Envisioning the Congregation, Practicing the Gospel by Stewart John W.;

Author:Stewart, John W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2015-04-14T19:46:46+00:00

17. While not an easy read, John Swinton and Harriet Mowat have assembled an excellent manual about the purposes and methods of qualitative research for use in congregations. See their Practical Theology and Qualitative Research (2006, esp. chapters 1-3).

Chapter 7

Practicing the Arts of Witnessing:

Testimony and Advocacy

Martyria

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

— Acts 1:8

And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

— Acts 2:47

The Greek word martyria in the New Testament is usually translated “witness.” The English word “martyr” derives from it. Scholars note that the etymological root of martyria is similar to “pointing.” Sometimes martyria carries the more expansive concept of “witness” as a creed or faith summary.

The novelist and essayist Frederick Buechner, in Telling Secrets, describes an incident when he was a visiting lecturer at Wheaton College, near Chicago. While discussing such mundane topics as weather and movies over lunch with two students, one of them asked the other, as naturally as he would ask the time of day, what God was doing in his life. “In the part of the East where I live, if anybody were to ask a question like that, even among religious people, the sky would fall, the walls would cave in, the grass would wither,” Buechner said. “I think the very air would stop my mouth if I opened it to speak such words among just about any group I can think of in the East because their faith itself, if they happen to have any, is one of the secrets that they have kept so long that it might almost as well not exist” (Buechner 1991, 82).

Buechner’s discomfort is not without some foundation. For some, the word “witnessing” carries baggage akin to unwelcomed confrontations. On a larger scale, any person with a history-­informed memory acknowledges that Christian witnessing in the name of God often escalated into ugly coercion and unspeakable violence against Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, and Mormons, to name only a few. The founders of the American republic viewed the wars of religion in Europe with disgust and noted that aggressive religious commitments bred violence and alienation in the body politic. To counter such threats, an ethic of toleration was written into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, policies that disestablished and de-­privileged one religious community over all others.

Buechner’s discomfort may also be grounded in the swelling diversity of religious commitments in contemporary North American society outlined earlier (ch. 2). Pluralism as an ideology has refined the meaning of religious “political correctness” in public arenas.

For many postmoderns, religious preferences, like one’s personal financial and political affairs, are strictly private and best kept closeted. “Don’t ask; don’t tell” is the mantra. I am reminded of a cartoon in The New Yorker by W. Miller in which the three proverbial monkeys are lined up in a row.

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