A Personal Word to the Clergy

Do I hear you say you are growingly disillusioned about the organized Church itself, and it makes you wonder? You’d be abnormal if you didn’t feel this, and I predict you will feel it off and on all the rest of your days. There is plenty in the Church to make us feel that it would be hard even for God to make “these dry bones live.” A few mornings ago I was reading St. Luke 9:1–6, where He sends out the Twelve to work miracles and preach: I could not help feeling how very different from this is an Ecumenical Council in Rome, or a meeting of the House of Bishops in the Episcopal Church, or a Presbyterian General Assembly, or a session of the World Council of Churches. We smile at the disparity, and then go on our old ways; isn’t it about time we cried at the disparity, and began taking a different way? The Church “talks a good fight.” When you know that the entire Episcopal Church, one of the wealthiest of all per capita, sends out only 270 missionaries, you know that as a church we just don’t care very much whether the Gospel gets to “all the world.” The churches are full of people who give a silent, inactive assent to things the clergy have to articulate for them, but there is more plodding and going-along than either sacrifice or the power of the Holy Spirit. I do not so much fear that the Church will go backward into total ineffectiveness, and I can scarcely hope that, at this rate, it will go forward into anything bright and exciting and adequate for these times. I fear that it will just continue on its own self-centered way, keeping up its old institutions, more or less looking after its own people, but having nothing with which to grip the world’s imagination or to stir its heart. I go along with you if these are your misgivings. But instead of stirring discouragement in me, they stir a will to put my shoulder to the wheel all the more enthusiastically—for what the Church has been given to give to the world is what the world needs more than any other thing.

You may already be feeling the conflict between the ecclesiastical harness and a spiritual ministry, or the difficulty of reconciling what you have learned through a free-wheeling movement of the Spirit and what you find in the Church. You need prayer, quiet judgment, and great wisdom about these things. Not long ago I heard that a minister who is being greatly used by God, but who had long faced the conflict of spiritual power with ecclesiastical activity, decided he must make his choice: he threw off the machinery of the institution altogether. I sympathize with his anguish, and I think I understand what made him decide as he did. But I cannot agree with his solution. Whence come any authority whatever, the sacraments, continuity, perspective, corrective from other congregations? I know how hard it is to mix the evangelical fire and the Catholic continuity, but I think we must manage to do it, for each has its own validity. Can this be brought about from the outside? Does it not simply begin another separation?

Facing Up To The Parish

There are some who will be called to a non-parish ministry. They may be evangelists, educators, writers, retreat-house leaders. If such opportunities keep them in constant touch with people, whereas parish work involves all sorts of fruitless administration and some pastoral work that is a spiritual dead end, they had better think twice before they abandon such a ministry for an ordinary parish. Any man who chooses the ordinary parish ministry must do so upon the basis that he will do his best to release “the Spirit in the wheels.”

If you wrinkle your brow and ask me whether one can honestly carry all the administrative and other routines of a parish ministry and at the same time keep it shot through with spiritual power, I can say only that this has been my own aim in two parishes over nearly forty years. There are places where this difficult combination is being happily worked out. Take Robert Raines’s church or Claxton Monro’s church. Raines’s book New Life in the Church is a documentary proof of it. Monro believes that as we develop the witnessing layman, living out in the world the new life he finds in the Church, all the old and customary ways of the Church will come to life—sacraments, preaching, religious education, Bible study, social service, worship, and all. It looks almost as if the Church has built up a good system of wiring through the years: all it needs is to be hooked up with the Dynamo.

Factors In Awakening

I do not believe that any of the Church’s given “means of grace” take effect without (1) continuous awakening in individuals, and (2) continuous awakening in the Church. No one can say much that is convincing about awakening, nothing that compares to seeing it and being part of it at a local level. But there are always four factors, as it seems to me, in any genuine awakening:

1. Conversion: somewhere a decisive beginning to the Christian life.

2. Prayer: the new climate in which converted Christians live and grow.

3. Fellowship: the need to live and work and worship with other Christians.

4. Witness: by life and word making Christ and faith real to others.

These four factors are intimately bound up with one another, none of them standing alone, like the four sides of a box. They are all old and familiar ideas, but they become new and exciting experiences when the Holy Spirit lets us know them at firsthand and in the company of others. If we begin with these four factors, I believe we shall be led into richer and deeper experiences all the time. We ought to preach on these things, getting our people familiar with them, and familiar with them together, not just as separate topics.

Does some of this sound too much to you like some forms of the old evangelism? I hope not, because I think that awakening in our time must supersede old-fashioned evangelism, with its probable emotionalism, intellectual obscurantism, Puritanical rules, and frequent self-righteousness. I think also it must go much deeper than the merely sacerdotal kind of Catholicism, with so much stress on outward forms and often so little on a changed heart. I think it must understand, but not be too much bowled over by, the insights of the intellectuals and the academics who talk mostly to the few of their own kind. One has the feeling that God must have for us an awakening which includes the warm enthusiasm of the evangelicals, the genuine sacramentalism of a true Catholicism with its steady emphasis on forgiveness and grace, and the intellectual honesty and social passion without which many moderns (rightly, I think) will not listen to us, and which would give to the Holy Spirit a wider as well as a deeper channel through which to work through the Church of today.

Yet—I think I hear you saying—all this concerns mostly the outwardness of attitudes and conceptions. What of the true inwardness of awakening, whether personal, parochial, or general? There is only one source of this, and it is the Holy Spirit. For many in the churches, including clergy, the Holy Spirit is very vague. We have not really gotten up through Easter yet, let alone through Pentecost. We must seek and pray and go among Spirit-filled Christians until we find Him, and he becomes a Living Presence, close and powerful. My own deepening conviction is that he is the source of all spiritual power, and this is part of the very nature of God as we know him through Christ. When you feel a sudden surge of power and direction as you are speaking, or are given a fresh insight as you talk with someone, or a piece of truth is given you as you walk or drive your car, or you feel an accession of joy, or repentance, or love for somebody, these are not just chance uprushes of your subconscious: they are the Holy Spirit speaking to your needs. Trust him and welcome him and give him thanks and ask him for more! The gathering momentum at a conference where the leadership is not in the grip of a program but open to Him to act as he will, the unbelievable unity that is sometimes given, the freedom and joy and power, the transformed people who go back from such a conference different forever—these are the Holy Spirit’s own handiwork. Praise him and pray to him and listen always for his voice! When the old human concern and worry, often with physical concomitants in our bodies, gives way to “joy and peace in believing,” and we are truly free, even for a short time, it is not alone our compliance with some kind of impersonal “spiritual laws”: it is the Holy Spirit at work in our own hearts, lifting depression, forgiving sins, raising our spirits, giving us fresh grants of grace. The old mere mouthing of doctrinal truths and the old effort to live up to impossible moral standards give way to a liberty in the Spirit that is unlike anything we have known before. It is His doing, and marvelous in our eyes. This is a real force, different from any we may ever have known. It is the Holy Spirit.

One of his contemporary manifestations certainly seems to be the “speaking in tongues.” I do not believe that is the only way he works, and the experience has never come to me. Let us be careful about expressing doubt or scorn. St. Paul thought prophesying (i.e., witnessing) was more important, but he never forbade speaking in tongues. As I said, this experience has not thus far been mine; I think it may be given to us, or may not.

Give The Spirit Full Range

Let us not get hung up on this one possibly controversial experience of the Holy Spirit. Rather let us seek in our prayers and our experience, especially that in small groups, to move up to and through Pentecost, giving the Holy Spirit full range in our lives, including that of a full and free exposure of ourselves to what he is doing in and through people in our time. Our annual nod to him at Pentecost is almost blasphemous in its brevity and triviality. In him alone is our hope for awakening and new life in the churches everywhere, and thus for peace and brotherhood in the world. If he were allowed to draw together under the bracket of his wide arms all the people who look to God and believe in him for conversion, healing, answered prayer, and guidance, in a kind of free totalitarianism under his dictatorship, we should have the answer to personal disputes, business clashes, disunity among the churches, and war in the world. These sound very distant and unlikely, but they do not sound impossible to anyone who has had a genuine experience of Him. I beg you to search for him through study, and through prayers, and through fellowship (he always seems a little more at home in a company than in private), till he becomes a reality, indeed the Great Reality, he who enables us to believe truly in the Father and the Son, in our life and ministry. Many are praying that we may be entering into the very age of the Holy Spirit. We have not yet even begun to know that power which can be ours if we belong wholly to him.

The deepest question I think you are asking, however, is whether this can all become real to you, and stay real. And I tell you, I believe that it can. You will face days when you feel alone in the ministry, when you are defeated in some area and need a fresh repentance and forgiveness, when you seem to be getting nowhere and accomplishing little. Your sins and limitations will seem to outrun your victories and capacities. Yes, but remember the Gospel is “for sinners only.” The depth of our prayer will be measured in part by the depth of our recognized need, and our ability to help people by our capacity to understand what they are going through. We clergy do not call down from some finally achieved height to folk still wrestling with elementary need and “unfaith” (to use a word of Tillich’s making): we are right beside them in the struggle much of the time. But we know Him, and we believe in him, and we know that he is winning the battle in us and in the world which we ourselves seem often to lose. We are in the ministry, not to prove anything as of ourselves, but by every capacity within us to affirm that He is available and that he is sufficient.

So give to God and to people all that you have. Pour it out lavishly, while remembering Alexander Whyte’s great injunction: “Squander your life, but be careful of your health.” I hope that as you come near the close of your ministry you will be able to say what I often say, that if I had had a thousand lives, I should have spent them all just where I have spent the one life I did have. And I should like to close this book with the words the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno used to end his great book, The Tragic Sense of Life: “and may God deny you peace, but give you glory!”

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.