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    Living the Faith Community: The Church That Makes a Difference (Seabury Classics)
    Living the Faith Community: The Church That Makes a Difference (Seabury Classics)
    Living the Faith Community: The Church That Makes a Difference (Seabury Classics)
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Living the Faith Community: The Church That Makes a Difference (Seabury Classics)

    By John H. Westerhoff

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    About this ebook

    Living the Faith Community is an eloquent summary of all that the church is called to be, an exploration of the reasons why Christians long to be in community, and the quality of the communities they need. In this systhesis of family, story, ritual, and church, Westerhoff shows how it is possible to find identity in a "faith family" that has been formed by the story of God, both Scripture and creed.

    The book begins with Christians' basic need for those communities without which they cannot receive, sustain, or deepen their faith. The four essentials of religious community are a common story and memory, a common authority, common rituals, and a fulfilling common life. Successsive chapters describe with clarity and insight the narrative characters of church life, the role of worship, the importance of liturgy to Christian nurture, and the role of catechesis in forming Spirit-filled community.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeabury Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2004
    ISBN9781596280199
    Living the Faith Community: The Church That Makes a Difference (Seabury Classics)
    Author

    John H. Westerhoff

    John H. Westerhoff taught at numerous Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theological schools around the world, retiring in 1994 as the Professor of Theology and Christian Nurture at Duke Divinity School. He is the author of more than 25 books, including Will Our Children Have Faith?, Living Faithfully as a Prayer Book People, and A Pilgrim People. He died in 2022.

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      Book preview

      Living the Faith Community - John H. Westerhoff

      Preface

      LIFE IN A COMMUNITY OF FAITH

      In the late 1960s I began to be concerned about the church’s educational ministry. In time I became convinced that the schooling-instructional paradigm that dominated Christian education theory and practice was no longer viable. For many years Christian educators had focused their efforts on instruction, the transmission of knowledge (mostly with children) in the context of a Sunday church school. Interestingly, having questioned this understanding of Christian education I was labeled the enemy of the Sunday school. As such some applauded and others condemned my efforts to find an alternative.

      Over time I explored what I called a community of faith-enculturation paradigm. This led me to develop a methodological theory for the church’s educational ministry that included instruction/training (acquisition of knowledge and skills foundational to the Christian life of faith) and education (critical reflection of every aspect of our personal and corporate life in light of the Christian life of faith), but focused on enculturalization or formation (participation in and practice of the Christian life of faith). And having begun to explore that aspect of my new paradigm, I became convinced that the context was as much or more important. I identified this context as a community of faith which included congregations, households, and when present, parochial schools.

      As a result of this conviction I wrote Living the Faith Community, originally entitled by me Life in a Community of Faith. Now some twenty-five years later I still hold to the insights explored in this book. Even more I remain convinced that our understanding of church is foundational in our efforts to make Christians or, more accurately, to provide a faithful influence in the intentional, lifelong process of Christening.

      In their book Contemporary Approaches to Christian Education, Jack Seymour and Donald Miller examine Christian education theory and practice in the last quarter of the twentieth century and identify five approaches: religious instruction, spiritual development, liberation/social justice, biblical interpretation, and community of faith. Attributing this latter school of thought to me and my teacher C. Ellis Nelson and our work in cultural anthropology, they wrote:

      Westerhoff stands in the grand tradition of Christian educators who look to the faith community as the context, content, and method for Christian education theory and practice. Westerhoff in fact does not call the discipline Christian education, substituting the word catechesis to signal clearly that the discipline is concerned with the way persons are initiated and grow into the Christian faith.¹

      And then they go on to comment that my approach is more a pastoral activity including the liturgical, ethical, spiritual, pastoral, and missional dimensions of parish life than a strictly educational activity. While this approach to Christian education is almost taken for granted now, it was quite controversial at the time and was only advocated by me and a very small group of scholars.

      This may also help to explain why the church today is experiencing strong disagreements in one or more of the characteristics I explore in this book as essential for a community of faith, namely: a common story, a common authority, a common ritual, a common life that is more familial than institutional, and a common goal other than survival.

      From the perspective of this book the church is a community of the baptized called to manifest their common faith within a community in which God’s reconciling power is made known, living, conscious, and active, so that it might be the body of Christ, God’s reconciling presence in the world.

      These two images of the church are dominant in the Scriptures. Both, I suggest, are based on the conviction that Christianity is a way of life lived in community that results from a particular faith or perception of God, life, and our lives. As such the church is not essentially a human, functional, religious institution. It is a divine and human community whose being is foundational. The church, therefore, is not called to have a catechetical ministry. It is called to be a catechetical ministry—which is the important subject of this book. I hope it will be as useful in our reflections on the context in which we engage in our strivings to make Christians today as it was in 1985 when it first appeared.

      Notes

      1. Jack L. Seymour and Donald E. Miller, Contemporary Approaches to Christian Education (Abingdon, 1982), 20.

      JUNE 2004

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      THE CHURCH AS FAMILY

      The family and family life have changed and are changing. Most of us have experienced some of the resulting disease, but few of us know the cure. Those of us who are Christians know instinctively that the church holds the clues to the cure; but in our experience the church, at best, has addressed only symptoms while the disease remains.

      With the birth of a child, parents raised in the church typically think first of baptism. For some, the reason may be fear: Baptism is a magical act to convince God to do something for our child, something that God would not do unless we performed the correct ritual. For others, the reason may be custom: Baptism is an act expected of decent parents. For still others, the reason may be the desire to share with their children life in the body of Christ. Still, in spite of our various reasons, all seem to sense unconsciously that they can’t go it alone. If their children are to have Christian faith and live the Christian life, they will need to be nurtured in that faith and life. And that cannot be done adequately outside a community of faith.

      While the family will always be a primary context for nurture, the modern family’s authority is limited; a complex configuration of societal forces impinge upon its influence. In the nineteenth century, when Horace Bushnell wrote Christian Nurture, it was important to stress nurture within the family. But we cannot frame a contemporary theory of Christian nurture based upon an image of the family or of the church from another era in history. Because we face unique problems in our day, new understandings must emerge.

      Throughout church history, both singleness and marriage have been considered Christian vocations. While in some periods one or the other was thought more holy, the church has maintained that both are proper contexts in which to do the will of God and witness to the gospel. Unfortunately, in our own day many people have assumed that only marriage can lead to meaningful life.

      As a result, some who should remain single get married and destroy the relationship. Others feel inadequate and unfulfilled because they never have the opportunity to be married. Some feel guilty because they do not wish to be married. Still others have connected singleness to priesthood or the religious life and therefore have denied ordination to people who also choose marriage.

      But life, whether single or married, requires community. Therefore, it is the church—a faith community—not the cultural family, which is essential to Christian faith and life. The foundation of Christian life is life in the church.

      Jesus consistently denied primary obligations to his cultural family and committed himself unreservedly to his faith family. The clearest statement we have about Jesus’ attitude toward family relations is a passage from Mark’s account of the gospel (3:7–35). Surrounded by his followers, hounded by critics, and now pursued by his frightened mother and distraught family members, Jesus answered the question, Who are my mother and brothers? by saying, They are those who do the will of God!

      Jesus announced that from that point onward kinship would no longer be defined biologically. Jesus claimed as members of his family those who shared his vision and acted accordingly. The members of his own cultural family were not excluded from this new fellowship, but neither were they automatically included.

      In Matthew’s account of the gospel, Jesus is even more radical. Here he speaks of dividing cultural families in the name of a faith family (10:34–37). Nevertheless, Jesus never condemns the family as an institution or suggests that living in a cultural family is not part of God’s intention for humankind. He simply puts the faith family first and suggests that those who relinquish traditional family ties will gain a new and ultimately more important family to nurture and sustain them in faith.

      The first great crisis in the life of the Christian church was related to biological kinship. Paul made it his life’s work to convince Jewish Christians that the inheritance of God’s promise to Abraham came not through bloodlines but through radical faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The future of the church depended on altering—that is, broadening and expanding—the notion of kinship and covenant relationships. While showing deep concern for the cultural family by acts such as baptizing whole households, the church understood itself as an expression of the family of God and asked for a familial commitment from its members.

      Those who embraced the gospel were members of cultural families, but Jesus called them out of their families and into a new family—a family not identified by genealogy or even clan association but by the covenanting of God with them. This new family was regarded as the household of God and, according to its self-understanding, was the family through whom all

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