eMusing Series: Doing Pastoral Work In The Big Apple

Part Six – Living With Congregants In A Postmodern Environment

Transfiguration Day 2004 – John L. Ng © Copyright 2004

In the movie The Matrix, the insurgence leader, Morpheus, asked pointedly, “What is real? How do you define real?” In the matrix world, nothing is what it seems. The movie borrows from a collage of different and opposing worldviews: Greek mythology, Buddhism, Plato, Descartes and the Bible. The film is also dense with illusions from Chinese Kong-Fu movies, Japanese Anime cartoons, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fantasies and popular psychology.

I did not enjoy watching Matrix. Its convoluted storyline was impossible to follow. That same feeling of perplexity also describes my pastoral work among mostly Asians who live in postmodern world. Concerning their Christianity, many ask Morpheus’s question: What is real? How do you define real?

Let me explain briefly Post Modernity. Post Modernity as a worldview is a wide and varied. It describes a philosophical construct of the universe as well as artistic expressions in architecture, visual arts and literature. It is not my purpose here to survey or classify it. My narrow focus is to see Post Modernity as the environment for pastoral work. How this worldview has impacted my congregants’ perception of reality and my pastoral task in that perceived reality.

The term was coined by the Spanish writer, Frederico de Onis, in 1930’s as his reaction against the rationalism of Modernity. Toward the end of the 20th century, Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, defined Post Modernity as the perceptive knowing process of the self who interprets reality. That is, the self alone determines what is real. Two illustrations will suffice:

In baseball, an umpire calls each ball thrown by the pitcher. He has one of two verdicts to render. The rule is simple. If the thrown ball is within the designated strike zone, it is a strike; if the thrown ball is outside the designated strike zone, it is a ball. A modern umpire might say, “There’re balls; there’re strikes, I call’em as they are.” A postmodern umpire would counter, “There’re balls; there’re strikes, I call’em as I see them.” Although the strike zone is defined precisely in the rulebook, the second umpire perceives it subjectively. It is irrelevant what another umpire sees. What is real is what is personally real to him.

Another example. Bill Moyers, the noted television journalist, broadcasted a series on Genesis – a living conversation in the 1990’s. In each episode, Bill Moyers led a group of discussants from varied disciplines – writers, teachers, clerics, theologians, artists, journalists and psychologists. They read a Genesis story and vigorously bantered its meaning. The series was advertised as a “dazzling, multi-layered chorus of voices.” Rightly so. The series’ subtext is obvious. The Biblical text has no inherent meaning. Whether the author has an intended meaning is inconsequential. What matters is that each participant understood the story on personal terms based on his or her own personal experience, interpretation and reading. The meaning emerges as the interpreter finds his or her own reality from the story.

The Enlightenment has given us the courage to think for ourselves. Post Modernity posits that what one thinks is what is real. There are many realities. A Buddhist, a Muslim and a Christian have their individual realities. Each is as valid as the other. In a postmodern world, even Christians differentiate what is real. Individuals who become Christian like to believe that their encounter with Jesus Christ is real. They like to believe that their experience of God authenticates their relationship with God. But different individuals have different, and some times opposing religious experiences. These individual experiences are real to the individual person. Who is to say what is authentic and what is not? (See the second article of this series, Part Two – Thinking Through The Identity Issue Among Asian-Americans, under “Religious Dynamics”)

In the Spring 2003 issue of Fuller Theological Seminary’s Theology, News and Notes, the cover title reads: “Conflicting Understanding of Christian Conversion.” Different church traditions understand conversion differently. Is conversion what happens when someone in a moment of clarity embraces Christ Jesus as God and savior? Or is conversion what happens when a nominal believer becomes an active member of the church? Or does conversion explains what happens to a person who struggles through long years of lifestyle values?

The magazine concludes that all conversions are complex, extended experiences. Each conversion is comprised of multiple personal encounters in a convergence of people, places and events. However, in these personal encounters, conversion is still about change of worldviews that ultimately leads to a change in lifestyle. The issue is not change. Being human that we are, not every one changes with the same degree or at the same rate. Then how much change is genuine change? A sampling of my encounters with congregants attests my agitation as their pastor:

A young man has attended our church for awhile. He wants to join the worship team and is interviewed by the worship leader and then by me as his pastor. During our conversation, he tells me that he has been baptized Catholic as an infant. Throughout his life, he has gone to church, both Catholic and Protestant, intermittently. Then he encountered God and professed Christ at a college Christian fellowship. I ask when did he become a Christian. He replies, “I have always believed. I just didn’t go to church.” He does not see his religious experience in college as a profession of faith but a confirmation of faith. He believes that he has been a Christian since his infant baptism. To join the worship team he first has to join the church. Our church’s polity accepts membership only from those who have gone through a believer’s baptism. Since the church does not recognize his as a believer’s baptism, he would have to be baptized again. At length we discuss the meaning of baptism. Finally he says, “I will not get baptized again. My baptism is very meaningful to me. I believe that God has accepted my baptism as an act of faith.”

This young woman has grown up in a protestant pastor’s home. But she cannot remember that she has ever volitionally believed in Jesus. “Since I could remember,” she says, “I have always believed Jesus as the Son of God.” After leaving home for college, she stopped attending church. She moved to New York and found her way to our church. One Sunday after worship, she expressed to me her appreciation for my ministry of the word. It seems my preaching has helped her get acquainted with God in a “real way” (her words). On several occasions, we talk about her formative years as a PK and her notion of what is a Christian. “I wasn’t bad or anything. I might have been a little rebellious but I really didn’t know what it meant to be a Christian growing up. Now I know.” Another young man attends our church while dating someone in the congregation. He has led a “hedonistic lifestyle” (his words) but became a Christian through a friend. At the time he first met our church member, he was seeing another woman and was breaking off with a third woman. On the night of their break up, he had sexual intercourse with the third woman. One day he comes to see me. “To come clean,” he says, “so you know who I am. I just want you as my pastor to know where I am coming from.” His desire to come clean is in earnest but not in remorse. “The Bible teaches a lot of things,” he concludes. “I don’t always agree. But I am trying to live the Christian life as I understand it.” We explore the meaning of a Christian lifestyle but disagree several times.

Another young woman in our church grew up in a family that was active in church all her life. She remembers raising her hand to express faith in Christ as a teenager at a youth retreat. As a core leader, she is very involved in church but struggles with her faith openly. During a casual conversation with me, she lets out that she has traveled with her boy friend several times. Each time, they have stayed in the same hotel room and once or twice shared the same bed. She admits that the church preaches against that. “There are more important issues the church should preach against, like abortion, corporate greed, and dishonesty, to name a few. What we did was solely economics,” she confesses in candor. “We needed to save money. There is nothing wrong with what we did. Besides, we didn’t have sex.”

Being a modernist doing pastoral work in a postmodern world can be nerve wrecking. I was educated with a modern worldview and see my pastoral task from that vantage. I believe that there are Biblical absolutes, that faith and reason are complementary in knowing God, and that our personal experience is defined by an objective reality. But my congregants live with a postmodern worldview. They question Biblical absolutes; they trust their subjective experience more than the objective truths of Evangelical faith. They have more confident in their ability to feel than in their capacity to reason; what they perceive is the only reality that matters. In this incongruous relationship with my congregants, how do I understand the most basic of question – what is a Christian conversion. Of the four congregants mentioned above, how does my understanding of Christian conversion verify their religious experience?

Regardless of our worldviews, my congregants and I have to say that Christian conversion’s domain definition is self-evident Biblically and historically. We have to start here by agreeing epistemologically what is a Christian. Our point of departure is non-negotiable. Otherwise, we have nowhere else to go. A Christian is a someone who has an ontological relationship with Jesus Christ; in this relationship there is a personal cognition of who Jesus is based on what the Christian Bible teaches; this cognitive orientation changes one’s worldview and directs one’s lifestyle.

Having articulated that non-negotiable definition, immediately I have to say that the individual experiences of becoming and being Christian will vary. Conversion comes unevenly from person to person. The dissimilar lives of faith of the three patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the three apostles – Peter, John and Paul, the three Marys – Jesus’ mother, Martha’s sister and Mary Magdalene, and the three reformers – Luther, Swingli and Calvin – show how individualistic is the divine conversion in human experience.

One thing is certain. Doing pastoral work in a postmodern world, we must be emphatic in our definition of what is a Christian but must not be dogmatic in the ways individuals become and being Christian. The differences of our congregants’ spiritual formation are reflected in their personal perception of what is real. Pastoral work is always done in this tension between objective definition and subjective practice.

Albert Borgmann’s Crossing the Postmodern Divide (The University of Chicago Press, 1992) provides some helpful philosophical strategies for pastors to work through this unavoidable tension between definition and practice. Although his book is intended for society’s market place, I like to apply his conclusion to church work. I like to hang on to three approaches as I live with my congregants in a postmodern environment. First, there is Focal Realism. To do pastoral work comfortably well, we must accept realistically what we find. What we see is the only reality we have to work with. Our congregants are real; their experiences are real. We must receive them for who they are without the need to fit them into what we think is true conversion. We have to trust in the power of the gospel to do its conversion work in the social and cultural contexts of our congregants without feeling too defensive. A Stradivarius cello is a magnificently rare. To protect it, we may be tempted to encase it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and reminisce how glorious it once sounded. Or we can invite Pablo Casals and Yo Yo Ma to play Bach’s cello suites with it. Their individual interpretation of Bach will differ but it is still a Stradivarius playing Bach.

Doing pastoral work among postmodern congregants, we should not be protective of how the truths of the gospel will change their lives. As we seek to speak the truth in love, it is the meeting of meanings. The meaning of the gospel will meet their individual meaning. We need to be secured enough to let truth speak for itself in individuals, trusting that the reality of the gospel can only be realized in human experience.

Then there is Patient Vigor. At first glance, patient vigor seems oxymoronic. “Patient” is that virtue that waits enduringly for something to happen. “Vigor” is that burst of proactive energy that gets something done. When combined, patient vigor in pastoral work is powerful. It is like the kind of professional longsuffering that marathon runners endure as they stride resolutely toward the finish line. Somewhere in that 26-mile journey, the long distance runners gain a “second wind” that propels them to finish the race.

Patient vigor enables the pastor to experience a second wind in ministry. Most pastors, including myself, do not have enough hindsight or foresight to respond adequately to the diverse demands of our congregants. In all its limitations and possibilities, pastoral work is doomed to fail many ways. But the vitality of patient vigor rests in the pastoral task of story telling. We do have a story to tell and stories to listen to. The duet task of the the pastoral task is to rehearse the meta-narrative of God and to listen to the petite-narratives of our congregants. In the telling God’s big story of redemption and the hearing our congregants’ individual stories of redemption, we affirm the reality of both in their lives.

Story telling and story listening are acquired skills. Both take patient vigor to do well. A pastor needs to be patient enough and vigorous enough. The longer we are at story telling and listening, the more proficient we will become. Effective pastors are good story tellers and listeners. They enjoy the audacious hope of telling God’s story and listening to my congregants’ stories as they witness the divine merging of both.

Finally, there is Communal Celebration. The idea of community is not uniquely Christian, but I think the Christian church exemplifies the unique quality of community better than anywhere else in this global village. Yet the loudest complaint congregants make to me is their sense of lack of community. Many of them are transplants from somewhere else. Ironically, living with eight million people in the Big Apple is a lonely experience. Although New York has more than 400 neighborhoods, those who live there are necessarily neighbors. We can live in the same apartment building without knowing other tenants down the hall; we can worship in the same church without getting acquainted with those across the aisle.

Cultivating and nourishing community among Christians is probably the most potent means to affirm the reality of the redemptive power of the gospel (John 13.34-35, Acts 2. 42-47). The church, as a community, can consistently verify the reality of Biblical truths to both members and non-members alike. Dallas Willard, the writer, spoke with a group of Seminary educators about the Trinitarian Reality of the Christian community. When the Grand Commission instructs the church to make disciples and baptize them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28. 16-20), implicit is that Christians can only experience the sovereignty of God, the love of Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit with all the saints (Paul’s emphatic phrase in Ephesians 3.16-19). That is, only those in community can enjoy the Trinitarian reality of the gospel.

Over the Summer, my wife and I toured the towns and villages under the Tuscany sun in Italy. These villagers provided a vivid example of community in celebration. Borgmann talks about two communal celebrations. One is ferial. This is the common celebration of communal living. Neighbors in these villages are truly neighbors. They share their work and play, food and friendships, joy and sorrow with one another. The other is festal. This is the special celebration when the community gathers to worship God, marry its sons and daughters, celebrate it’s the births of its children and mourn the deaths of its grandparents. To experience what is real, there is no more important pastoral task than to nourish these community celebrations.

Living with congregants in a postmodern environment is painstaking, and doing pastoral work among them takes pain. Sometimes, speaking the gospel to them, in Paul’s words in another context, seems like speaking into the air. (I Corinthians 14.9) But I know that is not true. What is true is that church work always finds itself wading in the crosscurrents of each generation’s culture. Just as the church wrestled with Modernity after the Enlightenment, it is now grappling with Post Modernity. Who knows what the church will face next. One thing I do know. Changing culture may set the context, but not the agenda, for church ministry. The unyielding agenda of the church has always been to let the gospel answer Morpheus’s question in culture.