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What difference would this make in pastoral ministry?
We would get away from a lot of our counseling techniques and go back to confession. A lot of what we do is sin, and we need forgiveness for that sin. And confession will help us to deal with that, rather than trying to analyze ourselves into some way of feeling better about ourselves.

How else would it affect ministry?
Primarily in worship. Currently, worship seems to be divorced from the story. It is programmatic and narcissistic. If we resituate worship in the story, then worship tells and enacts the story of God. And God is the subject of that worship rather than the object that we worship. The subject acts on us in worship and forms us into Christ's likeness and thus affects our spirituality.

And today, spirituality, like worship, is divorced from the story. Spirituality is shaped by psychology, shaped by focusing on the self. It's very narcissistic instead of being our continual embodiment of the story. Spirituality is ultimately not having some sort of esoteric experience, but becoming what God created us to be and making the world what God created it to be, a place of his glory.

Hans Urs Von Balthazar said that we need to take a passage of Scripture and so internalize it that we become it. If somebody asks where's Matthew 25, we should be able to say, "Oh, it's walking over there."

The call says some harsh things about "separatist ecclesiologies." But can a separatist ecclesiology be a temporary expedient?
Just today I picked up one of my favorite books—The Principle of Protestantism by Philip Schaff. Schaff does say that there is a principle of separation to bring about a correction. When that correction has been achieved, we ought quickly to unite again with the group from which we separated. He was using that with regard to the whole Protestant world and saying the Protestant world left the Catholic church for a correction. Once that correction has been made, he said, we should reunite again with the Catholic church.

We'll have a hard time agreeing with each other on when that should happen.
Right.

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More information on "A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future" will soon be available at Ancient Future Worship.

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September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9