that were surrounded by people. You know the story. The demographics of the neighborhoods changed and the churches remained isolated from and even contemptuous of their new neighbors. Many of those churches had seminary trained pastors. They used all the right curriculum resources, even engaged in quality liturgical practices. But they didn’t connect to their communities. I wonder if those pastors learned in seminary that they could engage the doctrines, teaching, liturgies of the Tradition without engagement of the surrounding context. If we can teach, worship, dialogue, and think in the enclave of Duke University in isolation from the surrounding communities and without engaging broken and suffering places in this community, we shouldn’t be surprised if those who pass through our classes assume they can do church in isolation from their neighborhoods and do theology divorced from such issues as economic disparity, racism, classism, gender inequities, war and violence, et.al.

Engaging the issues of the world in the light of the missio Dei and forming congregations in their baptismal identity and mission means something very radical in this culture fragmented, divided, and polarized by the growing economic disparity and concentration of power in the hands of the economy privileged. It requires the recovery of what I consider the most neglected spiritual discipline and means of grace.

That is the last in my modest list of requirements for the practice of Christian ministry in a consumerist culture: intentional moving to the margins and entering community with those Jesus called “the least of these” and Charles Wesley called “Jesus’ bosom friends”—the poor, the imprisoned, the outcasts, the vulnerable, the despised, the abused, outsider! We cannot know the God of the Exodus and Jesus apart from ongoing relationships with those with whom Jesus so closely identifies that he said, “Whatever you do to one of the least of these you do unto me” (Matthew 25). Jesus lives among the poor, the imprisoned, the abused, the scorned, the outsiders—those wounded by the excesses of the consumerist market practices and logic. And we cannot know and serve Jesus in isolation from the very people with whom Jesus lives!

Friendship with those who live on the margins is as essential in the practice of Christian ministry as study of the Scripture and knowledge of the Tradition, not as paternalistic acts of charity but as means of our own salvation and spiritual health. Knowledge and pastoral privilege can result in an elitism that blinds us to the gifts and presence of God in persons different from us, especially the non-academically trained. As a first-generation high school graduate, I owe much to books and scholars and I will not for a moment diminish the value of education. But neither would I minimize or negate my indebtedness to the men and women I have known in prisons and jails, especially my friend, Bill Groseclose, who has spent the last thirty years behind a prison wall, twenty-two of those on death row; or the homeless people who visit the feeding programs and lounge in the breezeways of churches I served; or Jesse who was addicted to alcohol but became my walking partner around the Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, and who is on the staff of Galloway UMC where Connie and Joey now serve. Or, my grandfather who was unable to read and write but whose wisdom about living in hard times, whose reverence for the earth and life, and whose quiet dignity taught me as much as any scholar. Or my mother, who has a sixth grade education, but who knows God as an ever-present reality and about whom I brother says, “When I look at her I see the face of God.” Or my deceased father who spent his nights in a textile plant and his days in the fields on hilly farms in East Tennessee, who taught me tenacity in important conflicts when he frequently said, “You better never start an unnecessary fight but you had better be around when necessary fights are over!” And by necessary, he meant fights in which bullies picked on the weak!

The practice of ministry in a consumerist culture requires that pastors and congregations intentionally go the margins. We go the margins because the Triune God opts for the margins and Jesus lives on the margins! We cannot understand grace, which is God’s economy, apart from relationships with those who rely daily on it. I don’t think we Methodists can understand Wesley by only reading his sermons and treatises. We cannot understand his doctrine of grace apart from his ongoing friendship with the poor, his intentional turning toward the margins of eighteenth century England.

By going to the margins, into the jails and prisons, the mobile home communities, public housing neighborhoods, homeless shelters, HIV/AIDS units, among the people left behind and even victimized by the market consumerist forces, we come into contact with an alternative logic or at least a longing for another way! There we meet the God who sees, hears, knows the suffering of God’s beloved children and who comes to deliver. There our abstract doctrines and theological propositions get challenged. There we meet the Crucified and Risen Christ, who is the image and source of all Christian ministry!

Conclusion

The challenges of practicing ministry in a consumerist culture are daunting. We cannot meet those challenges within ourselves and our own resources. To attempt to do so would be to live in accordance with the market’s logic of self-sufficiency and autonomy. Rather, Christian ministry flows from another logic-- God’s manna economy of grace! The God who calls us to share in the Divine Mission, invites us into a beloved community of grace, baptizes us into a New Creation wrought in Jesus Christ, feeds us with a new manna called Eucharist, and empowers us to live now in anticipation of God’s final victory over all the principalities and powers that thwart the New Heaven and New Earth, including global market consumerism!

1. See Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumerist Culture (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2005)

2. A more definitive description of the influence of the market on the church’s mission may be found in my Hickman Lecture, delivered at Duke Divinity School

3. R. Laurence Moore, Selling God (New York: Oxford Press, 1994), p. 5

4. Miller, op cit, p 3f.

5. C. C. Goen, “Ecclesiocracy Without Ecclesiology: Denominational Life in America,” American Baptist Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 4, December 1991, pp. 266-279.

6. See Goen’s book, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schism and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon: Mercer Press, 1980????

7. See David Lowes Watson, The Early Methodist Class Meeting: Its Origin and Significance (Nashville: Discipleship Resources), 2002; and David Lowes Watson, Accountable Discipleship: Handbook for Covenant Discipleship Groups in the Congregation (Nashville: Discipleship Resources), 1984. An up-dated and expanded version of the Covenant Discipleship ministry can be found in Steven Manskar, Accountable Disciples: Living in God’s Household (Nashville: Discipleship Resources), 2000.

8. Miller, op cit, p. 194.

9. Book of Discipline, The United Methodist Church 2004, Part II, “Doctrinal Standards and Our Theological Task”. For my own interpretation and commentary on the doctrinal statement, see Who Are We? Doctrine, Ministry, and Mission of The United Methodist Church, Leader’s Guide (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House), 2001 Revised edition.

10. The Works of John Wesley, 3^rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), vol. 8, pp. 314-315.