AMERICAN CONGREGATIONS

AMERICAN CONGREGATIONS
Volume 2: New Perspectives in the study of congregations
James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, editors
University of Chicago Press, 1994
ISBN 0-226-90188-2
288 pages

The book itself consists of 8 essays, plus a brief afterword. Of the authors, I was familiar with only one, Martin Marty. But his particular essay, Public and Private: Congregation as Meeting Place, I found particularly difficult to read. Not so the other seven.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one contains the most essays, 4, and places congregations in their historical and sociological contexts. The Gilkey essay that I commented on earlier is located in part one, and it develops the theme of congregations as religious communities. I was further delighted with the closing pages of that essay, in which Gilkey ponders the loss of personal piety within the leadership of mainline congregations. He begins by describing his father (an American Baptist) theologically, and then proceeds by describing him spiritually:

“Like his friend Harry Emerson Fosdick, he was about as liberal theologically and religiously as you could get. Nevertheless he spent an hour each day on his knees at prayer, another hour reading the Bible, and each morning we had family prayers for twenty minutes.”

But Gilkey is not simply calling for a return to the old ways. First, he considers the curricula in our schools of divinity as lacking if they do not have reflection and guidance on spirituality (minister AND congregation) at the heart of their curriculum. But second, he considers an experience in which he presented a paper on ethics at a conference. There was also a paper presented from a Buddhist perspective:

“I exemplifies in a way a modern version of Augustine’s ‘faith finding its perfection in love,’ or of Luther’s ‘faith is the doer, love is the deed.’ The monk’s treatise reversed all this: all the ethical acts he referred to (the ‘steps on the way”) preceded and made possible the religious: the slow discipline of the self and its desires, ascetic practices, meditative techniques of all sorts, acts of charity and confession, and so on.” (p. 129)

The second part of the book consists of two essays that dealt with traditions. I found particularly insightful Dorothy C. Bass’ writing on Congregations and the Bearing of Traditions. She lays out a strong case for congregations not only as the bearers of tradition, but as the shapers of tradition. “The question of what any tradition means is part of that tradition itself, and as long as the tradition lives the question remains in dispute. Congregations, even without knowing it, are immersed in this argument. They do not simply inherit tradition; they contribute to it. A living congregation does not leave a living tradition unaffected.” (p. 185)

The third and final part of the book deals with congregational leadership. The first essay is a historical study of how leadership has evolved in various types of American congregations (the book is primarily Christian, and protestant, but it gives considerable thought to Catholic congregations, and consistent, if less substantial thought, to non-Christian traditions). The final essay of the book, however, deals with leadership in Black congregations- in ways that both critique AND offer possibilities for the rest of us to consider. Since I was so caught up in Gilkey’s earlier thoughts regarding congregations as “Places of rescue,” I was given a bit of practical example by Franklin’s words:

”In the black tradition, the altar prayer or pastoral prayer is a significant therapeutic moment. In the absence of a formal ritual of confession, this moment permits congregants to have their personal and collective sinfulness named and absolved by the pastor or prayer leader. Such moments are never rushed; people are given time, as Howard Thurman said, to “center down” and remove themselves from the turbulence and traffic of their lives. In addition to the time and space for intimate communion with God, emotional license is given to each praying person to experience God’s response of liberation. Persons may do grief work, weep, express vulnerability, and make moral resolutions to do the right thing in the future.

Ironically, and fortunately, such intimate, private, personal spiritual work is done in the communal, public context so that one is discouraged from conceptualizing her or his prayer needs nonrelationally. Communal prayer challenges religious privatization as it gathers up the cares of the entire community and articulates them as the common existential expression of the people.” (p. 261)

I considered this book to be, for both theological and practical reasons, well worth the price of purchase and the time for reading.

George R. Pasley