The Witness: What Makes for a New Old Church?

What Makes for a New Old Church?
By Wayne Schwab
Wednesday, March 9, 2005

The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church by Diana Butler Bass
The Alban Institute, 2004

In Bass' new book, The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church, she researches fifty churches from seven mainline Protestant denominations (Roman Catholic churches were not included) differing in size, location, class, race, and ethnicity, and having either male and female pastors. Theologically, these congregations represent the "center" or the "left of center" of their traditions. Ten were chosen for on-site study in depth. (More specifics about the project are at www.practicingcongregations.org.)

Bass, a senior research fellow and director of the Project on Congregations of Intentional Practice (a Lilly Endowment-funded research study of vital mainline Protestant churches based at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va.), reviews past emphases and approaches in congregational life. She describes "practicing congregations" with both organizational detail and personal stories of participants.

The stories of the congregations and of their members sound many familiar notes -- being dynamic; faith-as-pilgrimage; intentional churchgoing; storytelling; re-traditioning; inclusiveness; and union with God. These notes are not really new, but a grouping of characteristics that many churches seek. The key question for this reviewer was what criterion was used to select which congregations to study. Reviewing the text, vitality and growth in numbers occur again and again as the criteria used to qualify as "practicing congregations" to be emulated.

These criteria are about the congregation, not about how the congregation and its members are transforming the world around them. As such, they are self-serving. They are "old old" and only another form of maintenance, not mission. That is a heavy word, but the time is running out for Christians to embrace God's mission -- God's call to struggle with and to bind the evil and sin that abound.

The real criterion for a "new old church" is mission -- a church whose members, with God's help, are transforming their daily arenas in love and justice and a church whose works as a body are building up both the local and the wider world in love and justice. Otherwise, they are relatively "safe places" that have yet to find their lives by losing them in serious struggle with the unrestrained individualism, the greed, and the violence that pervade so much of family life, our neighborhoods, the work place, our leisure and the media, the ignoring of the poor, and our nation's would-be quest of empire.

The Rev. A. Wayne Schwab is director of the Member Mission Press and Network in Essex, N.Y. He is the former evangelism staff officer at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City, and the author of several books, including When the Members are the Missionaries: An Extraordinary Calling for Ordinary People (2002). Wayne may be reached by email at membermission@aol.com.