The Strategy of Penetration
I hazard the prophecy that that religion will conquer which
can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness incarnate
in the passage of temporal fact.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Any careful reader of the Gospels is bound to be struck by the obvious effort of Christ to make His hearers understand the nature of His cause. The effort was marked by the tireless use of a great many figures. He told His little company that they were the salt of the earth, that they were the light of the world, that He had turned over the keys of the kingdom; He compared His own work to that of bread and of water; He said the kingdom was like leaven; He said He had come to cast fire on the earth. At first the variety of these figures is bewildering, but a powerful insight comes when we realize, suddenly, what they have in common. Each figure represents some kind of penetration. The purpose of the salt is to penetrate the meat and thus preserve it; the function of light is to penetrate the darkness; the only use of the keys is to penetrate the lock; bread is worthless until it penetrates the body; water penetrates the hard crust of earth; leaven penetrates the dough, to make it rise; fire continues only as it reaches new fuel, and the best way to extinguish it is to contain it.
Page 69
The cumulative effect of all these figures is almost overwhelming. In any case, they make absolutely clear what the function of Christ's company is mean to be. The Church is never true to itself when it is living for itself, for if it is chiefly concerned with saving its own life, it will lose it. The nature of the Church is such that it must always be engaged in finding new ways by which to transcend itself. Its main responsibility is always outside its own walls in the redemption of common life. That is why we call it a redemptive society. There are many kinds of religion, but redemptive religion, from the Christian point of view, is always that in which we are spent on those areas of existence which are located beyond ourselves and our own borders. "Religion is not a form of experience existing separately from other forms of experience. It is the transformation of the whole of experience."1
The outgoing character of the Christian movement is of such crucial importance that when it is understood, many of our religious presuppositions are thereby altered or rejected. One result of such understanding is the recognition of the complete ineptitude of the idea of a "churchgoer," mentioned in an earlier chapter. Christians may indeed come in, but they do so only that they may, in consequence, go out, and furthermore, that they may go out with greater effectiveness. The preposition used in describing Christ's own strategy is highly significant. "He called to him the twelve, and began to send them out" (Mark 6:7). The point is almost equally clear in the dispatch of the Seventy, whom He sent "on ahead of him" (Luke 10:1). Though it is discouraging to find how few of the millions of nominal Christians have even a slight comprehension of this, it is heartening to find it understood in some places. Thus, the
Page 70
Second Congregational Church of Grand Rapids prints, at the end of its order of events, in its weekly bulletin,
The End of Worship —
The Beginning of Service.
As we study carefully the strategy employed by Christ, we are forced to conclude that the crucial step was that by which disciples were turned into apostles. It was necessary, of course, to have disciples first, because there had to be some reservoir of human resources on which to draw before the actual penetration of the world could begin. Christ started by the individual enlistment of modest men in His little company, devoting Himself largely to their training and discipline. This is not very surprising, since many others, including Socrates, have had disciples. A disciple is a student or a follower and, if Christ had had merely disciples, His position in this regard would not have been radically different from that of John the Baptist. What is different is that all of the disciples in Christ's company were potential apostles or ambassadors. They were enlisted not that they might share in a separated fellowship, such as the Essene community associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that they might become the fellowship of penetration of the ordinary world.
If this analysis is correct it bears closely on the question of what a Christian is meant to be in the twentieth century, as well as what Christians were in the first century. It means that no person is really a Christian at all unless he is an evangelist or is getting ready to be one. The person who supposes that he can be a Christian by observing a performance, whether of the Mass or anything else, has missed the whole idea. There is nothing wrong with watching a performance, providing the watching serves to make the daily apostleship more real, but there is terrible wrong in watching a performance
Page 71
whenever this serves as the end. The Church, however large its buildings and however grand its ceremonies or vestments, is a denial of Christ unless it is affecting the world — in business and government and education and many other segments of human experience.
The Church can never be loyal to Christ merely by the orthodoxy of its teaching about theology. The Apostle Paul's most shocking heresy is not about theology, for in this field he helped to establish orthodoxy, but rather it is his bland rejection of those who were trying to criticize the institution of slavery.2 We are grateful that the essential leaven of the gospel finally penetrated the worldly dough sufficiently to make it possible for Christians to mount an attack upon slavery, but the sorrow is that it took almost eighteen hundred years for this operation to mature. The gospel proved finally its penetrating power, but it was discouragingly slow.3
In many contemporary Christian congregations the entire church operation points to a climax on Sunday morning, a conception which would have seemed very strange indeed to the early Christians. Often the major effort during the week is promotion of Sunday, the printed church paper plugging constantly for a bigger attendance. Sunday morning, then, when it finally comes, has something of the mood of a much advertised athletic contest, for which the team has prepared and to which it has been pointed all week. Finally, at twelve o'clock on Sunday, the whistle blows, the climactic event is over for another week, and the spectators go home to relax. If any reader imagines that this is a caricature, he ought to study the promotional material put out by countless churches — material which gives the undeniable impression that, for the Christian, the week is a preparation
Page 72
for Sunday. This is a complete reversal of the Christian pattern and something which finds no support whatever in the New Testament. The Christian pattern, if taken seriously, means exactly the opposite — namely, that what happens on Sunday is defensible only as a preparation for the daily ministry of the week which follows.
Worship is important, but it tends to be overemphasized in the contemporary church. It is very easy for the emphasis on worship to become a throwback to the Temple rather than a pushing forward to the strategy of Christ as represented in the Valiant Seventy. After all, it is significant to remember that Christ could contemplate the destruction of the Temple with absolute equanimity, and that, according to the record, when Jesus died on the cross "the curtain of the temple was torn in two" (Luke 23:45). The old order, which had served its day, was gone, and thereafter the "Seventy" was a more relevant symbol than the "Holy of Holies." What we have in the Bible is a threefold dialectic in which the Temple is the first moment, the synagogue the second moment, and the universal apostolate the third moment. The sorrow is that the Church is always tempted to slip back into one or the other of the positions which Christ came to transcend. There is a tendency, for example, to forget that Christ rejected the idea of a shrine as a necessary physical center of religious experience. This is the clear point of His unequivocal answer to the question of the Samaritan woman. "The hour is coming," He said, "when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father" (John 4:21). Worship for the follower of Christ, whatever its details, can never be a matter of place.
If we were to take the idea of a militant company seriously, the church building would be primarily designed as a drill hall for the Christian task force. It would be a place where Christian ambassadors in common life would come together
Page 73
to be trained, to strengthen one another, and to find solitude when it is needed. The building might reasonably resemble the plan of a small college, with much emphasis upon the Christian library, the bookstore, the seminar rooms. It would be equipped with sleeping accommodations for the constant stream of visiting recruits and with an easily accessible quiet room. It would be armory, arsenal, barracks, and college, all in one. In short, it would resemble the new Christian centers which are beginning to appear in many parts of the country.4
It is discouraging to see how slow churches are to make their church buildings contemporary. They seem to suppose that they are doing so when they adopt modernistic architectural design, but this is obviously a superficial and sometimes a foolish gesture. What is far more important than the use of peculiar lighting is a reconsideration of what the true function of a Christian building may be, and this depends, in turn, upon the philosophy of the nature of a Christian society. If the Church is an end in itself, one kind of building is reasonable, but if the Church is the apostolate, another kind is required. Since we have to use figures of speech, as the Church has always had to do, we may say that the Christian building should be a "launching pad," a place from which people engaged in secular life are propelled. The building is best understood not primarily as a shrine, and not as an assembly hall, but as the "headquarters" of the company. By a singular foresight, doing better than they realized, the members of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., when they purchased the modest building which they now occupy, began by calling it simply "Headquarters of the
Page 74
Church of the Saviour." It is not called the "church," and it is not even the major scene of operations. The major scenes are the psychiatric clinic, the coffee house, the art center, and the factory for the unemployed.
The earliest Christians owned no buildings at all, and with very good reason: they were so deeply engaged in the task of penetrating the world that they had no time to build a monument to themselves. The oldest known Christian structures — those underground at Rome — date from about A.D. 250. When Christians did finally begin to build, their major pattern was the dwelling house rather than the shrine. This was reasonable in view of the New Testament expression "the church in their house."5 There is nothing wrong with beauty, and we may be truly gratified for the labor which has gone into some ecclesiastical buildings, such as the medieval cathedrals, but we must never let even their beauty cause us to forget what the main purpose of a Christian building is. What we can say with real confidence is that a building designed to be used only once or twice a week is wholly inadequate. We need spiritual laboratories, with all of the emphasis placed on simple beauty and daily function rather than upon ostentation, or display. We have made a great start when we see the church building not as a holy place, but as the headquarters of the company, from which the recruits are expected to go out.
The effective Christian pattern is always a base and a field. The base — whether it be in a private house or in a church building — is the center to which the soldiers of Christ repair, periodically, for new strength. The field is the world, and this is where Christians are supposed to operate. A splendid and much admired example of this pattern is that instituted by Columba when he began the Christian invasion of Scotland nearly fourteen centuries ago, an example which, to some
Page 75
degree, has been copied by the Iona Fellowship of our own generation. In Columba's imaginative conception, the beautiful island of Iona was the base while the mainland of Scotland was the field. The return of the workers to Iona was always temporary, because that was not the primary scene of operation. It was the point of departure and subsequent return, but the return was made only in order that there might be another departure. The men who now go to the island in the summer, participating there in the actual physical building of the needed structures, are expected to spend all of the remainder of each year on the mainland in the mission of penetration, particularly of industrial areas.
An undue pride in the grandeur of the building is by no means the only danger which arises when a single aspect of Christianity is emphasized disproportionately. Another equal but different danger arises from the nurture of the small prayer group. While there can be no doubt that the rediscovery of the power of the small group has been one of the genuine Christian advances in our generation, it is possible that the prayer group, like the sanctuary, may involved a retreat from reality. A prayer group is dangerous, and even harmful, if the members are satisfied to indulge in their own delightful fellowship, making this fellowship essentially an end in itself. The society of a little group of fellow believers can be so pleasant that the poverty and the sorrow of the outside world are forgotten, at least for the time of meeting. But the poverty and the sorrow must never be forgotten, not even for a little while. A prayer group which does not make its members more effective apostles in their jobs and homes, and more sensitive participators in the fellowship of those who bear the mark of frustration, is essentially a failure. The test of the vitality of a group does not occur primarily while the group is meeting; it occurs after the meeting is over.
Page 76
The vitality of the original Christian movement was not demonstrated by the meetings they held, of which we have some limited knowledge, but by the way in which Christians provided an antidote to the loss of nerve and to the moral sag of the ancient world. If contemporary Christians are to have anything like the effect on modern civilization that Boris Pasternak6 says early Christians had on Roman civilization, we shall have to do a great deal more creative dreaming than we do now, in order to discover how.
All who care deeply about the Christian cause are heartened when they hear of imaginative new ways in which penetration is occurring. One of the most successful of the new efforts is the establishment of the Potter's House in Washington, D.C. The Potter's House is a Christian coffee house, located by careful design in an area in which many young people are living in boardinghouses or apartments, and where the races tend to meet. The building is not marked by religious symbols, but looks, from the outside through the big windows, like a clean, attractive place in which to spend some time over a cup of coffee. Though it was established and is supported by a local church, it is never used as a means of promoting that church's attendance or membership or finance. People simply drop in, sip their coffee, talk, look at exhibits, and go out.
The members of the supporting church take turns at the task of being in The Potter's House each evening, waiting on tables, sitting with the guests, and being inconspicuous parts of the crowd. If a conversation about Christ and His cause starts, the members feel free to enter into it, but they
Page 77
never start it. They listen to complaints, to attacks, to expressed bitterness, to arrogant sophistry; they listen with patience, and they answer as well as they can, mindful of the glorious admonition, "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence" (I Peter 3:15).
The result of this program is that many disrupted and uprooted people of all ages, who would never knowingly enter a building labeled religious, will actually enter such a building. For the first ten months of operation the customers at The Potter's House averaged ten thousand a month. The consequent changes in some lives is phenomenal. Many people, as a result of long hours in this particular setting, now have a wholly new understanding of what the Church as a redemptive movement really is. Some have been able to emancipate themselves from adolescent censoriousness, as they begin to look, with growing humility, at the miraculous effectiveness of the Church of Jesus Christ through the ages. Their minds are freed from the antagonism to a particular kind of physical structure and from the identification of the Church with a clerical hierarchy. Some, when they learn that the members of the Church give their services without pay, many hours each week, are at first skeptical, then astonished, and then open. They can hardly believe it when they realize that this free gift of labor is what makes the solvency of the entire enterprise possible. They wonder at first what the "catch" is, watching confidently for the hook within the bait, but finally they are forced to admit that none exists.
Another powerful example of actual penetration is the work of some contemporary Christian groups in prisons. We have long had chaplains in prisons, both state and federal, and there has been no dearth of "services" conducted for the sake of the inmates, but in 1955 an entirely new pattern
Page 78
began to appear. It started in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in the State of Washington, under the inspired leadership of Chaplain Charles F. Paine.7 The prisoners formed a small redemptive group in which they, instead of being attenders at a service or listeners to the preaching of professionals, became themselves a fellowship of penetration within the prison. They moved quickly from the role of disciples to that of apostles, providing within the prison community a remarkable example of what may paradoxically be termed redemptive infection. The change in the men of the group was remarkable not only while they stayed behind prison walls; it has carried over into their lives as paroled or free persons as well.
Once the experiment at McNeil Island was generally known, it was quickly copied in other penal institutions, with similar effect. One of these institutions was the famous California prison at San Quentin, where the chief instigator was Cecil Osborne, a pastor of a Baptist church in Burlingame. Into the San Quentin Yokefellow group of twelve men there came a young prisoner. Already serving his third term, both of his former paroles having ended in forgery and other crimes, he was, by his own account, full of self-loathing which he naturally projected on others, including his fellow prisoners. When he entered the group of twelve for the first time, he was amazed at what he found. As a true novelty in his life he discovered the reality of love, because the other prisoners seemed actually concerned for him. With them he found he could share his feelings of self-loathing and his hatred for the lucky people who lived outside the prison gate. Like the other members of the group, the young forger learned to study the Scriptures with absolute regularity, and to pray by name for the other members of the group. At the
Page 79
same time he sought to extend the new life he experienced to the entire prison population, insofar as that was humanly possible. For the first time in his life he learned what it is to be concerned genuinely for someone other than himself. The result was that he became a new and truly liberated person. He learned that "when anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; the old order is gone, and a new order has already begun" (II Corinthians 5:17, New English Bible).
Because of his new Christian experience the prisoner was ready for the risk of a third parole, but this parole was not granted until a similar group outside the prison — the group at Burlingame — sponsored him. At Burlingame the church members got him a self-respecting job, and he immediately joined one of the Yokefellow groups in the church — a prayer group that was more than a prayer group in that it practiced the strategy of penetration. The miracle was that it had been able to penetrate even prison walls, the walls of San Quentin. The paroled man reluctantly told the group the sad story of his past, and to his surprise they showed him a deeper affection rather than the rejection he expected. He had not reckoned with the power of Christian love. The San Quentin forger went on to become a student in the Berkeley Baptist Divinity School.
Let those who malign the Church ignorantly and unmercifully ponder the San Quentin story! There may be members of the Burlingame church who are mere attenders at a ceremony. But this we know: there are some others who see their function as Christians in terms of the penetration of the darkness by the light of Christ.8 They are not satisfied, as they may once have been, with a mere "disciple plan"; they have proceeded to the acceptance of an "apostle plan." They may be imperfect, but they have caught a glimpse of the
Page 80
dynamic logic of Christ beginning with commitment, which, if it is real, involves enlistment, which demands the kind of witness which leads to penetration.
The coffee house experiment and the prison experiment, though they are very striking, are only two of many experiments in the penetration of common life now being conducted. Most of these receive little publicity, and sometimes they are not even known to church leaders or to those who write about the strength and weakness of the Christian cause.9
One highly imaginative example of a penetrating Christian movement is the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.10 This fellowship conducts summer conferences for college and high school athletes at both Estes Park, Colorado, and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, but it is by no means limited to such efforts. The movement started with the observation that young men care about athletic prowess, that they are bound to have athletic heroes, and that great changes may come in their lives if these heroes are men of intelligent faith.
Nearly all of the strong movements of Christian laymen are now so organized that they emphasize not Sunday religion, but the effect of the gospel upon secular professions and daily work. We have some Christian leaders who, if they have to choose between speaking to a church audience and speaking to a meeting of the bar association, will choose the latter. They do this because they know that the leaven is ineffective unless it actually gets into the lump. The tragedy of many religious audiences is that they have become
Page 81
immunized by much listening to speeches. Wise Christian leaders will not give their precious time to saving the saved when they have alternative opportunities in life outside the purview of the Church. Such men, if they are writers, will choose to place articles in The Saturday Evening Post or Reader's Digest or The Atlantic Monthly, in preference to a religious journal. Certainly they will not write primarily with the intention of impressing fellow theologians. This follows naturally if they have even a vague notion of what the strategy of penetration means. "Writers, if they are worthy of that jealous name," says Archibald MacLeish, "do not write for other writers."11
When we begin to get a new vision of the Church as a fellowship seeking to reach into every nook and cranny of common life, we start looking for really fresh ways of operating in faithfulness to our inner mission. New subsidiary associations devoted to mutual help in hard but needed tasks are bound to spring up. One such group is the Guild of Christian Writers, an association of men and women who encourage and assist one another, particularly by the criticism of one another's literary work. Several good books have been published which would never have been written apart from this creative fellowship. Always, the purpose is to help one another in the effort to write in such a manner that modern man will listen. It is not enough for a scholar to empty his desk drawer into a pretentious volume. Great discipline, in regard to style as well as content, must be learned if we really seek to reach contemporary minds and are not satisfied merely to have books published. Among the features to be considered carefully is length, a feature to which C.S. Lewis has obviously paid close attention. There is little point, he seems to have understood, in printing what no one will read, no matter how important its message may be.
Page 82
Just as we have a Guild of Christian Writers who assist one another, regardless of their fields of interest, we need a Guild of Christian Politicians. Such a guild might be composed of young men who know something of where power for good resides in the modern world and who propose to do something about it by helping one another — both to get ready and to operate when they are ready. Each man is almost helpless alone, but together they might do wonders. They would stand at the opposite pole from those sincere but misguided Christian groups who suppose that a Christian cannot even vote, much less hold office. The fault in their understandable position is that they automatically create a power vacuum which others — perhaps less qualified or less conscientious — are sure to fill. The young men in the ideal Guild of Christian Politicians will not meet exclusively for prayer, though they may pray; they will meet to raise one another's sights, to stimulate, to advise, to learn. We must remember that while thought may be developed in privacy, it is seldom engendered in that way. We are creatures who need one another, especially in all intellectual endeavors. That is the essential reason for the artificial societies called colleges.
Among the needed new societies are those to be created specifically for the intelligent effort to recover the lost provinces of the contemporary Church. It is not enough to look upon the entire Church as one mighty company; we must also form subsidiary companies, or Christian task forces, to which specific assignments can be made.
A most urgently needed task force is one to restore Christian vitality in the colleges and universities, from which it has so largely departed. It must be understood that such an undertaking is no light matter — that at best the campaign will be long or unending and that the opposition is as strong as it is vocal. Because the belligerent hostility of semieducated
Page 83
youth to any religion is far greater than we like to admit, the persons enrolled in this force need a preparation that is awesomely thorough. When so much of the opposition appeals, though erroneously, to science, the members of this subcompany must be knowledgeable about science and skilled in scientific method.12 And since so many of the current problems are those with which the great philosophers have always been concerned, these campaigners must know philosophy. They must know enough philosophy not to be unduly impressed by the arrogance of a logical positivist.
The standard argument against Christianity today combines scientism, positivism, and determinism. Our best strategy, of course, is attack, and determinism is the first point on which we can train our workers to attack. This is the best place to begin because the philosophical position of determinism is so obviously vulnerable. The determinist can be shown to be undermining even his own logical position and therefore his own determinism, for in a world in which every action is predetermined the whole conception of truth and falsity becomes meaningless. Each person — who, according to the determinist position, is nothing but a pawn — does what he must and that is the end of the matter, but this is bound to include the believer in the truth of determinism as well as everyone else. At the same time it can be shown to any really open-minded person that a belief in determinism makes impossible any genuine responsibility. I am certainly not to blame for what I cannot help doing. This may seem elementary, but there are thousands of students in our colleges today who have not even considered such points. The task of the Christian is not to engage in pious talk, but rather
Page 84
to discipline his mind to outthink all opposition, expecting no quarter and asking none. If the Christian faith cannot bear full examination, it will be the first time in nineteen hundred years that this has been the case.
Always, the way to recover lost territory, academic or otherwise, is to accept the challenge rather than to neglect it. A good example of such strategy may be seen in the Christian's reaction to the atheistic existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre. We should start with Sartre, for here we have a point of contact, in his brave acceptance of personal responsibility, which contrasts so nobly with all determinism. All that we ask of a man like Sartre is that he examine carefully what the concept of responsibility implies. To whom am I responsible? It is clear that responsibility is a concept which is intrinsically transitive in character; it requires an object. Since things are not responsive and cannot be, only a personal object makes sense. But I cannot reasonably be responsible to myself, for I am not good enough to warrant it. The same is true of any other finite person or group of finite persons. Therefore, if responsibility is to be understandable, it must involve responsibility to Almighty God, for only in God is there the adequate personality and worthiness. It is possible — and even likely — that many of those existentialists who are also atheists would not be willing to follow this logical procedure, but they at least deserve the opportunity of examining it. It would be the function of a Christian academic task force to meet such opposition, to take it seriously, and to go on from there. But the ability to do so cannot come from taking an easy course.
In the long run the best solution of the problem of a fragmented and secularized education is the development of a Guild of Christian Professors who are equally skilled in some secular field of learning and in the unapologetic support of the Christian view of reality. Such people, who may teach
Page 85
geology or psychology or physics or anything else in the entire academic curriculum, can, if they will, become the spearhead of the Christian movement in even the most secularized of universities. It also seems, to our sorrow and shame, they are now needed equally in some of the institutions founded and supported by Christian conviction.
One of our urgent needs is to find men who can go to colleges and universities for what is called religious emphasis week. This work is so grueling and requires powers so unusual that the only hope lies in training persons specifically for the task. They must be prepared to lecture, to lead symposiums, to meet individual seekers at all hours, to listen to ancient objections with respectful attention, and to present the truth of Christ persuasively. The persons who can learn to do all this will not be under any delusion that skeptics can be argued into the kingdom, but they will know that there are thousands kept out of the kingdom by some little barrier or misgiving that can be handled with comparative ease, providing the missioner is ready. A good example of the beneficent elimination of such a barrier concerns the idea of God as truly personal. A girl says she cannot think of God as personal, though Christ obviously did, because God seems to her a great cosmic "force." Part of her motivation is that she is very eager not to have her idea of God too small or, as she would say, anthropomorphic. The member of the academic task force, if he understands his business, can show the girl that in her effort to avoid limiting God she has done exactly what she has sought to avoid. If she can know her friend and God cannot know him, this means that God is incapable of something of undoubted worth. The upshot is that she is really imposing a limit on God. The odd consequence is that the creature is recognized as greater, at one point, than the Creator. Suddenly the girl may see this with clarity and, as a result, gain a grateful sense of intellectual
Page 86
relief. The point is that she cannot do it alone; she needs help; and it is the work of the Christian professor, whatever subject he may teach, to provide that help.
What has been said about work in academic institutions can be extended to the recovery of vitality in other lost provinces, such as youth in general and organized labor. We need a new kind of center in which the skills for these task forces are deliberately cultivated. One might suppose that this is done in the standard theological seminaries, but, for the most part, it is not consciously done anywhere. This is one of the reasons why we need to take a new hard look at theological education. Too often, the seminary curriculum is a matter of going through the ancient motions, whereas it ought to do for the Christian cause something as bold as that which is done for the Communist cause in the Lenin Institute of Russia. That Institute makes a deliberate attempt to prepare men to occupy new territory. We have a different conception of what occupation of either new or old territory means, but we need to be equally serious in the effort. The preparation, if it is to be adequate, will not be less arduous.
We do not know much about how to reach modern youth, but we know a few things. One thing we know is that the policy of merely entertaining the young people in the church building does not and cannot succeed. What does succeed, in some places, is a venture in intellectual depth. Thus, in Midland, Michigan, a young Ph.D. in chemistry who is employed by the Dow Chemical Company is conducting a study of the hardest problems in the philosophy of religion, and he is conducting it among juniors and seniors in Midland High School! The class meets in homes on Sunday evenings and sometimes continues, with great enthusiasm, for as long as three hours at a time. Whether this can be duplicated in other places we do not know, but the fact that it can be done anywhere is highly reassuring. In any case, we need special
Page 87
institutes in which the task of reaching youth is studied with all of the intelligence which we can muster and from which the members of the institute are sent out to put their specific skills into practice. That this is a far cry from the old-fashioned training in religious education is obvious. Nearly all of the new tactics are still to be learned, but they will not be learned unless we form bodies designed for this very purpose. The holding of youth is so important for the Church of Jesus Christ that if we were wise we should jointly and imaginatively try to discover how it can be accomplished.
In a similar way we must have imaginative joint studies on how to reach labor. We must enlist the assistance of those few who are convinced followers of Christ and also members of labor unions. We have some splendid books on Christianity and daily work, but not books from men actually engaged in organized labor.13 We have had fine words about the possible dignity of daily work, but it is doubtful if much of this has reached the rank and file. "Why should a scientist or an engineer or an administrator," asks J.H. Oldham, "attach any great importance to religion unless it says to him: 'In the work you are doing day by day you are a partner with God in His work of creation and the realization of His purpose for the family of the sons of men.' "14 Can ordinary workers learn to say this?
We must, before it is too late, find ways to get to the men on the production line. It is a fact that the Christian faith does have a valid answer to the problem of the dullness of factory work, in the sense of a man becoming a partner in God's creation, even in little things, but what good does this do if it is not known or appreciated? Special preparation,
Page 88
which is not now provided anywhere, is required for the work of a labor task force. Certainly the ordinary preparation for the ordinary pastorate is not adequate or even relevant. For one reason, the mission to labor may not involve any preaching at all. It may involve a contemporary version of the worker-priest idea which, though it has been abandoned in France, may still be valid. Or there may be some new way to be discovered of which we have not even dreamed. If we were to have Christian research in such a field, as Dupont and Dow Chemical have in scientific fields, it is not unlikely that some really fresh answers would appear.
It need hardly be said that all of these new contemporary tasks are so arduous that they will never appeal to those who want easy lives or who desire to follow only in well-tried and conventional Christian channels. Many of the experiments in these new areas will fail, as scientific experiments frequently do, but that is how progress is possible. In any case, herein lies the relevant ministry for our time, and someone must begin the preparation for it. It is just possible that the very boldness of the undertaking, with consequent lack of security, may attract some strong minds, as the dangerous vocation of the astronaut has already attracted so many bold men. In only a few schools is the conventional professional ministry attracting the strongest recruits today, but, with a new vision, there could be a radical change.
What we need to do is to consider the tasks which are most urgent for our time and then try to find the men and women who will get ready to perform them. In Russia the two groups which now seem to have attracted the ablest persons are the grade school teachers and the engineers. They are given great prestige and a relatively high income as an incentive. One possible result is that the Russians may supersede
Page 89
us in the development both of human talent and of the machines which provide such power. If we who care about the Church and its farflung ministry were boldly wise, perhaps we should give much greater incentive to work with youth than we give to the management of a big ecclesiastical organization. But we cannot do this, or anything remotely similar, unless we have a revolutionary change in our own vocational values.
Once we begin to alter our conception of what the Church is, viewing it as intrinsically missionary — not merely in Africa, but in every part of the life of the West as well — we realize that we have hardly begun to see what our major task is. If we produce and train Christian task forces for universities and for youth and for labor, why should we stop there? We must have new approaches to the problems of poverty, of mental illness, of leisure, and many more. The horizon of Christian work will ever expand, for in the kingdom there is no known limit.
The expanding horizon of the ministry of all Christians seems to be the burden of Christ's last recorded words on the earth. The last words of Christ are found, not in any of the Synoptic Gospels nor in John, but in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. The last words that Christ was heard to say, after His death and resurrection, were these: "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth." What final testament could be more clear? The purpose of one enlisted in Christ's service is to penetrate concentric circles to the farthest border. The method of penetration is witness. By making witness we go "into all the world," including those aspects of the world called government and law and business and home life and scholarship. Thus the final words of Christ combine, in a single formula, the theme of witness and the theme of penetration. If the witness is to penetrate, as our
Page 90
culture requires, the major witness must be made not in the Church but in the world.
Herein lies the significance of the haunting words of Whitehead, which are used as the epigraph of this chapter, to which so many have responded. It is primarily in the passage of temporal fact — in the work of laboratories and factories, in the love of parents and children, in the discipline of secular minds, in the discoveries of new medicines and new ways of eliminating degrading poverty — that the true glory of the Living God is to be seen, if it is to be seen anywhere. It is not that there are two valid religions, one of the Holy of Holies and the other of common life. The truth is, as Whitehead saw and said so well, that there is only one valid religion, the religion by which the potential glory of common life is liberated and revealed.
Chapter 5 || Table of Contents
1. Oldham, Life Is Commitment, p. 96.
2. See I Timothy 6:1-6.
3. On this point see Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas.
4. Two of the newest and most imaginative are Laity Lodge near Leakey, Texas, and Tri-State Yokefellow House near Defiance, Ohio. These houses welcome groups of many sizes as well as individuals at all times. Both are devoted to the revitalization of the Church in the surrounding regions.
5. See I Corinthians 16:19 and Colossians 4:15.
6. See the paragraph from Doctor Zhivago quoted on pp. 15, 16. It is a curious fact that one of the most convincing descriptions of the redemptive penetration of the fellowship of the Living Christ should have been written in our time not by someone on our side of the Iron Curtain, but by that tragic genius who, though he was awarded the Nobel Prize, was forced by his fellow Russians to decline the honor.
7. See William L. Worden, "They Wear the Yoke Behind Prison Walls," in Together, August 1958.
8. See "Commitment to Life," in Crusader, December 1960, pp. 6 ff.
9. For example, no mention is made of such experiments by Russell Kirk in his article "Can Protestantism Hold Its Own in a Modern America?" in Fortune, February 1961, pp. 108 ff. Even more surprising is the omission of reference to such experiments on the part of Martin E. Marty in The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959).
10. The headquarters of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes is in Kansas City, Mo. The executive director is Don McClanen.
11. In Saturday Review, Nov 26, 1960, p. 26.
12. A good example of a powerful counterattack occurs at Carleton College, where the head of the Religion Department, Professor Ian Barbour, teaches the course in atomic physics. Professor Barbour is a Ph.D. in physics who took postdoctoral work at Yale Divinity School. This combination, while highly desirable, is understandably rare.
13. Good examples of books on work written by intellectuals are John Oliver Nelson, ed., Work and Vocation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954); and Alexander Miller, Christian Faith and My Job (New York; Association Press, 1959).
14. Life Is Commitment, p. 109.