AP’s full name is the Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission. For much of our first fifty-five years, major attention was focused on the renewal of corporate worship, its practice and its resources. Although such attention to the renewal of worship will continue to be necessary, it seems to me important for us to focus on the “mission” part of our title.

“Living the Covenant,” the 1999 conference cosponsored by Associated Parishes, gave valuable attention principally to ministries in the church, with less attention to mission in the world. We still need to rethink the ministry of all the baptized as we move into this new century, but there is also need to rethink and reformulate the basis of those ministries we are called to live out and the message we are called to proclaim in this new world. Who are we as God’s people, how are we called to live, and what are we to say to those who ask, “Why we are the way we are?” Questions like these have a renewed urgency as the old liberal convictions lose their certainty. I found some answers in N. T. Wright’s “The Resurrection of the Messiah,” the William Porcher DuBose Lectures given at Sewanee in October 1997 and reprinted in the Easter 1998 issue of the Sewanee Theological Journal. He has also covered much of the same ground in his recent book, The Challenge of Jesus, but the argument is clearer in the Sewanee lectures.

There seems to be a failure of nerve in understanding how and why we should address the contemporary world and a lack of vision of what makes us different as Christians. Wright describes the modernity which many of us, myself included, absorbed with our education in college and seminary, and shows why this was challenged by what came after modernity. I quote from his third lecture, “Resurrection and the Postmodern Dilemma”:

Modernity implied a narrative about the way the world was. It was essentially an eschatological story... the industrial revolution and the philosophical enlightenment would burst upon the world, bringing a new era of blessing for all... Modernity [now] stands condemned of building a new tower of Babel. Postmodernity has gone on to claim, primarily with this great metanarrative as the example, that ALL metanarratives are suspect. They are all power games. Collapsing reality, deconstructing selfhood, and the death of the metanarrative–these are the keys to understanding postmodernity. It is a ruthless application of the hermeneutic of suspicion to everything that the post-Enlightenment western world has held dear.  1

Many of us have plugged away in parish ministry and life in general as though the old certainties still worked. No one stands up during sermons and accuses us of “modernity” or of being “old-fashioned” (and these terms now mean the same thing), but there is an occasional attitude among the younger clergy and laity in the church that the church doesn’t “get it.” What then must those outside the community of faith believe about us? One sometimes wonders if “getting it” is understood to mean being postmodern, suspicious of all motives and all claims of truth, dismissive of all statements except the most limited “I feel...” or ”I think...” comments. In face of such skepticism, there is a temptation to pull up the drawbridge and circle the faithful. The challenge is to remember that this is the age to which we are called to proclaim the Good News of faith, hope and love. Wright observes:

And how long must it be before we learn that our task as Christians is to be in the front row of constructing the post-postmodern world? The individual angst of the 1960s has become the corporate and cultural angst of the 1990s. What is the Christian answer to it? The Christian answer is the love of God, which goes through death and out the other side. What is missing from the postmodern equation is, of course, love. The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes postmodernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch; in a Self that found itself by giving itself away; in a Story that was never manipulative, but always healing and recreating; in a Reality that can truly be known, a Reality that, being known, reveals a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved.

We have a chance, as this century draws to a close, to announce this message to the world that so badly needs it. I believe we have this as our vocation: to tell the story, to live by the symbols, to act out the praxis, and to answer the questions in such a way as to become, in ourselves and our mission to God’s work, the answer to the prayer that now rises, not just from one puzzled psalmist, but from the whole human race and indeed the whole of God’s creation: “O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.”  2

The entire set of lectures bears searching out and reading. In his two big books, Wright has drawn a convincing picture of the first-century world of Judaism and Greco/Roman paganism in which Jesus as portrayed in the synoptic gospels can be seen and understood (without the artificial skepticism of the Jesus Seminar and some other contemporary writers) as the one who fulfills Israel’s vocation and God’s promises through dying where, when and as he died. The lectures given at Sewanee show that the resurrection is truly cosmic in the same manner (pace the fundamentalists who try to make it a simple resuscitation of a corpse and the modernists who dismiss its historical value and cosmic character in other ways). We don’t have language to picture or describe what happened, but Wright makes a strong case that the church and its mission from earliest days can be understood best as based on some such event.

The church is called to show this kind of new life in its worship and fellowship and to empower the individual believer to incarnate such a vision in everyday life. Then we would reach people as the early church reached people and draw them into the new life. Such a vision would demand a different attitude to the surrounding society and a different way of being the church and individual believers in the world. This is already happening in some places. I hope that AP and its members can point to such new visions and provide tools to build such a new church. With this kind of renewed story, this kind of transformed vision, and worship which incarnates such newness, the mission of the church can move forward. Doubling in size may be too little!

Ron Miller is Coordinator of Associated Parishes.

-- Originally published in OPEN Winter 2001