So, here is some more on liturgy.
AKMA has finally given his two cents (25 really) about the issue. He gives three general impressions. They are, in brief:
1. It could have been worse.
2. If they lose thie tax exempt status for proclaiming what they believe, then more power to 'em!
3. "[One] of the founding principles of the baptist movement involved the believer’s freedom on conscience (vividly expressed in Thomas Helwys’s A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (8-meg downloadable PDF of scanned pages here; why hasn’t anyone transcribed and marked it up in HTML?)."
I want to focus on the third. As a Baptist, I have a particular understanding of the relationship of pastor and congregation that may seem unusual to some. As an American Baptist liberal type, that is nuanced even further. In spite of our post-moden grumblings about the preeminence of the individual, it is still the focus for many baptist communities. Yes, community focus is the individual. The church community exists to support and encourage an individual's relationship with God. This happens in relationship between believers, and between the believer and God. Interpretation exists within the community, but the final word is the individual's. Why? "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." The idea of soul competency matters not just a little here.
Also, the primacy of the individual is ideally to be based on the humility of all and the assumed generosity of God to do a special and specific thing in the life of the believer. Salvation belongs to God and is enjoyed by the individual. God's singular saving act is for the sake of all and is manifested in the life of the individual believer. Any breach of that is a reasertion of the oppression of which AKMA reminds us.
Where the preacher comes into this dynamic depends on the congregation. As congregations have autonomy, they also have distinct charisms: conservative, liberal, ecstatic, holy roller, pentecostal, intellectual, academic, primative, fundamentalist, high power difference, egalitarian...the list goes on and on. Typically, the preacher leads and models an existsing charism. This gets shady when a congregation's population and charism are in flux. I believe that the congregation in North Carolina was already in a state of flux and that the pastor pushed too hard in one direction. It really does not matter if he was pushing forward or backward. He was pushing. He pushed so hard that he ignored the spiritual lives of those he was called to serve. If one is to believe the news coverage, he decided to work out the salvation of his members for them.
A Baptist preacher is hired by the congregation. The congregation has the final say on whether or not the Holy Spirit has called a certain person to a pulpit. The congregation says whether or not the Spirit is being handed down from the pulpit as well. No other agency can make this claim for them. And this dynamic will play out on the individual level.
The SBC has been moving away from that. They have been growing more and more ecclesial in their understanding of the Church. Power is shifting from bottom to top. This is not news. The dynamic matters in the case of this congregation.
We in the ABC-USA struggle to maintain a low power structure. The pulpit is a heady place to be! It can be one of great esteem. As many have reminded me, when I preach the congregation is compelled to listen by the very structure of the service and the architecture of the church. Liturgy matters. The centrality of the sermon matters. That I preach it matters. But it also matters that the community calls a pastor and affirms that call by their regular attendance. They are compelled to listen, but, and this is important, they are never compelled to agree. This is where the pastor may have gone wrong.
Is it possible that Chandler breached a trust, a call? I really cannot say. The dynamics of the congregation are most definately more complicated than that. AKMA, however, said it well. "The controversy illustrates yet again that church leaders need the skill of careful and measured communication more perhaps than any other — and they run into all kinds of trouble when they say important things in careless ways." Perhaps Chandler was careless. It is not for me to judge. That is the place of the congregation and the individuals with in it...and most importantly, God.
Posted by tripp at May 13, 2005 12:02 PM