Church of God Chaplains Commission

Dale T. Irvin President, New York Theological Seminary

Church of God Chaplain’s Commission Pre-Assembly Conference

July 23, 2006

 

Introduction

I want to begin this morning by thanking you for the honor of being here and addressing you. I especially want to thank Dr. Robert Crick for the invitation to join you for this conference. I first met Dr. Crick in New York City a month after 9/11. He had come to New York to work with the chaplains at Ground Zero. Dr. Steve Land introduced us and we have been working together ever since. I will say more about that collaboration in a moment.

For the sake of full disclosure, I want to tell you up front this morning that although I consider myself a fellow-traveler in the Spirit-filled tradition, I am not a classical Pentecostal. What I have to say comes from one who is a sympathetic observer of what is happening in the Pentecostal movement world-wide, but who is not himself fully located within that movement.

I was born into the Christian and Missionary Alliance family, and am old enough to remember the days when there was considerable discussion (and not a little unease) with the shift from being a “fundamentalist” to being an “evangelical.” Many in the evangelical camp forget those concerns of a generation or two ago. We were also pretty clear back in those days – at least the Christian and Missionary Alliance folks that I remember – that we were definitely not tongues-speaking Pentecostals. My ecumenical journey continued when my father left the Alliance to take an appointment in what became after 1968 the United Methodist Church. I was confirmed in the Methodist Church as a teen-age (without having undergone water baptism – no one asked me about it) and was soon involved in the Charismatic Renewal that swept through the United Methodists during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was thus baptized in the Spirit before being baptized by water.

I became involved with an intentional community project that was a part of what was called “the Jesus Movement” in the early 1970s. It was there that I first came across names or crossed paths with people like Jim Wallis and later Don Dayton. I then went on to seminary in the late 1970s, starting at a Lutheran Seminary where I was convicted of the need to undergo water baptism, which I did in a Lutheran church, passing through Princeton Theological Seminary (the Presbyterians had a shot at me) and ending up at Union Seminary in New York in 1980 where I completed my Ph. D. While at Union I joined Riverside Church. In 1989 I took an appointment at New York Theological Seminary and was asked by the President of the school to be ordained. Riverside is a Baptist Church, and so I hold my ordination to this day in the American Baptist Churches. When pressed to define my location, I am most comfortable placing myself in that stream of Christian tradition that takes seriously the work of the Spirit both in the life of Jesus Christ and in the world today. When asked what label I would place on myself, however I prefer to say nothing more than “Christian.”

Let me talk about my involvement with your Chaplains Commission. Over the past four years at NYTS I have been a part of an extraordinary ecumenical experience. After 9/11 Dr. Crick and Dr. Land proposed that New York Theological Seminary host the Chaplaincy Training program that your Commission has developed. We began doing so in 2003, publicizing the program throughout Church of God congregations in the New York area as well as through the Seminary’s various other networks. Over the past three years we have run 4 week-long training events in New York City, and I have had the opportunity to sit through a number of sessions on different occasions with Dr. Jake Popejoy, Dr. Doc Williams, and others on the training staff of your national Commission.

Over the years I have worked with numerous denominations, church councils, and parachurch organizations. I have served directly in chaplaincy myself in a residential treatment center for children, and in prison. I’ve worked with military chaplaincy, teach in prison ministry, and am quite familiar with the professional standards that inform the field. Your program, your Commission, your people are among the best that I have ever encountered or worked with. You are to be congratulated on what you have accomplished.

New York Theological Seminary does not have any particular denominational identity. Founded in 1901 and known for during our first 65 years as the Biblical Seminary in New York, we were one of the first non-denominational seminaries in the nation. Our covenant is to work with the churches of the city – all of them. Students represent a range of traditions from Episcopal to Pentecostal to Southern Baptist. Of the 500 or so pastors and church leaders who have now completed one of your Chaplaincy Training programs through NYTS, my guess is that less than a third are Church of God, and maybe less than half are even Pentecostal.

I will say it again: Your trainers are extraordinary. Never once have I seen or heard them betray anything of their own Church of God commitments or identity on any number of social and theological issues of concern. At the same time, they have repeatedly shown sensitivity and respect for other traditions and commitments, and have made clear the professional standards that serve as guidelines for chaplains working in a complex inter-faith or secular context. I’ve had an opportunity to see up close your chaplaincy program at work, and I want to say it again that I commend you as a fellowship of churches for what you have accomplished in this ministry. It reflects well not only on your trainers, on the entire Church of God Chaplaincy Commission and on every chaplain that you have certified nationally and internationally through your Commission, but on the entire fellowship of the Church of God that is gathering now for this General Assembly.

It is against this background that I want to speak with you this morning. I want to talk about the unique opportunity that is before not just the Church of God fellowship today, and not just Pentecostal or evangelical churches in the US, but before us all in world Christianity. And I want to lift up the role of the chaplain in particular as a critical agent working in this complex and exciting situation. I am a missiologist both by training and by commitment. I believe that Chaplains – and from what I have seen of your national Commission, I would say Church of God Chaplains especially – better than any other ministry in the church today (including the professional “missionaries”) embody that distinctive mark of apostolicity that constitutes the missional identity of the church.

The apostles where those who had known Jesus most intimately, or in Paul’s case, ones to whom Jesus had made a special personal post-resurrection appearance. The apostles thus remain the most immediate or direct witnesses to the life, teachings, healings, and death and resurrection of our Lord. This makes their writings not only authoritative but definitive for the life, for the very identity of the church, which is that body of believers who seek to follow Christ in close communion with him through the Spirit. Apostolic thus means being true to the original.

The apostles were not only the formative theologians of Christian life and identity, however. They were also missionaries sent out by Christ through the power of the Spirit, commissioned to go into all the world, starting from Jerusalem and seeking to reach the ends of the earth as they knew it. Those first apostles crossed boundaries of language, culture, empire and continent to spread the news of Christian faith and call people into a new form of faithful living in community. The apostolic office was thus not only the essential link or connection to the original message and person of Jesus. It was also essentially a missionary office, taking the church into new places and giving Christian life and faith new expression through mission. The term “apostle” in fact means one who is sent, as on a mission. Its counterpart in Latin is “missio,” a sending. The apostolic office gives the church its fundamental missional identity.

Here then is the ironic reality. “Apostolic” actually means two things that are, if not opposites, at least in tension with one another. On the one hand “apostolic” means remaining true to the ancient tradition and witness, keeping things the same. On the other it also means crossing cultural and historical boundaries, taking the faith into new situations. In such new situations the faith must always be translated, which means it must become something different. On the one hand “apostolic” denotes historical continuity with tradition, and on the other it denotes contextual adaptation, change, and outright difference.

It is the latter characteristic that I am going to be suggesting is most important for chaplains in the global Christian context to be aware of today. The task of the chaplain is to minister to people outside the walls of the church, whether or not they be members of ones own congregation, denomination or tradition. In ministering outside the gates, the chaplain is representing the church outside itself, beyond its own borders or frontiers. But in doing so the chaplain must translate the message into the context, the reality, in which he or she is working. Often this means changing things. It means changing things not only in the way that the faith is expressed or actually practiced in the world outside the gates of the church. It means changing things in the way faith is expressed or actually practiced “back home” in the church. Chaplains are not just missionaries to the world outside the gates. In ministering effectively to the world outside the gate they in effect become missionaries to the churches that live within the gates, for if this entire church does not adapt and change effectively to the new context or situation, it will not grow beyond its own narrow horizons and will eventually die.

This is why in my view chaplains are worthy inheritors of that long tradition of itinerant missionaries who were also always reformers, stretching back to Francis of Assisi, Martin of Tours, Gregory the Wonder Worker and beyond. Chaplains are not only missionaries to the world outside the gate, they are missionaries to the church that lives within the gates, prophetic figures calling the church to renewal precisely by calling it out into ministry in the world. Chaplains are always thus in some way reformers of the church. May I add that most of those reformers who practiced itinerancy and worked outside the gates in ministry and mission were also mendicants, which is to say they were poor. I don’t need to tell any one of you, I am sure, that chaplaincy is not a way to get rich. In one sense being called as a chaplain is also being called to evangelical poverty.

From the pages of the New Testament the apostolic practice of crossing borders, ministering outside the gate, and being a representative of the faith in new situations, served to challenge the settled and more established modes of ministry and church life of its day. Movements of reform and renewal have often rediscovered the connection between their mission and identity, and have often launched missionary movements even among the already baptized. The church is always apostolic to the extent that it participates in the original mission that Jesus entrusted to the original disciples, and this mission always took the church beyond itself in ministry.[1]

We are living today in a period unlike any other in world history, and in the history of World Christianity. In this situation the apostolic character of your ministry as chaplains becomes more pronounced. We are definitely at the end of something in World Christianity. Those who continue to hone the sharp, eschatological edge that so characterized the early days of the Pentecostal movement have no difficulty interpreting events that are taking place as signs of the “last days.” But this means that we are also in the beginning stages of a new era, and a new collective experience of Christian life. Those of you who are chaplains may well be best positioned to help the rest of us in the existing churches see what is happening, and may well be best positioned in the world to help midwife the new church that is emerging in the power of the Spirit in our own day.

It is not unlike what those Pentecostal fore-bearers a century ago experienced and perceived to be their own new era, as they understood the rise of the new global Pentecostal movement of which they were a part to be. Indeed, I think in many ways the global Pentecostal movement that has arisen over the last century is an expression and even the leading edge of this new era in world Christianity. Early Pentecostals knew that they were on the edge of something tremendous, something huge. They might not have always been able to articulate exactly what that meant, but they knew that the very foundations were shaking and the world was about to take a decisive turn.

This morning I want to lay out a bit what I see going on in world Christianity today. I want to talk a bit about why I think the categories that are being used by some to interpret the situation are fundamentally wrong. They are wrong because they continue to interpret the new situation over against a set of questions or conditions that are the product of the dominant global Christian reality of the last 250 years or so, and it is precisely this dominant order that is now shifting. I am going to suggest that something fundamental has shifted regarding how we ought to understand Christian faith in the world, and that it has to do with the end of Christendom. In this new context something authentic to Christian identity that was found in the first several centuries of the Christian movement – before the emperor Constantine converted and before he and his successors made Christianity the official religion of an empire – is being rediscovered.

What is being rediscovered, I will argue, is the missional nature of the church. But I also want to suggest that a missional church finds its fundamental identity not within itself, but beyond itself. I will then suggest that the ramifications of this for Christian spirituality for any church in the world today are enormous. I will explore this aspect of Christianity engaging spiritualities beyond itself in the world in some depth as I think it is the heart of what you want to hear from me about chaplains living and working in the world today. I will suggest that chaplains are in fact primary agents and bearers of this missional identity, and in effect represent the growing edge of the church that finds its life outside itself. I will conclude with some observations about what this means for chaplaincy as well as for the church as a whole, be it the local congregation that is sending out a chaplain or a missionary, the fellowship of churches that you call the Church of God, and the church universal as it now exists on earth.

This then will be the structure of our conversation during the rest of the morning: 1) the situation of world Christianity at the beginning of the 21^st century; 2) the correlating shift to a much stronger missional identity; 3) implications for engaging world spiritualities; and 4) the role of chaplains as agents along the growing edge of world Christianity at the beginning of the 21^st century.

The new situation

In 1900 approximately 70% of the world’s Christians were located in Europe and North America, meaning 30% of the world’s Christians were in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Today more Europe and North America count for less than 40% of the world’s Christians, while 60% live in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Europe, which for some five hundred years dominated world Christianity, is now arguably the least-Christianized continent on earth. There are now ten times more Anglicans in Nigeria than in the US. There are more evangelicals in Asia than there are in North America. Here in your own Church of God, you list fewer than 1 million members in North America and more than 5 million members in the rest of the world.

How did we get to this situation? The quick answer is the modern missionary movement. Five hundred years ago Christianity was little more than a regional religion uniting the patchwork of societies that inhabited the geographical continent of Europe. In other regions of the world where Christianity had once been a major force, in North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Persia, churches had by the year 1500 become reduced to a remnant, living as subjugated minorities hemmed in by the laws of dhimmi (“protected minority”) under Islam, or had ceased to exist altogether. In Asia Minor a patriarch still sat on the ecumenical throne in what was once Constantinople (now the city of Istanbul), but the ancient Byzantine empire had effectively come to an end. Further to the east a once-promising expansion of churches into Central Asia and China had sputtered to an end several centuries earlier. A small but significant Christian community numbering in the tens of thousands could still be found in the south of India. Although relatively isolated from the rest of world Christianity and integrated into their surrounding Indian culture as a distinctive caste, they maintained a strong Christian identity that reached back through memory and tradition to St. Thomas, the Apostle to the East. In Africa, only the ancient Christian kingdom of Ethiopia remained as a place where Christians exercised meaningful control over the life of their churches.

The process of bringing the entire European continent under political and cultural rule of Christendom had only recently been completed at the dwn of the modern era 500 years ago.[2] The last non-Christian tribes on the northwestern frontier were only converted on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, while the last Islamic kingdom in Spain was defeated the year Columbus set sail for the Indies. Internally within Europe the integrated religious-cultural formation called Christendom that had been under construction for almost a thousand years was beginning to break apart under the weight of a number of factors, not least of them the emergence of a new political entity that became the modern nation state.

Externally these emerging European nation states began launching out on commercial voyages of discovery and conquest into other parts of the world. Their military forces took with them Christian chaplains whose first priorities were to serve the spiritual needs of the sailors, merchants, soldiers, and colonists, but who quickly began reaching out beyond their European walls to evangelize those with whom they were coming into contact. To the Jesuits goes the credit for having first clearly conceptualized this connection between chaplaincy to mission, giving rise to a new agent of foreign affairs called a “missionary.”[3]

Christianity in its diverse western cultural forms quickly spread, first through Roman Catholic and then through various Protestant or Evangelical mission efforts. The concept of a mission as an extension of the church within Christendom took root, having the negative effect in part of eventually separating church from mission. The modern missionary movement nevertheless accelerated through the nineteenth century to epic proportions, bringing agents of various forms of Western Christianity to virtually every corner of the world.

The great truth of world Christianity over the last five hundred years is that this mission was successful.[4] Here is a critical observation. Virtually every western church history and theology textbook written in the past century – evangelical, ecumenical, liberal or conservative – has assumed that the European Enlightenment was the most important event in the life of the churches over the past several centuries. I think this is a fundamental mistake. Looking at things from the perspective of world Christianity today, it is not the Enlightenment but the missionary movement that has been the most important force reshaping Christian faith and practice.

I don’t think it is insignificant that the majority of Christians in the world now live in regions of the world that until recently most western churches considered “mission lands.” But numbers alone do not define the situation. I do think that the most compelling questions that Christianity is now facing and will face in the immediate future are those that are raised in situations beyond the intellectual space that has been occupied by the modern West. This is why I think so much of contemporary US theology (evangelical and liberal) is taking a mistaken pathway. Far too much time is being devoted to answering questions posed by secularism and the modern western Enlightenment. We are living in a post-modern world where the Enlightenment is not the dominant intellectual force. We need to be attending to the real questions our churches are facing in the world in which they exist today – and these are often questions more about competing religious world-views and spiritualities than they are questions about secularism and the challenge of modern non-belief.

Let me give several examples, again from the context of world Christianity. In Asia today, Christianity represents overall around 3% of the total population. Yet Asia as a whole remains very religious. Christians there are living in a spiritually crowded universe. They must negotiate and navigate their way every day through complex conditions of interfaith dialogue and living. Even in China, which is officially at least an atheistic nation, Christians are not living in a spiritual vacuum. The Chinese people and Chinese culture are extremely spiritual. Local gods and what is often called “folk religion” in the West are showing increased growth and resiliency. Alongside this one encounters the traditional Chinese spiritual values of Confucianism, which has over the centuries shown a remarkable ability to achieve a synthesis with Christian spirituality. Confucianism I think is best understood as a spiritual, cultural and political philosophy that achieved dominance in China and then grew to occupy the ranks of a religion. Buddhism in China is equally a force in China today. Christians must deal with both at a deep level of engagement in East Asia.

In India Christians may be approaching 5% of the total population, but this means 95% of the population belongs to another religious tradition. Hinduism and Islam are much stronger social and cultural forces in India, and over the past century have often grown in strength precisely in response to Christian growth. I was in Malaysia in the summer of 2004 to attend the general congress of the International Association of Mission Studies. We visited the International Islamic University one afternoon during the conference, and met with some of the faculty members who taught Islamic educational theory and practice. One of our members asked what they used to teach dawa, the Islamic counterpart to evangelism. We where told that they were busy studying Christian textbooks and adopting Christian methods, which they were finding to be quite effective. Some of our members went to the main offices of the national Buddhist association, where they heard children in religious classes singing “Buddha loves me, this I know / for the scriptures tell me so.” The leaders of the national Buddhism relief organization reported their new slogan was “the first ones in and the last ones out,” which they had borrowed from a Christian relief organization. What we saw were Muslims and Buddhists adapting Christian evangelistic techniques and using them to strengthen Islamic or Buddhist spiritual communities.

In Korea Christian numbers approach 25% in and around Seoul, but to the south they still only represent 10% of the population – and in North Korea Christian churches are virtually non-existent. The strength and vitality of Korean Christianity especially as a global missionary force may well be concealing from view its own leveling off and even declining influence in its homeland of South Korea in the near future, as other religions – especially Buddhism – show increased strength.

Let me give an example of how new questions are emerging for churches in these regions. In Africa and Latin America the spiritual forces of the demonic are on the church’s radar screen far more than they are in North America or Western Europe. One of the reasons – although certainly not the only reason – that Pentecostalism has grown so rapidly over the past quarter-century in Africa and Latin America is because Pentecostal churches take seriously the presence and the challenges of the demonic. I have met numerous Pentecostal pastors from Latin America and Africa who wonder why we in North American do not take demon possession as seriously as they do. Performing exorcisms is one of the most common and important pastoral practices that they pursue. I have several times been asked why we don’t offer courses on exorcisms in our seminaries in the US. I am not suggesting that the Church of God Theological Seminary or NYTS begin offering such courses. I don’t know if we ever will. But for the pastors serving in the world outside the West today, these are real spiritualities that challenge them and us.

And just in case you haven’t noticed, let me point out that these are not just challenges in Asia, Africa and Latin America today. They are also challenges right here in the US. Religious pluralism and diverse spiritualities are now part of our context as well now. There are Hindu temples and Islamic mosques along the interstate highway in Tennessee, not just in New York City and Los Angeles. Pentecostals may well be the new “mainstream” in American Protestantism, but this means they are now being invited to sit on the podium at civic functions alongside the local Rabbi and Imam, and invited to say prayers that are received in an interfaith or multifaith context. Those of you who are serving as chaplains in the US military or in hospitals are encountering this multfaith context constantly now. I think you are the front wave of what is a much larger change coming to the US.

A stronger missional identity

One of the most significant developments that I see taking place in response to this new world Christian reality is the strengthening overall of what I will call the missional identity of the church. One sees this in Roman Catholic churches in Asia, where the bishops are very much aware of the realities of living as a minority religious community in an often-hostile context. Mission means much more than evangelism for them, although it does not mean less than that. Mission means evangelism, or sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, but it also means dialogue, service, and more. Christians need not abandon their belief that Jesus Christ is the primary or even exclusive way of salvation in order to listen and learn from other religious and spiritual traditions, to participate with them in working for justice and the common good, or in serving their neighbors who are outside the church.

The thinking that arose in the 16^th century in the West, and came to dominate world Christianity for several centuries divided the world into that portion that was part of a complex political-cultural entity called “Christendom,” and that part which was not. By the 19^th century this way of thinking had come to be signaled by the divide of the world into “Christian lands” and “mission lands.” Even some early Pentecostals got caught up in this way of thinking about the world, although I believe much that Pentecostalism embodied implicitly resisted it. The paradigm was much more pronounced among the more traditional Protestant denominations, and Roman Catholics.

According to this paradigm, “church” and “mission” were distinguishable and even dichotomized entities. The church was located in western lands, missions in the rest of the world east and south. Missions thus became the foreign affairs department of western churches. As Keith Birdston pointed out half a century ago, you had to cross salt water in order to be a missionary. The church sent out missions, which remained under the long-term control of church. When you talked about the church, you were generally referring to things that were central to the life of the faith, whereas when you talked about mission, you were talking about things that were peripheral, on the periphery or margins of the church. The forms of Christianity that were found within boundaries of Christendom, at the center, constituted “church,” while the forms of Christianity that were found outside the borders of Christendom, on the periphery, constituted “mission.”

The line, the border between these two was so well constructed in world Christianity by the 20^th century that long after Christendom in all of its political and cultural forms is over we still think in terms of the West and the Rest when it comes to world Christianity. People of European cultural descent come to Christianity through the church, while the rest of the world comes to Christianity in a form called “the mission.” In most of the theological schools of this nation, when you talk about “theology” you are talking about church ideas – be they liberal or conservative, ecumenical or evangelical – that people of European descent produce. Otherwise you add a localizing word in front: “African theology,” “Black theology,” giving it the flavor of mission.

You can see this structure in place in the way that baptism was conceptualized all the way through the late 20^th century in many western nations, even in the US. Pastors regularly baptized the children of any family in their town or parish, whether or not the ever saw the parents in church. Missionaries from the same denomination would never think of doing the same in Asia or Africa, and if they were Protestants, in Latin America. Again Pentecostals already registered early in the 20^th century their dissent from this kind of territorial understanding of Christendom and the church, giving baptism a much more heightened meaning through its identification with the Spirit but in the course of doing so blurring the line much more intentionally between mission and church.

I think that line ought to be blurred, to the point where it becomes impossible to think and talk about “the church” without thinking and talking about “mission.” “Mission work does not arise from any arrogance in the Christian Church; mission is its cause and its life” wrote Emile Brunner in 1931. “The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission, there is no Church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith.” For Brunner it was secondary whether we meant calling and sending individuals to preach the Gospel in foreign countries, or calling and sending them to preach in a local congregation on Sunday morning. “Mission … is the spreading out of the fire which Christ has thrown upon the earth.” Mission is not something that that church does. Mission is something that the church is.[5]

Pentecostals forged the way in the 20^th century in helping all of us in world Christianity rediscover this fundamental missional identity of the church. The church is not just a communion, a fellowship. It is both a communion and a mission. Mission is not what the church does. It is what the church is. Mission constitutes the very identity of the church. It is what it means to be “apostolic” in the New Testament sense. “Apostolic” means “sent.” An apostle was one who was sent to spread the Word in places where it had not yet been heard, or had not yet been adequately or completely heard – and this means all places here on earth to this day, for none of us can be said to have yet heard the word adequately and completely.

This means that the life and identity of any church lies ultimately outside of itself. The church is not the final goal of history. The Kingdom of God is. The church might be an agent of the Kingdom and even a harbinger of the Kingdom, but it is not going to turn into the Kingdom. This was the great mistake of liberal theology in the modern era, for it saw the church becoming the kingdom and located the kingdom in immanent terms as an outgrowth of our churchly efforts. Like John the Baptist, however, the church in a sense must ultimately decrease precisely in order that the Kingdom of the one who sent the church may ultimately increase. The church cannot be centered in itself. The church must find its center outside itself, in mission to God in the world into which God sends it over and over in history

This does not mean that the world outside the church is going to turn into the Kingdom of God any more than the church itself. There may well be significant elements or aspects of the Kingdom to be found outside the church in a preliminary or prefigurative way. This means that Chaplains who go outside the gates should expect to encounter elements or aspects of the Kingdom that need to be brought to the church as a whole to renew it. The chaplain does not minister only to his or her “own kind.” The chaplain ministers to those who are different – maybe not even Christian – precisely because she or he is a missionary on behalf of God, not a particular church.

Let me raise here a concern that I think affects all of us who align ourselves within what is being called “evangelicalism” today in North America. I know that the question of how we should understand the relationship of Pentecostalism to evangelicalism in the US in the 20^th century is still a debated subject, but for practical purposes most Pentecostals I know tend to identify themselves somewhat at least with what is generally called “evangelicalism” here in the US.

I want to raise a serious challenge about the total accommodation of so many US evangelicals to the middle-class consumer culture that now dominants this nation. Fran Pratt, Director of the Eastern Regional Office of the US Center for World Mission, which is no liberal organization, has just published an article in Ralph Winter’s journal Mission Frontiers. The article is titled “What DNA Are We (Really) Reproducing?” Reflecting on the work that he sees going on around the world in church-planting, he writes:

Our analysis has concluded that Jesus is not the spiritual father of our Evangelical culture. Our Evangelical world is more about our peculiar cultural values and what we like and dislike rather than a reflection of Jesus. If we take a hard, objective look at the Gospels, we will see a great deal of similarity between our Evangelical values and the values of the Pharisees rather than the values of Jesus.

Reflecting on his recent experience with a number of church-plant efforts, Pratt writes, “[E]vangelicals have such a dominant consumer orientation to ‘church’ that they quickly default to a focus on their needs and their family’s needs before the church does anything else.” He concludes:

Our [cultural] blindness will make it very easy for us to go from culture to culture in our world, planting churches that we think are representative of Paul’s apostolic ministry in the New Testament, when in reality our church-planting principles are a manifestation of our own culture and are not gospel to anyone but us.[6]

Let me be blunt here: nowhere in the pages of the New Testament do I find any hint of a suggestion that Jesus or his first Apostles had any expectation that the faith they were articulating – Christian faith – would ever be or become a dominant cultural religion. If we were to find it anywhere, we should expect to find it in Paul, who was the only Apostle we know of to expressly hold Roman citizenship, and apparently was even able to take some pride in it. Paul tells us repeatedly that he would like to go and ultimately preach before the Emperor himself. But there is no hint of an expectation that the Emperor will convert. No, Paul expects to suffer for his faith, to suffer persecution and ultimately even death, because this is what Christ suffered at the hands of the imperial powers of Rome.

I think we need not only in the evangelical churches but Pentecostal churches as well need not only to recover the defining nature of mission in their lives. They – we – must also recover a New Testament definition of mission as witness – marturion. In the New Testament mission and witness are intrinsically bound up with suffering even unto death. Jesus did not say ride to church in your comfortable chariot, or your air-conditioned SUV. He said pick up your cross and come, follow me.

The success of Christianity in its first several centuries throughout the world was not due to the strength of its advance planning teams, nor to any cleverly devised ad campaign. The single most important element in the life and work of the early church, the single factor most responsible for attracting and bringing new members into the Christian family, was the courage shown by the martyrs as they were persecuted and suffered the ultimate penalty of death for their faith.

Christianity was and still is a religion of the martyrs. When explicit persecution and martyrdoms ceased, Christianity continued to grow and reach beyond the cultural boundaries of its particular communities of faith only through an act of self-giving, of self-denial, rejecting self-centeredness in order to find life outside the boundaries of its own identity. We call such activity discipline, self-denial or asceticism. This is the foundational and guiding principle of monasticism. But before anyone jumps too quickly to reject monastic discipline and the ascetic impulse that guides it, let me point out that a degree of ascetic discipline is fundamental to all of Christian life and mission. Marriage is a form of asceticism. To take on the discipline of having only one partner and remaining faithful to that person is to discipline one’s life, to embrace a degree of asceticism. Not drinking, smoking, and eating too much are likewise ascetic practices. Holiness and asceticism are closely related in Christian life and practice.

I want to extend this insight, with a bit of help from Christian history, and suggest that the further you go in ministry and mission, the greater the degree of ascetic discipline you must practice. I think that everyone who has ever served as a pastor knows that the greater one’s pastoral responsibilities become, the greater the degree of spiritual discipline and self-denial one must embrace. But the further you go from your own home base, your own home location, the greater, the more urgent this principle becomes.

Chaplains know well that they are vulnerable on any number of fronts on spiritual, emotional and practical terms, and that the more vulnerable they become, the more they must embody and take on spiritual disciplines and practices that can be characterized as modes of asceticism. Another way of saying this is that the further you go from your primary community of accountability, the more you must build in accountability as an internal, spiritual discipline, through various forms of ascetic practice. Conversely the greater the ascetic discipline, the further one can go in missions. This is the great insight from the monastics of the ancient church – men and women who traveled literally to the ends of the earth to preach the Gospel precisely because they had taken vows of total poverty, chastity and obedience to Christ.

I want to get this principle in place before we turn to the question of engaging world spiritualities. It is an extension of the principle of embracing cultures, but heightened due to the heightened degree of what is at stake when it comes to spirituality and religion. Every cross-cultural missionary must learn first to distance him or herself from his or her own native culture, precisely in order to embrace the other, who is different. But a total embrace of the other is equally disastrous for ministry, mission and the life of the church, for the total embrace of a new culture is just as much a form of idolatry as the total embrace of one’s own native or familiar culture. The answer to the problem of American Evangelicalism’s total embrace of US middle-class consumer culture is not the total embrace of another culture. No amount of contextualization of the Gospel can hide the fact that total enculturation is as much a form of idolatry as the total lack of enculturation.

This principle gets heightened when we turn to world spiritualities. The missionary or chaplain who is not ready to practice an ascetic discipline, who has not embodied deeply the principles of self-denial and restraint. One should not, one must not feast on everything that is set before us at the banquet table of world spiritualities. There must be a moment of fasting that accompanies our feasting at this table, a moment that is critical for discernment or what the New Testament calls “testing every spirit.” I want to be sure that this principle is firmly in place before we head off further into our discussion of Pentecostalism among world spiritualities today. The pastor, missionary or chaplain who has not done so may well find her or himself tempted to try anything, feeling compelled to embrace everything, and in the end incapable of rejecting nothing.

Engaging world spiritualities[7]

In the ancient city of Hierapolis, in north-eastern Syria, stood a temple dedicated to Atargatis, the Syrian Mother God who was half-woman and half-fish. Inside the courtyard of the temple were two wooden columns. Twice a year a man would climb these like a palm tree, hoisting up wood and clothing to remain up on top for as many as seven days to pray to Atargatis.

It is against this practice in the region of Syria that we encounter an early Christian saint named Simeon the Stylite. Simeon was converted at an early age and entered a monastery to pursue a life of spiritual discipline. He soon left the monastery to pursue a life of solitary prayer as a hermit. He found that people would seek him out while he was in prayer just to touch him, however, so holy had his reputation become. And so around 420 Simeon climbed up on his first pillar (or stylos in Greek), to literally get above his admirers. He followed this by building a series of ever higher pillars, the final one about 20 meters or 60 feet high, and 2 meters or 6 feet across, which he climbed up and lived upon for the next 36 years, spending his days and most of each night in prayer and meditation. He ate little food, which was passed up to him by rope from his admirers on the ground. He took care of his bodily needs the same way. He wore only a leather garment and his hair and beard for protection. A smaller pole was fastened to the top of the stylos so he could tie himself down in a storm, and lean against each night when he would sleep for a short time. His exercise was bowing down in prayer. During the days people would come from as far as England, France and Persia to listen to him preach, have him pray for them, settle their disputes, and more. Others followed his lead and through the next several centuries living on top of a pillar, or stylos, became a rather common Christian practice in Syria and other countries in the East.

Simon the Stylite remains an extremely important figure in the life of the eastern churches, for his contributions to theology but even more important for the manner in which he embodied spirituality. Those of you who have encountered him in your seminary classes and church history text books know that in the West, and especially in the modern West, people do not know what to do with this spirituality. In our western church history texts Simeon the Stylite is usually presented as a case of Christian spirituality gone too far, being too extreme. Few in the East thought so or think so to this day, however. Instead Simeon is regarded as an icon, a reminder, of Christ’s own extreme self-sacrifice.

I simply want to point out to you this morning that his practice of climbing a pillar and staying on top for an extended period of time was not out of place in the region of Syria, where such behavior was already recognized as a legitimate way to pray to or honor a deity. Simeon and the other Stylites who followed him, it seems to me, took an indigenous or pre-Christian spiritual form and magnified it, even if excessively so.

I could go on and on with stories such as this from church history of a deep encounter between Christianity and other spiritual traditions or forms. In the 7^th century such an encounter took place between a group of monks sent by Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome, and the Anglo-Saxon peoples in what is now England. Gregory instructed them not to destroy the local religious shrines, but remove the idols found there and replace them with symbols of Christian faith, thereby baptizing Christian faith into the spiritual world of the Anglo-Saxon people in order to being the Anglo-Saxons to Christian baptism. Later among the Saxons in Germany missionaries looking for a way to translate the to translate the Greek word euangelian and the Latin word evangelium – “good news” – decided to put it into a Saxon spiritual frame of reference. Jesus was a powerful wizard who could work wondrous spells with his words. Hence what he brought was “Gods-spell” – the modern English word “Gospel.” The result of all this spiritual adaptation was one of the most successful, if syncretistic, forms of Christian faith ever known in history – what we call Western Christianity today.

What these episodes from the Christian past show – and we could produce numerous others – is that Christianity has always been borrowing from the spiritual world around it as it moves into new places and spiritual locations. Christianity, unlike most other religions we have seen on the face of the earth, actually lives by being translated into new situations, crossing enormous physical and cultural borders throughout the course of its 2000 years of history. This is not something that gets added on to Christian faith and practice. Christian faith is intrinsically and inherently incarnational. Its single most important teaching points to an event of translation that Christians claim defines the very nature of God: the Incarnation, in which God made the translation of himself across eternity to take on flesh, and language, and culture, and through the power of the Spirit to enter history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Word made flesh.

This act of translation did not stop with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It continued in an important sense in the manner in which the essential teachings about the life of Jesus were written down. Lamin Sanneh in his book Translating the Message argues that it is quite significant that these scriptures were not written in the language that Jesus himself spoke. The Christian scriptures are the only ones among the world religions that we have that were not written in the language that the founding figure himself spoke. Moses spoke Hebrew, the language of the Torah. The original Buddhist scriptures are written in Pali, the language the Buddha spoke. The Analects of Confucius are written in classical Chinese, the language of Confucius. But while Jesus spoke Aramaic, the New Testament was written in Greek, thereby giving rise to the very basic principle that Christianity lives through translation.

Another way of saying this is that Christianity lives by crossing borders, by building community across borders. Christian faith is found in the interstices – the places in-between cultures and peoples and identities. In this way it is always becoming new, embracing new forms, giving rise to new hybrid expressions. It must also remain the same, of course, as well. It must remain continuous with its own past, with the apostolic witness and identity. Here we can see most clearly the creative, dynamic tension in which the Spirit of the living God always calls us to live as people of faith, as Christians, in this world. Christians are called to embrace the new without losing the old. They always must live with the tension between remaining faithful to the apostolic faith and order, while being open to the new thing that God is calling us to embrace in the world around us, far from our apostolic origins.

Christianity lives at the margins, and is always crossing borders. It becomes new not just by introducing the new into history – God’s new thing, God’s new creation, which is simultaneously inaugurated and summed up for us in the event of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. It becomes new by embracing forms and spiritual realities already in place, already found in the world into which we are sent. Christian faith engages other spiritualities in order to redeem them, by translating into their own idiom the Good News. We translate Christian faith into new contexts precisely in order to translate the spiritualities we find there into effective vehicles for God’s grace.

Sanneh points out that this is what has happened over and over as Christianity moves into new places on the face of the earth. In Africa, he says, Christian missionaries repeatedly and consistently went into villages and regions and asked the simple question, what name is used for the highest divinity in this place. They then used the indigenous name to translate the name of the one who is called “God” in English (originally a generic Germanic term), or “theos in the Greek New Testament. This is a practice in sharp contrast to Islam, Sanneh points out, where no matter what ones language or culture might be, one can only address God using the Arabic term, Allah. But Christians translated the name of God, using indigenous names and terminology.

The effect upon the new hearers of the Christian message was a not-so-subtle embrace and affirmation of their own indigenous spirituality and culture. Sanneh says as an African you understood from these white people from England that they were worshipping Olodumare in England. More important, you were invited to continue to embrace the spiritual tradition and culture of your own people even while you were invited to embrace a new understanding of this God through the person of Jesus, and to embrace a new form of communion with these white people who were missionaries.

It is that communion, that sense of belonging to something beyond our own immediate borders, that the ancient church called “catholicity.” Like it or not, we belong to a family, a community of faith that is greater than our own local church, greater than our own denomination, greater even than our own particular tradition, such as “Protestant” or “Pentecostal.” We don’t agree on all of the particulars of our churches’ various teachings, but there is something of an overarching working consensus, what theologians sometimes call a “theological consensus” or the “consensus of faith” that more or less allows us to discern a coherent shape for Christian belief. This does not rule out possibilities for disagreements and disputes, but on the contrary, provides a framework in which such discussions can effectively take place.

As much as we might favor the right of individuals to interpret scriptures for themselves, what has historically been termed “soul liberty” in the reading and interpretation of Word, we must also recognize that the community as a whole has the task and even the responsibility to listen intently for the voice of the Spirit, guiding it forward in its collective interpretation of the Word. In this regard it is the task of the church as a whole, working together, to listen and discern what is acceptable and unacceptable regarding interpretations of Scripture and the faith.

This consensus is never an exact consensus, never entirely clear around its edges. It is an on-going dialogue, a conversation. And it changes over time. The consensus of the faithful is never entirely fixed in stone. It was once the consensus of the churches that women could not exercise pastoral leadership, for instance. Over the last several centuries there has been a growing challenge to this, not least of all from among Pentecostals. Until a hundred years or so it can be said that it was the overwhelming consensus of the faithful world wide that the gift of tongues had ceased with the closing of the apostolic age. Only here and there through the centuries, often on the edges or margins of the church, can you find people teaching and practicing the gift of speaking in tongues. Then suddenly Pentecostalism burst upon the global scene and we now have a very large portion of world Christianity – as many as one-third of all who call themselves Christian on the face of the earth today – not only accepting the gift of tongues as being legitimate, but practicing the gift, to the benefit of the church and to their own spiritual lives.

Within the Pentecostal tradition over the past century one sees a variety of teachings and behaviors or practices that have been the subject of controversy and disputation. The church as a whole has wrestled with what to make of many of these: writing in tongues, snake handling, purging at the altar, holy laughter or “the Toronto Blessing.” This is a sign not of weakness in the Pentecostal movement, but of health. A flourishing and rapidly growing global movement has not only given rise to dozens and dozens of new expressions and practices, but to the critical process of testing and discerning the spirits to determine which are authentic and which are not.

Let me suggest that as Church of God chaplains, you are called upon to engage in such discernment much more frequently than many of your peers in ministry who are working safely within the walls of their particular congregations and communities of faith. For many of you these questions are more than interesting topics of conversation talking place around a coffee table after an evening Bible study. You are not just reading in Christianity Today about all this stuff going on spiritually in the wider world. You are living in the midst of it. And this is why I think you need to have within you, formed clearly, not just the discipline I talked about early – that ascetic discipline, that discipline of a monk or nun who is capable of walking through the market-place of world spiritualities and not be tempted to try to taste of everything that is being offered. I think you also need to have formed within you a strong theological identity – a coherent dogmatic framework, if you well, or what Tertullian and others in the ancient church called a rule of faith, to serve as guiding principles, anchors of belief, roads that lead you clearly back to the original apostolic witness and practice.

Fanny Cosby wrote about this more than a hundred years ago:

Jesus, keep me near the cross, There a precious fountain Free to all, a healing stream Flows from Calvary’s mountain.

In short, the further you venture to the edges of the earth, the closer you need to be to the cross.

Chaplains as agents at the edge

I have talked several times now about chaplains being on the edge, the margins, the frontiers. I want to finish this morning by lifting up this metaphor or image more explicitly. Take a good look at the Bible, and you will see that God is always working in history not from the center of things, but from the edges. God always works upon the world from the outside in. It is the outsiders who are the ones God chooses to work through to change things in the world. Biblically speaking, God always works from the outside in, from the margins of history to transform the center.

No one exemplified this better in the Bible than Jesus himself. Jesus lived and worked primarily among the marginalized of his day. He sought to change the scribes and Pharisees, but he did so by bringing the message that God was not pleased with their piety. God was instead listening to the poor sinners. Whether it be healing the 10 lepers, siding with the woman taken in adultery, or telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus always went to the margins of society. From the perspective of the margins he criticized those who occupied the center, seeking to change them.

This in the end is what got him killed. The crucifixion was an act by which the leaders of the society of his day sought to marginal Jesus in an ultimate way. They were seeking to silence him by consigning him to the utter margins of history. But God raised him up through the power of the Spirit. The ultimate power of God in the form of the Resurrection, the first act of God’s new creation, was an act of transformation happening from the margins. This is why the book of Hebrews reminds us that Jesus suffered outside the city gate, so let us go outside the camp to be with him. As Kosuke Koyama likes to say, Jesus was a peripheral person who went to the utter peripheries of history. Therefore we must go to the periphery to meet him there.

Here is a profound observation about the nature of Christian faith. Christianity lives from the margins of history, the periphery, from which it changes the center. No one is better positioned to see this than those of you who are chaplains. You chaplains are people who live on the edge, outside the gates of the city, beyond the centers of church life and Christendom. You are edgy people. But this means you are not only better positioned to see Christ, who has gone to the utter peripheries of history and is calling us to join us there. You are also better positioned to be agents of God’s new history, God’s new creation. If God is always working from the margins to transform the centers of society and the world, then those of you who live and minister on the margins are not only the first warning system of God’s new order, but are special agents who are especially-well positioned to be participating in what God is doing that is new in history.

You can only do so effectively if you are keeping a life of spiritual discipline, especially those ascetic disciplines that embrace renunciation and restraint. You can only do so if you are equally capable of authentically embracing the cultures and communities among whom you are called to minister, for such an embrace is necessary to be able to translate the message into new contexts and situations. You must be engaging the various spiritualities that you encounter in the world in some positive manner precisely in order to bring them, and their primary adherents, into communion with the Triune God. You will find that this takes you to the edges of history. Know that the God who is Lord of all history has gone there ahead of you, journeys will you, and will meet you there to bring you home to the Kingdom of God.

God bless you.

Endnotes