Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gil Rendle is Senior Consultant with the Texas Methodist Foundation in Austin, Texas, and also works as an independent consultant working with mainline and North American denominations on issues of denominational change. He previously served for twelve years as a Senior consultant with the Alban Institute, as senior pastor of two urban congregations in Pennsylvania for sixteen years, and as a denominational consultant for The United Methodist Church for nine years.

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Journey in the Wilderness

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

It isn't that often that a whole people go through a religious wilderness together. Yet in North America that has been the case in my lifetime and in my experience. There have been historical instances, of course, all along the way, from the beginning of the European settlement of North America to the initial arrivals of religious people bringing their practices, followed by shifts, schisms, realignments, mergers, and inventions of groups, sects, and denominations. At some point or another there have been moments of discomfort in each of our religious bodies—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—that have required refocusing, restructuring, or restaffing. But rarer is the radical, rooted shift in a global culture that prompts and requires a whole people to question their practices and enter a prolonged wilderness in search of their future way of life. Ours has been such an exodus, an escape (or perhaps an expulsion) from a constraining past in search of a promised, and findable, future.

My personal experience in the church has been defined by this exodus. It has been a pilgrimage through a changed North American landscape. In reality the changed landscape is global rather than North American. The explosive growth of a new form of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere, the global spread of Islam, the growing practice of Hinduism and Buddhism in non-Asian countries including the United States, and the essential disconnecting of postmodern people from modern and pre-modern religious practices all attest to a broad-based and wholesale change. Nonetheless, given the massive changes that have brought both turmoil and ferment to all religious communities, this book is about our particular exodus through the wilderness. "Our particular exodus" refers to the mainline church in North America, which is the church I have been a part of throughout my life. The word exodus is rooted in the Greek (ex—out of; hodos—way). It offers the image of a people who have been taken out of a way of life that was well known and deeply established. My experience was to be born into a North American mainline denominational church that was strong, confident, growing, and a dominant voice in shaping the norms of North American life. As a young seminary graduate, I was ordained into a mainline church that was still able to live out of its assumptions of strength, confidence, growth, and dominance. However, my time as an adult working in the mainline church took me out of that earlier way and introduced me to a time of questioning, doubt, and searching. My time, along with that of many brothers and sisters across the mainline church, has been a wilderness experience, and I have been changed by the journey.

I do not despair of the fundamental connection between God and the people. The search for and interest in a relationship with God show no evidence of weakening in all their multifaith and personal spiritual dimensions. But I am the inheritor of a particular way to be with God—a Wesleyan inheritance through The United Methodist Church. Like my brothers and sisters in other mainline expressions of Christianity, I now ask, What do we bring to this relationship between God and God's people? Do we have a word to share? Can we shape a way to be that offers a current connection to God and to God's dreams for us and for our world?

I am encouraged. The longer I am in this wilderness, the greater my hope grows. For I have been witness to people all around me who have been open to learning new ways to live what were earlier and deeply established identities. Above all else the wilderness is a place to learn. The wilderness is where we learn again to live in a new way because old supports are gone, old assumptions no longer hold true, and old practices either fail or are no longer possible. To live, the people must learn anew even those most basic things that in the old homeland were hidden by our easy assumptions and learned behavior.

We have been learning. In fact, one question that this book seeks to address is, What have we learned by living in the wilderness for the last forty years that will sustain us in the future? In reality the question should be framed as, What have we taught ourselves? There are times and situations in which we must learn what no one can teach us. We cannot turn to others who have gone ahead because no one has been in front of us on the journey. We cannot point outside ourselves. We learn—teach ourselves—as a "community of practice." We learn by doing. Getting clear and bringing to conscious awareness what we have learned will instruct us further about how we can live in our future. By my measure, we have learned much. The story of our exodus is rich, and we are already changed. Of course, there is much left to do, and not everyone will want to do it. There is little doubt that our mainline denominations will be changed in size and shape by the rest of the journey. There is little doubt that a good percentage of our local congregations, perhaps as many as 25 to 30 percent, will not live through the journey and they will close. There is little doubt that our denominational structures, staffing, and use of resources will continue to undergo deep change. Nonetheless, we are being helped and shaped by what we have learned, our trust in God has deepened, and we have sufficient bread for the rest of the journey.

This book is framed by the metaphor of exodus, thinking about the pilgrimage of the mainline church out of old ways and into a new and unknown territory. Walter Brueggemann points out that the usefulness of a metaphor is not in a search for a direct connection between one's reality and the images of the metaphor. The relationship between a metaphor and the reality it reflects is odd, playful, and ill fitting, which allows the metaphor to show us more than we would have otherwise seen in our own experience. In this case the metaphor of exodus is meant to help us recognize ourselves as a displaced people who need to trust God for our future and who need to be willing to learn new ways and reshape our lives as we travel. The metaphor allows us to recall that without courage fear overwhelms, and the people will prefer to return to the old but deadly slaveries. We recall that in the wilderness old diets are replaced with new foods; old slave masters are replaced with new leaders, organization, and structure. We recall that there are times when the path ahead seems so clear it is as if lit by a pillar of fire; there are times when the path ahead is so unclear it is best to pitch tent and wait; there are times when some paths that seemed so promising peter out and steps must be retraced. We recall that at times the right hand and the left hand get disconnected and disorganized so that at the key moment that new commandments are received on the mountaintop, the same commandments are being broken at the mountain base. We recall also that through such a messy and oh-so-human exodus, the people are changed from those who were slaves in the old land to become a new nation for God, called to live in a new place.

I suggest that in our dominant North American bias toward orderliness, we perhaps expect too much from an exodus. We expect that the trip can be scheduled on a clear time line, that leaders will know the right direction to walk every...