Touch with Glory!: An Approach to an Urban Ministry

Urban work in the Church today is marked by baffling contradictions. One difficulty with the Church’s perspectives on urban work is perhaps inherent. The Gospel itself has been said to be agrarian, filled with rural imagery and ostensibly addressed to those unaccustomed to city ways and city situations. The complexities of our present-day cities, with their increasingly mobile populations, their detached dormitory communities, and their massive construction and renewal booms, present the Church with problems hitherto unknown. Urban work thus cannot be looked upon strategically from old blueprints. The world of a century and a half ago differed less from that of Christ’s time than does our world from that of our nation’s founding fathers.

What is needed in the Church today, if its urban work is to be accomplished in a way consistent with its presumed master-plan, is a recognition and recovery of essentials. The unhappy fact is, however, that we are not clear concerning essentials and not agreed upon a master-plan. Is the Church basically to seek for numerical growth, and this in areas of easy access? the extension of its influence in public life, and this primarily among the supposedly influential? the establishment of a solid business-like base of financial support, resting most comfortably upon the charity of the affluent? If the answers to these questions are given in positive terms, then our current course in urban work—involving, as it does, a holding of the line or patchwork here, and spasmodic, daring efforts elsewhere—is realistic and should be continued.

Further, and more fundamentally, if the direction of what we are doing is right, then the theology of identification, stemming from a currently fashionable approach to the fact of God’s gracious condescension to identify with frail and sordid human nature, should be continued and extended in our urban work. In the same way in which the Lord of the heavens felt a relationship with the whole of human life, so suburbia’s Church with its means and wisdom and power should help and become at one with its unfortunate feebler brethren in the inner city. So the logic of a theology of identification would run.

Identification, it must be said, does have its transparent values. But the historical reality of the Incarnation was not an end in itself. It was only a part of the means of redemption. A new theological emphasis clearly must be found and made.

Add a Touch of Beauty

Immediately we recognize that what is to be found must already be inherent in the theological groundwork of the Church. Fortuitously, from the new orientation of the ecumenical and liturgical movements which look creatively at the theological syntheses and outlook of the early fathers of the Church there has appeared a possible key to our current theological need. The answer which has been at hand is given broadly in terms of redemption, and this in its ultimate sense as the uplift and glorification of the whole of human life. This is held to be our basic, all-pervading religious purpose in every area and aspect of the Christian personal and corporate enterprise. It has potential validity for urban work also.

There could scarcely be a clearer statement of this point of view than that provided some fifty years ago by the Roman Catholic Abbot Ildefons Herwegen in an address on the Christian liturgy given to a German university audience—a statement which subsequently has had a revolutionary effect upon the development of the lay apostolate in the Roman church on the European continent. The heart of the abbot’s thesis—drawn from the writings of the ancient fathers—was that the transcendent purpose of the Christian religion is that of transfiguration. This same idea may be expressed as conversion, redemption, exaltation, salvation, glorification, or fulfillment. “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all things unto me”: this dominical decree gives substance to the Christian hope for the ultimate uplift of all of life to the plane where God would have it be. The abbot declared: “The purpose of the Christian religion is to assimilate man to God through Christ; to form mankind, therefore, in the likeness of Christ.” He added: “The purpose of the liturgy is the transfiguration of human souls,” and suggested significantly that this transfiguration is, indeed, the key to the whole programming of the Christian enterprise.

Might not the abbot’s approach to the role of liturgy be suggestive of a theological orientation to urban work which not only is perhaps sounder in theory than the current theology of incarnation, but (what is more important) promises far greater practical fruits as well? Herwegen’s turning to the ancient sources of Christian tradition, common to the whole of Christendom, led him to this conviction: that the Christian life is a life united with and lived in Christ, and so, while experienced in the here-and-now on earth, it is nonetheless invested continuously with a sense of the heavenly glory.

What greater need for the depressing sameness of the inner city streets than here and there a touch of Something Other? Whether in the form of the greenness of some spot of grass, the cleanliness of some place of refuge, or the welcome hand of concern and complete acceptance in the face of isolation or of loss, the something other brought into touch with the drab coldness of the urban scene may bring near the wanted touch of the transfigured life.

There could scarcely be a more flagrantly apparent scandal to the Christian cause within our inner cities than the often unseemly appearance of vast numbers of our depressed-area urban churches. The theology of identification suggests, at least in some quarters, the store-front type of church—“Meet the people where they are!” But the situation which those who walk the dark streets of our inner city depressed areas find themselves in is to be discerned not in an apparent, unattractive disarray, but in their hunger and thirst for the redemptive uplift which light and beauty bring.

The principle of transfiguration is at work perhaps even unconsciously in the Church’s great suburban pastures; there it suggests that the lovely hills which crown the landscape be further crowned with churches which bespeak God’s beauty. The churches’ handsome, wholesome spires and other aspects of crisp cleanliness further suggest that beyond the supposedly safe havens in which people live there is an even holier, happier place in which the human heart may find its super-native home. Here, intentionally or not, is expressed the Christian concept of transfiguration, the lifting of life above the immediacies and configurations of the here-and-now and the prefiguring of man’s experience in an area of life beyond the finite horizons.

First Order of Business

The first and possibly most immediate order of business for consideration in our inner city church life may well be to restore or create a sense of dignity and holiness for its temples. That we cannot teach people about heaven in a place that looks like something quite different than it should, ought to be recognized as axiomatic. For we learn really by sense, by an introduction into experiences which prefigure and foreshadow the realities which we would know. Thus it was that St. John in the Book of Revelation is said to have projected into the heavens a glorified and transfigured picture of the worship life of the Christian community which he knew. It might be said that he believed heaven would be like the local church in which he worshiped.

How far short of even a remote suggestion of the eternal ramparts fall so many of our inner city churches! And here—where in the midst of the dreary and the drab, the disorder and the dislocated, some witness must be shown for the peaceful and the purposeful, for harmony and grace—our church structures should speak most eloquently of and point most clearly to the realities which they represent. Not a lavishness which points attention to itself, but a sense of transcendent loveliness and order which seems inherently to uplift and sanctify should characterize the temples of the inner city’s Church.

Closely associated to this is the atmosphere of unreality in the Church’s orientation to the social needs of the inner city. Life in the raw, stripped of all pretense and encrustations, is seen most clearly, perhaps, in our inner cities. The inner city’s social needs are deep, its problems the most critical, and the Church’s meeting with the city’s social situation doubtless barometers most precisely the quality and intensity of the Church’s care for human life.

How characteristic, for example, it has been for us to lock out or freeze out these urban poor, these “different” people, from our churches—until our pews are nearly empty. And then, out of a newfound pious care and holy concern the Church (as symbolized by its professionals)—now wounded in its pride from faded glory, its people moved away—rushes in with impassioned zeal and bright-eyed righteousness to identify with life within its buildings’ neighborhoods. But is the Church within our inner cities truly identifying? The Church is not its isolated, no-longer-used or perhaps half-useful buildings. The Church is (we shrink at the thought!) … Christ’s Body, the extension of God’s life in and through time.

The theology of identification has given encouragement to clergy to come and live, in Christ’s and the Church’s name, among those who in the wild rush to suburbia of the affluent and the acceptable are so unfortunate as to be left behind or disqualified by economics, by color, or by ancestry. The key fiction here is our thinking that we can truly minister to those whom we have rejected or left behind by returning to them a remnant.

A New Perspective

The principle of transfiguration would not have the Church first isolate and then patronize, but would have the Church’s people, out of an imperative sense of vital urgency, be so deeply conscious of the divine and indeed otherworldly nature of its true and inner life that the social situation would be cast in a completely new, different perspective. “You are the Body of Christ,” says St. Paul, “and individually members thereof.” Our life “is hid with Christ in God.” Christ is “our life.” We are “in him,” and he is “in us.” What and where Christ is, to the extent that we enter into our rightful heritage, such also do we find ourselves to be.

The Church has faced the urban situation chiefly with its all-too-human resources and from an all-too-human perspective. Not until the Church studiously takes the step of first teaching and believing itself to be what by God’s decree it is—Christ’s life—will the Church be enabled to bring to the city’s situation redemption or release. After all it is only God who can redeem; his hand alone can bring order, fulfillment, and a sense of God-willed glory to the urban situation.

Is it too radical to suggest from the implications of a theology of transfiguration that the Church’s task in the contemporary world may not be to promote in its present manner Christian social relations or to construct, implement, and assist in the development of broad plans of social renewal until the Church has become—within itself—somewhat more of what it should be? May not it be unrealistic or simply escapist for the Church to give witness to racial, ethnic, and cultural unity before it actualizes this more fully within its own life?

Let the Church Begin with Herself

The correction or adjustment of housing patterns, for example, may be—as I believe—of no immediate concern to the Church’s organic life. What is of first and immediate concern to the Church is its own corporate life. Racial and ethnic segregation patterns—in elementary, practical terms—would receive the impact of the Church most forcibly if the Church did no more than simply integrate what most nearly belongs to itself, that is, if it lifted the well-nigh iron-clad bars to professional assignments outside of their own ethnic groups of its large segment of minority-group clergy. It is at rock bottom a denial of economy, a fictitious approach to the utilization of its manpower, and no less than a false representation of the Body of Christ to persist in an arbitrary and outmoded pattern which almost universally assumes that the Church’s task, in almost any area outside the South today, can be performed better by fourth-rate men of majority-group complexion than by even a first- or second-rate priest of darker hue. The Church’s task is always and everywhere simply to present, and not to deny, the Gospel. It is to bring into every situation something of the glory of its own transfigured life. Yet the Church remains the last bulwark of a rejected way in American and democratic life; by this clear sign will discerning men who in our day seek desperately for a sure instrument of divine guidance increasingly reject the Church.

Our National Council top staff positions, almost all of our diocesan and active cathedral staffs, and the rectorships of our great urban and suburban churches should—for the sake both of an image which may speak effectively to our contemporary world and of an organic life consistent with the idea of transfiguration—should, with a promptness alone consistent with a holy imperative, be opened to the Church’s hitherto “excluded” and capable minority-group clergy, and this with a wise, creative, disciplined, and massive encouragement.

Fresh Possibilities

Here in the immediately foregoing the principle of transfiguration may be seen to reject the notion of a “going forth” to identify, in favor of an “enfolding within” to bring fulfillment to the Church’s total corporate life. A transfigured Church knows no social or economic cleavage within Christ’s Body. It sees its situation, as indeed itself, as a unity. There is, after all, no earthly situation but the human situation in need of and imminently standing in the presence of redemption.

Other areas afford illustrations of the refreshing possibilities of the theology of transfiguration. In stewardship, for example, if the purpose is fulfillment, our direction will be oriented toward helping people to help themselves and others. In this sense, the aim of every mission would be to foster missions, thus enabling the seemingly destitute to become themselves benefactors, bringing to their inner city life some measure of fulfillment. In the area of parochial care, the priest would make the parish vital not by carrying out an exhausted and footsore professional ministry, but by encouraging and implementing the total ministry of lay discipleship.

In the liturgy most clearly we see our role in life which we perform each day, as members of Christ, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” The Christian life is a life in the world, though not of it. “Christians,” wrote the author of the Epistle to Diognetus in the second century, “are not distinguished from the rest of mankind either in locality or in speech or in customs.… Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.” Liturgy is the exercise of a holy function whereby the Christian life is renewed in Christ. It is the Christian life bringing along with itself its world and placing it into the hands of its transfigured priest in glory.

Liturgy transfigures life; and when liturgy is exercised in its primitive understanding in the context of our situation today, the Church—in urbia and suburbia, among the fields, in far-away areas, in every place—will find itself sharing in an exalted life which, while on earth, prefigures the actuality of heaven. It is of this that the theology of transfiguration both speaks and gives promise.

NATHAN WRIGHT, JR.

Rector

Saint Cyprian’s Church

Roxbury, Massachusetts

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