In chapter 12, I offer up a category called “Lived ecclesiology.” There’s plenty of literature out there around ecclesiology, about the practice of church and how we understand church life both sociologically and theologically.
My proposal is because, as the historical review earlier I hope made clear, we don’t tend to have much ecclesiology in our Disciples history and polity. One of the principles our origin story directly rebels against is “apostolic succession” from the apostles to bishops to parish clergy as a source of church authority, let alone for our essential definition of what it means to be “a church.” We lift up the local church as essential to understanding New Testament ecclesiology and have in the past let the whole discussion rest there – our separated fellows in the other branches of the Restoration Movement still speak of “the Restoration plea” which is to appeal to the New Testament model as the only real hope of finding wider Christian unity . . . and insisting more than appealing to anyone who will listen that churches conform to that New Testament model as the source of church authority and definition. Disciples of Christ don’t speak that dialect anymore, at least not since 1968. “The Restoration plea” is not a sermon title you’ve heard in a Disciples congregation in the last fifty years unless it was a history lecture.
Anything beyond the local congregation, to a local church member, is summed up with a vague understanding that we do so “to accomplish what local churches can’t do on their own.” That’s a fuzzy and vague definition of the “church of Christ” at best. When those local churches work together, co-operatively, in a district or a state, the autonomy of each congregation is an implicit but non-negotiable starting place for our relations with each other. At best, we’ve talked about ‘the work’ as the defining characteristic of regional church life, and tied much of what we affirm as regional work to growth . . . which we’ve seen precious little of in the last thirty years or so.
So I’m suggesting a phenomenological approach called “lived ecclesiology” for understanding how the church of Christ, beyond the merely local, is an actual form of church. That is something which from 1843 onwards Alexander Campbell himself affirmed, even if resistance quickly rose up to object. In a district or area or region, we live out the work of Christians together as a form of church, defined through a call to be an assembly, an ecclesia of Christ-followers, at work on calling and providing oversight to candidates for Ministry, in the challenging but necessary work of Stewardship over what God has provided around a region which needs management and sharing, and finally:
Lived Ecclesiology – Missions
Let’s cut to the chase. Our most effective missions program is Camp Christian. It’s our evangelism and outreach and service site and formation location and place of invitation and assembly ground and all that.
Camp Christian is the one thing we do together that we can’t do as well separately. So that’s got to be front and center in how we understand our regional identity. That doesn’t mean worshiping the dang torch or rituals or names of stuff at camp, but that location . . . it’s our seat of authority to be church together, literally our cathedra, our regional cathedral. It’s the church “building” to the region just as the physical church building is to our congregations. We will never stop needing to work with the temptation to worship the outward forms of buildings, to get overly attached to the buildings, but we also need that focal point and tool in ministry, as a springboard, a platform from which we can do other ministries. [WARNING: major footnote which you probably shouldn’t read – see end of chapter, but only after prayer & fasting.***]
There’s another reason I’m tying together our camp story with the theme of “Missions” – because historically, there is a very close intersection of missionaries and camp & conference programs. I’m going to address some of our complex history with what’s often called foreign missions, or overseas missions, in later chapters. But much of our vitality in the post-frontier, post-Founders era of the Restoration Movement has been rooted in missionary service; even for people in our local churches who never got out of their own particular rural county, the spirit of missionary advancement was a compelling narrative element of their commitment to the wider church, to where Christ was preached far beyond their own neighborhood, and why they could and should be passionate about supporting state & national missionary societies.
In that context, young adult conferences were, at the peak in some ways of our past growth, designed as the launching pad for calls to Christian service, both at home to parish ministry, and for becoming a missionary. In fact, for many young women, there were more and clearer paths to ministry and preaching through overseas missionary work than there were in their own state society. Becoming a missionary, for women or men, was a possibility that often began to open up in youth events on the local or district level, and summer young adult conferences in the 1920s. Missionary service was clearly considered in the first half of the Twentieth Century to be a calling that was even more honored, at least in principle, than a call to ministry, but both types of call experiences & opportunities were woven into the camp & conference ministry of the church. Absent a robust global missions awareness in local churches or at camp, and with a significant decrease in seminary admissions overall in the US & Canada, we have the remains of the camp & conference launching pad with too little sense of mission taking off from there to keep it as vital as it could be. Again, this will be addressed in more detail in later chapters.
Along with camp & conference ministries as our lived ecclesiology in Missions, surely new church establishment will be part of our missional activity as well. That priority has always been central to our co-operative identity, from Walter Scott’s hiring in 1826 for the Mahoning Association to our regionally sponsored “church plants” in the Ohio suburbs through the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies.
I am reluctant to say too much about new church establishment in Ohio. It was a huge point of dispute for both of the special investigations in 2017, in how it had been managed and supervised over the previous decade. Ultimately, I got to see and read through almost twenty years of meeting minutes, covering at least a majority of that commission’s gatherings, and at minimum I’ll say we clearly needed to wipe the slate clean and start with a fresh piece of chalk. Due to the complications and recriminations of the more recent period, I think we’re some years away from the Ohio Region expending money out of regional accounts for that purpose, but I believe there are ways the regional body can support and affirm and facilitate, alongside of general church efforts on this front, work of local congregations to stand up new churches in their neck of the woods. Mother churches birthing daughter congregations is a model which has shown great success in Ohio for the United Methodist Church, which is an encouraging option. Making the region entirely responsible for facilitating new church starts may have been a strategic error, an approach that worked in one era but stopped working even as we doubled down on it. That’s a mistake we can quickly recover from. There’s a role for regions in this, just not a primary responsibility.
Beyond finding ways for the region to assist in launching new expressions of Christian community, what else can we do? Well, in all candor I’d say we should enter into a chastened season of holding back from starting new programs, missional or otherwise. As Ecclesiastes says, “of the starting of new programs there is no end, and a great weariness thereof.” (Eccl. 12:12, sort of...) One of the many lessons of the regional implosion of 2017 was learning that we were overextended, undermanaged, and losing the plot as a region. There were so many things in theory going on it became difficult for anyone to know what was actually happening, what was happening in name only, and what was being missed that we were technically committed to do but hadn’t gotten around to for months or even years. Doing less is actually a way for us to get more done.
There are great mission projects going on in and through our local churches in Ohio. I hear the complaint from some clergy quarters that local congregations aren’t doing mission and service, but I worry what that actually means is “they aren’t doing the right things.” What would happen if as a region we really focused on asking, on listening, on sharing across the state, what congregations were doing that gave them a lively sense of the presence of God? What happens if we started from the assumption congregations are doing something (something) right, rather than presuming they’re surely all doing it wrong?
One of the biggest frustrations I have heard from fellow parish clergy in the last decade or so about regional and general communications, whether online, in print, or in person, is that it’s all about supporting the programs of the wider church, and a barely veiled presumption that most churches are doing diddly-squat. And I will, politely but firmly, agree that I do not find this to be so. And I get around a bit. Most congregations, in fact, are often doing more than they even give themselves credit for. Could we each be doing more? Sure.
The connectional sense, a tie that binds us in freely accepted bonds of covenant, would be much more alive if it felt as if it were more of a two-way relationship. A yoke borne by both region and congregation in concert. Does the region know what our congregations are doing . . . when, that is, congregations aren’t calling for help with their latest crisis? Which I understand full well is how the region can start to see churches, since that’s when they tend to get called in and given full access to local church life, when congregations are busy melting down.
That’s complicated by the reality that we’re not 200+ or even 150 congregations all ready to work together, but in fact we are, currently, (to repeat my own formulation) “about 120 congregations in the Christian Church in Ohio, of which 40 like us, 40 loathe us, and 40 are barely aware we exist.” Again, that’s less than we were, but nowhere near nothing. We are a smaller region than we were, but that’s not the same as no region at all.
And for all the shrinkage and dwindling and decline, there are some remarkable movements of the Holy Spirit out there in our congregations. Sometimes that spark of Christ’s light is more through one individual member than throughout the whole fellowship, but I don’t believe there’s a single church out there that doesn’t have at least a few sparks, looking for kindling to ignite.
Our lived ecclesiology can be transformed from where it has gotten to, into a new creation. We got so accustomed to ascendancy and wealth in Ohio over two generations that we couldn’t even see our own decline for what it was when it came, and by the time we identified it as such, we had lost the ability to be honest with each other about what was going on. That’s another reason why I think we need to “simplify, simplify, simplify,” as Campbell’s contemporary, Henry David Thoreau liked to say.
In ministry, to focus on intentional Christian formation for new ministers, and for a renewed Order of Ministry in which all clergy feel a place to stand secure and in community – and in “Search & Call” to be truthful and candid and accurate as far as is humanly possible.
In stewardship, to be open and honest and transparent about how we handle funds, hold trusts, and how we spend what we’re given as a region. We also have to be candid and careful about biting off more than we can chew, and to be realistic about what 40 churches that like us, 40 churches that loathe us, and 40 churches that have to be reminded there’s a region – what we 120 or so can actually do.
And in missions, to make the fullest and best use of our shared resources to share the Good News of God's love, such as through the camp facility and youth program as a form of evangelism and outreach and transformation . . . but using them as a launch pad for the missio dei, God’s purposes set loose from our doorsteps to the ends of the earth. This can include New Church Establishment, Public Witness on social issues, and ministries of service like refugee resettlement or disaster relief, as long as we stop and think before we add anything new about whether we’re actually doing what we’ve already said we’re engaged with . . . or honestly state what we’ll stop doing in order to take on something new.
Coda
Back in our first century of existence, Buckeye Disciples had more congregations than church buildings, and rented state society offices housing part-time leadership drawn from the congregations. Clergy were minimally trained, and equally minimally compensated (sometimes with produce), with their contacts beyond the next village to the work of their wider tradition entirely through print periodicals arriving at the general store’s post office. The districts took on more and more of the work around establishing new congregations, but many of them struggled to be accountable and efficient in their use of shared funds, and a move to centralize began in 1899 just as the population across the United States was beginning a decisive move from the rural countryside into cities and what we’d call today suburbs. Our style and approach helped us grow effectively in small towns and occasionally county seats, but we consistently struggled to put down roots in larger urban centers.
The 1920 Census is often pointed at by demographers and social historians as a key date within which we could see that the US had swung to a majority of the total population in cities, rather than the countryside. I think it’s beyond dispute that this swing also coincides with a shift in the fortunes of a polity like the Disciples of Christ. In many ways, we never truly adapted to the urban setting, and of the “seven sisters” of mainline/oldline Protestant church bodies, we were least able to find success beyond our core strengths in rural and smaller county seat settings (perhaps tied for sixth place with the American Baptist Church USA). David Harrell’s two volume work on the social aspects of our history and polity is instructive in this area.
In our second century, the Ohio Region built up funds and added staff (and added staff) and added programs (and added programs) as congregations grew and new starts continued, even as theological and organizational splits shrank the number of participating churches. We created a new “center” at Magnetic Springs and pulled various strands of our tradition together from around the state to that central location.
But in the second half of that second century, we ran through our funds, wasted reserves of respect and trust, and found ourselves shrunk back to where we last were in 1840 in terms of relative numbers. Still, that’s not nothing. We’ve gone backwards, but we’re not gone. We have a diverse batch of congregations, scattered around a state that says it is “The Heart of It All.” We still have giving shared each month for the work of the wider church from the local churches.
There’s the vital center in each church of an open communion table, our shared worship responsibilities around pooled gifts seeking to be used co-operatively in God’s service, and trained leadership who often come from elsewhere, who remind the long-time residents of our connections about those brothers and sisters we haven’t met yet.
In renewing and restoring our regional gifts of ministry, stewardship, and missions, Ohio might just become again a place where the Disciples of Christ look for inspiration and example. And we recall what Alexander Campbell himself said to those first organizers of our region in 1852: “if you succeed, your example will be followed in other states and we shall be delivered out of the helplessness that now afflicts us!”
That’s still a pretty good call to co-operation some 165 years later. We did it before, and with God’s help we can do it again. What will follow is an attempt to again use the arc of our history, to see if tracing it from behind us up and over the messiness of the last few decades can point us towards where missions might yet take us forward.
==================================================
***WARNING: the major footnote will be a standalone special installment for Tuesday, Oct. 12th.