We Presbyterians call it the session meeting. Episcopalians call it the vestry meeting. The rest of you probably call it the board of (fill in the blank) meeting. It’s the gathering of those commissioned by the Holy Spirit to give oversight to the ministry of the church.
It is God’s purpose that all human history and everything in heaven and on earth be consummated in Jesus Christ. The church is his body, his people, the center out of which his Lordship radiates to all creation. The church is guardian of the mysteries of Cod, trustee of the gospel, and proclaimer of the truth. It’s the redemptive community.
Why then is it so boring to give oversight to this glorious bride of Christ? More specifically, why are session, vestry, or board-of-whatever meetings such a drag?
Sometimes it’s just a matter of poor leadership. The moderator doesn’t moderate, the chair doesn’t chair, and the group ends up majoring on minors. The clock strikes ten, eleven, sometimes twelve and one a.m., and the leaders go home exhausted, empty, frustrated, and wondering just what it was they led-a religious organization, maybe, but certainly not the people of God.
Poorly defined goals, roles, and expectations can also make a session flounder in tedium and confusion. So can unresolved and unforgiven anger between elders or deacons. No doubt lack of prayer before and during meetings has also contributed to their failure. Fatigue has to share the responsibility too. On a human level, the church is a volunteer organization. Its leaders usually work all day, come home for dinner, and then rush off to deliberate the weighty matters of the kingdom of God at First Church. They would understandably rather be home, their brains in neutral, watching Monday night football.
But there’s a deeper reason than all these. It has to do with the culture in which we live, and it is this I want to focus on. It is privatization, or the process by which a wedge is being driven between our private lives and our public lives, with private life increasingly becoming the central locus of meaning.
Public life is life “out there” in the megastructures: the bureaucracies, unions, corporations, and government. Public life, says Richard Sennett, has to do with “those bonds of association and mutual commitment which exist between people who are not joined together by ties of family or intimate association; it is the bond of a crowd, of a ‘people,’ of a polity, rather than the bonds of family or friends” (The Fall of Public Man).
Private life, on the other hand, is life lived among family, friends, and other intimate associations. For modern Americans, it is the place where they can let their hair down, kick back, and be themselves. It’s the place of fulfillment, as opposed to life “out there” in the public domain.
Private life places great emphasis on intimacy. Psychological traits such as openness warmth, and trust are highly valued. Spontaneity is also highly regarded, and with it the conviction that the more we can dismantle structures, conventions, and tradition, the more free we will be to be ourselves.
It is my thesis that the ruling body of a local church has more of the public domain in it than that of the private. It’s in the session, where men and women are charged with oversight of the whole body, that the church in its greatest diversity comes into play. It’s where issues, more than feelings, ought to be at stake. People are asked to weigh, deliberate, compromise, and decide, rather than share little autobiographical sketches and then close in prayer. It’s less “Can I be myself?” and more “That’s beside the point.”
For this reason, it’s not surprising that privatistic individuals with privatistic expectations, attending what is basically a public event-a session meeting-can often come away feeling the whole thing was stale and empty. They can even feel cheated, and that the meeting was not “spiritual.”
Take intimacy. The church is the one gathering where people come together, not because of psychological compatibility, but because they swear allegiance to a common Lord. Psychological compatibility is the glue of private, intimate associations. A common Lord is what binds together a people, a polis.
In the Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis puts his finger right on this issue. The devil Wormwood is advised by Screwtape that a young Christian’s faith can be undermined by simply letting him attend his first church service and be confronted with “just that selection of neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided.” Lean heavily on those neighbors, says Screwtape. “Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew.”
Of course the young Christian can always avoid these people and sit elsewhere the next Sunday. But if he stays in the church, he might find them sitting next to him in a session meeting. The meetings will be much longer than a worship service. In them, he will be asked to work with these people to chart the course of the church. If he insists on intimacy, he is in for a long and frustrating term as an elder. If, on the other hand, he settles for the structures and conventions of public life, i.e., Robert’s Rules, minutes, and motions, he might get something done for the church and even end up liking these people in spite of himself.
But whether or not he likes them is beside the point. As a matter of fact, the peace he makes with these people might be only a partial peace, this side of the coming of the kingdom. As Richard John Neuhaus puts it, “It is sometimes more of a truce and a pledge to be decent to one another, in the hope of one day more fully actualizing God’s promised shalom” (Freedom for Ministry). That’s okay if “spiritual” and “Christian” are not confused with “private” and “intimate,” as is often done today.
Likewise with spontaneity. In a marriage or among friends, spontaneity can be a joy and the spice of relationships. But apart from that, not much that is worthwhile in human experience comes from mere spontaneity. No one wants a spontaneous brain surgeon or lawyer. If anything, we want these people to be a bit intense and overly conscientious. Great music, great art, great philosophy, and great churches come from great discipline, hard work, and austerity.
In my opinion, too much has been made of the church as being the family of God. I concede that it’s a biblical image, but I am also convinced that it has been seized and co-opted by the privatized vision of life. We need to hear more about the church as the people of God; men and women from every tribe and tongue-a chosen voice, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. These speak of the need to deal with the diversity, conflict, and compromise inherent in any healthy church.
The private vision, without a balancing public vision, is in the final analysis narrow, claustrophobic, and narcissistic. The external world is shrunk to the size of our own psyches, and we proceed as though the solution of personal problems is the solution of all problems. It is the pop wisdom of the Jedi master Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. Says Yoda to Luke Skywalker, “The dark side of the Force is strong in that cave.” Asks Luke, “Is there danger?” Answers Yoda, “Only what you take in with you.” The point? It’s all in your head, Luke. Get your head your private vision-together, and you’ll defeat Darth Vader, lift your spaceship out of the swamp, feed the hungry, and end war.
It takes spiritual maturity to be an elder; a broad vision of spiritual reality. God is every bit as active in the public sphere as he is in the private. For that reason, we must see the public sphere as a worthy arena for our activity as well.
God’s work in the world is arranged like the musical score of a symphony, with both upper and lower registers. There is the mundane, the everyday, the concrete world of bills to pay, planes to catch, committee meetings, and decision by consensus. That’s the lower clef. It’s potluck dinners and the sham Gothic cathedral on the corner of First and Main.
But there’s also the upper register. It is the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, the miracle of redemption, the mystic body of Christ, faith and hope and love. The mature Christian leader hears these two registers being played simultaneously and in harmony. He or she does so, because they come together in absolute harmony and unity in the Palestinian carpenter we worship as Son of God. For him, there was no wedge between public and private, upper and lower registers; there was simply the will of his Father to be done: “To unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). A
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