The Future Church: Comments  

Change in our “liminal times”
We are in liminal times – between modern times and we don’t know what. The difference between now and then will be similar, at least, to the difference between 1000 CE and 2000 CE. Granted the presupposition of deep change, I would suggest the following in regard to interfaith, the church, and finally the necessary attitudes to making it through the deep change.

Serious Interfaith dialogue and action changes the dynamic among religions because it admits, using Christian metaphors, that we are all created in God’s image; because it recognizes that there is something salvific in knowing the religiously diverse other; because it acknowledges that our religious life is inherently mysterious and paradoxical.

A church in liminal times requires serious intra-faith dialogue. Something radically new must come to deal with the moral imperatives associated with gender inequality, asymmetric warfare, and the possibility of global nuclear, environmental, and/or biological destruction. Something new will come.

The attitudes that will enable a church to sustain healthy development after this liminal era are known. These are: coherence with one’s past to sustain identity; harmonious relationships with humans and the natural environment; creativity in adapting belief, ritual, morality, and communal organization to offer meaning to those with whom they are related; an acknowledgement of mystery and paradox at the same time as sustaining a critical interrogation of what is happening; and hope that there is more than the chaos that surrounds them.
Nathan Kollar, nkollar@yahoo.com
St. John Fisher College, NY

Importance of the past for the future church
We cannot consider the future without acknowledging our connection with the past. The past has malleable properties that can serve the present and future needs of the Church. It also connects Christian communities to teachings and practices that have been embraced through generations of believers. Many of these teachings and practices reflect an accumulation of "traditional" norms over the centuries that continue to shape how we think and act as Christians.

Historical consciousness accounting for the otherness of the past induces fear in some (and a willful denial of historical change during the Christian era), anger in others (over abuses of power, the preservation of privilege, the subversion of key elements of Christ's teachings, and more), but also offers an opportunity to respond more swiftly and decisively in an age that experiences change, at an exponential rate, as the "normal" way of being human.

Pope Francis' embrace of development of doctrine and sensus fidelium has been controversial for some, because he is making transparent what has been the reality of Christians for two millennia: change. Some of it is good and has become a part of the growth and health of a maturing Christian Church. Some changes have been bad, and periodically require rejection, and a re-embrace of a "lost" belief or practice, or the incorporation of a new insight that was not evident, even in earliest Christianity.

Like the Second Vatican Council which incorporated for the first time notions of development in conciliar documents, the pontificate of Francis is reminding us that the unexpected does happen in the life of the Church. Change is possible in the most unlikely circumstances. So I live in hope for the Future Church. I try to live what I hope for ... and so to catch glimpses of what may be possible for the future. The rest is in God's hands.
Kenneth Parker, kennethlparker@gmail.com
Saint Louis University

The two faces of tradition
Jaroslav Pelikan in The Vindication of Tradition famously says: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” He tries ever so hard to affirm tradition and its unavoidable reality, vis-a-vis Luther/Calvin/the Enlightenment/etc., while not falling prey to an idolatrous attachment to it. He writes: "Tradition becomes an idol, accordingly, when it makes the preservation and the repetition of the past an end in itself; it claims to have the transcendent reality and truth captive and encapsulated in that past, and it requires an idolatrous submission to the authority of tradition, since truth would not dare to appear outside it.” Moses, Socrates, and Jesus remain relevant to our Western Christian tradition. “The presence and the power, within the tradition, of such voices as these may suggest another mark by which to identify a living tradition: its capacity to develop while still maintaining its identity and continuity.”

It seems to me there is some wisdom in his little book, although, of course it offers no easy formula for the church or any group to move forward in progressive change while valuing where we’ve come from.
Anton K. Jacobs, antonkjacobs@earthlink.net
Kansas City Art Institute

The future church as a listening church
Generation X was probably the first generational cohort since the Baltimore Catechism to have been socialized outside the all encompassing Catholic sub-culture. Information technologies , higher education, post-war prosperity, and the perceived possibility of limitless progress opened them to the reasonableness of other explanations of the world than the one they grew up with. The old catechesis could not help them bring their faith with them as they transitioned into this new reality. There is no reason to expect the millennials to be able to maintain allegiance to a Church that has fallen outside the mainstream of how they think, value, and act. The Future Church will have to be courageous in order to risk “compromising” its teachings and discipline in order to encounter and engage these children of the Church in a journey that is not aimed at getting them “back,” but on moving forward with them.

“Christ did not come to save the Church, but the world.” The Church in the future will have to be a listening Church. It will need forums and gatherings that allow and foster active participation in decision making about what is most important for the Church today. A new Catholic identity as “responsibility for the world” will facilitate rather than hinder a new commitment of responsibility for the Church. Otherwise the “signs of the times” will be no signs at all.
Richard Shields, richshields@sympatico.ca
University of St. Michel’s College, Toronto

Interfaith dialogue as narcissistic monologue?
Nathan, I do have a question for you. I am happy to read your comment on the salvific efficacy of interfaith dialogue. Could you elaborate on that point? How do you think the church can proceed when the [Catholic] starting point is a universal claim to the truths of salvation? Are we not simply involved in a narcissistic notion of monologue unfortunately projected as dialogue?

I argue the following: dialogue is the mode of being. It embodies the following key conditions: trust of the other and of the process, openness to the other and to the process, acceptance to be vulnerable in the process, and willingness to follow without hesitation the outcomes of dialogue. Is our church ready for this? Do we even recognize these demands when we, as church use flowery language to describe dialogue, but when the moment of encounter presents itself we immediately produce Curia documents warning against the risks of relativity and other evils.
SimonMary Aihiokhai, aihiokhais@yahoo.co.uk
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN

Images of the future church: teaching by phone, inter-denominationally
I recently interviewed a youth minister in a Catholic parish centered on social justice. He is a God and bible lover. Among other things he teaches the bible by phone.

“I do a bible study over the phone for my teenagers. The phone is what keeps them engaged; that’s their level. For the class everybody gets on the phone like a conference call. We have text messaging: I send out the lesson plan. I teach over the phone. They can interrupt me and ask questions about everything they want to talk about. I am on the phone for about an hour or an hour and half. It is way more interactive than if it were in person.

“I started it when in my bible class attendance was low and I realized that this generation is always in their phones and they text a lot. So I said: let me reach them at their level. I asked them, ‘If I teach you the bible by phone, would get on it?’ They all said yes.”

This youth minister is an ordained minister from another church. In this social justice parish all people are Christ-centered. To be a member of this parish one does not have to be Catholic but Christian. – Two or three years ago in Guatemala a priest told me that when he wanted to call a meeting, he sent out messages via cell phone. "People do not read the Bulletin anymore.”
These are images of the future church.
Pierre Hegy, pierre.hegy@gmail.com
Adelphi University

Trust through communication
Distrust is at the root of our difficulties. Research done years ago found that the primary way to build trust was with communication. But there are virtually no venues for the kinds of conversation that can build trust, whether between the official church and theologians, or the official church and people engaged in ministry in parishes and other institutions of the church, or between the official church and people in the pews. Without the kind of communication that helps people be known to each other, and hence to learn to trust, motivations are badly misjudged, and reduced to frameworks of power and status, making the recognition of the gifts of the Spirit working in many literally invisible.

Today I received a newsletter from a Carmelite community, celebrating the conclusion of the 500th anniversary of St. Teresa of Avila, with this telling comment. "An attempt to obtain the title [doctor of the church] for Teresa in the early 20th century met with the reply from Pope Pius XI, 'Obstat sexus.' ('Her sex stands in the way.')' It was not until 1970 that she was so declared - the first woman to bear this title. 1970!!!!

I, too, hope that one day a lay theologian, male or female, will head a Congregation, but I do not expect this in my lifetime. Meanwhile, I hope that at the level of our local churches that men and women serving in so many roles in varied institutions of the church will be granted the trust they deserve.
Zeni Fox, Zeni.Fox@shu.edu
Seton Hall University

A church in conversation
If there is no reason why a lay person cannot head the CDF, why can we not have laity as full members (voting members) of the Synod? Pope Francis speaks of the Synod as the "journeying together of the people of God." If over half the church population is missing in representation in the Synod, how is change going to take place? Only an open and dialogical synod will show forth a healthy church which will be more pastoral in its a approach.

I am reminded of Walter Brueggemann’s words, "the vocation of the prophet is to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures.” We as church need to value the input of each and every person among us. Every human being's experience counts because that person is speaking its history, God's history. Engaging every human being in the conversation does not do away with authority, in fact it brings out its true essence, which is to empower others to make a difference. This is the kind of a church I would like to see.
Eileen M. Fagan, eileen.fagan@mountsaintvincent.edu
College of Mount Saint Vincent

The way forward
Mass attendance and other measures of religious participation have declined since the 1970s. Social science research points to a widespread collapse in what Peter Berger calls the "plausibility structures" of religion – the interpersonal and communal structures and interactions, belief in the moral authority of organized religion supported by a narrative cocooned within face-to-face communities.

The upside or at least the way forward? Well, the organizational genius of Roman Catholicism throughout the millennia has been to absorb dissent and to change just enough, just at the last minute before it is too late. Vatican II was all about that strategy. John Seidler and Katherine Meyer interpreted Vatican II as the pent-up demand for change that had built for centuries. Constant change is the interpretive lens that best illuminates potential futures for the Roman Catholic Church. We are not prisoners to the past and change has a way of forcing itself from the outside. Rediscovering the Catholic tradition in new and fresh ways is the way ahead, even if reactionaries need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
Wayne Thompson, wthompson@carthage.edu
Carthage College, WI