St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota will be hosting their 21st Annual Monastic Institute entitled "One Heart, One Soul: Many Communities" on July 1-7. If you are interested in learning more about the growing interest in monasticism from those who are engaged in living the monastic way, click here for conference information.
Boundary Walking :.
Living on the Boundaries gathers together the experiences of female evangelicals serving in academic institutions, articulating the struggle to be oneself somewhere within the broad expanse of what is known as "evangelical." Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine D. Pohl's description of the interior sorting and weighing of beliefs held in relationship to the exterior shifting of social constructs and evangelical norms, help to name what it is like to be a evangelical women with a call working among the sometimes indifferent and other times misogynistic mindsets found within the evangelical world.
The book is thoughtfully written, pushing the reader to do one's own careful reflection. Engaging both heart and mind, the depiction of the nobility of these women's struggles describe crucial groundbreaking work in the Kingdom of God.
Particularly helpful to me was the section describing the evangelical movement. According to Creegan and Pohl...
Churches that fall within the evangelical spectrum are widely diverse in institutional structure and appearance: they include megachurches, Pentecostal congregations, small emergent groups, Brethren assemblies holding communion every Sunday, Salvation Army corps that do not baptize, nondenominational community churches and evangelical churches within mainline denominations.....The universalizing aspect of evangelicalism has tended to emerge from the large parachurch and missions organizations and outreach rather than from church or denominational structure, or from conscious attention to signs of the universal church.
.....Thus evangelicals, to the extent that they are children of the Reformation, take seriously the priesthood of all believers. Leaders come and go, but the small and informal group at prayer perhaps best characterized evangelicalism, its strength and its ecclesial weakness; here is confidence that Christ is with us, where two or three are gathered in Christ's name. As a result, individualism survives within tight-knit groups, and attention to the larger church is often absent. Faith can be nurtured ahistorically, looking neither backward nor forward. And ironically, in spite of the heavy emphasis on institutions in evangelical identity, there is also an abiding suspicion of the structures required to maintain theological coherence across cultures and historical perspectives.
While the vertical dimension of God's being with us as individuals, or as two or three are gather, may be strong, a more communal sense of God's presence in the sacramental community and in the historical witness is weak. Perhaps for this reason, evangelicals morph easily into nonbelonging believers or emergent alternative groupings. This also means, though that issues surrounding women can not be dealt with conclusively. Without "institutional memory" questions are not settled in either direction for long. And the questions do not go away, perhaps because, as we have discovered, gender plays a silent though important role in evangelical identity.
A feminist theology of church was first oriented around issues of ordination rather than around a comprehensive critique of the institution or around the development of a distinctive ecclesiology. While the movement of the ordination of women has some its roots in the nineteenth-century evangelical revivals, it was successful in the mainline denominations only in the second part of the twentieth century. Ironically, at the end of the nineteenth century, some women in more sectarian, holiness or Wesleyan churches were ordained. Later backlashes against women in ministry have all but obliterated this memory in evangelical institutions. In mainline churches, ordained ministry has change as women have entered the ranks.....Making the situation even more complex is that for different reasons and motivations, in both feminist and evangelical circles, a radical egalitarianism is never far from the surface, calling into question the validity and necessity of hierarchies and separate ordained ministry (144-5).
Particularly noteworthy are issues of individualism, priesthood of believers, institutional memory, and the ahistorical nature of the evangelical church's identity. Being a person of 'catholic' roots, I have struggled with the limited evangelical self understandings of church. The short sighted approaches to ecclesial life are foreign to the universal, grounded in history, Body of Christ, I experienced as a youth: the "I Am" of God which is large and encompasses all. The invitation to Gospel life is to something and Someone much greater than one's small individual experience within a particular congregation at a particular moment of time. The slippery nature of the changing evangelical landscape due to its ungroundness in a larger sense 'of self' creates an intriguing foil to base the struggle of individual women to find their selves. The challenge to evangelicalism (and its women) may lay in this field of definition of evangelicalism's own self identity connected to the broader landscape of church.
Free of Charge :.
Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf is a clear and compelling book on the redemptive and transformative activity of God's grace in the receptive heart through the spiritual practices of giving and forgiving. Unlike some other of Volf's books which are more academic in quality, Free of Charge is an accessible read for everyone who desires to be challenged and changed. Volf writes effortlessly, breathlessly building one thought on another, tearing down old images of God and futile religious effort with new understandings of faith, gratitude, hope and forgiveness.
Here is a little taste of what the pages contain within on the function of community in "crafting givers" of grace...
Finally, the Spirit counters our indolence by placing us with the community of Christ's body. Community helps craft us into good givers. It's in the community that the Spirit suffuses our giving with hope; we hope because we are in a community of hope. It's in the community that Spirit molds our character; we display a life of virtue because we live in a community that values and fosters virtue. And how does the Spirit energize and direct our talents? We allow the community's needs to lay claim on us, and we seek the community's wisdom to help us discern what we are good at. Finally, it is by the Spirit and through the waters of baptism that we die with Christ and rise to new life in him. We don't receive the Spirit's hope, the Spirit's fruit, the Spirit's gifts and Christ's life on our own as isolated individuals. They are ours and we are members of a community of giving, whether the community is a family, a circle of close friends, or a church.
...The relation between the life of the community and the gift giving of its members is not a direct one. Communities don't make givers. Givers are not made by humans at all. They are born--born of the Spirit through the good practices of communities. God's Spirit is the agent; people are the instruments. That's how it is in regard to giving gifts. And that's how it is in regard to crafting givers (Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, 120).
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