PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Members of the Zionist Church gather at St. James Beach in Cape Town, South Africa, for the baptism of new members. istock/jono0001
What global Christianity means for the church in America
AMERICAN CHRISTIANS WILL NEED TO "DE-AMERICANIZE" THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL, SAYS WESLEY GRANBERG-MICHAELSON
It's not news that the epicenter of Christianity has shifted to the global south. Yet many Christians in America seem unaware of that development, living as though in a bubble, says Wesley Granberg-Michaelson.
"People may have some sense that Christianity has shifted, but they aren't thinking about what that means for the church in the United States, for the 350,000 congregations here, and how we understand our faith," Granberg-Michaelson said.
A former general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, Granberg-Michaelson is the author of "Future Faith: Ten Challenges Reshaping Christianity in the 21st Century." In the book, he examines major influences on the faith and practice of Christianity in the world today and what they mean for the church in America.
The first step for Christians in the United States, Granberg-Michaelson said, is to recognize that they are part of a vibrant global faith.
"It would help American Christians if they reframed their own narrative to see that they're part of a faith that is thriving globally," he said. "It's complicated, but it's actually pretty exciting."
To do that, U.S. Christians must recognize "a few simple things."
"One is that we have to de-Americanize the gospel," he said. "We have to grasp the gospel in its real intent instead of interpreting it through this shroud of nationalism, which sometimes gets really extreme and causes all kinds of problems."
That means that Christians in the U.S. can no longer read the Bible simply through the lens of American culture.
"We need to open ourselves to the voices and the movements of Christianity outside our own culture, and that will open up the deep reality of the gospel to us," he said.
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWAL, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson: What global Christianity means for the church in America
As Christianity shifts to the global south, Christians in the U.S. must ‘de-Americanize the gospel’ and be open to movements of the faith in other cultures, says the author and denominational leader.
It’s not news that the epicenter of Christianity has shifted to the global south. Yet many Christians in America seem unaware of that development, living as though in a bubble, says Wesley Granberg-Michaelson.
“People may have some sense that Christianity has shifted, but they aren’t thinking about what that means for the church in the United States, for the 350,000 congregations here, and how we understand our faith,” Granberg-Michaelson said.
AMERICAN CHRISTIANS WILL NEED TO "DE-AMERICANIZE" THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL, SAYS WESLEY GRANBERG-MICHAELSON
It's not news that the epicenter of Christianity has shifted to the global south. Yet many Christians in America seem unaware of that development, living as though in a bubble, says Wesley Granberg-Michaelson.
"People may have some sense that Christianity has shifted, but they aren't thinking about what that means for the church in the United States, for the 350,000 congregations here, and how we understand our faith," Granberg-Michaelson said.
A former general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, Granberg-Michaelson is the author of "Future Faith: Ten Challenges Reshaping Christianity in the 21st Century." In the book, he examines major influences on the faith and practice of Christianity in the world today and what they mean for the church in America.
The first step for Christians in the United States, Granberg-Michaelson said, is to recognize that they are part of a vibrant global faith.
"It would help American Christians if they reframed their own narrative to see that they're part of a faith that is thriving globally," he said. "It's complicated, but it's actually pretty exciting."
To do that, U.S. Christians must recognize "a few simple things."
"One is that we have to de-Americanize the gospel," he said. "We have to grasp the gospel in its real intent instead of interpreting it through this shroud of nationalism, which sometimes gets really extreme and causes all kinds of problems."
That means that Christians in the U.S. can no longer read the Bible simply through the lens of American culture.
"We need to open ourselves to the voices and the movements of Christianity outside our own culture, and that will open up the deep reality of the gospel to us," he said.
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWAL, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson: What global Christianity means for the church in America
As Christianity shifts to the global south, Christians in the U.S. must ‘de-Americanize the gospel’ and be open to movements of the faith in other cultures, says the author and denominational leader.
It’s not news that the epicenter of Christianity has shifted to the global south. Yet many Christians in America seem unaware of that development, living as though in a bubble, says Wesley Granberg-Michaelson.
“People may have some sense that Christianity has shifted, but they aren’t thinking about what that means for the church in the United States, for the 350,000 congregations here, and how we understand our faith,” Granberg-Michaelson said.
A former general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, Granberg-Michaelson is the author of “Future Faith: Ten Challenges Reshaping Christianity in the 21st Century.”(link is external) In the book, he examines major influences on the faith and practice of Christianity in the world today and what they mean for the church in America.
The first step for Christians in the United States, Granberg-Michaelson said, is to recognize that they are part of a vibrant global faith.
“It would help American Christians if they reframed their own narrative to see that they’re part of a faith that is thriving globally,” he said. “It’s complicated, but it’s actually pretty exciting.”
To do that, U.S. Christians must recognize “a few simple things.”
“One is that we have to de-Americanize the gospel,” he said. “We have to grasp the gospel in its real intent instead of interpreting it through this shroud of nationalism, which sometimes gets really extreme and causes all kinds of problems.”
That means that Christians in the U.S. can no longer read the Bible simply through the lens of American culture.
“We need to open ourselves to the voices and the movements of Christianity outside our own culture, and that will open up the deep reality of the gospel to us,” he said.
In addition to his work with the Reformed Church in America, Granberg-Michaelson has long been active in ecumenical initiatives including the Global Christian Forum, Christian Churches Together and the World Council of Churches.
He spoke recently with Faith & Leadership about “Future Faith.” The following is an edited transcript.
The first step for Christians in the United States, Granberg-Michaelson said, is to recognize that they are part of a vibrant global faith.
“It would help American Christians if they reframed their own narrative to see that they’re part of a faith that is thriving globally,” he said. “It’s complicated, but it’s actually pretty exciting.”
To do that, U.S. Christians must recognize “a few simple things.”
“One is that we have to de-Americanize the gospel,” he said. “We have to grasp the gospel in its real intent instead of interpreting it through this shroud of nationalism, which sometimes gets really extreme and causes all kinds of problems.”
That means that Christians in the U.S. can no longer read the Bible simply through the lens of American culture.
“We need to open ourselves to the voices and the movements of Christianity outside our own culture, and that will open up the deep reality of the gospel to us,” he said.
In addition to his work with the Reformed Church in America, Granberg-Michaelson has long been active in ecumenical initiatives including the Global Christian Forum, Christian Churches Together and the World Council of Churches.
He spoke recently with Faith & Leadership about “Future Faith.” The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Give us an overview of your new book, “Future Faith.” I’ve read where you’ve described it as sort of a “Future Shock” or “Megatrends” for the church.
My conviction is that Christianity is at one of those huge points in history. It may be looked back upon like the Reformation, or like 1054, when the split occurred between the Eastern and Western churches, or 312, when Constantine became emperor.
Those were all dramatic points. This is less immediately obvious, but Christianity has undergone the most dramatic geographical shift in its history. Christianity is now predominantly in the global south, where two-thirds of all Christians live.
Those facts have been out there since Philip Jenkins’ work,(link is external) and that of other people. But within the American church, we live within a ludicrous bubble that makes us think we are the center of everything, when in fact, we are no longer the epicenter.
People may have some sense that Christianity has shifted, but they aren’t thinking about what that means for the church in the United States, for the 350,000 congregations here, and how we understand our faith.
Q: And of course, as you point out in the book, as Christianity undergoes explosive growth in the global south, it’s been declining in the United States. Give us an update on the church in America and the world.
When you visit congregations, especially predominantly white congregations in the U.S., you’ll typically see fewer than 100 people, and a seminary-trained pastor who is committed and trying to do a good job, and they have a food bank, and people volunteer at the homeless shelter, and they give to the denomination.
But if you look around the sanctuary, there’s a lot of white hair and hardly any kids, and despite the deep faith that people have, the congregation is in trouble and is probably going to die.
The statistics bear that out. Today, 50 to 70 percent of the congregations in the U.S. have less than 100 people. Small churches can be great, but when you get below 100 -- to 75, going toward 50 -- then the question becomes, can you sustain this? Is this viable?
And it’s mostly because of age. About 20 percent of the U.S. population is between 18 and 34. But only 1 in 10 congregations in the U.S. has that same proportion of young people. Most churchgoers are much older, and that’s what drives the reality.
Scott Thumma at the Hartford Institute has said that 30 to 40 percent of congregations in the U.S. will close in the next 25 years. I don’t think that’s unrealistic. A lot of serious change is on the horizon.
Even so, that’s mostly about white Protestants, which have declined by 33 percent since 1991. Meanwhile, the religious participation of people of color has increased in the U.S.
In the Assemblies of God, 43 percent of its growth in the last 10 years is driven by nonwhite people, similar to other denominations. In the Catholic Church in the U.S., 54 percent of all Catholic millennials are now Hispanic. The Catholic Church in the U.S. would be in free-fall were it not for immigration.
But the landscape overall [in the U.S.] is decline, particularly in white congregations.
Globally, though, the church is growing -- two-thirds of all Christians today live in the global south. Fifty years ago, Africa’s Christian population was 134 million; now, it’s 631 million. Latin America has about 600 million Christians, and Pentecostalism is growing there about three to four times faster than Catholicism, though Catholicism remains strong. Christianity is also growing rapidly in Asia.
Much of the growth around the world is in forms of Pentecostalism. In 1970, less than 10 percent of Christians were Pentecostal. Today, one out of four Christians identifies as Pentecostal or charismatic.
Pentecostalism tends to grow among the poor on the margins of society, people who have been discarded by society and told they’re worthless. In Pentecostal communities, they find a sense of self-worth and affirmation and community.
And all of this is outside the awareness of most of the American Christian church.
Q: What does this mean for congregations in the U.S.?
I think it means 10 things, which is why I wrote 10 chapters. But the main thing is that it would help American Christians if they reframed their own narrative to see that they’re part of a faith that is thriving globally. It’s complicated, but it’s actually pretty exciting.
It would help if U.S. congregations recognized a few simple things. One is that we have to de-Americanize the gospel. We have to grasp the gospel in its real intent instead of interpreting it through this shroud of nationalism, which sometimes gets really extreme and causes all kinds of problems.
When I travel abroad and am with Christians around the world, whether evangelical or Catholic or Pentecostal, they are astonished at Christian support in the United States for President Trump. They’re not making a political statement; they’re asking, “What has happened to Christian witness within your country?”
This is just bewildering. We can’t cloak our faith within the shroud of nationalism and think that we’re getting to the heart of it. We have to recover the message of Jesus and the language of faith that often goes against the grain of a culture that is parochial and closed in on itself.
Q: Do people in the United States realize how “Americanized” the gospel is here?
No, they don’t. I don’t think they do.
Across the board, our congregations have to come to grips with the fact that we can’t simply read the Bible through the narrow eyes of American culture, especially when that culture promotes nationalism as the highest value. And frankly, when it’s those of us who are white who are doing it, we’re reading it through our white experience and our white eyes, and we’re not seeing the whole gospel.
We need to open ourselves to the voices and the movements of Christianity outside our own culture, and that will open up the deep reality of the gospel to us.
Q: What are the lessons that the church in America can learn from global Christianity and from Pentecostalism in the global south?
It can learn that, first of all, our perspective is not the only way of seeing the world. We’ve got to put on another pair of glasses. One simple lesson is that the mix between the material world and the spiritual world is much deeper and much more interchanged than we think.
Not to get too abstract, but we think there’s a clear line between matter and spirit. But outside our culture, in Native American culture and in Africa and Latin America, people see this differently. They see spiritual reality much more intertwined with life. That’s a much more biblical view, and a deep lesson we can learn.
Regarding Pentecostalism, I ask myself: What’s happening here? Why do we see this upsurge?
I think it’s because there’s a thirst for faith that meets the whole person in a deeper way. In the U.S., we make faith very intellectual. You’ve got to believe the right propositions.
I’ll put it this way. If I talk to evangelicals, they ask me, “What do you believe?” When I talk to Pentecostals, they ask me, “What’s your story?” The power of story and narrative goes far beyond Pentecostalism, but that’s partly why people are attracted. They want worship that appeals to all the senses. And you don’t have to go to a Pentecostal church to do that.
Two months ago, I was at the Taizé community for the first time. I was astonished at this community that prays three times a day with simple chants and words of Scripture. The week I was there, 2,000 kids from Portugal showed up on vacation. This happens every week. They come to participate, and they’re grounded in an experience of worship where they’re not asked to say what they believe, where they’re not told, where they’re not preached at, but where they experience God in this way.
Another thing churches here need to learn is the relationship between the individual and the community. In this culture, we place the individual first, and everything revolves around the individual. It’s what we’ve inherited.
In his book “Community and Growth,” Jean Vanier wrote that any healthy body, any healthy Christian community, has to have more people who say “me for the community” than people who say “the community for me.”
Well, in most of our society and most of our churches, people say “the community for me.” In Africa and Latin America and Asia, Christianity grows in cultures that begin with the importance of community. It’s the way people live.
We don’t think about it much, but the gospel is a call to community, to be a part of the body and to blend with one another. But we think the gospel is what causes me to prosper and be satisfied and be successful. It’s all “me, me, me” -- but that’s not in the Bible.
Q: What are the biggest challenges for U.S. churches in embracing global Christianity and this different approach?
As I said, we live within this comfortable bubble. But if you allow yourself to interact honestly with the biblical story, if you sit with it and listen, it’s designed to break your life open. It’ll do that if you give it a chance.
You don’t have to take a mission trip to Malawi to do that. Just relate to the immigrants who are in your community, who have come as God’s gift. People don’t realize how many of those who immigrate to the United States are Christian.
The word “immigrant” has been so politicized by Donald Trump and others that when you hear it, people think of a person who’s here without papers or illegally. The fact is, most immigrants come here as Christians. And the process of immigration makes anyone’s religious faith grow stronger. That’s a sociological fact; people have studied this.
Immigrants from Africa and Asia and Latin America are here, practicing their faith and living it out in fresh ways, right at our doorstep. And we tend to ignore them. Maybe we rent church space to them and don’t like the smell of their food, but we don’t really interact and learn from them. We can encounter global Christianity in our neighborhoods and in our communities right now because of immigration.
We can also listen. We can simply listen to non-American, non-Western voices out there. They are in the ecumenical world, the Pentecostal world, the evangelical world, the Catholic world.
The great gift to us in all of this is Pope Francis. Why is he saying the things he’s saying? Partly because he is the first Catholic pope from the global south. He’s speaking the language that I hear all the time, whether it’s from Catholics or Protestants.
When I’m in other parts of the world, I hear people talking like Pope Francis and his concern about the environment and about the world being sacred. This seems to be hard for us to understand, with all the climate change deniers. But you go to other cultures and the starting point is exactly the opposite. They say the world is God’s gift and it’s sacred.
Q: Soong-Chan Rah wrote in the foreword of your book that American Christians, rather than embracing this future church, may be threatened by the decline of Western white Christian supremacy and greatness. What is your take on that? So much of what you’re talking about dovetails with much of what’s happening politically in our country right now, especially as it transitions to a much more diverse nation.
The demographics of the U.S. are changing dramatically. A lot of the politically driven fear in our country is in response to that, especially from a white community that is fearful, consciously or unconsciously, of being displaced and without power. What we call white supremacy is being undermined by demographics, and that becomes deeply threatening.
White supremacy is often subconsciously integrated into our church life. It’s not just the U.S. versus a new global reality; it’s these realities right within the U.S. culture. The challenge is whether the church -- especially the white church -- will be able to make the transition that it has to make, out of a sense of belonging to the most culturally diverse body on the face of the earth. What that means in terms of power and dynamics and voice -- all those questions come right home within the issues that we’re facing within our culture, within the issues you’re facing at Duke Divinity, within the issues that the church is facing in virtually any context.
Q: So much of what you describe in “Future Faith” is so countercultural to how we live in this country.
It is. But that’s what it means to follow Jesus, and that’s what we have to reclaim.
When I talk to pastors, they ask me, “How do I get my hands around this? What do I do in my congregation?” And I say, “Well, what about preaching about Jesus? You should find a good start there.”
The heart of it is getting back to talking about the real Jesus, the one we say we follow. What can unlock this for most congregations in the United States is to recover the radical, true and authentic message of Jesus.
Q: You say in the book that a key foundational theological question we need to ask is, “What does God love, and why?” What do you mean?
The biggest damage that American culture and Christianity within the U.S. has done to the faith is this division between what was the evangelical and the social gospel. One branch of Christianity has focused on personal salvation, and another has focused on social justice. This isn’t just a theological division; it’s an institutional division. You live within one of these two worlds, in a gospel that’s completely bifurcated and so untrue to the central message of Jesus.
I like to reframe that by asking, “What is it that God loves?”
If we start with that question, then we start at a new point that gets us out of this crazy bifurcation between a faith that’s just personal and individual and a faith that’s focused on the ways in which God’s purposes are to transform society. You can’t keep those things separate if you ask, “What is it that God loves?”
Read more from Wesley Granberg-Michaelson »
When Astead Herndon decided to dedicate his career to newspaper reporting, he knew he was committing himself to a declining industry. Now that he holds the enviable position of political reporter in Washington, D.C., he's dedicated to helping other young people through the career pipeline. In his conversation with "Can These Bones" co-host Laura Everett, he talks about the parallels between the newspaper industry and the church, the barriers faced by African-American journalists, the approach he takes to using social media, and the challenges of covering the Trump White House. He also gives Everett advice on how to manage her email.
Faith & Leadership
CAN THESE BONES
A Faith & Leadership podcast »
VOCATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA
Episode 2: Astead Herndon on navigating the career pipeline as a young, black newspaper reporter
When Astead Herndon decided to dedicate his career to newspaper reporting, he knew he was committing himself to a declining industry. Now that he holds the enviable position of political reporter in Washington, D.C., he’s dedicated to helping other young people through the career pipeline. In his conversation with “Can These Bones” co-host Laura Everett, he talks about the parallels between the newspaper industry and the church, the barriers faced by African-American journalists, the approach he takes to using social media, and the challenges of covering the Trump White House. He also gives Everett advice on how to manage her email.
This episode is part of a series. Learn more about Can These Bones or learn how to subscribe to a podcast.
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ABOUT THIS PODCAST »
Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Astead Herndon
Twitter: @AsteadWesley(link is external)
Boston Globe: Herndon staff profile(link is external)
Boston Globe articles (may require subscription):
“President Trump keeps blocking people on Twitter. Is that legal?(link is external)”
“Trump is making lexicography great again (link is external)”
“Decoding the lyrics -- about cheating, back stabbing, and Kanye -- on Jay Z’s new album(link is external)”
“How do you memorialize the fallen in a war without end?(link is external)”
“Trump has ushered in an era of political shamelessness(link is external)”
“What Trump’s words say about him(link is external)”
Transcript
Laura Everett: One of the things we wanted to do when we launched this podcast was to broaden our conversations, to talk with people in the church who were finding life in dry bones, but also to talk to people in other institutions and other fields.
Bill Lamar: I get so much life from talking with persons who live lives different from my own and who serve institutions different from the one that I serve. I love reading books and listening to podcasts from different fields to get a fresh look at what I’m trying to do at Metropolitan AME Church and in my community.
Laura Everett: I love serving the church. It’s the great calling on my life, and I get so much joy from doing it, but there are weeks at a time where I can go with only talking to people who are already involved in the church or only talking to other clergy.
I need to talk to people who are in other institutions; I need to learn from them to know how to do my job better at the Massachusetts Council of Churches.
Bill Lamar: Laura, today’s guest is a voice from another field, a wonderful field, the field of journalism. Astead Herndon, who covers politics and the White House for The Boston Globe, joins us today. Laura, you know Astead and wanted to have him on the show. Why?
Laura Everett: I’ve always been fascinated by the parallels between what the newspaper industry and what the church are facing today. And I think Astead has an interesting take on the necessity of the newspapers and the need for change in ways that will help us think more clearly about the church.
Bill Lamar: Let’s listen to your conversation with Astead Herndon of The Boston Globe.
Astead, welcome to “Can These Bones.”
Astead Herndon: Thank you. I appreciate you having me.
Laura Everett: So let’s dig deep and talk about this messy industry. I was raised by a journalist and became a pastor. And you were raised by a pastor, and you became a journalist.
Astead Herndon: Yes.
Laura Everett: Right?
Astead Herndon: Yeah.
Laura Everett: And the joke in my family is that Everetts love dying institutions. My father was a newspaper editor; my mom was a print graphic designer; I work for the church.
We, for some reason, my people, my family, feel very strongly about these older institutions.
And you come from a church background -- your father founded a church. You know how hard it is to start something new, but you went to a traditional institution. Why give your life to newspapers?
Astead Herndon: So my father founded a Pentecostal church in the Church of God in Christ when I was 1 or 2. So the church and me are very much the same age. And one of the benefits of that is that while my sisters, who are both older, have experience before Hallelujah Temple, which is the name of the church, my whole experience, both family and so much of my life, has been singularly driven through this institution and my father’s experience with founding it, and all the pluses and minuses that go along with that.
And while certainly it is true that it is a tough thing to sustain, and that has been very clear to me, it has also been very clear that the passion, the self-actualization, the centering that the church gives him was more than worth it for all the struggles that came along with it.
And so for me, joining something that I cared about was more important than tagging along to something that may stay afloat for longer.
So that leads me to media. But even within media, there are a lot of, you know, shiny new objects every day. There are a lot of digital outlets, there are a lot of verticals, and they certainly have their place.
I’m a big reader of them. I am a big fan of them. But for me, there’s nothing better than newspapers. There’s nothing that grounds our democracy more, that breaks new information, the kind of rush, the bedrock that they are -- it still means more to me than the kind of precarious situation that newspapers find themselves in.
And so while certainly, you know, sometimes I look over at friends or other outlets that are making money through the roof and are thinking here’s another shiny new object, hiring for this or that. And then I think back to where those places are getting their information from -- where, even now, are the bedrocks of holding power accountable? -- and I always come back to newspapers.
And so to tie it back to my father, I think that the kind of passion, the kind of self-worth, the, like, self-identity I now have as a newspaper reporter still matters more to me than the questionable business model -- you know, not even questionable -- the sinking business model we have found ourselves in.
Laura Everett: Right. That sense that this is [worth] giving one’s time, one’s history, one’s education, one’s intellectual curiosity for, even at a moment where the credibility of newspapers or the credibility of religious institutions is being undercut in many ways, that there’s something in the sort of foundational claims that these institutions make that’s worth spending time with.
Astead Herndon: I think of the quote, “There’s nothing that’s wrong with America --” I’m misquoting this, but it’s something like, “There’s nothing that’s wrong with America that what’s right about America can’t fix,” you know?
And I feel like that around newspapers. I’m the first to criticize, I think, the shortcomings of newspapers. But what I believe about them is I believe that -- and I could certainly, if I asked my father about his experience in the church, I think he would say the same thing -- the parts of it that you believe in, the part of it that’s right, I still believe can overcome the shortcomings.
And I enjoy feeling part of the solution. And so it’s not just about writing stories that I think need to be told, but it’s also being the kind of reporter, pushing my institution to be the kind of institution -- I try to make the Globe a place where I think we do more right than we do wrong.
Laura Everett: I think one of the core commitments of Leadership Education and this podcast as we ask, “Can these bones live?” -- we know the answer to the question, or we have faith in the answer to the question, which is that there will be new spirit that is breathed into some pretty rickety old bones. But [one of our core commitments is] that we believe the bones are worth saving.
When you look at your own institution, at newspapers in general, where are the places where you’re really feeling like bones coming on bone, things are connecting?
Astead Herndon: Journalists are very bad at solutions. We are very, very good at pointing out all the places where we have failed and pointing out the places where we continue to fail.
But you get journalists around the room and say, “How do you fix it?” and we all kind of look -- like, “Fix it?” You know, like, “Who -- that’s someone else’s job. Someone gets paid a lot more money than I do to think about solutions.”
And so … but that’s all inadequate now. I think that it’s all part of -- I mean, as I was saying before, I think we have to actively work to be part of the solution.
And so to go back to your question, the places that I have seen us be part of the solution -- I’ll mention a couple of things.
First is that we need to be better at our job. We just need to -- that’s kind of a cop-out solution, but when someone messes up in the industry right now, it is so overblown in a way that’s really not their fault. The first thing that we need to do, and I think we have done in the last year, is prove ourselves worth it by being good at our jobs.
You know, when you look at so much of the information that has come out, the pertinent information about the Trump administration, about Trump himself -- that’s come from newspapers, almost exclusively. And I think that that’s important.
The second thing is we have to let the old inner industry hatchets die, and I think we’re seeing more of that. We’re seeing more collaboration between newsrooms. We’ve seen a lot more sharing of work through newsrooms. The easiest and most classic example of this is the Post and the Times are sharing each other’s work. And you know, that’s kind of unthinkable 20 years ago.
But right now, the enemy is not the newsroom across the street, and that’s so clear -- that we are both under an attack from a president who likes to use us as a punching bag but also we have a real trust problem within the industry. And that doesn’t matter if you’re the Times or the Post.
I also think, the thing that I’ve seen some of but I hope we get even better at is about transparency.
We’ve seen stories -- well, the first one I think of is when Mike Flynn was found to have lied to Vice President Pence, it wasn’t just anonymous sources that they put in that story. They listed, “We had four administration officials from this department, three administration officials from this department …”
I don’t know if those are the numbers, but that was the idea. And I think that that’s increasingly important.
Laura Everett: And that’s the change?
Astead Herndon: And that’s the change. The change is that we’re not just asking you to blindly trust us that we know who these people are. We are giving you more information about how we got this, and who these people are, while still protecting their identities. And we’re getting much more of that.
And so I think it’s easier for a reader to understand how the reporter gets to that point, because before, the reader was being asked to trust the outlet, to say, “Hey, this is The Boston Globe, so if this person is telling me this thing is true, it is likely true.”
And we’re just not at that -- we don’t have that institutional credibility anymore. So I think what is incumbent upon us is to prove ourselves. And I think we’re doing more of that, but I hope to see even more.
Laura Everett: So let’s talk about some of the stories that you’re writing, because I’ve noticed some shifts, and how your stories have changed, and what could be possible, right?
There are some pretty well-trod paths: you went from being a metro reporter in Boston to being a journalist in D.C., a national political reporter, part of the White House press corps. You could be doing the synopsis of the daily -- well, sometimes-daily -- press briefings.
Astead Herndon: Yeah.
Laura Everett: But instead, I see you building out some of these really smart, bigger-picture ideas.
You’ve written things about -- asking questions: How do we memorialize the dead of the war on terror? How do you memorialize the dead in a war that won’t end? How does President Trump’s language change our lexicography?
You’ve written stories about if tweets are now presidential speech, is it legal or moral or wise for the president to block people on Twitter? And you’ve written about how President Trump’s regular refusal to apologize has been permission-giving for other politicians.
So as you have done some of this shifting from events-driven, sort of “straight” reporting to bigger-picture, wider-context, how have you changed as a journalist, and how are you coming to these ideas? Where’s this coming from for you, Astead?
Astead Herndon: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s a unique place that I’m operating in right now, because there is a temptation for news outlets to write about whatever the daily scandal is -- because there is a daily scandal. If your bar for what scandal is is the same as it was 10, 15 years ago, that threshold will be crossed every other day.
And so you can find yourself in a kind of reactive state to everything that happens, and summarizing kind of the news of the day. Our added value was not going to be writing another story about what happened today.
In the end, you’re not super adding to the ecosystem. Like, the added value is very marginal, and especially when you’re working at a paper that will still take their stories and put it in.
So we were thinking, why don’t we just increasingly take their news-of-the-day stories, and then people like Astead and Matt [Viser](link is external) and Annie [Linskey],(link is external) the people who are in D.C., write other things, write interesting things, tell new stories, and then we have two for the price of one?
I don’t have to go to the press briefing and, when she stops talking, charge out a bunch of words that nearly thousands of people are writing at the same time. I just leave. And so it’s been very helpful.
But to get to your point, it also is difficult, because everything I do here is idea-driven. I have, obviously, people I talk to and people who help me get ideas, but it is incumbent upon me to find things that are not being said and to tell them in a different way, but to still do that journalistically, because you’re not a columnist. I can’t just say, “This is what’s happening.” I need to find different things, new stories, that I can prove, and to report on.
And so it is, it’s fun, but it’s also hard. You start noticing that [Trump’s] use of “huge” is now a joke for my mom, and it’s like how -- there was not a singular word that Barack Obama said that my mom could make the joke and we all got.
That’s a Trump thing. That’s his unique way of talking, his kind of -- you know, the way he just blanketly covers all of media. It’s just the way he seeps into our lives.
And so for me, staying in tune with that, and staying in tune with how he is affecting people, is how you get the most interesting stories.
Because as much as -- I mean, D.C. is a real bubble for the game of politics. Everyone is, you know, pretty obsessed with the kind of horse race of politics. But for our jobs, for my job, that’s not interesting, you know? If I was going to pitch stories about who’s up and who’s down every week, I would be unemployed.
And so it is important, I think, for me, to figure out the ways in which politics matters to people and to stay in touch with maybe people who are unseen, with people who have been historically ignored, and find stories that tell that side of it.
And that’s the way that I continue to come up with things; it’s kind of by -- it’s a part of being humble about, I don’t have all of the ideas about where this man matters, and many of them come from people he has imposed upon, and how can I tell that story?
Laura Everett: And part of what’s such a gift to me about your work is that both in your writing and in your social media presence, I see the marks of a real person, with humor and wit. You’re an actual human behind the notepad. So I’m really grateful for that in you.
Astead Herndon: I appreciate that. I think that’s something that different reporters have different takes on, but in my view, I like that. I like being able to connect with audiences and for them to feel that not only are they getting reporting and a kind of insight into what’s going on politically right now, but I also want them to feel as if they are connected to the person who is writing this.
For me, I think in this media age, it’s important for us to try to put all our cards on the table.
Laura Everett: So that’s a conscious decision for you, about what amount of your sort of personal interests -- I get a lot more European soccer in your Twitter feed than I might otherwise consume -- but it’s, right, like it’s a personal decision for you to share more of who you are as an individual than just what you’re covering that day?
Astead Herndon: Exactly. I think it certainly is a conscious one. I think it comes about in a couple of ways.
One is that I’m just younger mostly than other folks doing my beat, and I think that I’ve come up with social media in a different era and lens. I had Twitter in high school, and so even when it became professional, it was frankly hard for me to strip all of that away.
But then the second thing is, especially when writing about politics, I think that it can be hard for people coming up, especially people from marginalized communities, people who don’t see themselves represented, to see the path, and to see themselves in some of the people who are writing this.
And so for me, as I talk with younger reporters or work with younger reporters, or people see my Twitter feed or something, I enjoy that it says that you can like this stuff and still be qualified to write about the Senate health care bill.
You know, you can like rap and still feel just as part of the White House briefing room as everyone else. Because sometimes that stuff hasn’t been allowed, and it sometimes isn’t now. And I want to be able to kind of create a situation where people can see themselves and feel like, you know, they can get there as well.
Laura Everett: So you’ve got a real sense of the visibility of your profile as a young, black reporter in the White House press corps?
Astead Herndon: Certainly. I think that it kind of comes with the territory. It happened before the White House, honestly.
There’s such an underrepresentation of African-Americans and just nonwhite people generally in traditional newsrooms that even when I was on metro or local, that was something that was very clear to me from the beginning, that there weren’t many people who look like me who had my experiences who are in this place.
And that only becomes magnified when I got to D.C. And so now there are other ways people can see me. I’m on television every now and then; I am -- you know, you can turn on the briefing and see, “Who’s the black guy with the beard in the back?”
And so the way that people can see you is magnified, but the kind of intention around understanding where you stand in wanting to create a sense of connection between yourself and your audience and understanding the kind of role you play as someone who is visible -- that started before D.C.
And truly, not because of anything special about me, but because of just the general underrepresentation that is true in media.
Laura Everett: That’s so helpful. I share some of that experience as a woman in ministry in some spaces, where the body that I’m in raises questions when I walk into a room that would not be there otherwise.
Astead Herndon: Yeah, that is a similar experience. I think that, you know, this stuff is so fluid. So where I may have certain privileges I experience as a man being in this place, I think being black and being young adds another element.
And I certainly, when I speak to other reporters who come from different backgrounds, who are women, who are Jewish, who are Muslim, we can talk about our experiences as being analogous.
That in a space that is so predominantly white and male being politics right now -- I mean, you look at the people we are questioning in power, almost overwhelmingly rich, white and male -- there’s another dynamic that’s created.
And for a reporter, where your job is to get information, where your job is to tell a story, many times the final product is very removed from all the stuff that happens before.
So one of the things you have to -- I have had to -- be conscious about is knowing that my identity plays a role in my job but still being able to navigate and still being able to produce what I’m expected to do.
Laura Everett: I want to ask you about some of the pipeline problems. And I’ve noticed you and other journalists I admire thinking about diversity in newsrooms, and you in particular have pointed out some of the economic barriers for increased diversity, like unpaid internships.
And it strikes me that for those of us who work in legacy institutions or traditionally or primarily white institutions, in some spaces, like historic churches, there’s an interesting analogy about both a stated desire for diversity and the reality that there are hidden barriers for access, or barriers that are hidden to the people who are in power. How have you navigated that?
Astead Herndon: Yeah. I mean, it’s very clear to me. So first, many of these places, your first route is an internship, and many of those internships are unpaid. And for many of these institutions, they couch that in the language of the struggling nature of media in general.
They say, “You know, we don’t have the money,” or, “It’s so hard to get a job that you should take this as an opportunity, as an experience; we’re paying you in exposure” -- all of these things that seem kind of innocent. And you can see how a powerful institution could kind of wipe their hands of paying people, especially in this environment.
But for people who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, or for people who just really don’t have the means to be able to take that on, that’s a killer.
I know so many students who -- particularly in the National Association of Black Journalists -- who could not get to the second or third step of the paid internship because they were stopped at the first one. They could not leave their work-study job in college; they couldn’t find a way to pay rent if they were working 20 hours a week in a capacity where they weren’t getting paid.
And so it’s tough, because I think on the back end, places like the Globe, we make enough money to live in Boston at that internship. And so a lot of the more powerful institutions can say, “You know what? We pay our interns.”
But the thing that happens here is that places like the Globe also require you to have three internships before that. And so inherently, they’re already cutting off a group of people who wouldn’t be able to make it.
I’ve noticed that when you’re talking to journalists of nonwhite backgrounds who have “made it” or have a stable job at a traditional legacy outlet, you can usually pinpoint a moment when someone took a risk on them, had to accept their nontraditional upbringing or background.
For me, it comes at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I could not take an unpaid internship that would qualify me for the Milwaukee Journal internship, which is the biggest one in the city, so I couldn’t do the kind of traditional lead-ins that most of the other Marquette students did to get you to that point.
But what they said was, oh, I had taken a year off and I had done AmeriCorps, and they valued that kind of, you know, frankly, weird experience for a college student of [serving] in a school for a year.
And so for an education reporting internship, they said, “You know what, it doesn’t matter that you have never been in the newsroom before; we’re going to take a shot.”
And there’s usually a point like that, that allows you -- where someone sees things kind of out of the mold that traditional media usually does and allows you to get your foot in the door. Because other than that, I don’t get newsroom experience, and I’m probably not where I am right now.
Laura Everett: I really appreciate you naming those barriers. And appreciate that even as an established but emerging journalist, you are already taking interest and being intentional about mentoring the generation of journalists behind you.
Astead Herndon: Yeah. I think that that’s something that, for me, is kind of a nonnegotiable. It was so clear to me both then and still now. These more stable reporters who really helped and really took an interest in helping me navigate what is a very messy industry -- having a lot of experiences very quickly in this industry has given me some tips that I think I can pass along to other people.
Some experiences, both in journalism, some skill-building things, but also just the knowledge of how to navigate, which is something that I think, especially, as I keep going back to -- people of nontraditional or marginalized backgrounds can often not have that.
They are usually the first -- I know that I certainly am the first of anyone I know around me -- to be a journalist, to be in this media space.
And so we are in an industry that has still not figured out how to make money, still not figured out how to be sustainable and profitable. And until that happens, we’re all treading water.
Laura Everett: As a final question, Astead, I want to ask you -- talk to me about your phone.
In this moment where people who are working for major institutions are toggling between being highly connected and [doing] the work we need to do to be wise and listen carefully, what -- do you turn your phone off? Do you -- how do you manage that component of your life? Because you are an excellent and regular tweeter, and we want to encourage everybody to follow you.
I aspire both to be highly connected and accessible and to listen carefully for those big trends. And I am not my wisest and sanest self when I’m highly connected, either.
So tell me what you do, so I can be a better pastor.
Astead Herndon: It’s hard. So first off, I’m frequently on my phone during the weekday, because that’s just how work goes.
I have, I’m sure, more than a dozen unread emails in the course of this conversation. And a part of that is just the way journalism is. There’s an expectation for you to always be plugged in.
Last week, I got edits on a story at like midnight on the weekend, and they were asking me to have them done before the morning. You know, so there’s a part of it that I just like cannot, cannot remove, and is just a component of the job.
But last year, I had some friends who actually were like -- had an intervention with me, and were like, “You need to get off your phone, Astead.”
And we are at this place, and we come here every weekend -- it was our favorite soccer bar from my favorite team -- and they’re like, “You’re invested, but you’re not here.”
And it was one of those moments when at first you’re really upset. Because I’m very defensive, like, “Oh, you’re on your phone, too. Look at that!” And then I thought about it, and I tried to ...
Laura Everett: I’m just trying to do my job, you know?
Astead Herndon: Right, right, right. And I thought -- I’ve tried now to make weekends largely phone-free. I try to do things that are personally active and physically active, that just take away my phone, right? If I’m hiking or playing basketball at the gym, I’m not going to be on my phone, right?
But I’ve also made a conscious choice that when I am around the group of people who mean the most to me, that’s going to be phone-free. And that had to be a conscious effort, because otherwise I would’ve lost some friends.
And so what I’ve done is set up alerts. I can put my phone on a mode where if my boss emails me, it comes through, or if the Globe’s general extension is calling me, it comes through.
But I’m limiting every tweet. I used to have -- and this is probably the last thing I’ll say -- I used to have every Twitter notification on for a long time. Because I was like, “Oh, I want to -- I don’t want to be one of those reporters who only read when verified people tweet them; I want to read everyone.”
And it was just stupid; it just got to a level where I was spending hours and hours reading Twitter mentions. Not even responding, but just reading them.
And I just -- and this is like a month ago -- I put on more intense filters where I very rarely see things that I don’t need to see anymore. And that’s part of me trying to limit the amount of intake I have on my phone.
Laura Everett: Well, look, we are really grateful for the careful reporting you are doing, the wide range of voices you are listening to, the people you are encouraging to this noble profession, and the time that you took to put down your phone and have a conversation with me.
Astead Herndon, I’m so grateful for the conversation we’ve had and the good work you do. Thank you.
Astead Herndon: Thank you, I appreciate it.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Astead Herndon, political reporter for The Boston Globe. Laura, he really has some thoughtful things to say about the state of the newspaper industry and how it affects young journalists.
Laura Everett: The parallels with the church and the newspaper industry are fascinating. These are legacy institutions with a mission that’s still critical, but institutions that are struggling to find a new form, and often struggling to find a new economic model for their mission.
And when Astead said that the passion he has as a newspaper reporter matters more than the business model, that sounded to me like the language of vocation and call.
Bill Lamar: Astead also touches on the talent pipeline in newspapers. Again, something that’s common to so many institutions -- the challenges in getting ahead or even getting started with that first internship, especially if you are in a marginalized community or are not the typical white, male candidate.
You know, all of our institutions struggle with how to identify and cultivate the next generation of talent. In my own study and thought about how we do it in my own world, it’s been really the apprenticeship model. Young talent has been scouted, and the elders and those who are more senior in the profession of ministry and preaching bring them alongside and teach them and pour into them.
The difficulty, though, is that often the talent scouted is limited to male talent. And I think that we see that in certain precincts in the church, but I think also what we have to do is be invitational.
You mentioned, Laura, the language of vocation, and that always arrests me, that we have to be “calling” institutions. So in a real sense, we cannot wait for persons to hear, but we have to be speaking to them, pointing them toward ministry, pointing them toward service, and pointing them toward really the beauty of the life and the challenges of the life that make for great possibility for individuals and for communities.
And I feel like in our own denomination and in other places, we are trying to be more careful to extend the call, to cast a vision, and to take the work of calling unto ourselves. When we see bright persons, asking them, “Have you considered this kind of service?” And I think therein lies the strength of the church and the institutions that we care about.
Laura Everett: Part of what I heard in Astead’s journey to the position that he’s in now is the number of times that people reached out to him, people in leadership. People took a chance on him. He said, you know, he didn’t have a typical background when he had that first internship at the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal; he had done AmeriCorps.
And so sometimes I feel like I’ve learned, in identifying folks and recruiting people, that I want to look for the skills rather than the credentials. That when I look for the skills in people, it means I’m looking at other life experiences, other than academic institutions or certain kinds of programs or certain pipelines that have worked for the church but have limited the number of people who are called.
The other thing that came through so clearly for me in Astead’s conversation was the emphasis on mentoring, that both he has had people who have mentored him and, even as a young reporter, he is mentoring people who are coming up behind him.
And to do that is really a testament to the life abundant, that these jobs are not things to hold on to and cling to and protect but an invitation to invite more people into this work that is so important.
Bill Lamar: It’s been fascinating for me, and I know you’ve seen it as well. I mean, we think ourselves to be young, but I guess we’re not as young as we used to be.
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: That’s right.
Bill Lamar: But [I’ve seen] the number of seminarians who are coming and wanting to see what the institutional life is like, what the life of pastoral ministry is like. And I think that both of us -- we’ve spoken about this -- we have taken it upon ourselves to be invitational.
And the work of mentoring is difficult work; it requires an attention and a presence that will encourage these persons.
The sad thing about mentorship, on the opposite side of the coin, is when we’re not invitational, when we’re not present, we could indeed be extinguishing a fire, a faith, an imagination that could help the church be stronger. So it’s something to take very seriously.
Laura Everett: I also heard in Astead, gosh, that affirmation that this is worth giving one’s life to. He gave a really robust defense of newspapers and why they matter. And as a millennial, as a younger journalist devoted to this older institution, he sees both the value and the shortcomings.
And I heard in that the sort of loving critic who believes enough in the institution that they want to change that. I know when I’ve mentored younger folks who have a sense of the things that are wrong, I can get defensive about this institution I love.
But [it’s important] to receive some of that criticism, sometimes with a grain of salt, but also with an openness that these are folks who have just as much right and ability to call us to the kind of institution that God longs for us [to be].
Bill Lamar: And definitely being willing to hear the criticism. And what I tend to do is to point them historically to the challenges that the institution has faced but also to the ways that, beyond the challenges, we really by the grace and mercy of God have continued to go forward.
And I try to cast the vision that for the rest of their tenure of service, they indeed will be vacillating between having great highs, great lows, being very clear about the direction of the institution and having internal challenges about that clarity.
And being able to walk in the midst of those things while remembering your vocational clarity and the vision about what you can be, where your community can be, and what your institution can be. Having that understanding, that missional understanding, if you will, can keep you in the midst of those polarities, which can really, really, really be debilitating.
Having a clear vision always helps to give strength in the midst of it all. And that clear vision is sometimes -- helps me to hold on.
And I was very thankful that in Astead, we hear a young person committed to an older institution, and I am seeing that in my own life, and that does indeed bring me great hope.
Laura Everett: Now part of what is so fun about this interview is we got into some of the nitty-gritty on what it is like to lead and serve in this kind of way. I got to ask Astead about his phone.
He has an active social media presence, he is on call a lot of the time, and I think every busy person can relate to Astead’s friends staging an intervention about his phone. It has not gotten to that for me, but I’ll be honest, sometimes my wife will go on Twitter to find out where I am. I’m not proud of that.
[Laughter]
But it’s real, right? You know, this reality that we need our electronic devices to do our ministry but at the same time we can sometimes become beholden to them. And so it was really helpful for me to ask Astead about how he manages his information consumption and his availability.
So, Bill, have you learned anything that’s working for you?
Bill Lamar: Well, it’s very interesting. I have some friends who have spoken with me about my being tethered to my device.
What I try to do is to keep ahead of the emails and the text messages, and I am telling myself often that I’m just trying to stay ahead of the curve. And really I think that in a sense, the constant stimuli, the ringing noises that an incoming message has come, almost has been a Pavlovian distraction in my situation.
So what I have taken to doing is turning down alerts and trying my best to not depend on the phone every five minutes or 15 minutes. I really, for a moment or two, put myself on a technology diet, because I’ve thought often about a phrase that one of my professors would use, “the tyranny of the immediate.”
And in the tyranny of the immediate, distraction of the phone and messages has kept me from thinking the kinds of thoughts and having the sustained reflection that allows me to do my work with any kind of meaning.
And so while the device is helpful as a tool of communication, I think one of the difficulties if we do not untether ourselves is it keeps us -- it becomes an enemy of reflection and thought. And with all that’s going on in the world, we need to be reflective and thoughtful about what we’re saying and how we’re moving in the world.
So I applaud the devices for what they can do, but I also fear what will happen if we are not clear about how these devices lead us away from sustained thought and, many times, from deep conversations that can become transformational for us and for our institutions.
Laura Everett: I think a lot about that, too, and the sort of pastoral response that I want to have to people, that gift of careful listening, the kind of listening that I believe God does to us, the practice of pastoral attentiveness.
And I know that when I’ve got my Twitter alerts coming in, or text message after text message and email alerts, that I’m not giving the kind of pastoral attentiveness that I want to. I’m not being the kind of pastor I want to.
I like being highly connected. I think it’s part of what has allowed me to do my job well, to make the vibrant church visible, to tell the stories I want to tell. At the same time, that hyperconnectedness sometimes gets in the way of me being a good pastor.
You know, one of the things I’ve actually changed on this is I noticed that some of the older generation perceived my checking of my phone as disrespectful, even when I was just checking to see what time it was.
And, Bill, I’ve made some changes, and instead of checking my phone, I actually bought a wristwatch so that I can look on my wrist and see what time [it is]. And you know, I don’t think it’s disrespectful to check my phone, but I recognize, for some of my older members of the community, that they perceive it as not being attentive.
And so you know, I’m willing to make that kind of adaptation for the good of the whole.
Bill Lamar: Laura, for my benefit and for the benefit of our listeners, could you tell us what a wristwatch is?
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: They’re ancient devices. [Laughter] Very funny, Bill.
Thanks for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. There’s more about Astead Herndon, including some of his writing, on our website, www.canthesebones.com.(link is external)
Bill, who are we talking to next?
Bill Lamar: Laura, I had a fascinating conversation with Albert Reyes, president and CEO of Buckner International, a global ministry serving children and senior adults.
Laura Everett: I’m looking forward to it.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan Gilmer and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
Listeners, we’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @RevEverett,(link is external) and you can find my colleague Bill at @WilliamHLamarIV.(link is external) You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Laura Everett, and this is “Can These Bones.”
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY
Globalization and the growing church
Although Christianity has been spreading across the globe for centuries, today we are aware of this globalization and are challenged with the task of living in a pluralistic world, said José Casanova, professor of sociology at Georgetown University.
Faith & Leadership
RECONCILIATION, GLOBAL, INTERFAITH
José Casanova: Globalization and the growing church
The global church is one in which Christians are both connected to and conscious of other faiths and denominations, says a Georgetown scholar of religion.
Although Christianity has been spreading across the globe for centuries, today we are aware of this globalization and are challenged with the task of living in a pluralistic world, said José Casanova, professor of sociology at Georgetown University.
“This is the awareness that we are all in one single, global humanity living in the same time and space,” he said. “This is what I think is radically new.”
Q: How is “globalization” different from the historical spread of Christianity across the globe?
You could argue that the Christian church has been a carrier of globalization for 20 centuries. You could say that religions -- not all religions, but those religions that have come out of what is called the Axial Age: Buddhism, Islam, Christianity -- have been globalizers.
We have to differentiate what we will call the “age of globalization,” the age in which we all, whether we want to or not, become consciously aware of globalization, both in terms of global connectivity -- everything that happens affects everybody else in the globe -- and global consciousness. This combination of connectivity and consciousness.
The condition that we are really within one single globe, and within this globe there are many, many religions claiming to be universal and global. And so it is the task to organize a world of pluralistic universalism, which is the interesting new phenomenon that we find today.
This is the awareness that we are all in one single, global humanity living in the same time and space. This is what I think is radically new.
Q: So both the interconnectedness and the consciousness of our interconnectedness.
Especially the awareness that this is a condition of plurality. Before, as long as you tried to Christianize the world, to make the world Christian, and you are the true faith, then you are under one particular idea of globalization, one in which your own form of being global is hegemonic and universal.
Q: You have a project on the Jesuits’ globalization(link is external). Talk a little bit about that.
Well, the project came about because the Jesuits were the first globalizers in the sense of global connectivity. They played a crucial role in connecting North and South, East and West. They were brokers, cultural brokers. They brought the cultures of the East to Europe. They brought the cultures of Europe to the East.
The Jesuits at first go with the ships -- colonial colonizers, Portuguese and Spanish. But soon they break away from them -- precisely, to penetrate China and India and Japan and Paraguay, and they go native. They go native in a way in which they become what we would [call] today “glocalizers” -- they are global and local at the same time.
They became Brahmans in India, mandarins in China, Indians in Paraguay, slave owners in Maryland. So it becomes global and universal by becoming local everywhere.
They had an original model of globalization that was more attuned to the kinds of issues that we are also confronting today. Then eventually, they lost ground. They were expelled from every Catholic country by the Catholic kings. Then the Catholic kings forced the pope to dissolve the order, because they were too global, too transnational.
For me, the interesting thing is that in the last 50, 60 years, we’re entering a new phase of globalization which doesn’t have a Western center but is much more open to what we call multiple modalities.
And the Jesuits have become again interesting global players in global education. They were pioneers of education in the 16th, 17th centuries, but they were dissolved. They lost all their colleges everywhere, with the exception of America. They were expelled from every country, and they took refuge in Protestant America and in Orthodox Russia.
So you have Georgetown, the first Jesuit university, which was established precisely at the point when the Jesuits do not exist anywhere else. But in the last 50 years, they have reopened universities everywhere. For instance, now India is the largest Jesuit province.
So the Jesuits today are not anymore a Western order, but they are predominant more in Africa, Asia, Latin America, which of course [also] happened to the global church.
They present an alternative model of globalization to what would be called capitalist globalization.
Q: Have you discovered any lessons from the Jesuit past for the church today?
Perhaps not lessons, but at least it opens up the idea that there are simply different ways of globalizing.
And so the idea [of the Jesuits and Globalization Project] is to look for which aspects of their historical contributions are still of interest for us today as we are facing these global questions, and then use this tradition to help the global church reflect upon the challenges they have today.
I think that partly the Jesuits themselves do not reflect enough upon their own tradition. [The project] also is a way of offering the Jesuits a forum for self-reflection around global challenges.
Q: You’re talking about a church institution that has persisted despite being disbanded. This makes me wonder whether American Protestantism is premature in predicting its own demise.
The argument is that the 20th century was both the American century and the American Protestant century. And to a certain extent, it was.
But we know that global Christianity is really, really flourishing everywhere. [This is] very much out of the evangelical thrust of American Protestantism.
And today, you have global centers of Pentecostal Christianity, which originally came out of the social street experience, in Brazil and Korea and Nigeria and South Africa and so on. So on the one hand, you have a transnationalization of what could be called forms of American Christianity that now are not American anymore but have become global.
So you could also say that American Christianity is very much linked to what we could call the self-evident truths of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness -- that they have become or are becoming self-evident truths.
The interesting question about American Christianity is the extent to which it is so linked to something which goes beyond Christianity. At the time where perhaps we may be concerned and even worried about the survival or the decline of the Protestant churches in America, we should be aware that whatever American Christianity was is becoming globalized today very, very rapidly.
So it’s a very interesting tradition today, in which human rights, the sacred human rights which emerged most clearly in the United States in the self-evident truths of the Declaration, have become globalized.
But they become globalized not necessarily through Christianization but through precisely the kind of dynamic relation that happens between different cultures and world religions.
They compete. You could say that today all the world religions compete with one another to claim, “We are the truly human religion, the one that does more for humanity.” There is a very interesting kind of competitive denominationalism, in which each religion claims to be unique and different and particular, and yet, at the same time, universal for all of humanity.
Q: What is the effect of increasing ethno-religious and cultural diversity in the American church?
Well, it goes both ways. American evangelicals go and missionize the rest of the world, but then Christian immigrants come here and bring a different form of Christianity.
It is most obvious in the case of Catholicism, because of the impact of North American Catholicism upon Latin American Catholicism, but then so many Latino immigrants would come here and renew the Catholic Church.
But the same goes for the Latino Protestants and Protestants from Asia, Korea and so on. So American Christianity went global, and then, in return, immigrants bring new forms of global Christianity to America.
And I would argue this is the greatest strength of the United States. We could say America is the first truly global society by becoming the first society made up of all the religions of the world.
This is, I think, a very interesting experiment. At the very moment when people talk of the clash of civilizations, in America the experiment is taking place where all the religions of the world are becoming part of American society.
Then all those immigrant religions have a crucial transforming effect in their home countries, the same way that American Catholicism transformed world Catholicism, American Judaism transformed world Judaism. And today, American Muslims have an impact on world Islam.
Q: You have said that you reject the idea that modernization inevitably leads to secularization. Why?
In Europe, it is taken for granted, because the experience is overwhelming, that as European society becomes more modern, they become less religious. And so the explanation was they are less religious because they are more modern.
But of course America was always more modern but continued being religious. And then we see how the rest of the world modernizes and they become, not less, but more religious.
At the time of [American] independence, at most 20 percent of the population belonged to churches. The Christianization of the American population happened later, through the Great Awakenings.
So in this respect, the democratization of America and democratization of Christianity went hand in hand. So in America, to become modern, to become religious, to become democrats are one and the same thing.
As long as it was the United States, it was called American exceptionalism -- America as the exception to the European rule. But now Korea became Christian as they became modern, and China is becoming now as it’s modernizing. Muslim countries are becoming more religious as they become more modern.
And so it looks more and more as if it is Europe that is the exception.
But then, if modernization is not the explanation, what is the explanation? So the question I’ve dedicated much of my life to in the last years is to try to offer a better explanation of why European societies have become more secular.
It’s not because they are more modern but because European societies went through a process of forced confessionalization, in which every state became a confessionalist state and cuius regio, eius religio, the religion of the king determined the religion of the subjects. And so they became homogenous Protestant in the North, homogenous Catholic in the South, and then three biconfessional societies in between: Holland, Germany and Switzerland. These boundaries remained until the 20th century. There was no change.
We know that in America, people change their denominations. According to the last Pew survey on religion, almost one-third of American adults claim to have changed their religion since childhood. This is unthinkable in Europe. Nobody changes their religion. The only movement is from the church to secularity.
In Europe, unchurching means deconfessionalization, because people had a confession forced upon them. Here, denominational identities are voluntary; they are not imposed by the state, but they are part of a project of mutual recognition of groups in society.
So the history of confessionalization and deconfessionalization in Europe is very different from the history of denominational affiliation in the United States.
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Christianity in Korea can be a catalyst for reconciliation
The Korean Peninsula is a divided land, long torn by hostility and enmity. But Christianity is a life-giving religion that can help write a new history even there, says a noted Korean-American church leader.
Faith & Leadership
MISSIONS & EVANGELISM, RECONCILIATION, GLOBAL
Syngman Rhee: Christianity in Korea can be a catalyst for reconciliation
The Korean Peninsula is a divided land, long torn by hostility and enmity. But Christianity is a life-giving religion that can help write a new history even there, says the noted Korean-American church leader.
The land that is now North Korea was once an important and successful mission field called “the Jerusalem of the East.” And though Christianity is virtually nonexistent there today, it nevertheless offers one of the best hopes for peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea, said the Rev. Syngman Rhee.
“There is a particular need for reconciliation between North and South Korea by the teaching and the love of Christ,” said Rhee, a noted Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and mainline church leader.
Some Christians in South Korea oppose anything to do with North Korea, believing that Christianity and communism cannot coexist, Rhee said. But others disagree.
“A growing number of Christians in South Korea insist that we -- Christians -- can no longer be enslaved by the belief that Christianity equals anti-communism,” Rhee said. “Christianity was not created to fight against something. It is life-giving and can be a catalyst to create a new history in any kind of society, capitalist or communist.”
Born in what is now North Korea, Rhee came to the United States after the Korean War for college and seminary and has long worked for peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea. He was president of the National Council of Churches from 1992 to 1993 and moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 2000-01.
From 1998 to 2011, he taught mission and evangelism and Asian theology and served as director of the Asian-American Ministry and Mission Center at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Va. He currently serves Union as special assistant to the president for global ministry and advancement.
Rhee spoke with Faith & Leadership while at Duke Divinity School for a consultation on Northeast Asia hosted by the Center for Reconciliation (link is external). The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Why should the church in America care about missions and reconciliation with North Korea?
One, North Korea, particularly the capital city of Pyongyang, used to be called “the Jerusalem of the East.” There was a strong Christian witness and concentration of mission activities in that city and throughout North Korea.
Presbyterian mission work centered around Pyongyang in the north of Korea, and Methodist mission work centered around Seoul in the south. So North Korea was a very important mission field. A lot of enthusiasm and conviction about Christianity was born there, in Pyongyang.
Two, the division between North and South Korea that happened at the end of World War II was a tragic event, one that had very little to do with the Korean people’s aspiration. Korea had been under Japanese control for a half-century, until the end of the war, and was divided at the 38th parallel by the United States and the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, that division for military purposes became a political reality, with a North Korean government backed by the Soviet Union and a South Korean government backed by the United States.
Once it was divided, both sides became further entrenched, which led to the Korean War. And for Christians in North Korea, including my family, life under the communist regime was not easy. My father was a pastor who was martyred in prison in the fall of 1950.
After that, my mother insisted that her two sons -- I, at 19, and my 17-year-old brother -- go to South Korea as refugees, because she feared the same thing would happen to us. We left home, our mother and four little sisters, on December 3, 1950, and walked for about 10 days to Seoul, and then from Seoul to the southern tip of South Korea, a place called Chinhae, where we joined the South Korean Marines.
When I think about it now, what a tragic reality that was, but that’s how we survived. The enmity and hostility for what happened to us as Christians was so deep that we felt a justification to fight each other, between North and South Korea.
After I was discharged in 1956, I came to the United States and went to college in West Virginia, then Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, Yale Divinity School for my master of theology degree and Chicago Theological Seminary for a doctoral program in sociology of religion.
I became a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister to follow in my father’s footsteps and to carry on the task that he was unable to complete.
Q: What’s the state of the church in North Korea today? Mostly nonexistent?
Basically, that is correct, but since about the middle of the 1980s, we have made every effort to re-establish Christian community in North Korea. In 1989, for the first time, two church buildings were built -- one Protestant, one Catholic. And they also published the Bible and the hymnbook.
I attended that first worship service in 1989. That was a wonderful, joyful day, to see a building with a cross on the top; just a moving picture it was.
But having said that, how much freedom do people have to share the gospel and attend the church services? Young people in particular are prohibited from coming in contact with Christian teachings.
So in a sense, yes, there has been some change to allow Christians to worship. Maybe 200-300 church people gather every Sunday to worship. And two years later, another small Protestant church was built, the Chilgol Church, so there are now at least two Protestant churches and one Catholic congregation in North Korea. But in terms of how much actual freedom people have, that is still questionable.
Q: What would it take to rebuild Christian institutions in North Korea? Do you think that will ever happen?
This gets to the basic question of North Korea’s understanding of what Christianity is about.
Unfortunately, tragically, ever since the Korean War, Christianity has been considered to be the religion of the enemy -- that is, the United States. From that point of view, Christianity was not welcomed, but because of international pressure, eventually they opened the door so that there are Christian churches.
But it is complicated. The continuing tension and enmity between North and South Korea has a great deal to do with what the future of the church will be in North Korea. The more openings there are between North and South Korea, the more opportunities there will be for the churches to grow and flourish.
But given the tensions between North and South Korea, it is difficult to be encouraged.
Q: Is there a role for the church in South Korea in creating those openings and opportunities?
Yes. Some Christians in South Korea still oppose anything to do with North Korea. They say communism and Christianity just cannot coexist.
On the other hand, a growing number of Christians in South Korea insist that we -- Christians -- can no longer be enslaved by the belief that Christianity equals anti-communism. Christianity was not created to fight against something. It is life-giving and can be a catalyst to create a new history in any kind of society, capitalist or communist.
There is a particular need for reconciliation between North and South Korea by the teaching and the love of Christ. That is a growing conviction now, and this consultation is one of those efforts to bring that about.
Q: You’ve been the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and president of the National Council of Churches. What’s your assessment of the future of the church generally, both in the U.S. and around the world, particularly the mainline?
When we talk about the church in general, American as well as Korean, in spite of some decline in the mainline churches in the United States, I still believe that there are basic roots of Christian teaching and belief that need to be strengthened.
We all experience decline, both in membership and in influence, as society has become more secularized and churches have failed to make Christianity relevant to the younger generation.
Before, churches almost took it for granted that society would help them, but they no longer can expect such things. Now, churches should take the central message of the gospel as their own and take responsibility for it.
As I see it, we are in a transition period, with a greater awakening of what it should mean to be a Christian. It’s good that we have to struggle with that kind of question.
In South Korea, of course, Christianity has grown since the missionaries, particularly Methodists and Presbyterians, went there about 125 years ago. It is really a success story, a miracle story, of the American mission. Until recently, Korean churches have grown because of the struggles with the Korean War, the difficulties people faced.
But now, when I visit South Korea, I hear about a decline of church influence, mainly for two reasons. One, people do not feel the need to satisfy their own existence and aspirations, which the church used to provide. There are other sources of comfort and joy.
Secondly, churches have become so inwardly oriented, as a result of the church growth movement and the development of megachurches in South Korea.
Q: The largest church in the world, the Yoido Full Gospel Church (link is external), is in Seoul.
That’s right.
It’s good and bad in a sense. Church is not supposed to be for its own survival or existence. But these churches have become so big they have to deal with internal structures and maintenance.
Korean society is becoming critical of the churches, particularly Protestant churches, for becoming larger and larger and having enormous financial resources. Rather than using those resources for the well-being of society, it has grown to be self-serving.
But it’s a time of awakening for the churches in South Korea. South Korean Christians are really thinking about and asking how to be an effective church in Korean society.
Q: What can the church in America learn from the church in Korea?
American churches have forgotten the grace of God, which is basically what it’s all about. Any organization, including religious organizations, when it becomes comfortable and powerful, becomes focused on sustaining and maintaining itself, and begins to think less about the basic essence of what the church was made of.
I think of myself. I came here in the middle of the 1950s, so I experienced all the history of the church’s decline. When I was a campus minister at the University of Louisville in the early ’60s, I took part in the civil rights movement, because that was a manifestation of our Christian message at that time historically, and I was glad to be part of it.
But we neglected to nurture the roots of our faith. It is imperative to nurture the roots of our faith if we are going to have the fruits of our faith.
Unfortunately, I think mainline denominations were so involved in bearing the fruits of our faith that they neglected nurturing the roots of our faith -- basic things like the importance of Scripture, devotion and worship, and so on.
Q: Anything else?
If I can sum up, I’m just deeply grateful for even the fact that I am alive today, because there were many occasions that I could have gone. So basically, to use a Korean expression, it’s second-chance life.
In a real sense, as a Korean Marine during the war, there was no particular reason that I survived, whereas my comrades perished. This is now the second-chance life given to me. That is the basic conviction that I live with.
And so rather than trying to become somebody famous or big, just wanting to be faithful to the given opportunities each day and each year. God has led me all the way. I have just a deep sense of gratitude.
Korea is still divided with hostility and enmity. How we can bring reconciliation and peace in the Korean Peninsula is such a complicated matter. It’s not just the North Korea-South Korea relationship; it’s also all the major powers involved -- China, Japan, Russia, the United States.
And the tragic thing is that the Korean people have become the victims of regional and global dynamics. But the Korean people are really one people, with no difference in language and customs. Yet we are caught in that, and that’s why the message of reconciliation is very important.
My conviction is that Christianity is at one of those huge points in history. It may be looked back upon like the Reformation, or like 1054, when the split occurred between the Eastern and Western churches, or 312, when Constantine became emperor.
Those were all dramatic points. This is less immediately obvious, but Christianity has undergone the most dramatic geographical shift in its history. Christianity is now predominantly in the global south, where two-thirds of all Christians live.
Those facts have been out there since Philip Jenkins’ work,(link is external) and that of other people. But within the American church, we live within a ludicrous bubble that makes us think we are the center of everything, when in fact, we are no longer the epicenter.
People may have some sense that Christianity has shifted, but they aren’t thinking about what that means for the church in the United States, for the 350,000 congregations here, and how we understand our faith.
Q: And of course, as you point out in the book, as Christianity undergoes explosive growth in the global south, it’s been declining in the United States. Give us an update on the church in America and the world.
When you visit congregations, especially predominantly white congregations in the U.S., you’ll typically see fewer than 100 people, and a seminary-trained pastor who is committed and trying to do a good job, and they have a food bank, and people volunteer at the homeless shelter, and they give to the denomination.
But if you look around the sanctuary, there’s a lot of white hair and hardly any kids, and despite the deep faith that people have, the congregation is in trouble and is probably going to die.
The statistics bear that out. Today, 50 to 70 percent of the congregations in the U.S. have less than 100 people. Small churches can be great, but when you get below 100 -- to 75, going toward 50 -- then the question becomes, can you sustain this? Is this viable?
And it’s mostly because of age. About 20 percent of the U.S. population is between 18 and 34. But only 1 in 10 congregations in the U.S. has that same proportion of young people. Most churchgoers are much older, and that’s what drives the reality.
Scott Thumma at the Hartford Institute has said that 30 to 40 percent of congregations in the U.S. will close in the next 25 years. I don’t think that’s unrealistic. A lot of serious change is on the horizon.
Even so, that’s mostly about white Protestants, which have declined by 33 percent since 1991. Meanwhile, the religious participation of people of color has increased in the U.S.
In the Assemblies of God, 43 percent of its growth in the last 10 years is driven by nonwhite people, similar to other denominations. In the Catholic Church in the U.S., 54 percent of all Catholic millennials are now Hispanic. The Catholic Church in the U.S. would be in free-fall were it not for immigration.
But the landscape overall [in the U.S.] is decline, particularly in white congregations.
Globally, though, the church is growing -- two-thirds of all Christians today live in the global south. Fifty years ago, Africa’s Christian population was 134 million; now, it’s 631 million. Latin America has about 600 million Christians, and Pentecostalism is growing there about three to four times faster than Catholicism, though Catholicism remains strong. Christianity is also growing rapidly in Asia.
Much of the growth around the world is in forms of Pentecostalism. In 1970, less than 10 percent of Christians were Pentecostal. Today, one out of four Christians identifies as Pentecostal or charismatic.
Pentecostalism tends to grow among the poor on the margins of society, people who have been discarded by society and told they’re worthless. In Pentecostal communities, they find a sense of self-worth and affirmation and community.
And all of this is outside the awareness of most of the American Christian church.
Q: What does this mean for congregations in the U.S.?
I think it means 10 things, which is why I wrote 10 chapters. But the main thing is that it would help American Christians if they reframed their own narrative to see that they’re part of a faith that is thriving globally. It’s complicated, but it’s actually pretty exciting.
It would help if U.S. congregations recognized a few simple things. One is that we have to de-Americanize the gospel. We have to grasp the gospel in its real intent instead of interpreting it through this shroud of nationalism, which sometimes gets really extreme and causes all kinds of problems.
When I travel abroad and am with Christians around the world, whether evangelical or Catholic or Pentecostal, they are astonished at Christian support in the United States for President Trump. They’re not making a political statement; they’re asking, “What has happened to Christian witness within your country?”
This is just bewildering. We can’t cloak our faith within the shroud of nationalism and think that we’re getting to the heart of it. We have to recover the message of Jesus and the language of faith that often goes against the grain of a culture that is parochial and closed in on itself.
Q: Do people in the United States realize how “Americanized” the gospel is here?
No, they don’t. I don’t think they do.
Across the board, our congregations have to come to grips with the fact that we can’t simply read the Bible through the narrow eyes of American culture, especially when that culture promotes nationalism as the highest value. And frankly, when it’s those of us who are white who are doing it, we’re reading it through our white experience and our white eyes, and we’re not seeing the whole gospel.
We need to open ourselves to the voices and the movements of Christianity outside our own culture, and that will open up the deep reality of the gospel to us.
Q: What are the lessons that the church in America can learn from global Christianity and from Pentecostalism in the global south?
It can learn that, first of all, our perspective is not the only way of seeing the world. We’ve got to put on another pair of glasses. One simple lesson is that the mix between the material world and the spiritual world is much deeper and much more interchanged than we think.
Not to get too abstract, but we think there’s a clear line between matter and spirit. But outside our culture, in Native American culture and in Africa and Latin America, people see this differently. They see spiritual reality much more intertwined with life. That’s a much more biblical view, and a deep lesson we can learn.
Regarding Pentecostalism, I ask myself: What’s happening here? Why do we see this upsurge?
I think it’s because there’s a thirst for faith that meets the whole person in a deeper way. In the U.S., we make faith very intellectual. You’ve got to believe the right propositions.
I’ll put it this way. If I talk to evangelicals, they ask me, “What do you believe?” When I talk to Pentecostals, they ask me, “What’s your story?” The power of story and narrative goes far beyond Pentecostalism, but that’s partly why people are attracted. They want worship that appeals to all the senses. And you don’t have to go to a Pentecostal church to do that.
Two months ago, I was at the Taizé community for the first time. I was astonished at this community that prays three times a day with simple chants and words of Scripture. The week I was there, 2,000 kids from Portugal showed up on vacation. This happens every week. They come to participate, and they’re grounded in an experience of worship where they’re not asked to say what they believe, where they’re not told, where they’re not preached at, but where they experience God in this way.
Another thing churches here need to learn is the relationship between the individual and the community. In this culture, we place the individual first, and everything revolves around the individual. It’s what we’ve inherited.
In his book “Community and Growth,” Jean Vanier wrote that any healthy body, any healthy Christian community, has to have more people who say “me for the community” than people who say “the community for me.”
Well, in most of our society and most of our churches, people say “the community for me.” In Africa and Latin America and Asia, Christianity grows in cultures that begin with the importance of community. It’s the way people live.
We don’t think about it much, but the gospel is a call to community, to be a part of the body and to blend with one another. But we think the gospel is what causes me to prosper and be satisfied and be successful. It’s all “me, me, me” -- but that’s not in the Bible.
Q: What are the biggest challenges for U.S. churches in embracing global Christianity and this different approach?
As I said, we live within this comfortable bubble. But if you allow yourself to interact honestly with the biblical story, if you sit with it and listen, it’s designed to break your life open. It’ll do that if you give it a chance.
You don’t have to take a mission trip to Malawi to do that. Just relate to the immigrants who are in your community, who have come as God’s gift. People don’t realize how many of those who immigrate to the United States are Christian.
The word “immigrant” has been so politicized by Donald Trump and others that when you hear it, people think of a person who’s here without papers or illegally. The fact is, most immigrants come here as Christians. And the process of immigration makes anyone’s religious faith grow stronger. That’s a sociological fact; people have studied this.
Immigrants from Africa and Asia and Latin America are here, practicing their faith and living it out in fresh ways, right at our doorstep. And we tend to ignore them. Maybe we rent church space to them and don’t like the smell of their food, but we don’t really interact and learn from them. We can encounter global Christianity in our neighborhoods and in our communities right now because of immigration.
We can also listen. We can simply listen to non-American, non-Western voices out there. They are in the ecumenical world, the Pentecostal world, the evangelical world, the Catholic world.
The great gift to us in all of this is Pope Francis. Why is he saying the things he’s saying? Partly because he is the first Catholic pope from the global south. He’s speaking the language that I hear all the time, whether it’s from Catholics or Protestants.
When I’m in other parts of the world, I hear people talking like Pope Francis and his concern about the environment and about the world being sacred. This seems to be hard for us to understand, with all the climate change deniers. But you go to other cultures and the starting point is exactly the opposite. They say the world is God’s gift and it’s sacred.
Q: Soong-Chan Rah wrote in the foreword of your book that American Christians, rather than embracing this future church, may be threatened by the decline of Western white Christian supremacy and greatness. What is your take on that? So much of what you’re talking about dovetails with much of what’s happening politically in our country right now, especially as it transitions to a much more diverse nation.
The demographics of the U.S. are changing dramatically. A lot of the politically driven fear in our country is in response to that, especially from a white community that is fearful, consciously or unconsciously, of being displaced and without power. What we call white supremacy is being undermined by demographics, and that becomes deeply threatening.
White supremacy is often subconsciously integrated into our church life. It’s not just the U.S. versus a new global reality; it’s these realities right within the U.S. culture. The challenge is whether the church -- especially the white church -- will be able to make the transition that it has to make, out of a sense of belonging to the most culturally diverse body on the face of the earth. What that means in terms of power and dynamics and voice -- all those questions come right home within the issues that we’re facing within our culture, within the issues you’re facing at Duke Divinity, within the issues that the church is facing in virtually any context.
Q: So much of what you describe in “Future Faith” is so countercultural to how we live in this country.
It is. But that’s what it means to follow Jesus, and that’s what we have to reclaim.
When I talk to pastors, they ask me, “How do I get my hands around this? What do I do in my congregation?” And I say, “Well, what about preaching about Jesus? You should find a good start there.”
The heart of it is getting back to talking about the real Jesus, the one we say we follow. What can unlock this for most congregations in the United States is to recover the radical, true and authentic message of Jesus.
Q: You say in the book that a key foundational theological question we need to ask is, “What does God love, and why?” What do you mean?
The biggest damage that American culture and Christianity within the U.S. has done to the faith is this division between what was the evangelical and the social gospel. One branch of Christianity has focused on personal salvation, and another has focused on social justice. This isn’t just a theological division; it’s an institutional division. You live within one of these two worlds, in a gospel that’s completely bifurcated and so untrue to the central message of Jesus.
I like to reframe that by asking, “What is it that God loves?”
If we start with that question, then we start at a new point that gets us out of this crazy bifurcation between a faith that’s just personal and individual and a faith that’s focused on the ways in which God’s purposes are to transform society. You can’t keep those things separate if you ask, “What is it that God loves?”
Read more from Wesley Granberg-Michaelson »
CAN THESE BONES PODCAST: ASTEAD HERNDON
Faith & Leadership
CAN THESE BONES
A Faith & Leadership podcast »
VOCATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA
Episode 2: Astead Herndon on navigating the career pipeline as a young, black newspaper reporter
In this episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Laura Everett talks with Astead Herndon, politics reporter for The Boston Globe, about why he’s committed to helping other young professionals navigate this legacy institution.
Update: Astead Herndon has announced that he will begin working at The New York Times in May 2018.When Astead Herndon decided to dedicate his career to newspaper reporting, he knew he was committing himself to a declining industry. Now that he holds the enviable position of political reporter in Washington, D.C., he’s dedicated to helping other young people through the career pipeline. In his conversation with “Can These Bones” co-host Laura Everett, he talks about the parallels between the newspaper industry and the church, the barriers faced by African-American journalists, the approach he takes to using social media, and the challenges of covering the Trump White House. He also gives Everett advice on how to manage her email.
Listen and subscribe
Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Astead Herndon
Twitter: @AsteadWesley(link is external)
Boston Globe: Herndon staff profile(link is external)
Boston Globe articles (may require subscription):
“President Trump keeps blocking people on Twitter. Is that legal?(link is external)”
“Trump is making lexicography great again (link is external)”
“Decoding the lyrics -- about cheating, back stabbing, and Kanye -- on Jay Z’s new album(link is external)”
“How do you memorialize the fallen in a war without end?(link is external)”
“Trump has ushered in an era of political shamelessness(link is external)”
“What Trump’s words say about him(link is external)”
Transcript
Laura Everett: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Laura Everett.
Bill Lamar: And I’m Bill Lamar. This is episode 2 of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and from other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in the “valley of dry bones.”
Bill Lamar: And I’m Bill Lamar. This is episode 2 of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and from other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in the “valley of dry bones.”
Bill Lamar: I get so much life from talking with persons who live lives different from my own and who serve institutions different from the one that I serve. I love reading books and listening to podcasts from different fields to get a fresh look at what I’m trying to do at Metropolitan AME Church and in my community.
Laura Everett: I love serving the church. It’s the great calling on my life, and I get so much joy from doing it, but there are weeks at a time where I can go with only talking to people who are already involved in the church or only talking to other clergy.
I need to talk to people who are in other institutions; I need to learn from them to know how to do my job better at the Massachusetts Council of Churches.
Bill Lamar: Laura, today’s guest is a voice from another field, a wonderful field, the field of journalism. Astead Herndon, who covers politics and the White House for The Boston Globe, joins us today. Laura, you know Astead and wanted to have him on the show. Why?
Laura Everett: I’ve always been fascinated by the parallels between what the newspaper industry and what the church are facing today. And I think Astead has an interesting take on the necessity of the newspapers and the need for change in ways that will help us think more clearly about the church.
Bill Lamar: Let’s listen to your conversation with Astead Herndon of The Boston Globe.
Laura Everett: I’m thrilled to have with me Astead Herndon, who is a national political reporter for The Boston Globe. He joined the Globe in 2015 after a summer reporting internship. Astead is a graduate of Marquette University and has previously worked at CNN.com and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Now, I know [you] Astead from your time in Boston, back when you were on the local beat. Astead has written explainers ranging from Senate health care [to] a decoder of Jay Z’s “4:44.”Astead, welcome to “Can These Bones.”
Astead Herndon: Thank you. I appreciate you having me.
Laura Everett: So let’s dig deep and talk about this messy industry. I was raised by a journalist and became a pastor. And you were raised by a pastor, and you became a journalist.
Astead Herndon: Yes.
Laura Everett: Right?
Astead Herndon: Yeah.
Laura Everett: And the joke in my family is that Everetts love dying institutions. My father was a newspaper editor; my mom was a print graphic designer; I work for the church.
We, for some reason, my people, my family, feel very strongly about these older institutions.
And you come from a church background -- your father founded a church. You know how hard it is to start something new, but you went to a traditional institution. Why give your life to newspapers?
Astead Herndon: So my father founded a Pentecostal church in the Church of God in Christ when I was 1 or 2. So the church and me are very much the same age. And one of the benefits of that is that while my sisters, who are both older, have experience before Hallelujah Temple, which is the name of the church, my whole experience, both family and so much of my life, has been singularly driven through this institution and my father’s experience with founding it, and all the pluses and minuses that go along with that.
And while certainly it is true that it is a tough thing to sustain, and that has been very clear to me, it has also been very clear that the passion, the self-actualization, the centering that the church gives him was more than worth it for all the struggles that came along with it.
And so for me, joining something that I cared about was more important than tagging along to something that may stay afloat for longer.
So that leads me to media. But even within media, there are a lot of, you know, shiny new objects every day. There are a lot of digital outlets, there are a lot of verticals, and they certainly have their place.
I’m a big reader of them. I am a big fan of them. But for me, there’s nothing better than newspapers. There’s nothing that grounds our democracy more, that breaks new information, the kind of rush, the bedrock that they are -- it still means more to me than the kind of precarious situation that newspapers find themselves in.
And so while certainly, you know, sometimes I look over at friends or other outlets that are making money through the roof and are thinking here’s another shiny new object, hiring for this or that. And then I think back to where those places are getting their information from -- where, even now, are the bedrocks of holding power accountable? -- and I always come back to newspapers.
And so to tie it back to my father, I think that the kind of passion, the kind of self-worth, the, like, self-identity I now have as a newspaper reporter still matters more to me than the questionable business model -- you know, not even questionable -- the sinking business model we have found ourselves in.
Laura Everett: Right. That sense that this is [worth] giving one’s time, one’s history, one’s education, one’s intellectual curiosity for, even at a moment where the credibility of newspapers or the credibility of religious institutions is being undercut in many ways, that there’s something in the sort of foundational claims that these institutions make that’s worth spending time with.
Astead Herndon: I think of the quote, “There’s nothing that’s wrong with America --” I’m misquoting this, but it’s something like, “There’s nothing that’s wrong with America that what’s right about America can’t fix,” you know?
And I feel like that around newspapers. I’m the first to criticize, I think, the shortcomings of newspapers. But what I believe about them is I believe that -- and I could certainly, if I asked my father about his experience in the church, I think he would say the same thing -- the parts of it that you believe in, the part of it that’s right, I still believe can overcome the shortcomings.
And I enjoy feeling part of the solution. And so it’s not just about writing stories that I think need to be told, but it’s also being the kind of reporter, pushing my institution to be the kind of institution -- I try to make the Globe a place where I think we do more right than we do wrong.
Laura Everett: I think one of the core commitments of Leadership Education and this podcast as we ask, “Can these bones live?” -- we know the answer to the question, or we have faith in the answer to the question, which is that there will be new spirit that is breathed into some pretty rickety old bones. But [one of our core commitments is] that we believe the bones are worth saving.
When you look at your own institution, at newspapers in general, where are the places where you’re really feeling like bones coming on bone, things are connecting?
Astead Herndon: Journalists are very bad at solutions. We are very, very good at pointing out all the places where we have failed and pointing out the places where we continue to fail.
But you get journalists around the room and say, “How do you fix it?” and we all kind of look -- like, “Fix it?” You know, like, “Who -- that’s someone else’s job. Someone gets paid a lot more money than I do to think about solutions.”
And so … but that’s all inadequate now. I think that it’s all part of -- I mean, as I was saying before, I think we have to actively work to be part of the solution.
And so to go back to your question, the places that I have seen us be part of the solution -- I’ll mention a couple of things.
First is that we need to be better at our job. We just need to -- that’s kind of a cop-out solution, but when someone messes up in the industry right now, it is so overblown in a way that’s really not their fault. The first thing that we need to do, and I think we have done in the last year, is prove ourselves worth it by being good at our jobs.
You know, when you look at so much of the information that has come out, the pertinent information about the Trump administration, about Trump himself -- that’s come from newspapers, almost exclusively. And I think that that’s important.
The second thing is we have to let the old inner industry hatchets die, and I think we’re seeing more of that. We’re seeing more collaboration between newsrooms. We’ve seen a lot more sharing of work through newsrooms. The easiest and most classic example of this is the Post and the Times are sharing each other’s work. And you know, that’s kind of unthinkable 20 years ago.
But right now, the enemy is not the newsroom across the street, and that’s so clear -- that we are both under an attack from a president who likes to use us as a punching bag but also we have a real trust problem within the industry. And that doesn’t matter if you’re the Times or the Post.
I also think, the thing that I’ve seen some of but I hope we get even better at is about transparency.
We’ve seen stories -- well, the first one I think of is when Mike Flynn was found to have lied to Vice President Pence, it wasn’t just anonymous sources that they put in that story. They listed, “We had four administration officials from this department, three administration officials from this department …”
I don’t know if those are the numbers, but that was the idea. And I think that that’s increasingly important.
Laura Everett: And that’s the change?
Astead Herndon: And that’s the change. The change is that we’re not just asking you to blindly trust us that we know who these people are. We are giving you more information about how we got this, and who these people are, while still protecting their identities. And we’re getting much more of that.
And so I think it’s easier for a reader to understand how the reporter gets to that point, because before, the reader was being asked to trust the outlet, to say, “Hey, this is The Boston Globe, so if this person is telling me this thing is true, it is likely true.”
And we’re just not at that -- we don’t have that institutional credibility anymore. So I think what is incumbent upon us is to prove ourselves. And I think we’re doing more of that, but I hope to see even more.
Laura Everett: So let’s talk about some of the stories that you’re writing, because I’ve noticed some shifts, and how your stories have changed, and what could be possible, right?
There are some pretty well-trod paths: you went from being a metro reporter in Boston to being a journalist in D.C., a national political reporter, part of the White House press corps. You could be doing the synopsis of the daily -- well, sometimes-daily -- press briefings.
Astead Herndon: Yeah.
Laura Everett: But instead, I see you building out some of these really smart, bigger-picture ideas.
You’ve written things about -- asking questions: How do we memorialize the dead of the war on terror? How do you memorialize the dead in a war that won’t end? How does President Trump’s language change our lexicography?
You’ve written stories about if tweets are now presidential speech, is it legal or moral or wise for the president to block people on Twitter? And you’ve written about how President Trump’s regular refusal to apologize has been permission-giving for other politicians.
So as you have done some of this shifting from events-driven, sort of “straight” reporting to bigger-picture, wider-context, how have you changed as a journalist, and how are you coming to these ideas? Where’s this coming from for you, Astead?
Astead Herndon: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s a unique place that I’m operating in right now, because there is a temptation for news outlets to write about whatever the daily scandal is -- because there is a daily scandal. If your bar for what scandal is is the same as it was 10, 15 years ago, that threshold will be crossed every other day.
And so you can find yourself in a kind of reactive state to everything that happens, and summarizing kind of the news of the day. Our added value was not going to be writing another story about what happened today.
In the end, you’re not super adding to the ecosystem. Like, the added value is very marginal, and especially when you’re working at a paper that will still take their stories and put it in.
So we were thinking, why don’t we just increasingly take their news-of-the-day stories, and then people like Astead and Matt [Viser](link is external) and Annie [Linskey],(link is external) the people who are in D.C., write other things, write interesting things, tell new stories, and then we have two for the price of one?
I don’t have to go to the press briefing and, when she stops talking, charge out a bunch of words that nearly thousands of people are writing at the same time. I just leave. And so it’s been very helpful.
But to get to your point, it also is difficult, because everything I do here is idea-driven. I have, obviously, people I talk to and people who help me get ideas, but it is incumbent upon me to find things that are not being said and to tell them in a different way, but to still do that journalistically, because you’re not a columnist. I can’t just say, “This is what’s happening.” I need to find different things, new stories, that I can prove, and to report on.
And so it is, it’s fun, but it’s also hard. You start noticing that [Trump’s] use of “huge” is now a joke for my mom, and it’s like how -- there was not a singular word that Barack Obama said that my mom could make the joke and we all got.
That’s a Trump thing. That’s his unique way of talking, his kind of -- you know, the way he just blanketly covers all of media. It’s just the way he seeps into our lives.
And so for me, staying in tune with that, and staying in tune with how he is affecting people, is how you get the most interesting stories.
Because as much as -- I mean, D.C. is a real bubble for the game of politics. Everyone is, you know, pretty obsessed with the kind of horse race of politics. But for our jobs, for my job, that’s not interesting, you know? If I was going to pitch stories about who’s up and who’s down every week, I would be unemployed.
And so it is important, I think, for me, to figure out the ways in which politics matters to people and to stay in touch with maybe people who are unseen, with people who have been historically ignored, and find stories that tell that side of it.
And that’s the way that I continue to come up with things; it’s kind of by -- it’s a part of being humble about, I don’t have all of the ideas about where this man matters, and many of them come from people he has imposed upon, and how can I tell that story?
Laura Everett: And part of what’s such a gift to me about your work is that both in your writing and in your social media presence, I see the marks of a real person, with humor and wit. You’re an actual human behind the notepad. So I’m really grateful for that in you.
Astead Herndon: I appreciate that. I think that’s something that different reporters have different takes on, but in my view, I like that. I like being able to connect with audiences and for them to feel that not only are they getting reporting and a kind of insight into what’s going on politically right now, but I also want them to feel as if they are connected to the person who is writing this.
For me, I think in this media age, it’s important for us to try to put all our cards on the table.
Laura Everett: So that’s a conscious decision for you, about what amount of your sort of personal interests -- I get a lot more European soccer in your Twitter feed than I might otherwise consume -- but it’s, right, like it’s a personal decision for you to share more of who you are as an individual than just what you’re covering that day?
Astead Herndon: Exactly. I think it certainly is a conscious one. I think it comes about in a couple of ways.
One is that I’m just younger mostly than other folks doing my beat, and I think that I’ve come up with social media in a different era and lens. I had Twitter in high school, and so even when it became professional, it was frankly hard for me to strip all of that away.
But then the second thing is, especially when writing about politics, I think that it can be hard for people coming up, especially people from marginalized communities, people who don’t see themselves represented, to see the path, and to see themselves in some of the people who are writing this.
And so for me, as I talk with younger reporters or work with younger reporters, or people see my Twitter feed or something, I enjoy that it says that you can like this stuff and still be qualified to write about the Senate health care bill.
You know, you can like rap and still feel just as part of the White House briefing room as everyone else. Because sometimes that stuff hasn’t been allowed, and it sometimes isn’t now. And I want to be able to kind of create a situation where people can see themselves and feel like, you know, they can get there as well.
Laura Everett: So you’ve got a real sense of the visibility of your profile as a young, black reporter in the White House press corps?
Astead Herndon: Certainly. I think that it kind of comes with the territory. It happened before the White House, honestly.
There’s such an underrepresentation of African-Americans and just nonwhite people generally in traditional newsrooms that even when I was on metro or local, that was something that was very clear to me from the beginning, that there weren’t many people who look like me who had my experiences who are in this place.
And that only becomes magnified when I got to D.C. And so now there are other ways people can see me. I’m on television every now and then; I am -- you know, you can turn on the briefing and see, “Who’s the black guy with the beard in the back?”
And so the way that people can see you is magnified, but the kind of intention around understanding where you stand in wanting to create a sense of connection between yourself and your audience and understanding the kind of role you play as someone who is visible -- that started before D.C.
And truly, not because of anything special about me, but because of just the general underrepresentation that is true in media.
Laura Everett: That’s so helpful. I share some of that experience as a woman in ministry in some spaces, where the body that I’m in raises questions when I walk into a room that would not be there otherwise.
Astead Herndon: Yeah, that is a similar experience. I think that, you know, this stuff is so fluid. So where I may have certain privileges I experience as a man being in this place, I think being black and being young adds another element.
And I certainly, when I speak to other reporters who come from different backgrounds, who are women, who are Jewish, who are Muslim, we can talk about our experiences as being analogous.
That in a space that is so predominantly white and male being politics right now -- I mean, you look at the people we are questioning in power, almost overwhelmingly rich, white and male -- there’s another dynamic that’s created.
And for a reporter, where your job is to get information, where your job is to tell a story, many times the final product is very removed from all the stuff that happens before.
So one of the things you have to -- I have had to -- be conscious about is knowing that my identity plays a role in my job but still being able to navigate and still being able to produce what I’m expected to do.
Laura Everett: I want to ask you about some of the pipeline problems. And I’ve noticed you and other journalists I admire thinking about diversity in newsrooms, and you in particular have pointed out some of the economic barriers for increased diversity, like unpaid internships.
And it strikes me that for those of us who work in legacy institutions or traditionally or primarily white institutions, in some spaces, like historic churches, there’s an interesting analogy about both a stated desire for diversity and the reality that there are hidden barriers for access, or barriers that are hidden to the people who are in power. How have you navigated that?
Astead Herndon: Yeah. I mean, it’s very clear to me. So first, many of these places, your first route is an internship, and many of those internships are unpaid. And for many of these institutions, they couch that in the language of the struggling nature of media in general.
They say, “You know, we don’t have the money,” or, “It’s so hard to get a job that you should take this as an opportunity, as an experience; we’re paying you in exposure” -- all of these things that seem kind of innocent. And you can see how a powerful institution could kind of wipe their hands of paying people, especially in this environment.
But for people who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, or for people who just really don’t have the means to be able to take that on, that’s a killer.
I know so many students who -- particularly in the National Association of Black Journalists -- who could not get to the second or third step of the paid internship because they were stopped at the first one. They could not leave their work-study job in college; they couldn’t find a way to pay rent if they were working 20 hours a week in a capacity where they weren’t getting paid.
And so it’s tough, because I think on the back end, places like the Globe, we make enough money to live in Boston at that internship. And so a lot of the more powerful institutions can say, “You know what? We pay our interns.”
But the thing that happens here is that places like the Globe also require you to have three internships before that. And so inherently, they’re already cutting off a group of people who wouldn’t be able to make it.
I’ve noticed that when you’re talking to journalists of nonwhite backgrounds who have “made it” or have a stable job at a traditional legacy outlet, you can usually pinpoint a moment when someone took a risk on them, had to accept their nontraditional upbringing or background.
For me, it comes at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I could not take an unpaid internship that would qualify me for the Milwaukee Journal internship, which is the biggest one in the city, so I couldn’t do the kind of traditional lead-ins that most of the other Marquette students did to get you to that point.
But what they said was, oh, I had taken a year off and I had done AmeriCorps, and they valued that kind of, you know, frankly, weird experience for a college student of [serving] in a school for a year.
And so for an education reporting internship, they said, “You know what, it doesn’t matter that you have never been in the newsroom before; we’re going to take a shot.”
And there’s usually a point like that, that allows you -- where someone sees things kind of out of the mold that traditional media usually does and allows you to get your foot in the door. Because other than that, I don’t get newsroom experience, and I’m probably not where I am right now.
Laura Everett: I really appreciate you naming those barriers. And appreciate that even as an established but emerging journalist, you are already taking interest and being intentional about mentoring the generation of journalists behind you.
Astead Herndon: Yeah. I think that that’s something that, for me, is kind of a nonnegotiable. It was so clear to me both then and still now. These more stable reporters who really helped and really took an interest in helping me navigate what is a very messy industry -- having a lot of experiences very quickly in this industry has given me some tips that I think I can pass along to other people.
Some experiences, both in journalism, some skill-building things, but also just the knowledge of how to navigate, which is something that I think, especially, as I keep going back to -- people of nontraditional or marginalized backgrounds can often not have that.
They are usually the first -- I know that I certainly am the first of anyone I know around me -- to be a journalist, to be in this media space.
And so we are in an industry that has still not figured out how to make money, still not figured out how to be sustainable and profitable. And until that happens, we’re all treading water.
Laura Everett: As a final question, Astead, I want to ask you -- talk to me about your phone.
In this moment where people who are working for major institutions are toggling between being highly connected and [doing] the work we need to do to be wise and listen carefully, what -- do you turn your phone off? Do you -- how do you manage that component of your life? Because you are an excellent and regular tweeter, and we want to encourage everybody to follow you.
I aspire both to be highly connected and accessible and to listen carefully for those big trends. And I am not my wisest and sanest self when I’m highly connected, either.
So tell me what you do, so I can be a better pastor.
Astead Herndon: It’s hard. So first off, I’m frequently on my phone during the weekday, because that’s just how work goes.
I have, I’m sure, more than a dozen unread emails in the course of this conversation. And a part of that is just the way journalism is. There’s an expectation for you to always be plugged in.
Last week, I got edits on a story at like midnight on the weekend, and they were asking me to have them done before the morning. You know, so there’s a part of it that I just like cannot, cannot remove, and is just a component of the job.
But last year, I had some friends who actually were like -- had an intervention with me, and were like, “You need to get off your phone, Astead.”
And we are at this place, and we come here every weekend -- it was our favorite soccer bar from my favorite team -- and they’re like, “You’re invested, but you’re not here.”
And it was one of those moments when at first you’re really upset. Because I’m very defensive, like, “Oh, you’re on your phone, too. Look at that!” And then I thought about it, and I tried to ...
Laura Everett: I’m just trying to do my job, you know?
Astead Herndon: Right, right, right. And I thought -- I’ve tried now to make weekends largely phone-free. I try to do things that are personally active and physically active, that just take away my phone, right? If I’m hiking or playing basketball at the gym, I’m not going to be on my phone, right?
But I’ve also made a conscious choice that when I am around the group of people who mean the most to me, that’s going to be phone-free. And that had to be a conscious effort, because otherwise I would’ve lost some friends.
And so what I’ve done is set up alerts. I can put my phone on a mode where if my boss emails me, it comes through, or if the Globe’s general extension is calling me, it comes through.
But I’m limiting every tweet. I used to have -- and this is probably the last thing I’ll say -- I used to have every Twitter notification on for a long time. Because I was like, “Oh, I want to -- I don’t want to be one of those reporters who only read when verified people tweet them; I want to read everyone.”
And it was just stupid; it just got to a level where I was spending hours and hours reading Twitter mentions. Not even responding, but just reading them.
And I just -- and this is like a month ago -- I put on more intense filters where I very rarely see things that I don’t need to see anymore. And that’s part of me trying to limit the amount of intake I have on my phone.
Laura Everett: Well, look, we are really grateful for the careful reporting you are doing, the wide range of voices you are listening to, the people you are encouraging to this noble profession, and the time that you took to put down your phone and have a conversation with me.
Astead Herndon, I’m so grateful for the conversation we’ve had and the good work you do. Thank you.
Astead Herndon: Thank you, I appreciate it.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Astead Herndon, political reporter for The Boston Globe. Laura, he really has some thoughtful things to say about the state of the newspaper industry and how it affects young journalists.
Laura Everett: The parallels with the church and the newspaper industry are fascinating. These are legacy institutions with a mission that’s still critical, but institutions that are struggling to find a new form, and often struggling to find a new economic model for their mission.
And when Astead said that the passion he has as a newspaper reporter matters more than the business model, that sounded to me like the language of vocation and call.
Bill Lamar: Astead also touches on the talent pipeline in newspapers. Again, something that’s common to so many institutions -- the challenges in getting ahead or even getting started with that first internship, especially if you are in a marginalized community or are not the typical white, male candidate.
You know, all of our institutions struggle with how to identify and cultivate the next generation of talent. In my own study and thought about how we do it in my own world, it’s been really the apprenticeship model. Young talent has been scouted, and the elders and those who are more senior in the profession of ministry and preaching bring them alongside and teach them and pour into them.
The difficulty, though, is that often the talent scouted is limited to male talent. And I think that we see that in certain precincts in the church, but I think also what we have to do is be invitational.
You mentioned, Laura, the language of vocation, and that always arrests me, that we have to be “calling” institutions. So in a real sense, we cannot wait for persons to hear, but we have to be speaking to them, pointing them toward ministry, pointing them toward service, and pointing them toward really the beauty of the life and the challenges of the life that make for great possibility for individuals and for communities.
And I feel like in our own denomination and in other places, we are trying to be more careful to extend the call, to cast a vision, and to take the work of calling unto ourselves. When we see bright persons, asking them, “Have you considered this kind of service?” And I think therein lies the strength of the church and the institutions that we care about.
Laura Everett: Part of what I heard in Astead’s journey to the position that he’s in now is the number of times that people reached out to him, people in leadership. People took a chance on him. He said, you know, he didn’t have a typical background when he had that first internship at the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal; he had done AmeriCorps.
And so sometimes I feel like I’ve learned, in identifying folks and recruiting people, that I want to look for the skills rather than the credentials. That when I look for the skills in people, it means I’m looking at other life experiences, other than academic institutions or certain kinds of programs or certain pipelines that have worked for the church but have limited the number of people who are called.
The other thing that came through so clearly for me in Astead’s conversation was the emphasis on mentoring, that both he has had people who have mentored him and, even as a young reporter, he is mentoring people who are coming up behind him.
And to do that is really a testament to the life abundant, that these jobs are not things to hold on to and cling to and protect but an invitation to invite more people into this work that is so important.
Bill Lamar: It’s been fascinating for me, and I know you’ve seen it as well. I mean, we think ourselves to be young, but I guess we’re not as young as we used to be.
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: That’s right.
Bill Lamar: But [I’ve seen] the number of seminarians who are coming and wanting to see what the institutional life is like, what the life of pastoral ministry is like. And I think that both of us -- we’ve spoken about this -- we have taken it upon ourselves to be invitational.
And the work of mentoring is difficult work; it requires an attention and a presence that will encourage these persons.
The sad thing about mentorship, on the opposite side of the coin, is when we’re not invitational, when we’re not present, we could indeed be extinguishing a fire, a faith, an imagination that could help the church be stronger. So it’s something to take very seriously.
Laura Everett: I also heard in Astead, gosh, that affirmation that this is worth giving one’s life to. He gave a really robust defense of newspapers and why they matter. And as a millennial, as a younger journalist devoted to this older institution, he sees both the value and the shortcomings.
And I heard in that the sort of loving critic who believes enough in the institution that they want to change that. I know when I’ve mentored younger folks who have a sense of the things that are wrong, I can get defensive about this institution I love.
But [it’s important] to receive some of that criticism, sometimes with a grain of salt, but also with an openness that these are folks who have just as much right and ability to call us to the kind of institution that God longs for us [to be].
Bill Lamar: And definitely being willing to hear the criticism. And what I tend to do is to point them historically to the challenges that the institution has faced but also to the ways that, beyond the challenges, we really by the grace and mercy of God have continued to go forward.
And I try to cast the vision that for the rest of their tenure of service, they indeed will be vacillating between having great highs, great lows, being very clear about the direction of the institution and having internal challenges about that clarity.
And being able to walk in the midst of those things while remembering your vocational clarity and the vision about what you can be, where your community can be, and what your institution can be. Having that understanding, that missional understanding, if you will, can keep you in the midst of those polarities, which can really, really, really be debilitating.
Having a clear vision always helps to give strength in the midst of it all. And that clear vision is sometimes -- helps me to hold on.
And I was very thankful that in Astead, we hear a young person committed to an older institution, and I am seeing that in my own life, and that does indeed bring me great hope.
Laura Everett: Now part of what is so fun about this interview is we got into some of the nitty-gritty on what it is like to lead and serve in this kind of way. I got to ask Astead about his phone.
He has an active social media presence, he is on call a lot of the time, and I think every busy person can relate to Astead’s friends staging an intervention about his phone. It has not gotten to that for me, but I’ll be honest, sometimes my wife will go on Twitter to find out where I am. I’m not proud of that.
[Laughter]
But it’s real, right? You know, this reality that we need our electronic devices to do our ministry but at the same time we can sometimes become beholden to them. And so it was really helpful for me to ask Astead about how he manages his information consumption and his availability.
So, Bill, have you learned anything that’s working for you?
Bill Lamar: Well, it’s very interesting. I have some friends who have spoken with me about my being tethered to my device.
What I try to do is to keep ahead of the emails and the text messages, and I am telling myself often that I’m just trying to stay ahead of the curve. And really I think that in a sense, the constant stimuli, the ringing noises that an incoming message has come, almost has been a Pavlovian distraction in my situation.
So what I have taken to doing is turning down alerts and trying my best to not depend on the phone every five minutes or 15 minutes. I really, for a moment or two, put myself on a technology diet, because I’ve thought often about a phrase that one of my professors would use, “the tyranny of the immediate.”
And in the tyranny of the immediate, distraction of the phone and messages has kept me from thinking the kinds of thoughts and having the sustained reflection that allows me to do my work with any kind of meaning.
And so while the device is helpful as a tool of communication, I think one of the difficulties if we do not untether ourselves is it keeps us -- it becomes an enemy of reflection and thought. And with all that’s going on in the world, we need to be reflective and thoughtful about what we’re saying and how we’re moving in the world.
So I applaud the devices for what they can do, but I also fear what will happen if we are not clear about how these devices lead us away from sustained thought and, many times, from deep conversations that can become transformational for us and for our institutions.
Laura Everett: I think a lot about that, too, and the sort of pastoral response that I want to have to people, that gift of careful listening, the kind of listening that I believe God does to us, the practice of pastoral attentiveness.
And I know that when I’ve got my Twitter alerts coming in, or text message after text message and email alerts, that I’m not giving the kind of pastoral attentiveness that I want to. I’m not being the kind of pastor I want to.
I like being highly connected. I think it’s part of what has allowed me to do my job well, to make the vibrant church visible, to tell the stories I want to tell. At the same time, that hyperconnectedness sometimes gets in the way of me being a good pastor.
You know, one of the things I’ve actually changed on this is I noticed that some of the older generation perceived my checking of my phone as disrespectful, even when I was just checking to see what time it was.
And, Bill, I’ve made some changes, and instead of checking my phone, I actually bought a wristwatch so that I can look on my wrist and see what time [it is]. And you know, I don’t think it’s disrespectful to check my phone, but I recognize, for some of my older members of the community, that they perceive it as not being attentive.
And so you know, I’m willing to make that kind of adaptation for the good of the whole.
Bill Lamar: Laura, for my benefit and for the benefit of our listeners, could you tell us what a wristwatch is?
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: They’re ancient devices. [Laughter] Very funny, Bill.
Thanks for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. There’s more about Astead Herndon, including some of his writing, on our website, www.canthesebones.com.(link is external)
Bill, who are we talking to next?
Bill Lamar: Laura, I had a fascinating conversation with Albert Reyes, president and CEO of Buckner International, a global ministry serving children and senior adults.
Laura Everett: I’m looking forward to it.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan Gilmer and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
Listeners, we’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @RevEverett,(link is external) and you can find my colleague Bill at @WilliamHLamarIV.(link is external) You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Laura Everett, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.Read or listen to this podcast »
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY
Globalization and the growing church
Although Christianity has been spreading across the globe for centuries, today we are aware of this globalization and are challenged with the task of living in a pluralistic world, said José Casanova, professor of sociology at Georgetown University.
Faith & Leadership
RECONCILIATION, GLOBAL, INTERFAITH
José Casanova: Globalization and the growing church
The global church is one in which Christians are both connected to and conscious of other faiths and denominations, says a Georgetown scholar of religion.
Although Christianity has been spreading across the globe for centuries, today we are aware of this globalization and are challenged with the task of living in a pluralistic world, said José Casanova, professor of sociology at Georgetown University.
“This is the awareness that we are all in one single, global humanity living in the same time and space,” he said. “This is what I think is radically new.”
Casanova is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and heads the Program on Globalization, Religion and the Secular at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.
He is an expert in religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory, and his book “Public Religions in the Modern World” is considered a classic in the field. In 2012, Casanova received the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen, for lifelong achievement in theology.
Casanova spoke to Faith & Leadership while at Duke University to give a lecture as part of the Religions and Public Life(link is external) initiative. The following is an edited transcript.Q: How is “globalization” different from the historical spread of Christianity across the globe?
You could argue that the Christian church has been a carrier of globalization for 20 centuries. You could say that religions -- not all religions, but those religions that have come out of what is called the Axial Age: Buddhism, Islam, Christianity -- have been globalizers.
We have to differentiate what we will call the “age of globalization,” the age in which we all, whether we want to or not, become consciously aware of globalization, both in terms of global connectivity -- everything that happens affects everybody else in the globe -- and global consciousness. This combination of connectivity and consciousness.
The condition that we are really within one single globe, and within this globe there are many, many religions claiming to be universal and global. And so it is the task to organize a world of pluralistic universalism, which is the interesting new phenomenon that we find today.
This is the awareness that we are all in one single, global humanity living in the same time and space. This is what I think is radically new.
Q: So both the interconnectedness and the consciousness of our interconnectedness.
Especially the awareness that this is a condition of plurality. Before, as long as you tried to Christianize the world, to make the world Christian, and you are the true faith, then you are under one particular idea of globalization, one in which your own form of being global is hegemonic and universal.
Q: You have a project on the Jesuits’ globalization(link is external). Talk a little bit about that.
Well, the project came about because the Jesuits were the first globalizers in the sense of global connectivity. They played a crucial role in connecting North and South, East and West. They were brokers, cultural brokers. They brought the cultures of the East to Europe. They brought the cultures of Europe to the East.
The Jesuits at first go with the ships -- colonial colonizers, Portuguese and Spanish. But soon they break away from them -- precisely, to penetrate China and India and Japan and Paraguay, and they go native. They go native in a way in which they become what we would [call] today “glocalizers” -- they are global and local at the same time.
They became Brahmans in India, mandarins in China, Indians in Paraguay, slave owners in Maryland. So it becomes global and universal by becoming local everywhere.
They had an original model of globalization that was more attuned to the kinds of issues that we are also confronting today. Then eventually, they lost ground. They were expelled from every Catholic country by the Catholic kings. Then the Catholic kings forced the pope to dissolve the order, because they were too global, too transnational.
For me, the interesting thing is that in the last 50, 60 years, we’re entering a new phase of globalization which doesn’t have a Western center but is much more open to what we call multiple modalities.
And the Jesuits have become again interesting global players in global education. They were pioneers of education in the 16th, 17th centuries, but they were dissolved. They lost all their colleges everywhere, with the exception of America. They were expelled from every country, and they took refuge in Protestant America and in Orthodox Russia.
So you have Georgetown, the first Jesuit university, which was established precisely at the point when the Jesuits do not exist anywhere else. But in the last 50 years, they have reopened universities everywhere. For instance, now India is the largest Jesuit province.
So the Jesuits today are not anymore a Western order, but they are predominant more in Africa, Asia, Latin America, which of course [also] happened to the global church.
They present an alternative model of globalization to what would be called capitalist globalization.
Q: Have you discovered any lessons from the Jesuit past for the church today?
Perhaps not lessons, but at least it opens up the idea that there are simply different ways of globalizing.
And so the idea [of the Jesuits and Globalization Project] is to look for which aspects of their historical contributions are still of interest for us today as we are facing these global questions, and then use this tradition to help the global church reflect upon the challenges they have today.
I think that partly the Jesuits themselves do not reflect enough upon their own tradition. [The project] also is a way of offering the Jesuits a forum for self-reflection around global challenges.
Q: You’re talking about a church institution that has persisted despite being disbanded. This makes me wonder whether American Protestantism is premature in predicting its own demise.
The argument is that the 20th century was both the American century and the American Protestant century. And to a certain extent, it was.
But we know that global Christianity is really, really flourishing everywhere. [This is] very much out of the evangelical thrust of American Protestantism.
And today, you have global centers of Pentecostal Christianity, which originally came out of the social street experience, in Brazil and Korea and Nigeria and South Africa and so on. So on the one hand, you have a transnationalization of what could be called forms of American Christianity that now are not American anymore but have become global.
So you could also say that American Christianity is very much linked to what we could call the self-evident truths of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness -- that they have become or are becoming self-evident truths.
The interesting question about American Christianity is the extent to which it is so linked to something which goes beyond Christianity. At the time where perhaps we may be concerned and even worried about the survival or the decline of the Protestant churches in America, we should be aware that whatever American Christianity was is becoming globalized today very, very rapidly.
So it’s a very interesting tradition today, in which human rights, the sacred human rights which emerged most clearly in the United States in the self-evident truths of the Declaration, have become globalized.
But they become globalized not necessarily through Christianization but through precisely the kind of dynamic relation that happens between different cultures and world religions.
They compete. You could say that today all the world religions compete with one another to claim, “We are the truly human religion, the one that does more for humanity.” There is a very interesting kind of competitive denominationalism, in which each religion claims to be unique and different and particular, and yet, at the same time, universal for all of humanity.
Q: What is the effect of increasing ethno-religious and cultural diversity in the American church?
Well, it goes both ways. American evangelicals go and missionize the rest of the world, but then Christian immigrants come here and bring a different form of Christianity.
It is most obvious in the case of Catholicism, because of the impact of North American Catholicism upon Latin American Catholicism, but then so many Latino immigrants would come here and renew the Catholic Church.
But the same goes for the Latino Protestants and Protestants from Asia, Korea and so on. So American Christianity went global, and then, in return, immigrants bring new forms of global Christianity to America.
And I would argue this is the greatest strength of the United States. We could say America is the first truly global society by becoming the first society made up of all the religions of the world.
This is, I think, a very interesting experiment. At the very moment when people talk of the clash of civilizations, in America the experiment is taking place where all the religions of the world are becoming part of American society.
Then all those immigrant religions have a crucial transforming effect in their home countries, the same way that American Catholicism transformed world Catholicism, American Judaism transformed world Judaism. And today, American Muslims have an impact on world Islam.
Q: You have said that you reject the idea that modernization inevitably leads to secularization. Why?
In Europe, it is taken for granted, because the experience is overwhelming, that as European society becomes more modern, they become less religious. And so the explanation was they are less religious because they are more modern.
But of course America was always more modern but continued being religious. And then we see how the rest of the world modernizes and they become, not less, but more religious.
At the time of [American] independence, at most 20 percent of the population belonged to churches. The Christianization of the American population happened later, through the Great Awakenings.
So in this respect, the democratization of America and democratization of Christianity went hand in hand. So in America, to become modern, to become religious, to become democrats are one and the same thing.
As long as it was the United States, it was called American exceptionalism -- America as the exception to the European rule. But now Korea became Christian as they became modern, and China is becoming now as it’s modernizing. Muslim countries are becoming more religious as they become more modern.
And so it looks more and more as if it is Europe that is the exception.
But then, if modernization is not the explanation, what is the explanation? So the question I’ve dedicated much of my life to in the last years is to try to offer a better explanation of why European societies have become more secular.
It’s not because they are more modern but because European societies went through a process of forced confessionalization, in which every state became a confessionalist state and cuius regio, eius religio, the religion of the king determined the religion of the subjects. And so they became homogenous Protestant in the North, homogenous Catholic in the South, and then three biconfessional societies in between: Holland, Germany and Switzerland. These boundaries remained until the 20th century. There was no change.
We know that in America, people change their denominations. According to the last Pew survey on religion, almost one-third of American adults claim to have changed their religion since childhood. This is unthinkable in Europe. Nobody changes their religion. The only movement is from the church to secularity.
In Europe, unchurching means deconfessionalization, because people had a confession forced upon them. Here, denominational identities are voluntary; they are not imposed by the state, but they are part of a project of mutual recognition of groups in society.
So the history of confessionalization and deconfessionalization in Europe is very different from the history of denominational affiliation in the United States.
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Christianity in Korea can be a catalyst for reconciliation
The Korean Peninsula is a divided land, long torn by hostility and enmity. But Christianity is a life-giving religion that can help write a new history even there, says a noted Korean-American church leader.
Faith & Leadership
MISSIONS & EVANGELISM, RECONCILIATION, GLOBAL
Syngman Rhee: Christianity in Korea can be a catalyst for reconciliation
The land that is now North Korea was once an important and successful mission field called “the Jerusalem of the East.” And though Christianity is virtually nonexistent there today, it nevertheless offers one of the best hopes for peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea, said the Rev. Syngman Rhee.
“There is a particular need for reconciliation between North and South Korea by the teaching and the love of Christ,” said Rhee, a noted Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and mainline church leader.
Some Christians in South Korea oppose anything to do with North Korea, believing that Christianity and communism cannot coexist, Rhee said. But others disagree.
“A growing number of Christians in South Korea insist that we -- Christians -- can no longer be enslaved by the belief that Christianity equals anti-communism,” Rhee said. “Christianity was not created to fight against something. It is life-giving and can be a catalyst to create a new history in any kind of society, capitalist or communist.”
Born in what is now North Korea, Rhee came to the United States after the Korean War for college and seminary and has long worked for peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea. He was president of the National Council of Churches from 1992 to 1993 and moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 2000-01.
From 1998 to 2011, he taught mission and evangelism and Asian theology and served as director of the Asian-American Ministry and Mission Center at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Va. He currently serves Union as special assistant to the president for global ministry and advancement.
Rhee spoke with Faith & Leadership while at Duke Divinity School for a consultation on Northeast Asia hosted by the Center for Reconciliation (link is external). The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Why should the church in America care about missions and reconciliation with North Korea?
One, North Korea, particularly the capital city of Pyongyang, used to be called “the Jerusalem of the East.” There was a strong Christian witness and concentration of mission activities in that city and throughout North Korea.
Presbyterian mission work centered around Pyongyang in the north of Korea, and Methodist mission work centered around Seoul in the south. So North Korea was a very important mission field. A lot of enthusiasm and conviction about Christianity was born there, in Pyongyang.
Two, the division between North and South Korea that happened at the end of World War II was a tragic event, one that had very little to do with the Korean people’s aspiration. Korea had been under Japanese control for a half-century, until the end of the war, and was divided at the 38th parallel by the United States and the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, that division for military purposes became a political reality, with a North Korean government backed by the Soviet Union and a South Korean government backed by the United States.
Once it was divided, both sides became further entrenched, which led to the Korean War. And for Christians in North Korea, including my family, life under the communist regime was not easy. My father was a pastor who was martyred in prison in the fall of 1950.
After that, my mother insisted that her two sons -- I, at 19, and my 17-year-old brother -- go to South Korea as refugees, because she feared the same thing would happen to us. We left home, our mother and four little sisters, on December 3, 1950, and walked for about 10 days to Seoul, and then from Seoul to the southern tip of South Korea, a place called Chinhae, where we joined the South Korean Marines.
When I think about it now, what a tragic reality that was, but that’s how we survived. The enmity and hostility for what happened to us as Christians was so deep that we felt a justification to fight each other, between North and South Korea.
After I was discharged in 1956, I came to the United States and went to college in West Virginia, then Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, Yale Divinity School for my master of theology degree and Chicago Theological Seminary for a doctoral program in sociology of religion.
I became a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister to follow in my father’s footsteps and to carry on the task that he was unable to complete.
Q: What’s the state of the church in North Korea today? Mostly nonexistent?
Basically, that is correct, but since about the middle of the 1980s, we have made every effort to re-establish Christian community in North Korea. In 1989, for the first time, two church buildings were built -- one Protestant, one Catholic. And they also published the Bible and the hymnbook.
I attended that first worship service in 1989. That was a wonderful, joyful day, to see a building with a cross on the top; just a moving picture it was.
But having said that, how much freedom do people have to share the gospel and attend the church services? Young people in particular are prohibited from coming in contact with Christian teachings.
So in a sense, yes, there has been some change to allow Christians to worship. Maybe 200-300 church people gather every Sunday to worship. And two years later, another small Protestant church was built, the Chilgol Church, so there are now at least two Protestant churches and one Catholic congregation in North Korea. But in terms of how much actual freedom people have, that is still questionable.
Q: What would it take to rebuild Christian institutions in North Korea? Do you think that will ever happen?
This gets to the basic question of North Korea’s understanding of what Christianity is about.
Unfortunately, tragically, ever since the Korean War, Christianity has been considered to be the religion of the enemy -- that is, the United States. From that point of view, Christianity was not welcomed, but because of international pressure, eventually they opened the door so that there are Christian churches.
But it is complicated. The continuing tension and enmity between North and South Korea has a great deal to do with what the future of the church will be in North Korea. The more openings there are between North and South Korea, the more opportunities there will be for the churches to grow and flourish.
But given the tensions between North and South Korea, it is difficult to be encouraged.
Q: Is there a role for the church in South Korea in creating those openings and opportunities?
Yes. Some Christians in South Korea still oppose anything to do with North Korea. They say communism and Christianity just cannot coexist.
On the other hand, a growing number of Christians in South Korea insist that we -- Christians -- can no longer be enslaved by the belief that Christianity equals anti-communism. Christianity was not created to fight against something. It is life-giving and can be a catalyst to create a new history in any kind of society, capitalist or communist.
There is a particular need for reconciliation between North and South Korea by the teaching and the love of Christ. That is a growing conviction now, and this consultation is one of those efforts to bring that about.
Q: You’ve been the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and president of the National Council of Churches. What’s your assessment of the future of the church generally, both in the U.S. and around the world, particularly the mainline?
When we talk about the church in general, American as well as Korean, in spite of some decline in the mainline churches in the United States, I still believe that there are basic roots of Christian teaching and belief that need to be strengthened.
We all experience decline, both in membership and in influence, as society has become more secularized and churches have failed to make Christianity relevant to the younger generation.
Before, churches almost took it for granted that society would help them, but they no longer can expect such things. Now, churches should take the central message of the gospel as their own and take responsibility for it.
As I see it, we are in a transition period, with a greater awakening of what it should mean to be a Christian. It’s good that we have to struggle with that kind of question.
In South Korea, of course, Christianity has grown since the missionaries, particularly Methodists and Presbyterians, went there about 125 years ago. It is really a success story, a miracle story, of the American mission. Until recently, Korean churches have grown because of the struggles with the Korean War, the difficulties people faced.
But now, when I visit South Korea, I hear about a decline of church influence, mainly for two reasons. One, people do not feel the need to satisfy their own existence and aspirations, which the church used to provide. There are other sources of comfort and joy.
Secondly, churches have become so inwardly oriented, as a result of the church growth movement and the development of megachurches in South Korea.
Q: The largest church in the world, the Yoido Full Gospel Church (link is external), is in Seoul.
That’s right.
It’s good and bad in a sense. Church is not supposed to be for its own survival or existence. But these churches have become so big they have to deal with internal structures and maintenance.
Korean society is becoming critical of the churches, particularly Protestant churches, for becoming larger and larger and having enormous financial resources. Rather than using those resources for the well-being of society, it has grown to be self-serving.
But it’s a time of awakening for the churches in South Korea. South Korean Christians are really thinking about and asking how to be an effective church in Korean society.
Q: What can the church in America learn from the church in Korea?
American churches have forgotten the grace of God, which is basically what it’s all about. Any organization, including religious organizations, when it becomes comfortable and powerful, becomes focused on sustaining and maintaining itself, and begins to think less about the basic essence of what the church was made of.
I think of myself. I came here in the middle of the 1950s, so I experienced all the history of the church’s decline. When I was a campus minister at the University of Louisville in the early ’60s, I took part in the civil rights movement, because that was a manifestation of our Christian message at that time historically, and I was glad to be part of it.
But we neglected to nurture the roots of our faith. It is imperative to nurture the roots of our faith if we are going to have the fruits of our faith.
Unfortunately, I think mainline denominations were so involved in bearing the fruits of our faith that they neglected nurturing the roots of our faith -- basic things like the importance of Scripture, devotion and worship, and so on.
Q: Anything else?
If I can sum up, I’m just deeply grateful for even the fact that I am alive today, because there were many occasions that I could have gone. So basically, to use a Korean expression, it’s second-chance life.
In a real sense, as a Korean Marine during the war, there was no particular reason that I survived, whereas my comrades perished. This is now the second-chance life given to me. That is the basic conviction that I live with.
And so rather than trying to become somebody famous or big, just wanting to be faithful to the given opportunities each day and each year. God has led me all the way. I have just a deep sense of gratitude.
Korea is still divided with hostility and enmity. How we can bring reconciliation and peace in the Korean Peninsula is such a complicated matter. It’s not just the North Korea-South Korea relationship; it’s also all the major powers involved -- China, Japan, Russia, the United States.
And the tragic thing is that the Korean people have become the victims of regional and global dynamics. But the Korean people are really one people, with no difference in language and customs. Yet we are caught in that, and that’s why the message of reconciliation is very important.
Read the interview with Syngman Rhee »
The wonder of it all
Rooted in the changing demographics of global Christianity, City Seminary is a school for a particular time and place. Its sole focus is leadership development for urban ministry in New York, primarily in the city's ethnic and immigrant communities where Christianity is thriving.
Faith & Leadership
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Open source software makes the basic program instructions available for anyone to see and edit. An 'open source church,' likewise, is one in which the basic functions of mission and ministry are open to anyone. Members feel free to pursue their callings from God that are consistent with what God has called the congregation to be and do.
But what does 'open source church' look like? In Open Source Church: Making Room for the Wisdom of All, Landon Whitsitt argues that Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can see and edit, might be the most instructive model available to help congregations develop leaders and structures that can meet the challenges presented by our changing world. Its success depends, he demonstrates, not on the views of select experts but on the collective wisdom of crowds. Then, turning to the work of James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds, he explores the idea that the body of Christ itself -- when it is intentionally diverse, encourages independence of thought, values decentralization, and effectively captures and aggregates the group's collective wisdom -- is an open source church.
Together, these phenomena show us what an 'open source church' looks like. It is the body of Christ at its best.
Learn more and order the book »
The wonder of it all
Rooted in the changing demographics of global Christianity, City Seminary is a school for a particular time and place. Its sole focus is leadership development for urban ministry in New York, primarily in the city's ethnic and immigrant communities where Christianity is thriving.
Faith & Leadership
EDUCATION, SEMINARY, INNOVATION, INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION
The wonder of it all
Mid-morning on a rainy fall Saturday, four people clustered near the subway entrance in Flushing, Queens, the last stop on the 7 line that stretches back to Times Square. Twenty yards away, hundreds of people hurried about their business, streaming through crosswalks and dodging traffic at Main and Roosevelt.
Their destinations: a jarring mix of stores and offices that line the two streets. Old Navy, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. A grocery with caramel-colored roast ducks, hanging by their necks. A podiatrist with “before” and “after” photos attesting to the treatment of foot fungus. Jewelers, lawyers, travel agents and optometrists, advertised by signs in Chinese, Korean and English.
Near the subway stop, three of the small group stood with bowed heads. The fourth, Peter Ong, 39, looked about, eyes wide open, taking everything in and praying softly.
“Lord, we ask that you bless all the people here, all the commuters on the 7 line, the shoppers, and all the people of Flushing,” Ong said.
High above, atop a building across the street, a billboard proclaimed, “The Wonder of It All.” It was an ad for a casino. But that didn’t matter. That morning, it was a blessing, a benediction, a statement of fact.
Because this was all the classroom of City Seminary of New York(link is external). Teams of City students, faculty and alums -- African, Indian, Chinese and Puerto Rican, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Baptist and more -- were on the move, walking, learning about and praying for Flushing and its people.
Among them was the Rev. Mark Gornik, a pastor and scholar who came to New York about 10 years ago to start a church in Harlem and wound up launching City Seminary as well. Opened in 2003, the school is a small, independent seminary that provides theological education to men and women in ministry in the rapidly changing religious landscape of New York. More accurately, Gornik insists, it is an intercultural learning community that brings together pastors and others in Christian ministry in New York to learn from one another.
Rooted in the changing demographics of global Christianity, City Seminary is a school for a particular time and place, Gornik said. Its sole focus is leadership development for urban ministry in New York, primarily in the city’s ethnic and immigrant communities where Christianity is thriving.
At a time when many denominations and seminaries are trying to determine how best to prepare ministers for a changing world, City Seminary is using innovative theological education to narrow the gap between the academy and church, theology and the world. It is exploring questions all seminaries face, questions of how to provide contextual education and how to prepare leaders for ministry in a globalized, multicultural world.
City Seminary is answering those questions in a way that is specific to New York and the needs of its urban pastors, said Christian Scharen, an assistant professor of worship and theology at Luther Seminary and a member of City Seminary’s board of directors. Still, other schools have much to gain from City Seminary’s re-imagining of theological education.
“There is a real richness in being in conversation with others about how they are answering similar questions in their context,” Scharen said. “What we’re doing here at Luther Seminary is trying to learn from how they are answering the questions, in order to spark creative ideas about how we can answer the questions here.”
The city is the seminary
The first clue to City Seminary’s identity is its name, especially the city part, says Emmanuel Katongole, a Ugandan-born theologian, authority on world Christianity and co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School. It’s not a generic descriptor like City Plumbing or City Hardware or City Auto Sales.
“The city is the seminary,” said Katongole, who has taught at the school. “All roads lead to New York. The whole world is there. A vision of world Christianity is already being lived out, right there in New York City.”
What Gornik and City Seminary have done, Katongole said, is value and embrace that vision and the people -- the pastors and others -- who are bringing it about in congregations all over New York.
“This is not the usual seminary, where you come, sit down and learn from above,” Katongole said. “Rather than top down, it is bottom up. Many of these pastors may not have formal theological education, but they have valuable experience. What the seminary does is to help them build upon that experience.”
To understand City Seminary, set aside all preconceptions of the academy, Gornik said.
“We’re a community,” he said. “That’s who we are and how we operate.”
The school does not offer degrees and is not accredited, though both items are on its list of long-term goals. Until recently, students could earn credit toward a master’s degree at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, but that program ends next spring as Westminster phases out the New York branch of its urban ministry program. About 150 students take part in various sessions or events each year, including a core group of about 50 in ongoing programs. Tuition is low -- $295 for its eight-month-long Ministry Fellows program -- and the school is funded primarily by donations and grants, including one from Lilly Endowment Inc.
The school has no traditional courses, no Intro Old Testament or History of Christianity 101. Several stand-alone seminars and workshops on urban ministry, world Christianity and other subjects are held each year and have featured an impressive lineup of speakers, including Katongole, Miroslav Volf, Christine Pohl and Luke Timothy Johnson. But the heart of the school’s educational offerings -- programs such as Ministry Fellows, a leadership training program in urban ministry -- weave together the study of Scripture, the changing church, missions and theology.
Even then, the focus is on community, with the school working on a cohort model, Gornik said “You can’t just come in, take a class and be gone,” he said. “You enter with a particular cohort of students. You learn together. You’re building relationships and everyone’s knowledge increases because it is shared.”
It’s a participatory approach to education, rather than a “banking” approach in which knowledge is received, deposited and later withdrawn. It is also an approach that is highly academic, Gornik said.
“Our question is ‘How do we do ministry in New York City?’” Gornik said. “If you really focus on that question, it’s going to produce a profoundly theological and scholarly enterprise.”
To find the answers, the students read theology, learn about New York and its history, and study global Christianity. Together, they read and study Scripture extensively, looking at Acts, for example, as a model of how the gospel advances across different cultures. This year, Gornik said, they’ve been reading John deeply, drawing on Jean Vanier’s commentary “Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John.”
The typical student doesn’t have formal theological education but is already active in ministry. Highly skilled and motivated, they come to the school to dig more deeply in the Christian tradition, explore questions about ministry with others and gain a greater theological grounding.
Because most work full-time, the sessions are held in the evenings or on weekends, at the seminary’s office in Harlem or in churches around the city. Leavened throughout it all are experiences that get the students out in the city.
Because the students are from many different cultures and traditions, they have to be willing to listen, to hear how others understand the Christian faith, Gornik said. That way, everyone contributes.
“That’s how the body of Christ is supposed to work, actually,” Gornik said. “That’s the image in Ephesians, we reach the full stature of Christ together.”
The Rev. Adebisi Oyesile, pastor of Chapel of Hope Redeemed Christian Church of God in Brooklyn, a Pentecostal denomination founded in Nigeria, said City Seminary helped him understand and appreciate other faith traditions. Before, he was reluctant to speak with nonbelievers and sometimes those from other traditions.
“But this school points you to Christ,” he said. “You may be Catholic, Pentecostal, Protestant. What affects you affects everybody. It’s all pointing to Christ, and you can see that it all works together.”
Pray and break bread
The Saturday event in Flushing was a “Pray and Break Bread” event, essentially a series of small pilgrimages held over the past three years in every borough. The events bring together students and others to pray for the peace in the city and learn more about New York. After reading and meditating on Scripture together, participants walk around the selected neighborhood in small groups, pray as they feel called and afterward reflect together over a community meal.
“I can’t explain who we are any better than the Pray and Break Bread events,” Gornik said. “It’s people grounded in community who are coming together for an intercultural learning experience. We’re on the streets, learning from one another, having a great time together and sharing food. That is the seminary in a nutshell. It’s as good a picture of the seminary as you can get.”
The October event began at the Flushing branch of the Queens Library, where Ong gave colleagues an overview of his neighborhood. He’d chosen to meet at the library because it represents much of what Flushing is about, Ong said. Serving a constantly changing immigrant community, it’s the busiest branch of the busiest public library system in the nation, with books and movies in about 50 languages. Chiseled into the front stairs are book titles in Russian, Arabic, Chinese and English.
The borough of Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the United States, Ong explained, with a mix of white, Hispanic, Asian and African-American residents. In Flushing, most residents are foreign-born, and almost 80 percent speak a language other than English at home.
With the ethnic diversity comes religious diversity. On one nearby street, Ong said, a Hindu temple, synagogue, mosque, Protestant church and Catholic church all stand within blocks of each other.
But beneath this bustling and vibrant cityscape, all is not well, Ong said.
“There are some tensions in the community, some antagonisms over race and ethnicity,” he told the group. “There are immigration issues. Issues of access to health care. It’s not uncommon for people to have to work seven days a week to make ends meet. So, pray for the people of Flushing.”
Before they fan out in teams of three and four, the group reads Scripture together, including Psalm 146, with its reminder that the “The LORD watches over the alien…”
For the next 45 minutes, Ong’s team moved through the neighborhood, praying at the subway stop, a struggling Protestant church, a retirement home and Flushing High School. Then they rejoined the others at Jade Asian Restaurant, discussing over lunch what they’d seen and learned.
Based on people’s cars and clothes, they’d noticed what seemed to be a surprising range of incomes in the area. Amid the overwhelming Asian presence, one person noticed a group of Hispanic day laborers, waiting for work.
The school’s dean, Maria Liu Wong, pushed the students to continue reflecting on the day’s events after they returned home. A former City student recruited by Gornik to the dean’s post, Wong has played a leading role in designing the Pray and Break Bread events and other programs.
“What is God telling you in walking with others and praying in community?” she asked.
As the gathering ended, Ong offered parting words.
“My hope is as you walk away, remember the people of Flushing,” he said. “Get out of the provincialism we all fall into. Continue to pray for us.”
An incarnational experience
Even in New York, it’s easy for people to stay in their own neighborhoods. It’s hard to realize you’re part of sweeping demographic and religious change when you’re in the middle of it.
Ong, who works developing lay leaders for Asian-American churches, said he wanted to go to City Seminary to study theology, to think and reflect. Once, Gornik assigned Ong’s cohort of students to attend a worship service at a church from a different faith tradition and ethnicity. A Presbyterian, Ong went to a service for the deaf at a Pentecostal Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“I’ve met Kenyan pastors and Puerto Rican pastors, East Africans living in Hunter Point, people in the Bronx and in Harlem,” he said. “The seminary challenged and stretched us.”
As the students learn from and support one another in community, they also help each other in the practice of ministry. It’s an incarnational approach to theological education
“We’re physically engaged in the city,” Gornik said. “Our bodies are in the city. We’re listening, seeing, talking, and praying. We’re making connections between our faith and every area of life. It’s a very comprehensive understanding of Christian faith. It’s a faith that walks, a faith that talks, a faith that listens and a faith that sees.”
That intimate, embodied approach to theological education is perhaps one of the greatest lessons that City Seminary has to offer traditional seminaries, Katongole said.
Despite their strengths, many traditional seminaries can become isolated outposts. In his own work, Katongole said, he often wonders how traditional seminaries and other institutions can stand apart and expect to have any impact in transforming communities -- especially those that are overlooked or neglected, whether in Africa, urban immigrant communities or rural America.
“What Mark is saying is that the city has a dynamic of its own and you can’t engage it from a distance,” he said. “Mark is calling for an incarnational vision of the gospel that requires an incarnational seminary experience.”
Gornik is reluctant to offer much advice for others. But he notes that all seminaries are grappling with changes in religious life and in the world. Clearly, the world is becoming more urban, and if they haven’t already, seminaries need to turn their face to the city, he said.
“But I don’t think we can say to anybody, ‘You should do this,’” he said. “Every institution has to find its own charism and calling. This is who we are. There are always lessons learned from every institution, but you have to be who God called you to be. And we’re trying to be true to our vocation.
“We’re just a storefront seminary trying to muddle our way through the challenge of trying to learn together.”Read more about City Seminary »
The wonder of it all
City Seminary students gather at Flushing library to read Scripture together before prayer walk. Courtesy of City Seminary
Global Christianity is in New York. Mark Gornik and City Seminary are preparing its leaders, using an innovative model of theological education.Mid-morning on a rainy fall Saturday, four people clustered near the subway entrance in Flushing, Queens, the last stop on the 7 line that stretches back to Times Square. Twenty yards away, hundreds of people hurried about their business, streaming through crosswalks and dodging traffic at Main and Roosevelt.
Their destinations: a jarring mix of stores and offices that line the two streets. Old Navy, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. A grocery with caramel-colored roast ducks, hanging by their necks. A podiatrist with “before” and “after” photos attesting to the treatment of foot fungus. Jewelers, lawyers, travel agents and optometrists, advertised by signs in Chinese, Korean and English.
Near the subway stop, three of the small group stood with bowed heads. The fourth, Peter Ong, 39, looked about, eyes wide open, taking everything in and praying softly.
“Lord, we ask that you bless all the people here, all the commuters on the 7 line, the shoppers, and all the people of Flushing,” Ong said.
High above, atop a building across the street, a billboard proclaimed, “The Wonder of It All.” It was an ad for a casino. But that didn’t matter. That morning, it was a blessing, a benediction, a statement of fact.
Because this was all the classroom of City Seminary of New York(link is external). Teams of City students, faculty and alums -- African, Indian, Chinese and Puerto Rican, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Baptist and more -- were on the move, walking, learning about and praying for Flushing and its people.
Among them was the Rev. Mark Gornik, a pastor and scholar who came to New York about 10 years ago to start a church in Harlem and wound up launching City Seminary as well. Opened in 2003, the school is a small, independent seminary that provides theological education to men and women in ministry in the rapidly changing religious landscape of New York. More accurately, Gornik insists, it is an intercultural learning community that brings together pastors and others in Christian ministry in New York to learn from one another.
Rooted in the changing demographics of global Christianity, City Seminary is a school for a particular time and place, Gornik said. Its sole focus is leadership development for urban ministry in New York, primarily in the city’s ethnic and immigrant communities where Christianity is thriving.
At a time when many denominations and seminaries are trying to determine how best to prepare ministers for a changing world, City Seminary is using innovative theological education to narrow the gap between the academy and church, theology and the world. It is exploring questions all seminaries face, questions of how to provide contextual education and how to prepare leaders for ministry in a globalized, multicultural world.
City Seminary is answering those questions in a way that is specific to New York and the needs of its urban pastors, said Christian Scharen, an assistant professor of worship and theology at Luther Seminary and a member of City Seminary’s board of directors. Still, other schools have much to gain from City Seminary’s re-imagining of theological education.
“There is a real richness in being in conversation with others about how they are answering similar questions in their context,” Scharen said. “What we’re doing here at Luther Seminary is trying to learn from how they are answering the questions, in order to spark creative ideas about how we can answer the questions here.”
The city is the seminary
The first clue to City Seminary’s identity is its name, especially the city part, says Emmanuel Katongole, a Ugandan-born theologian, authority on world Christianity and co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School. It’s not a generic descriptor like City Plumbing or City Hardware or City Auto Sales.
“The city is the seminary,” said Katongole, who has taught at the school. “All roads lead to New York. The whole world is there. A vision of world Christianity is already being lived out, right there in New York City.”
What Gornik and City Seminary have done, Katongole said, is value and embrace that vision and the people -- the pastors and others -- who are bringing it about in congregations all over New York.
“This is not the usual seminary, where you come, sit down and learn from above,” Katongole said. “Rather than top down, it is bottom up. Many of these pastors may not have formal theological education, but they have valuable experience. What the seminary does is to help them build upon that experience.”
To understand City Seminary, set aside all preconceptions of the academy, Gornik said.
“We’re a community,” he said. “That’s who we are and how we operate.”
The school does not offer degrees and is not accredited, though both items are on its list of long-term goals. Until recently, students could earn credit toward a master’s degree at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, but that program ends next spring as Westminster phases out the New York branch of its urban ministry program. About 150 students take part in various sessions or events each year, including a core group of about 50 in ongoing programs. Tuition is low -- $295 for its eight-month-long Ministry Fellows program -- and the school is funded primarily by donations and grants, including one from Lilly Endowment Inc.
The school has no traditional courses, no Intro Old Testament or History of Christianity 101. Several stand-alone seminars and workshops on urban ministry, world Christianity and other subjects are held each year and have featured an impressive lineup of speakers, including Katongole, Miroslav Volf, Christine Pohl and Luke Timothy Johnson. But the heart of the school’s educational offerings -- programs such as Ministry Fellows, a leadership training program in urban ministry -- weave together the study of Scripture, the changing church, missions and theology.
Even then, the focus is on community, with the school working on a cohort model, Gornik said “You can’t just come in, take a class and be gone,” he said. “You enter with a particular cohort of students. You learn together. You’re building relationships and everyone’s knowledge increases because it is shared.”
It’s a participatory approach to education, rather than a “banking” approach in which knowledge is received, deposited and later withdrawn. It is also an approach that is highly academic, Gornik said.
“Our question is ‘How do we do ministry in New York City?’” Gornik said. “If you really focus on that question, it’s going to produce a profoundly theological and scholarly enterprise.”
To find the answers, the students read theology, learn about New York and its history, and study global Christianity. Together, they read and study Scripture extensively, looking at Acts, for example, as a model of how the gospel advances across different cultures. This year, Gornik said, they’ve been reading John deeply, drawing on Jean Vanier’s commentary “Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John.”
Questions to consider:
- How can your community engage more deeply the particularities of life at street level in your city?
- If the Bible “starts in a garden and ends in a city,” what can we learn about God’s intentions by studying cities as multi-layered as New York?
- Many seminaries were founded when this country was largely rural. As we become increasingly urban, how will those institutions adjust?
- With mass immigration, Christians from Africa, Asia or Latin America are often our neighbors now. How can we become a more multi-ethnic, multi-national church by being better neighbors to them?
- In what ways, if any, do you or your church or other institution unknowingly fall into the provincialism that Peter Ong speaks of? What changes might be going on around you that you’re not even aware of and how do you open your eyes to those changes?
Because most work full-time, the sessions are held in the evenings or on weekends, at the seminary’s office in Harlem or in churches around the city. Leavened throughout it all are experiences that get the students out in the city.
Because the students are from many different cultures and traditions, they have to be willing to listen, to hear how others understand the Christian faith, Gornik said. That way, everyone contributes.
“That’s how the body of Christ is supposed to work, actually,” Gornik said. “That’s the image in Ephesians, we reach the full stature of Christ together.”
The Rev. Adebisi Oyesile, pastor of Chapel of Hope Redeemed Christian Church of God in Brooklyn, a Pentecostal denomination founded in Nigeria, said City Seminary helped him understand and appreciate other faith traditions. Before, he was reluctant to speak with nonbelievers and sometimes those from other traditions.
“But this school points you to Christ,” he said. “You may be Catholic, Pentecostal, Protestant. What affects you affects everybody. It’s all pointing to Christ, and you can see that it all works together.”
Pray and break bread
The Saturday event in Flushing was a “Pray and Break Bread” event, essentially a series of small pilgrimages held over the past three years in every borough. The events bring together students and others to pray for the peace in the city and learn more about New York. After reading and meditating on Scripture together, participants walk around the selected neighborhood in small groups, pray as they feel called and afterward reflect together over a community meal.
“I can’t explain who we are any better than the Pray and Break Bread events,” Gornik said. “It’s people grounded in community who are coming together for an intercultural learning experience. We’re on the streets, learning from one another, having a great time together and sharing food. That is the seminary in a nutshell. It’s as good a picture of the seminary as you can get.”
The October event began at the Flushing branch of the Queens Library, where Ong gave colleagues an overview of his neighborhood. He’d chosen to meet at the library because it represents much of what Flushing is about, Ong said. Serving a constantly changing immigrant community, it’s the busiest branch of the busiest public library system in the nation, with books and movies in about 50 languages. Chiseled into the front stairs are book titles in Russian, Arabic, Chinese and English.
The borough of Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the United States, Ong explained, with a mix of white, Hispanic, Asian and African-American residents. In Flushing, most residents are foreign-born, and almost 80 percent speak a language other than English at home.
With the ethnic diversity comes religious diversity. On one nearby street, Ong said, a Hindu temple, synagogue, mosque, Protestant church and Catholic church all stand within blocks of each other.
But beneath this bustling and vibrant cityscape, all is not well, Ong said.
“There are some tensions in the community, some antagonisms over race and ethnicity,” he told the group. “There are immigration issues. Issues of access to health care. It’s not uncommon for people to have to work seven days a week to make ends meet. So, pray for the people of Flushing.”
Before they fan out in teams of three and four, the group reads Scripture together, including Psalm 146, with its reminder that the “The LORD watches over the alien…”
For the next 45 minutes, Ong’s team moved through the neighborhood, praying at the subway stop, a struggling Protestant church, a retirement home and Flushing High School. Then they rejoined the others at Jade Asian Restaurant, discussing over lunch what they’d seen and learned.
Based on people’s cars and clothes, they’d noticed what seemed to be a surprising range of incomes in the area. Amid the overwhelming Asian presence, one person noticed a group of Hispanic day laborers, waiting for work.
The school’s dean, Maria Liu Wong, pushed the students to continue reflecting on the day’s events after they returned home. A former City student recruited by Gornik to the dean’s post, Wong has played a leading role in designing the Pray and Break Bread events and other programs.
“What is God telling you in walking with others and praying in community?” she asked.
As the gathering ended, Ong offered parting words.
“My hope is as you walk away, remember the people of Flushing,” he said. “Get out of the provincialism we all fall into. Continue to pray for us.”
An incarnational experience
Even in New York, it’s easy for people to stay in their own neighborhoods. It’s hard to realize you’re part of sweeping demographic and religious change when you’re in the middle of it.
Ong, who works developing lay leaders for Asian-American churches, said he wanted to go to City Seminary to study theology, to think and reflect. Once, Gornik assigned Ong’s cohort of students to attend a worship service at a church from a different faith tradition and ethnicity. A Presbyterian, Ong went to a service for the deaf at a Pentecostal Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“I’ve met Kenyan pastors and Puerto Rican pastors, East Africans living in Hunter Point, people in the Bronx and in Harlem,” he said. “The seminary challenged and stretched us.”
As the students learn from and support one another in community, they also help each other in the practice of ministry. It’s an incarnational approach to theological education
“We’re physically engaged in the city,” Gornik said. “Our bodies are in the city. We’re listening, seeing, talking, and praying. We’re making connections between our faith and every area of life. It’s a very comprehensive understanding of Christian faith. It’s a faith that walks, a faith that talks, a faith that listens and a faith that sees.”
That intimate, embodied approach to theological education is perhaps one of the greatest lessons that City Seminary has to offer traditional seminaries, Katongole said.
Despite their strengths, many traditional seminaries can become isolated outposts. In his own work, Katongole said, he often wonders how traditional seminaries and other institutions can stand apart and expect to have any impact in transforming communities -- especially those that are overlooked or neglected, whether in Africa, urban immigrant communities or rural America.
“What Mark is saying is that the city has a dynamic of its own and you can’t engage it from a distance,” he said. “Mark is calling for an incarnational vision of the gospel that requires an incarnational seminary experience.”
Gornik is reluctant to offer much advice for others. But he notes that all seminaries are grappling with changes in religious life and in the world. Clearly, the world is becoming more urban, and if they haven’t already, seminaries need to turn their face to the city, he said.
“But I don’t think we can say to anybody, ‘You should do this,’” he said. “Every institution has to find its own charism and calling. This is who we are. There are always lessons learned from every institution, but you have to be who God called you to be. And we’re trying to be true to our vocation.
“We’re just a storefront seminary trying to muddle our way through the challenge of trying to learn together.”Read more about City Seminary »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
But what does 'open source church' look like? In Open Source Church: Making Room for the Wisdom of All, Landon Whitsitt argues that Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can see and edit, might be the most instructive model available to help congregations develop leaders and structures that can meet the challenges presented by our changing world. Its success depends, he demonstrates, not on the views of select experts but on the collective wisdom of crowds. Then, turning to the work of James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds, he explores the idea that the body of Christ itself -- when it is intentionally diverse, encourages independence of thought, values decentralization, and effectively captures and aggregates the group's collective wisdom -- is an open source church.
Together, these phenomena show us what an 'open source church' looks like. It is the body of Christ at its best.
Learn more and order the book »
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
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