The play’s the thing…
Despite my reputation as being a philosophic and systematic theological type, my favourite type of theology is in fact narrative theology. Both Open Secrets and Upon this Rock would qualify in many ways as narrative theology; they demonstrate theological principles by and through the story, with multiple possibilities of interpretation and example. When I took a playwriting/screenwriting course, the very first principle of story-telling was written upon the board as this: ‘No conflict, no story, no interest.’ The basis of story-telling, be it short stories, novels, plays, sitcoms or drama, is that there is a conflict of some sort that needs to be resolved. Unsatisfying stories are the ones in which no conflict arises; ironically, the conflicts do not have to be settled for the story to be successful (although modern television writing might lead one to think differently, wherein almost every problem is resolved within 22 or 44 minutes, leaving plenty of time for advertising interruptions).
Jesus knew well the power of story-telling. This could be applied well to the idea of ministry; the places of interest, and the opportunities for learning, come not from the smooth functioning and flawless exercise of ministry, but from the difficulties and the ‘messy bits’. The texts under consideration address the narrative from different perspectives – one from a personal, subjective perspective, and one from an outside-narrator, objective perspective. Each has strengths and weaknesses in the approach, but as a comparison, they both lead to insights for the reader into the operations, management styles, and to a certain extent the feelings and motivations of the ministers. Both give a series of scenes, like the progression of a play, for the reader to follow, and variously laugh, cry, get irritated, and be amazed. There is drama and comedy here. There is a true human voice that speaks from each story.
The Promised Land
Both Richard Lischer and Johnny Ray Youngblood went into their ministries as full of hope as they were full of misconceptions. Youngblood’s ministry is in an urban setting, which is where Lischer had hoped to be. However, I wonder if Lischer would have been so eager had he heard Youngblood’s impressions:
Here is New York City, Reverend Youngblood thinks, the Promised Land, the new Canaan, and all the talk is defeat. It’s unlivable; it’s ungovernable; it’s dying of crack and AIDS and greed. So many of his own parishioners speak of leaving New York, returning to the same South they once fled…
True, there is a certainly glamour in the midst of the chaos and confusion, and it certainly reads better on a resume to have been pastor of a church in New York City than in… where was that again? Oh, yes, New Cana:
The city was where the action was, not in suburbs such as the one I grew up in, and certainly not in country churches like this one, with its broken cross and flourishing graveyard. Two minutes on this lonely road was a clarifying experience. The spiritual heroics of the secular city had passed me by.
There was a physical sense of loneliness, desolation and isolation that Lischer could immediately feel. Of course, these sad conditions (both of the material and spiritual) are not confined to the depressed rural parts of the country – these can be present anywhere. The picture of Lischer burning trash in the barrel (the Sacred Burning Barrel), surrounded by nothing but rural solitude and poverty, in essence parallels well with images from depressed areas around Youngblood’s neighbourhoods, where homeless people huddle around barrels set alight for warmth on cold days in the city. Why is poverty situated next to wealth and tall buildings considered somehow more prestigious a ministry field?
Advent
Conflict was waiting for Lischer and Youngblood from the beginning of their ministries; little did they know that such conflict had already begun before their arrivals. Youngblood’s confrontation with the elder Sanford over money and control parallels Lischer’s initial incident with Leonard Semanns. This casts in strong light the difference between the two pastors and how they dealt with early conflict. Youngblood faced the difficulty head on, with no small amount of drama, and facing an uncertain outcome.
However, when Semanns announced publicly that he hadn’t voted for him (which set off a chorus of others noting the same), Lischer really didn’t address the conflict at all, rather preferring to let the incident pass without action. The stormy departure of Sanford, one of the ‘powers’ of Youngblood’s church, contrasts with Leonard Semanns’ continuance in the church at New Cana. Is this part of the rural character – that Semanns had nowhere else to go? Or would the thought of going somewhere else even have occurred to him? In many respects, perhaps a stronger parallel from Lischer with the Sanford affair would be the excommunication of Heather – both Lischer and Youngblood lost the persons in question from their churches, and failed to follow up with them later.
Pride goeth before a fall…
Celebrant: Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
People: I will, with God’s help.
As I was reading the experiences of Lischer and Youngblood, this passage came to mind. Part of the renewal of baptismal vows in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, the key word that appears in relation to the stories recounted of Lischer and Youngblood is whenever. No one is expected to be perfect; even from the point of baptism, it is expected that there will be mistakes, failures, and even the occasional intentional wrongdoing. Would that most ordination liturgies would have a similar reminder and injunction against the assumption of perfection! This is a conflict that both Lischer and Youngblood had to engage on a continuing basis – the idea that they actually know something. Indeed, each was an educated man, with experiences and book-knowledge upon which to draw, but each also had repeated experiences that taught them that education, particularly for ministry, is a life-long process (even if that process is not intentional and classroom/seminary-oriented).
While this might not be precisely what the syllabus called for in identifying and comparing conflicts and styles, I feel it is the one that will last for me for the longest time. I could identify with each in different ways, but particularly with regard to how education and training impacts and prepares (or fails to prepare) one for real life and ministry. Never being one to discount book-learning and formal, academic training (far from it!), I nonetheless recognised a pattern from my own ministry experience at Bell Trace in the words and experiences of both Lischer and Youngblood. Lischer spoke of his earliest experiences as a preacher at his new church in New Cana:
The only person who appreciated my sermons was my wife, who, like me, lived from books. Tracy was completing her course work for a Ph.D. in English and, therefore, considered poetry and literary allusions to be the most natural of all forms of communication. What’s a sermon without, ‘Perhaps Milton said it best when he wrote…’ But among the rest of the congregation my preaching produced a standoff of sensibilities: If the idea for a sermon did not come from a book, I was not interested in pursuing it. If it did not emerge from life, my parishioners were not interested in hearing about it. In a few short months we had achieved homelitical gridlock.
People in the pews in this congregation (as in many congregations) had not been to seminary, or even college. Milton was as foreign in many respects as peppering a sermon with untranslated Latin, Greek and Hebrew phrases to people who barely have a command of the English language.
Youngblood has a similar experience in the method of his sermon development. He learned early that the connection has to be made, and has to be made explicitly.
That kind of preaching was what drove black men from church in the first place. Where was Jesus and his hocus-pocus when ten percent of black men were unemployed, when their average life span was declining, when the leading cause of death for the young generation was murder? So Jesus goes into town and resurrects this dead dude, Reverend Youngblood could imagine his listeners asking. What does that have to do with me?
Sermons that might dazzle the faculty at Colgate-Rochester would often bore and alienate the people in the pews. Knowing your audience is important (speaks the old Communications Director); while we often resist speaking of homiletics and church enterprises in marketing and business terms, fearing secularlisation or some other taint coming from such ‘crass’ ideas, nonetheless it is basic to effective communication to know to whom you are preaching.
I could connect to type of conflict, which is both internal to the pastor and external with the congregations as a whole, for in my own experience at Bell Trace there was the beginning of homiletical gridlock, and I was once directly asked by a parishioner, ‘What does this have to do with me?’ My first homily there was a technical masterpiece that Ron Allen, and perhaps even Craddock and Buttrick, would have appreciated. My congregation fell in the first four weeks dramatically, going from 35 persons to 28, then to 19, then finally to 12 before I realised I was preaching myself out of a job.
The Value of Education
One of the conflicts I have been dealing with lately has been more in the teaching realm than the congregation. Having been a teaching assistant for over a dozen courses at Christian Theological Seminary (and having been a teacher, lecturer, and professor in my own right at other institutions), I am used to the regular litany of some students: Why are we reading this? What does this have to do with me? When am I ever going to use this again? However, as the teaching assistant in systematic theology this year, there seems to be for the first time a collective effort against the subject, almost as if the students have unionised, banding together against the subject, and particularly against Tillich. I was therefore interested as both Lischer and Youngblood mentioned the value the education and theology, and Tillich in particular. Lischer mentions it in terms of his seminary experience:
In the late autumn of my final year in seminary, Thomas Merton died in Bangkok, while exploring the Zen tradition of Buddhism. Earlier Paul Tillich had died after a lifetime of doing theology on the boundaries between religion, art, and psychology. Our seminary mourned their passing, but only unofficially in the commemoration of a few students and bold teachers.
I wonder if Tillich will ever be regarded with such affection here? One of the most vocal opponents in the class specifically referenced her African-American tradition, trying to explain that Tillich might be okay to study, but had no relevance for her tradition. However, that is not the experience of Youngblood and his colleagues in ministry:
When Reverend Charles Adams of Hartford Memorial Baptist church in Detroit is called the ‘Harvard whooper’, or when Reverend James Forbes of Riverside Church describes himself as being a ‘Tillichian Pentecostal’, the phrases imply the scope demanded of a black preacher. One must embrace knowledge and experience, book-learning and mother wit. One can earn a doctorate from the Harvard Divinity School, like Reverend Adams, or become an expert in the German theologian Paul Tillich, like Reverend Forbes, but one must never lose connection with the Holy Spirit.
Once again, the internal and external conflict is apparent, and different methods of resolution are shown, some deliberate and conscious (such as Forbes self-appellation) and some are more subtle and subversive (such as the unofficial acts at Lischer’s seminary). How does one keep the creative tension alive between seminary and parish? How does one instill a love and desire for learning among those who ‘already know’?
Six Degrees of Separation
Lischer speaks early of his long range desires; seminary, ‘significant’ pastorate, professorship, presidency of a seminary – an idyllic career path. He felt separated from the people of New Cana from beginning to end; this separation was also perceived, and possibly perpetuated, on the part of the community, who viewed him as an outsider. One wonders if he would have ever become a community member, or if, because he did not have close ties to the community (no family tree intersections with the Semanns, for instance), he would have been perceived as an outsider even had he spent his entire career in New Cana. His congregation had very strong traditions, but in their holding fast to these, they were removed in many ways from the larger traditions of their own denomination and historical background.
Youngblood has a stronger connection and affinity with his congregation at Saint Paul’s, but even there, he began as an outsider, who chose to rely on other outsiders for support. The congregation noticed.
‘He’s takin’ over,’ the woman said. ‘He’s changin’ everything around. Folks can’t have their clubs. They gotta give all their money to church.’ Then she added grudgingly, ‘But they got a lotta young people up there.’ Reverend Youngblood was at war with tradition – if not with the proud history of the black church, then certainly with the customs passed unquestioningly from generation to generation.
It has been remarked that what most people in congregations mean when they talk about tradition or ‘the way it has always been done’ is in fact simply the way things have been done for the last two to three generations. Ironically, by expecting people to tithe (a time-honoured tradition honoured more in the breach than the observance), Youngblood was perceived as going against tradition. The people had become separated from their own traditions and heritage, and were in need of education in addition to salvation. Both Lischer and Youngblood had a respect for education, but recognised the pitfalls and difficulties, even if both could never fully overcome them.
I began working on the sixth degree of my academic career in 1993, the year the film ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ came out in cinemas. A friend remarked that I was achieving my six degrees of separation from reality, having been locked in ivory towers for so long. In fact, I have always been a person who works along with taking classes, and have not been ‘just a student’ since the early 1980s, but have always been aware of the very different life and perspective that those in the academy, even ones with a practical intention such as medical schools, law schools and seminaries tend to have against the ‘real’ world. If indeed each of us on the planet is interconnected to each other by no more than six other persons (the origin of the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’), this disconnection between ministers and congregations ought to be easy to overcome, no? Perhaps I live in hope, the same hope with which both Lischer’s and Youngblood’s story ended, as each ends in the words of a journey.
As Youngblood might say, ‘Let’s eat together. Let’s drink together. Let’s go down, singing.’
Bibliography
Book of Common Prayer. New York: Seabury Press. 1979.
Freedman, Samuel G. Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church. New York: HarperCollins. 1993.
Lischer, Richard. Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery. New York: Broadway Books/Random House. 2001.
Thank you for sharing such an informative article with us!