By LeRoy Lawson
Renewal for Mission: A Concise History of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ
W. Dennis Helsabeck Jr., Gary Holloway, Douglas A. Foster
Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2009
A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry
Garret Keizer
HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, 1993
Priest, Prophet, Pilgrim: Types and Distortions of Spiritual Vocation in the Fiction of Wendell Berry and Cormac McCarthy
Todd Edmonds
Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2014
When I was 9 years old, I made my nervous way down the aisle of my home church. I confessed my faith to our minister in front of all those people. Then that evening he baptized me (in front of all those people). That same good man became my spiritual father and in many ways my model and lifelong inspiration.
This happened in the little town of Tillamook, Oregon. Some of those people were there a few months ago when I preached for the church”s 125th anniversary. They are proud to belong to a Christian Church.
Not everybody knows what Christian Church means. They know the Bible is taken seriously there. They know Jesus is proclaimed there. The people there practice baptism by immersion and observe Communion each week. But not everyone understands why.
To help them out, here”s Renewal for Mission: A Concise History of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, cowritten by Dennis Helsabeck, Gary Holloway, and Douglas Foster. These men are scholars, but they write for people like us. They tell their story straight, noting the movement”s strengths and, with equal honesty, its failures and frustrations.
Renewal for Mission renews this reviewer”s appreciation of who we are and why:
“¢ To be a voice for unity in a fractious world. (If Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell could, with their widely diverse opinions, be part of the same movement, then unity is no pipe dream. It can actually happen.)
“¢ To continue early church practices with their early church meanings: immersion, the Lord”s supper, congregational interdependence, the Great Commission imperative.
“¢ To call us all back to serious study of the Scriptures, letting them speak for themselves.
“¢ To engage people”s minds as well as their hearts.
“¢ To be Christians only without pretending to be the only Christians.
In addition to the 12 concise chapters, the authors have written guides for group discussions. If you would like to know where your Christian church came from, this book”s for you.
Real Church
When I became a minister, my church couldn”t support me. It didn”t take much, since I was a bachelor who hadn”t even completed a bachelor”s degree. The seven other people in the congregation didn”t know how ignorant I was. (I did.) They just trusted God to do something with us. (God did.)
When I married and we began our family, I became more expensive. To pay our bills, I taught English at the local high school. That was my work: full-time teacher, part-time preacher.
You”ll understand, then, how much I enjoyed Garret Keizer”s A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, written by a full-time high school English teacher and part-time lay minister of a small Episcopal parish in the old railroad junction town of Island Pond, Vermont. I so identified with his stories I began fantasizing about taking up my dual profession once again. They say you”re never too old. . . .
Keizer didn”t know much about pastoring when he went to Island Pond. Not a formally trained priest, he was “only” ordained as a lay leader. His humility (he felt he had a lot to be humble about) served him well; knowing he didn”t know opened his mind and heart to what can only be learned in on-the-job training.
He loved his parishioners: the adoring””and disarmingly blunt””little children; the pillars holding up the church at the center; the grizzled, suspicious, world-weary cynics at the edge; and the old and infirm, slipping not so gently into their good night. Keizer””like this reviewer before him””learned to regard even the crustiest as saints in disguise. The young lay minister was the “professional” in their eyes; they were the real teachers in his.
Small-town ministers can”t afford to be picky about their jobs or particular about what”s real church work and what isn”t. They run errands others could just as easily do, but don”t. They wind the church clock even though it”s been dead for years. In the process, they learn how clocks tick. They visit and then befriend old derelicts in nursing homes, where the world and family tossed them, and in so doing discover that when the Holy Spirit is in an act it becomes a kind of sacrament in itself.
Or, to summarize in Keizer”s words, this thing called ministry “is about mysticism and orthodoxy, ordinariness and sanctity, unity and diversity and about the intersection of all these things in a design that looks to me like a cross.”
An unforgettable lesson came from Pete, a nearly blind, deaf curmudgeon trapped in his nursing home room as he inched inexorably to his death. Keizer promised Pete that he would be his friend. Every week Garrett visited after school to bathe Pete”s feet, run his errands, adjust his furnishings””whatever it took to make him comfortable. Then Pete died. Reflecting on their friendship, including the selfish aspects, he concludes,
But in that dross was something else, a thought no less trivial or self-centered, really, but somehow not shameful either. It has stayed with me ever since. It is, I believe, a gift from God and from Peter, and apparently I needed it more than I could have known or would have admitted.
I had made a promise to a friend, and by God””by God, indeed””I had kept it.
Garrett Keizer has written other books since A Dresser of Sycamore Trees. I want to read them. The man understands ministry.
Caring Pastor
So does Todd Edmundson. Priest, Prophet, Pilgrim is proof of it. This author also wears two hats: part-time professor (Emmanuel Christian Seminary and Milligan College) and full-time pastor (First Christian Church of Erwin, Tennessee). He has earned the right to write about ministry.
Not that his book is about being a pastor. It isn”t. It isn”t even about the church. But through his study of two of America”s most perceptive though very different authors, Wendell Berry and Cormac McCarthy, Edmondson shows us the kinds of people a caring pastor gets to care for . . . and about. Some are comfortable in their skins, expressing their vital spiritual lives in and through the flesh. Others, mistakenly believing flesh and spirit to be at odds, can find no serenity, no spirit-body harmony.
Still others find wholeness in the embrace of their communities, where they live at peace with and contribute to the well-being of their neighbors. Unfortunately, yet others resist, even reject, the community, insisting they are better than or at least certainly different from and hence not in need of their neighbors. The loss is theirs.
The truth is that some, the blessed ones, find God in the everydayness of life, like pilgrims reveling in the journey as much as the destination; their opposites, sadly, run from God and God”s created world and discover only estrangement everywhere.
Edmondson explores the priest, the prophet, and the pilgrim types in Berry”s fiction, contrasting them with McCarthy, who, he believes, presents the dark side of each of them: the anti-priest with hardened heart; the ethically deadened anti-prophet; and the anti-pilgrim, who is moving but whose movement is flight from, not pilgrimage toward, wholeness.
All of these types lived wherever I have lived. They can also be found in Erwin, Tennessee, where a wise pastor works to redeem.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and on Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee.Â
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