John McKenna: New York City and American Bible Society conference
By John McKenna
At the National Church Advisory Council 2001 Conference, November 26-28, in New York City, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr., Senior Minister of the Riverside Church, attempted first to persuade us about a new priority we must realize in our worship. We need healing, renewal, and refreshment in the love of Jesus. Since 9/11, we must pay closer attention to the impulses of the Holy Spirit for the work that lies ahead of us. There exists a tension in us of our comforts and our commitments.
Reverend Forbes drew our attention to the prophet Jonah. He assigned by analogy identification between Jonah’s struggle with the will of Yahweh and the Church’s struggle to obey Christ. From Jonah’s point of view going to Nineveh was out of the question. From Yahweh’s point of view, it was a must. God invades Jonah’s comfort zone. Shall it be our comfort or the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
The story is told that in the Perfect Storm there is God’s Big Fish and the prophet’s salvation from his comfort zone’s desires and his gratefulness for God’s deliverance of him from death from drowning in the sea. The deliverance of the prophet then results in a turning towards the mission the Lord God has for him. On dry land again, the prophet can overcome his self-centeredness and obey the Word of God. It is the Lord Jesus Christ who is the Big Fish of the storms in our lives. It is His Grace that persuades us to do the will of God for our lives.
The pastor of the Riverside Church looked for a new unity among Christians since 9/11 and a new willingness to go where we are sent in the New Year.
My only concern for this preaching has to do with the typological analogy employed in order and its relationship to the self-centeredness of the Church. Direct identification with Jonah is not possible. Jesus has identified himself with the prophet in the Gospels and we must allow his mediation of the sign that Jonah is for us in the Church. It is mediated identification and not direct identification that is appropriate if typology is to be employed in the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. We will remain self-centered if we are not delivered from the direct identifications of our causes and our psychology with the Word of God heard in the world through the ministry of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, sent from the Father.
The keynote speaker was Andrew Rasiej, president of MOUSE, Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools and Education. He is an expert on the world of the Internet and the Information Age which is the future of our race upon the planet, an age of technology that is as profound a transformation of civilization as any we have ever experienced in our history. The Age of the Internet, says Rasiej, participates in the democratic and global revolution in which we are all presently involved. The problem is finding truth is the flood of information becoming available to everyone. The answer revolves around making it possible to find the Word of God in the midst of the development where everyone is free to choose for herself and himself to what they are willing to listen.
The Internet works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are 250 million people on-line. Websites compete for their time on it. We need the creativity to link up in this cyberspace with those who would choose to hear the Word of God in their times.
In the digital world, the Library of Congress On-Line will completely transform the availability of information. What will the Big Fish be in this ocean of word and pictures?
The Word of God was not written in Internet forms. To build a business among these forms takes great time, energy, and money. Who will pay for a form of the Word of God in cyberspace and time? Mr. Rasiej suggests that grants and foundations must be sought to equip us. We need custodians of this kind of space and time just as we have had custodians of the grounds where our institutions headquarter the Word for the world. Custodians should seek for as much unity in the diversity of these forms as it is possible for us to create.
But the deeper problem lies in the relationship between the forms of the Word in cyberspace and time and personal space and time. The dynamics of real education cannot be successfully realized without personal time and space. How will God put His Face on and face us on the Internet? The substance of faith requires this personal dimension and along with Internet forms we must learn to provide this personal space and time for those who are willing to hear the Word of God among us.
Who will resolves these problems? What will the Church on the Internet appear to be? Some people, at MIT for instance, believe that computers will obtain a power of intelligence able to replace the human brain. Artificial intelligence is not just a dream. It is at hand. What is the relationship of that which can be computed in this world and the non-computable dimensions of the reality of the development of human thought? Mr. Rasief appeared to suggest that, in the final analysis, the zero/one bites could add up in some sense to the rationality of the Word of God with us.
My concern here will be obvious to anyone who has given the mind/brain relationship a second thought. I belief we ought not to confuse the mind with the brain and that the mind-brain relationship involves the human race in transcendent dimensions of realities that cannot be properly thought through except from within the determinate level on which we exist. To confuse technological advancement with scientific advancement and scientific advancement with theological confessions that are bound with the Mind of Christ is a great mistake, the dead-ends of which can be read in our history from Socrates and through Alexandria and the Middles Ages to the modern world of our civilization. Photons may not be electrons but they are as solidly there and belong to the uncreated light that God was and is and will be over all that is His Creation. Technology and science must in time be given real Christological considerations if in all the rapid changes of the world we are to hear the Eternal Word aloud for us in the Son sent by the Father in the Spirit for us in our times.
The workshops, held after the keynote speaker and the preaching of Reverend Forbes, were 1) Dale Carrell, Media Visions 2) Evan Morgan, Education and the Christian University Globalnet 3) John LaRue, Christianity Today, and 4) Robby Richardson, Evangelism and Gospel Communications International. One could not attend all of the sessions as they overlapped one another. I chose to Evan Morgan’s session on Education (www.cugn.org) and Robby Richardson’s session on the Gospel Communications (robby@gospelcom.net). Evan exhorted us to understand that, in all e-learning, mentoring and spiritual formation is imperative and automatic. There are 600 on-line courses already available from 150 different schools. Interactive courses across various time zones are becoming possible for anyone, anytime, anywhere. The problem is between the formal elements of education and the informal dimensions of learning. But distance learning in the democracy of globalization will occupy the 21st century. But there is much here to be learned and developed. Robby’s concerns were similar, but specifically focused upon core purposes and peripheral tools employed in the electronic world. Is the Internet world a neutral place, can it become a place of the Word, will it be employed for divine purposes? These are his questions, the answers to which must be decided in the 21st century. The best experiences thus far have been with ‘seeker-sites’, where felt needs are discerned and the Gospel’s clarity is brought to them. Then with various forms of follow-up and discipleship, people may be led into Church fellowship. We need to employ a tight focus for these sites while maintaining a broad network of relationships. Both workshops were very much aware of the way, since 9/11, the medium was deeply and profoundly involved in ministry both in New York and around the world.
My concerns with the workshops are involved with taking seriously as His Church the real space-time correlates of the Risen and Ascended Lord, the fact that in history He is the Lord of space and time as well as the Lord of Mankind. The distinction between the formal and substantial implicit in the assumptions of many divides observational from theoretical forms in much of the thinking here. To speak of the relationship between cyberspace and time and God’s space and time is to make a Christological commitment I find lacking in the conference’s considerations. Deeper reflection in the Christ of the Cosmos is a must for the American Bible’s Society’s workshops. If we are free to be successful and go good, we are also free to choose against God’s Word in this world. What does He call us to do in this space and time in the way of following Him here? A global culture can be as much against Him as any tribal superstition about time and space and man and the universe of God. We need to understand His unique Being and Nature in Jesus Christ within the space and time of the bodily resurrected Word ministering to us by His Spirit from the Right Hand of the Father.
Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, serving a Military Vicariate that was established by the Roman Catholic Church in 1917, spoke with us about the pre-evangelistic work that is inherent among the chaplains of the many denominations in our armed services. Grace builds up nature and the military with its chaplain helps young people develop values the world does not teach its children. The chaplain is a lay-ministry sanctioned by the U.S. Government to do work that prepares people to live out Gospel truth. The great chasm that exists sometimes between military culture and society in general must speak to us of the way that military service and its traditions belong to biblical values of servant-leadership.
This was, so far as I know, the first appearance of a chaplain at ABS. Probably because of 9/11, we are more ready to hear of the way those who are willing to take up arms and serve their country as fighting men and women belong to the grace and truth of Christ with us. America’s leadership in the struggle for peace and freedom in the world certainly cannot be understood without this grace and this truth.
There was also special times allotted to some other speakers. Chris Thyberg of the Church Online (www.ForMinistry.com) taught us the three c’s employed to equip God’s People on the Internet world. Capacity, capability, and competency belong to the collaborate considerations of ministries on-line to serve local congregations. Trust relationships must be built up when information architects can do the hard task of creating the most unity between the various churches and para-churches seeking to proclaim the Gospel in cyberspace. The development of these architects is vital for the future of the proclamation.
Fergus MacDonald of the United Bible Society also exhorted us to take seriously the world since 9/11 and know that the world has responded to America’s tragedy and there is now an opportunity for a new family of societies possible. The Christian community ought to deal afresh with Aids around the world, find a new openness with Islam, and seek to make the Western Civilization more intelligible to the developing nations. The question about the West having lost its way in the world must be addressed with a positive leadership in which the world is given fresh opportunities to realize their destinies under God.
A young couple from Ghana was also given some special time to speak on behalf of the 70 language groups of Papua, New Guinea. They were with Wykcliff Bible Translators and burdened with the task of getting the Gospel put into the languages of these peoples. They gave a call to the African American Church to become more involved in the ministry of Bible translations. There are still 400 millions of peoples on the earth who do not own the Bible in their own languages.
The 2001 banquet speaker was the Reverend Della Reese-Lett. As a young woman Miss Reese was well known as a jazz-singer and most recently is known to everyone as one of the angels in the television drama Touched By An Angel. But Miss Reese is also a pastor of a church in Hollywood, where her preaching seeks to exhort her congregation into the positive values that we find in the Gospel. Terror, she sought to assure us, cannot and will not reign victoriously on this earth. Miss Reese’s appreciation for the uniqueness of the individual and her destiny in the world makes her seem something like an angel to many among us. I met her once in a jazz club in Cleveland, Ohio and reminded her of it and she said, "Its nice to see you again, Jack." After meeting with her, one cannot help but feel that there may be something to the individual as an angelic uniqueness in the world. But check your Bible on this impression.
The final two addresses were given by the preaching once again of Reverend Forbes and the address of the president of the American Bible Society, Dr. Eugene B. Habecker. Pastor Forbes preached for interfaith settings and the necessity of pluralism. Christian intercession and community must be seriously pursued. Individual and self-centered concerns must come to serve the values of the greater and common good. "No time for foolishness", Forbes remembered about his sabbatical at the deBois Center of Harvard University was the inspiration of the Reverend Higgenbottom. In the rapidly changing world, especially since 9/11, there is no time for foolishness among us. The opposite of the grace of God is the foolishness of man, and with the tragedy of the Twin Towers behind us we must understand that there is not time for foolishness in our nation.
The president’s address sought to impress us with the conference’s focus on the Word of God and a fresh understanding of the heart of Jesus in our time. The 6th president of the Bible Society was John Quincy Adams, when the message of the Bible seemed the clear concerns of Christianity in the young nation. It is this tradition that President Habecker conceives as our mandate. Before 9/11 a cacophony of words from a diversity of points of view polarized the dynamics of Church and State in our time. But after 9/11 a new regard for truth drives us to seek to understand the Bible afresh and move beyond perspectives to grasp their relationship with the truth of the Word of God. Political tones have changed. Agendas have been revised. Life’s frivolities have been lost. We know we need to hear that Word of God that stands forever even in the midst of a rapidly changing world and its struggle to define our humanity. Churches must become the sources of the Bible’s wisdom and not Bible ignorance. The Bible’s wisdom must guide us into social actions that indeed define our humanity for us. The president quoted Greg AIbrecht, where he seeks to grasp the new boundaries that may define Christianity in our world, and from Mike Feazell’s The Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God, where the author seeks to help us grasp afresh the real significance of the grace and truth of God with us.
President Habecker was very much aware that the future must mean for us a new consciousness of the vital importance of relationality in our time. True values belong to life’s wholeness and we must live out our freedom in the knowledge of grace both common and redeeming in the wholeness of God’s Word with us. For this kind of relationality to be realized, transformations are necessary. Organizational forgiveness is imperative. It is this forgiveness that nutures good leadership, leadership that can overcome models of perfection employed as standards in the past and give real direction into the future. Here reconciliation with God is at the heart of institutional as well as individual development. We must be able to learn from our mistakes and champion a culture where divine forgiveness and the common good meet in Jesus Christ.
Since 9/11 the incarnate Word and the written Word must be listened too afresh and a new vision from the heart of Jesus enable us to face our future in Him.
My general concern for the Bible Society’s annual meeting of its National Advisors was reflected in certain complaints I heard at the plenary de-briefing session. More reflection is necessary, when some deeper thinking can be accomplished. The workshops need to become more think-tank sessions, where a more dynamical interaction might lead us to some more profound ideas for our visions of communication the Gospel. We need to overcome the merely descriptive grasp of the New World orders and penetrate into the realities that foresee those orders.
My personal exhortation is, as it was last year, that the Society must come to grips with the relationship of the Gospel not merely to technological developments but to real science and the kind of creativity that drives science’s progress. The relationship between Theology and Science is fundamental to any real understanding of the dynamics of our society and civilization’s development in the world. ABS will do well to learn to reflect on these fundamental issues, as she desires to nurture those relationships that serve best the communication of the Gospel in the post 9/11 world.
Dr. John McKenna
Copyright © Worldwide Church of God, 2002