Niebuhr and the gospel...
I'm still beset by papers (only 25 more pp. to go), so I will post the words of another for right now. Last night, I read this journal entry from Niebuhr's Leaves From the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic to Margaret as we were turning out the lights. This is the journal he kept for the 13 years he was a parish minister in Detroit, and I love the self-effacing tone throughout. God bless the spouses of those who are interested in this stuff. God save the ones who are married to people who try to make a career out of it.From an entry dated in 1919:
We had a great Easter service today. Mother made the little chapel look very pretty, working with a committee of young women. It takes real work to decorate such a little place, and make it really inviting. We received our largest class of new members into the church thus far, twenty-one in all. Most of them had no letters from other churches and yet had been reared in some church. We received them on reaffirmation of faith.
This matter of recruiting a membership for the church is a real problem. Even the churches which once believed a very definite conversion to be the sine qua non of entrance into the fellowship of the church are going in for "decision days" as they lose confidence in the traditional assumption that one can become a Christian only through a crisis experience. But if one does not insist on that kind of an experience it is not so easy to set up tests of membership. Most of these "personal evangelism" campaigns mean little more than an ordinary recruiting effort with church membership rather than the Christian life as the real objective. They do not differ greatly from efforts of various clubs as they seek to expand their membership.
Of course we make "acceptance of Jesus as your savior" the real door into the fellowship of the church. But the trouble is that this may mean everything or nothing. I see no way of making the Christian fellowship unique by any series of tests which precede admission. The only possibility lies in a winnowing process through the instrumentatlity of the preaching and teaching function of the church. Let them come in without great difficulty, but make it difficult for them to stay in. The trouble with this plan is that it is always easy to load up your membership with very immature Christians who will finally set the standard and make it impossible to preach and to teach the gospel in its full implications.
posted by John and Mag @ 1:19 PM
3 Comments:
That's pretty interesting. We have a friend who is experiencing some frustrations around the prerequisites to membership at Wilshire (specifically the baptizing). I think the feeling is that the doors of the church should be open to all without requiring baptism. I initially had a similar viewpoint when I was confronted with the situation a year or two ago, however some consultation with George helped me appreciate that the doors of the church can be open to all but to be a member means more than just giving donations and posessing a willingness to volunteer on a committee. It means being committed to a shared faith.
We meant to (and perhaps Jennifer did) get your perspective on this all when you were here. While not directly related, this piece offers an interesting angle.
-- Ed
so, john, what is your perspective on the baptist requirement of full emersion for church membership.
jick
Well, I am a Baptist, and I support the teachings of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Given that our historical foundation is rooted in our rebellion against the insistence of infant baptism by the Puritan and Reformed traditions, I think that the Baptist identity is rather tied to its position on baptism. Therefore, I support baptism by full immersion as a requirement for membership in the church. The important thing is to remind the candidate that to require someone to be baptized is not to say that if they are not, they are somehow not part of the Christian fellowship. However, it is requiring of them a sacrifice of individual identity to become a larger part of a community. That is, they are buried in the same baptismal waters as the rest of the members in that tradition, and they are raised to walk in the same communal life of Christ with those people.
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