I hate to admit it, but I just turned 53 years old.  I was born smack-dab in the middle of the Baby Boom.  On my birthday a few days ago, my wife and I were headed to a worship service out of town and stopped at McDonalds for a cup of coffee.  Two cups cost $1.07.  I was surprised and commented on the price.  The sweet young woman at the cash register smiled and said, “It’s the price for seniors.”  Ouch.  After church we went to a restaurant that had a buffet.  The waiter who came to ask about drinks also asked, “Is either of you a senior?”  Now, this is cruel and unusual punishment for an aging Baby Boomer on his birthday. 

Those of you old enough to remember, do you remember the 1968 movie, “Wild in the Streets?”  Among other au-dacious happenings, a 24-year-old gets elected President of the United States.  The tagline of this film was, “If you’re 30, you’re through!”  Although I was a young teenager and did not ever see the film (my parents probably wouldn’t let me, so my memories come from previews), I remember thinking how racy it all seemed.  We thought we were shattering all the rules. 

We Boomers tend to hold on to this image of being young, even though we, too, are going the way of all flesh.  Jean Twenge, in Generation Me, has argued persuasively that Baby Boomers, who think of our generation as having re-defined popular culture (I’m amazed at how many of us believe that Woodstock [1969 version] really did change the world), do not even hold a candle to the young people of today on pushing aside traditional expectations.  I work with college students and love the job.  That said, I’m feeling increasingly “geezerish” on an almost daily basis.  This generation of emerging adults (an actual sociological term nowadays) is mystifyingly paradoxical to me.  They are brazenly self-assertive, even “in your face.”  At the same time they are surprisingly passive and vulnerable, in some ways really fragile.  They are very opinionated, yet when challenged (even gently and respectfully), they tend to wilt.  They have opinions, they just don‘t know how to support them.  Now, I know these observations are, for the most part, my own anecdotal, very unscientific, observations.  But some of them seem to go along with what I’m reading.

One of the most paradoxical qualities that I see in young people is their passion and hunger for God (coupled with a deep desire for community) and their detachment from organized Christianity.  It is increasingly the case that I en-counter students on the campus where I teach who think of themselves as deeply committed Christians, who do not participate, who do not engage, a local church at all.  In other words, they never or rarely go to church on Sunday.  They may consider chapel their “church” for the week or it may be a small group or some sort of “Bible study” with friends.  In keeping with the brazen, opinionated quality I just mentioned, I overheard one student (a self-identified Christian) describe church as “boring as hell.”  He doesn’t go.

What do we make of this picture?  I honestly don’t know.  As Christian Smith has recently written (see “Getting a Life,” christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/006/2.10), the one thing we don’t do is lurch between anxiously grasping at “relevance” or rigidly demanding that young people do church the way we oldsters think it ought to be done.  One thing that is still critically important – relationships.  But relationships with young people will likely be more off-putting in certain ways and bumpier than we’d like.  We’re going to need a huge dose of humility and pa-tience…and love.  In a word, the American church needs to repent for ignoring its young.  I’m working on this kind of penitence every day.  I admit, these young ‘uns do make me scratch my head.           

They were traveling up the center aisle to see the body. Moving with faithful footsteps toward the one they dearly loved. Tears filled their eyes and they held tight to daughters and sisters as they came forward to view the deceased, hands folded calmly, suit freshly pressed.

I had lost the battle, you see. My pastoral sensitivity overran my pastoral authority. I am fairly new to the world of ordained parish ministry with a special focus in pastoral care. My newness does not mean that I am new at presiding in worship at funerals. With our congregations aging and with more and more “unchurched” people turning toward the church at the time of death—not knowing where else to go—pastors have a great gift and opportunity to travel alongside families who are grieving, families who are trying to figure out what to do with their dead. Pastors receive this gift frequently. My newness, in this case, meant that I presided over an open casket funeral. Not my practice, not my theology: but there the congregation was traveling up during a hymn to pay their last respects.

We believe that the funeral service is a “Witness to the Resurrection.” The funeral is the place where we affirm that in life and in death we belong to God. It is the place where we say aloud that death has no power to pull us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. It is the place where we give thanks to God for the gift of life experienced in the one we loved and where we place that one into God’s everlasting arms. All that is to say that the funeral is about God.

But then there is that person—that body: surrounded by memories and stories and jokes. There is that person—that body: surrounded by brothers and daughters, by colleagues and choir buddies—all with tales and lessons and laughter that they are bursting at the seams to share.

In my struggle, I turned to an amazing article, “O Sing to Me of Heaven: Preaching at Funerals,” by Tom Long (Journal for Preachers, Easter 2006). Long claims, “We have a tug of war between the quiet, but somewhat abstract, ideal of a worship service reflecting on the joy of the resurrection and the Oprah-esque carnival of anecdotes and memories.” I felt comforted that I was not alone in this tug of war. Long recounts what the funeral was for our Christian forebears: Christians washed, anointed and dressed in baptismal garments the bodies of the deceased. Then they would carry them to the grave, singing as they traveled. The dead were seen as saints traveling on to God. The focus was on the journey and ultimately the destination.

Traveling to God—not to a lifeless body—that is what we are doing at funerals. All of life is a pilgrimage toward God. The dead have finished the journey; they are home.

The next time I watch people travel up the center aisle at a funeral—the next time I receive that gift, I will try to speak a word about the One to whom we all are traveling, a word about the heaven to which we are going, and yes, a word about the person who is home and what there journey there was like.
 

I teach at a seminary where we try very hard to be sensitive to the diversity of the whole body of Christ.  While most of the community is of Euro-American descent and the overwhelming majority of the student body consist of anglo Presbyterians, we are delighted that the faculty is becoming more and more diverse ethnically and denominationally and we have hopes that the student body will slowly but surely follow.

Nonetheless two events in the late spring reminded us that while good intentions do not always pave the way to hell they often don’t pave the way to koinōnia either.

The first was our own seminary commencement, held in the sanctuary of a local church.  The person presiding over the event reminded us all before the degrees were awarded that this was a worship context and that, therefore, we would be expected to comport ourselves worshipfully.   What he meant by that was, no cheering and no clapping.

The problem was that the definition of a worship context was decidedly shaped by the white, middle class,  Presbyterian history both of the presider and of the seminary.  Many in the congregation came from African American Baptist or AME churches and some from Hispanic Pentecostal churches.  They, too, intended to comport themselves worshipfully, so they did what they often do at other services when they want to praise the goodness of God and to rejoice when another member of the body rejoices: they cheered and clapped.

I hope that next year we will think about “worship” more broadly.

The other event was sadder and more serious.  After it was discovered that the person who shot a number of students at Virginia Tech was Korean American,  the president of our Korean student association wrote to the whole community.  The Korean students, he wrote, were not only saddened they were ashamed at the behavior of this person of Korean descent.

The e-mail letters came pouring back.  Appropriately many pointed out that the student shooter had been a deeply disturbed young man.  Less appropriately, many of us tried to persuade our Korean brothers and sisters that they needed to take a more Western view of the world.  If only they had read more Locke or Jefferson (we implied) they would know that responsibility is always an individual and never a communal affair.

Instead of seeking to understand their perspective in order to be helpful, we urged them to adopt our perspective and then take comfort.  We did not take much time to think about what convictions might lie behind their sense of shame, and we certainly did not reflect on the fact that their sense of community identity was probably a good deal closer to the self-understanding of New Testament churches than our Kantian individualism.  When Paul reminded the Corinthians that they were the Body of Christ he was reminding them precisely that their belonging was at least as important as their individuality.

The tough thing about trying to be a genuinely diverse and multicultural church is this: it takes a good deal of research and a great deal of thought. 
 

Earlier this spring I joined a group of preachers studying the lectionary texts for the season of Pentecost.  We were reminded of the quip attributed to Alfred Loisy the French New Testament scholar: “Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom but what we got was the church.”

The clear implication of that statement is that we ought all to be disappointed.  As we looked at the assigned texts for the Pentecost season we wondered whether it was possible for the church– with all our attention to institutional preservation and denominational agendas—to keep any attachment whatsoever to the promises and demands of God’s reign.

Shortly after the seminar ended we were back home attending our local church.  We discovered when we arrived that it was Youth Sunday, and though my own preaching career began on a Youth Sunday many years ago, I wasn’t exactly filled with eager anticipation.

Yet the music was affecting, the scriptures appropriate and the brief homilies thoughtful and faithful both.

Most impressively at the conclusion of the service the lay sponsors of the youth group said a few words about each of the students who were graduating from high school in the week to come.

Among the group there was a young man who had won a nationwide competition in epidemiology and with it a large scholarship to one of our most prestigious colleges.  There was a young woman who is developmentally slow who is clearly among the most popular members of the group.  One young man was not at all certain what he might do next and another had his life planned out for the next fifty years.  A seventeen year old single mother held her newborn daughter in her arms; the proud grandparents stood beside her looking on.

What was clear in each of the testimonies was how much these young people had mattered to the church and how much the church had mattered to them.

Maybe it wasn’t the Kingdom of God.  But it wasn’t far from it, either.

As the church year moves from Eastertide to Pentecost this weekend (May 27, 2007), it is easy for us to get swept up in the disciples’ spiritual combustion or their evangelistic fervor in the marketplace. But what is it that prepared them for being fired-up and what is it that they carried out into the marketplace that attracted so many? It was their communal life in which the categories of rich and poor, slave and free, male and female held no superiority or inferiority and in which the lowly and outcast were lifted up and honored. It was a communion in which each person gave their all and everyone received as they had need (Acts 1-4).

If a Christian version of “Letterman” were to have a “Top 10” list of “Ways the Church Can Be Recognized,” many would give the number 1 spot to preaching or teaching, mission or service. The Reformers of the church have consistently pointed to ‘right preaching’ and ‘right administration of the sacraments’. For Jesus, however, the love of the disciples, one for another, was the definitive mark by which they would be recognized as Jesus’ disciples (John 17). We find this affirmation as well in the Letters of Paul:  Whether Christians love each other in real, tangible, life-transforming ways is the key evidence by which people decide whether Jesus is really the Christ and whether the church is really the Body of Christ. And this communal life in the Spirit is actually the primary substance of Paul’s ‘right’ preaching and his teaching about the sacramental life.

The Word of God is proclaimed most explicitly and powerfully as Christians build a common life of self-sacrificial love and extend that fellowship beyond all visible boundaries. Eucharistic life in Christ, our communion with one another in the Spirit of Christ, is the end-all and be-all of what the church is and what it does. The title of a book by Paul McPartlan says it succinctly: The Eucharist Makes the Church.

If Eucharistic unity is the heart of ecclesial life, and I believe it is, then it would behoove church folks like us to grapple with one of the major obstacles to enacting the eucharist in congregational life: middle- and upper-class lifestyles predominant in American society. With respect to two of those values, we have adopted unreservedly the value of self-sufficiency through material accumulation. Hoping and praying and striving for affluence, we blanch at the thought of being openly dependent upon others for the basic necessities of life. Our corporate worship on Sunday morning usually reflects these social values. We congregate as separate and independent individuals who have grown accustomed to “drive-by” passing of the peace: a smile, a handshake, and a polite how-do-you-do. The separation to which we have become culturally accustomed has become that to which church members aspire.

Mutual dependence is what catalyzed the early church. Sharing all things in common set the stage for Pentecostal transformation. They clung desperately to each other in part because they were being persecuted. They gave their lives to one another because their lives were literally at stake. But most of the time, when we are ‘at church’ what do we do? We talk. We share our experiences and feelings and thoughts. But let’s be clear about it: we share, but we share mostly by talking. That’s ok as far as it goes, but talking to each other is not the same thing as sharing a common life, as depending upon one another for our very survival.

In such an individualistic milieu, how do congregations come to reorient themselves to the common life we, in fact, share? And how might that common life in Christ be enacted more fully in the congregations’ worship and mission? Well, in a word, we must relearn it. And we will learn it best the same way we learn how to do any activity better: by practicing.

If eucharistic living is to break out of the confines of bourgeois values of independence and self-sufficiency, then we need to share our lives more fully – every aspect of life, including the basic necessities.  In order to learn eucharistic living, we need to think about every aspect of church life as a teaching-learning venue. We need to practice our worship services, mission efforts, pastoral care, and mission as opportunities to cultivate and extend a fellowship of koinonia.

We’ve all heard the reports of folks returning from an arduous but productive mission trip, who can’t wait to go again because of the concrete impact they made and the spirit-filled friendship that formed among missioners and their hosts. These experiences are demonstrations that we shouldn’t think about communion within the church apart from its mission beyond its walls. To experience koinonia in and through mission is commonplace among those whose lives are unified in interdependent mission to others. Unfortunately, and to the church’s shame, these experiences are compartmentalized and set apart from the ordinary practices of worship, education, and other aspects of congregational life. When the mission trip ends, everyone returns to their pews and the deep sharing of a common life is relegated to a nice memory.

There are two principles I want to lift up in this blog by which a greater communal life can be developed in congregations. First, lift up before the people the ways in which they are, perhaps unaware, already sharing their lives eucharistically. Here congregations of struggling and suffering people, of hard-pressed urban and rural communities, may have one-up on more affluent, suburban congregations. People for whom economic struggle is a way of life are usually already serving each other interdependently. Because their lives are woven together in mutual support, they may more fully understand what it is to be in communion. For example, when a farmer is sick during harvest time, it is not unusual for the neighbors to help bring in the crop. When I was a member of an inner city, multi-racial congregation, after evening meetings we would, for safety’s sake, accompany each other to our means of transportation. In that congregation, it was also assumed that during the year, some members of the congregation would go through hard times and would need our assistance. Regularly and without fanfare, offerings were taken and groceries were delivered, all as expressions of the congregation’s mutuality. These diaconal acts of compassion are marks of a robust, material communion, a sharing in the necessities of life, much like the early church in Acts.

Usually, this kind of sharing is not connected explicitly with the sacrament of communion. But it should be. If we were more attentive to the ritual of the sacrament itself, taking its implicit cues, we could incorporate the congregation’s diaconal service of one to another as a means by which Christ is shared among the Body. That way, the sacrament of communion would vividly consummate the sacramental unity already at work among the members. One way, among many others, of making the connection between the daily acts of love among the people and the Lord’s Supper is to make the offertory more than a fund-raiser. During the offertory time, usually considered to be a necessary inconvenience, people might stand to give testimony of what others have done for them and what the congregation has done for others. Much more than cold, hard cash can be brought to the altar: food, clothing, building materials, etc. These gifts are symbols of our very lives that we are giving to each other and to our God. And even the bread and wine for the eucharist can be brought up and placed on the altar by the people who made them.

Make it clear to everyone, through all kinds of symbolic gestures, that we are giving not only our money but our lives. And we are giving not only to “the church” as an institution but to one another and to the larger society. As the gifts of the people are placed on the altar as bread and wine, they are then transfigured by the Spirit to be Body and Blood of Christ for the Body of Christ. To partake of what we have made and done together vividly demonstrates that the Eucharistic bread is not just a symbol but an ecclesial relation that is the very substance of our lives. During the last supper, didn’t Jesus instruct us to ‘do this’  - to lay our lives on the altar as bread and wine, to be transformed by the Spirit, to be given back and received one to another for the redemption of the world – in remembrance of him?

A second principle of developing communal awareness and intention among the congregation has already been anticipated in the first point: make the worship service more than a mere expression, make it a vibrant enactment of what the church is in Christ. Rather than conceiving the worship service as primarily oriented away from the congregation to a distant God, reimagine the service as an opportunity for the Spirit to fill the assembly, unify it, and send it outward. Every Sunday is Pentecost! Look at it this way: the praise and glory we ascribe to God is much more acceptable to God when it arises out of our unity in Christ and mission through the Spirit. The worship service should be the time when the assembly more fully becomes – in reality – the Body of Christ. When we leave the service, we should feel that we have not only come to “know” God better, but that we have experienced our unity in Christ more intensely.

A major hindrance to this kind of communal enactment, it seems to me, is the circumscribed nature of the service itself. Most of the time, corporate worship is a thing unto itself, isolated from the mundane activities of life. But it doesn’t have to be. I have been privileged to experience worship that was more thoroughly integrated with the rest of the congregation’s life. The same multi-racial congregation I mentioned earlier shared its buildings with a Korean congregation. The differences between the way these two congregations structured their worship were stark. Not that one was necessarily “better” than another, but to me it was clear that the Korean congregation had a better sense of what a communal life together meant. The most striking difference was the order of worship. First, the Koreans would gather bringing all kinds of food to the kitchen area. Men, women, and children would help prepare the meal they would later share. Off to the side, a small group would practice their choir music, filling the hall with a beautiful if incomplete work-in-progress. People would flow in and out of the “rehearsal,” coming from or going to other responsibilities. In a room off to the side, many of the children gathered with a couple of adults for a type of Sunday School. But again, this classroom was not isolated from the rest of the activities; children were enlisted to set the tables and to help in other ways. When all was ready, everyone would sit down and enjoy the meal and afterward would slowly assemble in the main sanctuary for the worship service.

I was fascinated to find out that the Koreans believed the “preparatory time” to be as much a time of worship as the actual service. The linkage between the “preparatory time” and the service was crucial to their understanding of what it meant to worship God in spirit and truth. When they partook of the eucharist bread and wine, they had in mind (and body) the feast they shared earlier. For them, the Eucharist was the explicit enactment that vividly demonstrated an abiding way of life. Not all congregations will be able to do what these Koreans did, but in many communities, for example, the “pot-luck supper” could easily be incorporated more intentionally into the worship time to serve the same purpose. Isn’t that exactly the structure of church life in Acts and I Corinthians?

There might be any number of ways the worship service can become more robust and more integrated with the rest of the congregation’s life. As church leaders in congregational learning, we should strive to engage our faith communities in everyday rituals and practices that enact more fully the communion we share in Christ. Then, unexpectedly and without warning, the Spirit may descend upon us, igniting our hearts aflame with the Good News of the Gospel, sending us out into a dangerous world with a risky message. Who knows, we too may become church.