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The
Bishop's Journal
December 2002
Preparing the Way or Consolidating a Position?
As much as we might like to avoid him, there is no way that we can make our way along Advent's "royal highway" without encountering John the Baptist and his call to "Prepare the way of the Lord." This stern-faced, hard-nosed, locust-eating prophet can't be sidestepped. His word from the wilderness can't easily be dismissed.
John the Baptist knew that his job was to point others toward Christ. Likewise, the church exists only to point toward "one who is greater than we." We have sometimes forgotten that. Too often we have looked upon ourselves, our agendas and our institutions as being the primary focus of God's intentions.
Some years ago, a Harvard business professor named Theodore Levitt wrote a classic article that focussed on the demise of the railroad industry in North America. The decline of the industry, Levitt says, didn't come about because people and freight no longer needed transportation. The railroad declined, rather, because the railway managers came to believe that they were in the railroad business and not the transportation business. They lost their focus. They confused the means with the ends.
The same thing can happen within the life of the church. We, too, can confuse the means with the end. We, too, can lose our focus and start acting as if we were in the "church business" instead of the "blessing business."
Don't get me wrong! I love the church with all my heart and know the vitally important role that the institutional church plays in proclaiming the good news of the Gospel throughout the world. As such, we need to do everything we can to support the church and to see that it's mission is advanced. At the same time, we always need to remember that the church is only a means to an end. It is not an end in itself.
This, of course, has profound implications for how we understand the nature of our mission today. I suspect that there are many people in our communities who are open to hearing a prophetic voice in the midst of our contemporary wilderness-in fact, many of them will be coming to our services of worship over the next few weeks in hope of hearing such a voice. They won't, however, be easily drawn to consider fuller participation in the life of a church which appears to be more interested in the church business than in the spirit business.
The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietsche is reported to have stated that he would have found it easier to believe in a resurrected Christ if he experienced more resurrected Christians. If we want folks to embrace the new life of Christ they must see that new life present in us. They need to experience a church that is pointing toward something that is bigger than itself . They need to see a church that is preparing a way and not merely consolidating a position. May God grant us the grace needed to provide such a witness.
The Rev. Michael J. Pryse,
Bishop
