THE NEW MINISTRY: BRINGING GOD BACK TO LIFE
DECEMBER is the darkest month. The sun is lowest in the sky. The nights are longest. Yet in its midst--perhaps in their hunger for warmth and light in the nadir of seasons--believers of the Western world have immemorially celebrated hope. In recent years, God has seemed to many as dim as the winter-solstice sun on the horizon. It has been a December of religion. Now, as the days grow longer into the new decade, believers and those who would like to believe are hoping that the long, bleak month is over.
Is God coming back to life? Was he ever really "dead"? Perhaps he was eclipsed during a period of dizzying social change. And if he returns, will it be to the familiar life of church and synagogue or to another locale? The marketplace? The slum? The commune? The barricade?
The most notable fact in religion today is that ministers of all denominations are trying, somewhat desperately but with immense energy and imagination, to find new ways to carry God back into the everyday life of society and to make him, in the prevailing cliche of the day, "relevant." This is not primarily a theological movement. Still, important new trends in theology suggest that God may best be met in the co-creation of a more humane society or, internally, in the deepest structures of our own psyches (see box, page 42). As so often in the history of faith, this new effort to build a new ministry is a reaction against past failures.
Titanic of the Spirit
Churchmen have been visible enough: Martin Luther King preaching his dream, Dan and Phil Berrigan raiding draft boards, William Coffin marching for peace, Father Groppi summoning his people out of the ghetto. Even so, the failure of the churches at large to deal with the social and psychological condition of mankind seems to many to reflect a decline of decision and direction. The prevalent eroticism in the arts, sexual permissiveness, the drug culture, the rise in crime and other violence, the increase in petty dishonesty --all point to the erosion of the churches' moral authority. With gallows humor, a Catholic priest dismisses reforms like lay parish councils as "shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic."
The Gallup poll records a slippage in U.S. church attendance on an average Sunday from 49% of the population in 1958 to 43% in 1968. The young are not as irreligious as they seem --far from it. But most fail to recognize their religious impulse, and they satisfy it far away from the churches --in Eastern (or pseudo-Eastern) mysteries, in drug reveries, in the noisy trance ,of rock, or sometimes in the touchable realities of nature.
Protestant seminary enrollments are slightly up, but Catholic enrollments in the U.S. and elsewhere are dropping drastically. More disturbing is the departure of experienced Catholic priests. According to a conservative estimate, as many as 4,000 U.S. priests leave the formal priesthood each year. Often they include some of the ablest men in the priesthood: college presidents, heads of monasteries or religious provinces, teachers and philosophers.
Something, clearly, has prompted such men to abandon the old forms. Although dissatisfaction with the rule of celibacy is one important cause, most dropout priests and many vocation specialists find that the roots of trouble are deeper. For some young curates in an old-fashioned rectory, it may be simply a feeling that they are not realizing their potential; for others, the cause is frustration with a system of authority that seems overbearing and out of date. Yet the church cannot just abandon the structure. Too many generations of priests, says Sociologist Philip Murnion, have been "socialized"--conditioned to react only to the dictates of an established structure. When priests live and work on their own, as they have in some experimental programs, they often leave the active ministry. After they leave, they are apt to join secular bureaucracies--notably welfare agencies --that also allow them little room for personal initiative and responsibility.
The Deeper Dilemma
A malaise affects all faiths when society seems to be coming apart, as it does seem to many today, and minister and congregation both may be uncertain which role is more appropriate: that of prophet anticipating the future, or that of stabilizer reaffirming the past. On the other hand, Dr. Dale Moody, a Baptist theologian currently teaching at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University, believes that the church is being deliberately dinned out of its complacency: "God is giving the church a good shaking today. With his left hand he disturbs her slumber with the noise of social revolution, and with his right hand he rings the bell calling for relevance to such pressing social problems as race, poverty and war. A polarity develops in every denomination of Christianity between those calling for old-fashioned soul-winning and those new styles of social action that shock and startle the faithful."
A similar conflict has begun to appear in the Jewish faith. "The world teeters and Judaism peters," writes Jewish Theological Seminary Graduate Ben Hollander in an outspoken criticism of Jewish seminary attitudes. "Flames flare close; horrors in Harlem, clashes at Columbia. But the seminary inscrutably stands proclaiming its message. The encyclopaedia must learn to get off the shelf and start walking and talking like a man."
On the one hand, laymen of every faith are declaring their independence by shaping their own personal ethics; on the other, they are demanding that the clergy, who ought to have the answers, somehow solve all the urgent and increasingly complex moral, technological and political issues that face society. Some say that the task is impossible and simply dismiss it; others have decided, like Hollander, that the only answer is broadly based training that equips a churchman to comprehend the clamorous needs of today's world. Like their counterparts in secular universities, seminarians do not always recommend the wisest changes for the long run; they often want to discard required courses like Hebrew and Greek without realizing that the conservative seminaries, which are preserving the languages, would thus acquire a virtual monopoly on biblical exegesis. But in other areas, the students are forcing the best seminaries into meeting the problems of society headon, and in the process are clearly forming the future of the church.
The New Seminaries
The most obvious result so far is the increasing--some say overemphasized --concentration on inner-city ministries. Unitarian Universalist churchmen have approved an experimental plan that will allow seminarians to freewheel around New York for three years, taking courses wherever they want to, living in the ghettos if they choose, learning to minister to the world principally by living in it. A larger and more structured program along similar lines is apparently working well. Last year Manhattan's onetime conservative New York Theological Seminary made a major shift in direction by choosing as its new president George W. ("Bill") Webber, 49, liberal former pastor of the experimental East Harlem Protestant Parish. Out went required courses; in came such things as a part-time bachelor-of-divinity program, which those in secular employment can finish in five years.
In Somerville, near Boston, young Jews are trying a different approach --not by moving out into the city but by moving in toward each other. The group calls itself Havurat Shalom Community Seminary, but it bears little resemblance to a traditional Jewish divinity school. It is actually a fellowship of about 40 well-educated members, including married couples, who meet in a small frame house to study Jewish mysticism and devise experimental forms of worship. Similar group-seminaries are springing up in New York and Philadelphia.
By far the major development in religious education will be the ''cluster seminary," modeled on the successful Graduate Theological Union on "Holy Hill" in Berkeley. Founded only seven years ago, G.T.U. now includes nine seminaries and seven associated centers, including Episcopal, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Unitarian institutions, and three theological schools of Roman Catholic religious orders: Jesuit, Dominican and Franciscan. The Boston Theological Institute has brought together six Roman Catholic and Protestant seminaries and a graduate department of theology in a similar union; other clusters are being formed in Rochester, N.Y.; Washington, D.C., New York City, Toronto and even Dubuque.
The conglomerate seminary has obvious practical benefits. Libraries are better. Snared facilities raise teaching standards while keeping individual seminary costs at a bearable level. Cross-registration affords each student the chance to pursue his own curriculum under the best available teachers. The interaction of the diverse groups also contributes dramatically to future changes in the church. President John Dillenberger of G.T.U. even hopes that local parishes will tie in to the cluster and participate directly in this transformation.
Such, ferment in the seminaries indicates that the church has any number of options. The suggestions from the schools--and from ghetto, pulpit and cloister--are broad: team ministries, part-time ministries, specialized ministries; elaborate celebrations, informal rituals; large, united churches, small groups. Some forms that now seem incompatible may well come to live side by side. Most of them are already being tested by ministers even now.
A Special Magic
What really works in the ministry today? Curiously, almost anything, if it is done with spirit--or Spirit. Now, as in other times, there are ministers with that special gift of God that the Greeks called charisma, an ability to inspire energy and enthusiasm among the apathetic and the alienated. Though they can be found in every ministry, many seem to work a special magic among the young.
Last month in Florida, Los Angeles-based Baptist Minister Arthur Blessitt, 29, took his hip spiritual message to the West Palm Beach Rock Festival. Of the 50,000 spectators who heard him speak, 20,000 showed up for a Sunday-morning Gospel service. Blessitt, who holds almost permanent open house in a converted nightclub on Sunset Strip called His Place, appeals to his young congregation in their own argot: "Jesus is just the best trip, man. You don't have to drop acid to get high--all you have to do is pray and you go all the way to heaven." He runs a home for reformed drug addicts, regularly holds "toilet services" in which parishioners who want to kick the habit ceremonially flush away their drugs. A Louisiana bayou boy who has been preaching since he was 15, Blessitt criticizes the churches for being "more interested in condemning than helping"--a criticism not likely to be made against him.
Like Blessitt's free-form vocation, New York-based John Rydgren's ministry to the young is conducted in their own language--but in Rydgren's case the language is rock. Snappily dressed and sideburned, Rydgren, 37, is an ordained minister of the American Lutheran Church still on the active books of his denomination--and one of the country's most articulate and popular rock disk jockeys. His show, called Love, runs on 13 FM stations in major cities. On Los Angeles' KABC-FM his tapes are broadcast 24 hours a day, dispensing a lively selection of rock aimed at pointing up his capsule philosophical comments or provocative questions about life and the state of the world. Rydgren has picked up a sizable group of young followers who write to him as "Brother John," asking for personal or spiritual advice. He answers them all. And, he points out, he can say what he likes because "I don't have to pass the plate."
One ancient life style the young have taken up with fresh enthusiasm is communalism. Increasingly popular among the youthful dispossessed, whose rural hippie enclaves seem to be adopting more and more a quasi-religious mystique, the commune is an authentic American tradition, dating principally from the Utopian religious communities of the 19th century. Young and old are again attempting the collective life, particularly in several urban communities.
An Episcopal pentacostalist is having remarkable success with one such experiment in Houston. Some 120 followers of the Rev. Graham Pulkingham have organized 16 experimental communes, ranging from groups of working people to foster homes for parentless children. The communes are set up in ordinary houses scattered throughout the city. Members contribute all or part of their income to the community, basing their action on the example of the early Christian communities.
Pioneering Commune
A pioneer in the modern urban religious commune was Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Ill., founded in 1957 by a group of students from Mennonite-run Goshen College in Indiana. Today the fellowship (which includes four of the original members) numbers 15 families and a dozen single people from many religious backgrounds, though mainly from the "peace" churches: Quaker, Mennonite, Church of the Brethren. All personal income (ranging downward from one member's $14,000 a-year salary) goes into the community. Says Virgil Vogt, a member since 1962: "Snaring our money and living together this way is what religion is all about. Our basic motivation is Christian: we're involved in the search for new forms."
Not all the methods of revitalizing the urban scene are unconventional. In downtown Philadelphia, the Rev. Dr. James Montgomery Boice, 31, has used an old-fashioned ministry of preaching and theology to inject new vigor into the fading, 140-year-old Tenth Presbyterian Church, just off Rittenhouse Square. Boice has superb credentials: a Harvard English degree, a Princeton bachelor of divinity, a doctorate in theology from the University of Basel (where Karl Barth taught). He uses his training, spends up to three days a week preparing meticulous sermons on the Bible. He is currently working his way through a year-long exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, explaining Christ's ethics step by step each Sunday. His middle-class parishioners have warmed to his teaching. Membership has risen, and attendance one Sunday early this month was 500--a peak that had not been reached in many years.
What This Neighborhood Needs
Youth can clearly be a major asset in a city ministry. Rabbi Stephen Riskin is only 29, but his congregation, Lincoln Square Synagogue, is one of the most exciting in New York. And it is Orthodox. Rabbi Riskin does not bend the law: he explains it. "Rituals teach discipline, compassion," he maintains. "How you eat, what you eat, can be a religious experience." Because he believes that a rabbi is rightly defined as "a teacher involved with his students"--and practices that belief--Riskin evokes a remarkable response. Young people gather around him at the synagogue and pack his weekly classes on Jewish mysticism. Unequivocally, Riskin feels that the 20th century is finally "giving the soul its due. We have passed the age of rationalism and are understanding that we relate to a Higher Being."
Traditional methods, imaginatively used, have resulted in crowded Masses at New Orleans' St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church. The white frame building once stood in an equally white section of town, but now the central-city area is black. To meet the needs of the new congregation, Father Joseph Putnam, 40, its white pastor, employs more than one kind of tradition. The freewheeling Sunday services, though Catholic in ritual, are heavily Black Baptist in flavor. Music Director Alexander Rankins, a Negro, pounds an old upright piano, leading the al-tarside choir in standard Negro spirituals and other numbers from three books on the piano: The Catholic Mass, The Baptist Standard Hymnal and Gospel Pearls. Father Putnam talks about the meaning of humility--"A humble man must be strong. Jesus taught us that" --and recommends a play that some of the neighborhood's angry young blacks are presenting in the Dashiki Project Theater, for which the parish supplies space. The Mass closes with Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Membership is particularly strong among the young.
Still within the urban parish mold --but hardly in the traditional church building--is Chicago's Circle Church, which meets in a Teamsters hall. Its founder, David Mains, 33, was a vaguely dissatisfied Baptist minister trying to start a new parish in a polyglot Chicago neighborhood when he chanced to stop by the union hall. "Any time you want to start a church," the local's secretary-treasurer told him, "you can meet here for free. What this neighborhood needs is another goddam Protestant church." Mains' church is Protestant--it has since affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America --but it welcomes everyone. His team ministry is mixed (a Negro, two whites and a Filipino-Chinese assist him), and the congregation is even more disparate: foreign students from the University of Illinois' nearby Chicago Circle Campus, poor people from the neighborhood, an increasing number of hippies and occasional young whites from the suburbs. Worship services are simple: a sermon, followed by a choice of four discussion groups, ons in each corner of the hall. Despite his social concern, Mains insists that his mission is primarily spiritual. ''I think." he says, "that man has changed mainly through personal relation with God."
That theme--spirituality--is stressed more and more these days by activist members of the ministry. Ivan Illich, who gave up the formal priesthood to work on his educational theories at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, insists that the proper outcome of any of the new ministries is "an intimate personal awareness of the meaning of religion." The psychedelic generation's most revered and thoughtful guru, former Episcopal Priest Alan Watts, now living in Sausalito, Calif., argues that church services ought to offer "more opportunity for meditation and spiritual experience." Monsignor Robert Fox, director of New York's Full Circle Associates, is an activist who nonetheless maintains that "you can't reach others without prayer and contemplation."
The Riches of Others
Full Circle has a spiritual mystique that is rare in religious urban reform efforts. As a result of Fox's work as archdiocesan coordinator of New York's Spanish Community Action, Full Circle has established affiliates and projects in most of the city's marginal or ghetto areas. The object, says Fox, is not to push through neighborhood improvement projects, but "to show others the riches in themselves"--to inspire the poor to become aware of their own resources and the potential beauty of the urban setting. That process has inspired some notable neighborhood renewals.
The title of Fox's group derives from his conviction that "when you help others, you grow yourself--and you find the need to grow and develop further." His almost mystical approach has been criticized as unrealistic by a good friend. Father Harry Browne, a Manhattan pastor who has made his own considerable imprint on urban redevelopment mainly through political methods. Browne, for ten years president of the Stryckers Bay Neighborhood Council redevelopment project on the West Side, now heads St. Gregory's parish in the same neighborhood, where he has mobilized voter-power to get better housing, schools and police protection.
Others who share Bob Fox's earnestness and creativity are carving out unusual ministries in a number of related fislds. In Louisiana, Roman Catholic Priest Albert McKnight. 45, a Brooklyn-born black, has had remarkable success with a rural redevelopment enterprise called the Southern Consumer's Cooperative. It has opened, among other things, a farmers' cooperative, a prosperous fruitcake bakery and a cut-rat; supermarket, and has given local Negroes a strong motivation to join Father McKnight's literacy program. (A former sharecropper, illiterate two years ago, is now the co-op's farm marketing expert.) In Philadelphia, American Baptist Minister Leon Sullivan, another Negro, has pursued the self-help goal on an even larger scale. He is credited with starting dozens of job-training centers across the country. The Rev. Jesse Jackson's "Operation Breadbasket," on Chicago's South Side, is nationally famous for its community action.
Black clergymen, in fact, have seemed to enjoy a confident tradition of "open ministry" that puts them in the forefront of church action. Pentacostalist Minister Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, 33, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, believes -- and earnestly preaches -- that all races can live together better than they can separately. His principal ministry these days is folk songs, which he delivers in a rich Leadbelly bass, often on marches for peace in Washington or New York, and this month on a tour of some 20 colleges and universities through the South. Though a robustly spiritual man, Kirkpatrick suggests that more black ministers might use their spe cial independence more fruitfully if they could abandon the pie-in-the-sky preaching inherited from slavery days and "get down to the problems right here."
As far back as the late 19th century, when Walter Rauschenbusch worked out his Social Gospel in the slums of New York, the urban ministry has been the classic ordination-of-fire for young clerical zealots. But despite the problems, opportunities for white ministers are fading. For one thing, many black communities no longer want white clergymen, friendly or not. For another, there are more and more radicalized seminarians competing for ghetto ministries. Now, as interest in parish assignments begins to go up again, seminary graduates are being forced to look to the suburbs, where many innovative ministers have proved that there is opportunity aplenty.
Challenging the Affluent
Northeast of Los Angeles, amid the rolling hills Presbyterian of Minister suburban Gary La Demarest, Canada, 43, speaks wryly of his mission. "In the '60s, we saw ourselves out there leading the army magnificently, but when we looked back, the army wasn't there." Now he soldiers quietly by employing his affluent congregation in the task of finding low-cost housing for less prosperous families. The congregation recruits bankers, mortgage lawyers and other professionals to help low-income families find and purchase FHA homes. The congregation commits itself to advise and assist such families for the life of the mortgage.
A more comprehensive example of religious revival in the suburbs is the Community of Christ the Servant in Downers Grove, Ill., a booming residential district just west of Chicago. With the blessing of President Robert J. Marshall of the Lutheran Church in America, the Rev. Jack Lundin, 43, set up headquarters in a rickety barn and house opposite a new shopping center a year ago. "Not a church, but a community," according to its pastor, it has 160 members who have "accepted the covenant" and 100 or so more who attend with some regularity. The members are busy, but not with the usual parochial committee work. Wednesday nights, adults meet for "content" sessions on spiritual and social questions while children gather for freewheeling classes on the arts. On Thursdays, adults gather T-group style for community problem solving. On Sundays, worship services usually begin with ten or 15 minutes of informal discussion among the congregation, followed by liturgy and music that are often composed by Lundin, formerly a professional musician, or a member of the congregation. The music for Christmas was written by a Jewish friend who works for Playboy.
U.S. clergymen have no monopoly on imagination. In British Columbia, Bishop Fergus O'Grady founded "the Frontier Apostolate," in which 174 volunteers serve as a kind of Far North VISTA for Catholic and non-Catholic alike in O'Grady's farflung diocese. In Lima, Peru, 100 young priests drafted a proposal of revolutionary social reforms, calling for the church to set the example. Surprisingly, Juan Cardinal Landazuri Ricketts moved out of his mansion and into a modest working class district. In Isolotto, outside Florence, suspended priest Don Enzo Mazzi (TIME, Dec. 27, 1968) is still holding his open-air Masses in the piazza for hundreds of worshipers.
The most radical new idea has come, as usual, from The Netherlands, where the Dutch provincial of the Augustinian order has proposed opening the country's 23 Augustinian convents to men and women of any Christian faith, married or single. Life would follow an experimental communal pattern that has not yet been fully worked out. They may not have the chance. Rome--which may remember that both Luther and Erasmus were Augustinians--has threatened to disband the Dutch province if it goes ahead with the project.
In the early 1900s, many Christians talked euphorically of the "Christian Century"--a label still worn by a liberal Protestant magazine. Others predicted that the era would see the demise of religion and the triumph of science; they were also proved wrong. Few prophets today see either triumph or tragedy. Whether the ministry survives will ultimately depend on what mankind decides a minister is--or should be. Though clergymen, theologians and social scientists offer widely different interpretations of some aspects of the future church, the consensus for the foreseeable future seems to be that old and new will exist side by side. Some of their specific predictions:
sb ROMAN CATHOLICISM: Celibacy will become optional, possibly within the decade. The church will become increasingly democratic. Catholic laymen--as Protestants and Jews customarily have done--will choose their own ministers. The lines between priest and laymen will blur. Rome has already sanctioned the married diaconate, which allows men to serve some priestly functions. In time, women may be ordained and laymen may celebrate the Eucharist.
sb PROTESTANTISM: Ecumenical team ministries, averaging four or five members, will increasingly become the mode in Protestantism; several are already in existence. Liturgical duties and responsibilities for such tasks as education, counseling and administration will be divided according to each man's abilities.
sb JUDAISM: Emerging from the ghetto in the past century, Judaism set up its rabbis in the prevailing Christian style as remote religious functionaries. Many Jews are now trying to reinstate the traditional role of the rabbi, which, as Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Karasick points out, is to be "a teacher, guide and judge, integral to the community." In emphasizing the classic concept of the rabbi, the three U.S. branches of Judaism may grow closer together.
Most faiths and denominations will learn to tolerate internal sectarianism, a growth of little churches, or quasi churches, within the parent bodies. Such religious groups could be like the Christian underground or "liberated" churches. Ecumenism may well be halted at the formal institutional level as various denominations grow to cherish their distinctive characteristics all over again. At the same time, there will be more interfaith communication among individuals and among local churches.
Liturgies will continue to develop along two lines--the informal, at-home or small-group service, perhaps built around a neighborhood gathering or encounter session, and the bigger-than-ever cathedral celebration. Light shows, poetry, dance and electronic music may upstage incense, stained glass and organ, but the psychological effect will be much the same and just as necessary. Negro and Jewish influences may very well enrich the Christian tradition. As the Rev. J. Archie Hargraves notes, the Negro has two contrasting virtues: "soul" and "cool." He has learned to blend both, which may provide a useful example to white Christians needing to balance the passionate and the rational in their lives. From Judaism, suggests Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, Christians could profitably take the ideas of "peoplehood" and "holy worldliness," for both may be central in the religions of the future.
To Humanize the World
The ministry will become ever more flexible. Besides team ministries and shared churches, there will be more "tentmaker ministries"* and "hyphenated" priests--lawyer-priests, doctor-priests and others who emulate the Apostles by supporting themselves with a-secular profession and serving a community during their free time. Such ministers, often trained laymen, will be needed to supplement rather than supplant the full-time cleric.
Beyond what the minister may do, what will he be during the next few decades? As material existence becomes more abundant for more and more men, the minister will have to become more and more the guide, energizer and catalyst--the "playing coach," in one cleric's term, the agent provocateur in another's.
An aloof and alien technological society has already shocked man into a rediscovery of his own humanity, with all its hopes and miseries. In every faith and in every believer, there is once again a burgeoning awareness of God--or at least a sense that every man is a priest to his fellow man.
* Named for St. Paul, who followed that trade throughout his life.
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