RESOURCING THE CHURCH FOR ECUMENICAL MINISTRy A ...

leaders proclaim themselves experts on
matters economic, and prove it by taking the
most out of the economy! Then they
promote charity as if it were the work of the
church, finally telling us troubled clergy to
shut up and bless the economy as once we
blessed the battleships.
The challenge for us is to affirm the good, wellintentioned
charitable giving of those in our
congregations and challenge our folks to engage in
issues of justice by asking, in different ways, why so
many need charity in the first place! Then our
witness will be more complete.
I wonder if discussions about unity
and witness would be better received
and enacted if they were reframed
using a rubric of generosity.
Like many of you, I am constantly considering how
best to craft and frame messages. My interest in
message framing is a product of my love for
preaching and writing, and it stems from my
experience in political communications, where
many times the debate is won or lost by how the
issues under debate are initially framed. I wonder if
discussions about unity and witness would be better
received and enacted if they were reframed using a
rubric of generosity. Put simply, our response to a
generous God is to have open, welcoming, caring
attitudes and actions. This rubric may also speak to
the overarching concern of money and funding.
When money is tight, do we retreat from outward
commitments and focus on institutional survival?
If so, might that hasten our decline?
Allow me a brief story. My grandmother, hands
down, made the best homemade preserves ever!
That’s the end of that discussion (but not the end of
my story). Among Nana’s scrumptious offerings,
my personal favorite was her cherry preserves. There
was only one thing wrong with a jar of Nana’s cherry
preserves: It had a bottom. At some point, the
preserves would run out. You could pound on the
bottom of the jar until your hand ached or scrape it
until the glass broke. You could strain your jaw and
stick your tongue as far into the jar as humanly
possible or consider rigging some vacuum to suck
out just a little more. You could hoard the preserves
and hide it from others. No matter what your
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methods, the cherry preserves in that jar would
eventually end.
Of course, my cousins who lived in the same town
as my grandmother didn’t have such a problem.
They could go to Nana’s house any or every day and
eat preserves until their contented tummies wanted
no more. They could wander in the house, toast
some bread, casually sit at the kitchen table, talk to
Nana, and comfortably eat preserves without
looking over their shoulder for a father or younger
brother who at any moment could swoop in and
snatch that last bit of preserves right off your plate
and then bask in glory.
Did the clink of the spoon at the bottom of a jar
trigger anxiety and near tears in my cousins? I doubt
it. Their supply was bigger. But even though my
cousins were much better positioned than I, never
once do I remember my grandmother withholding
or restricting her preserves from me. To say it the
other way, her abundant gifts were always more than
plenty. Kind of reminds you of God’s abundant
love, doesn’t it? Always plenty—and so rather than
hoard it for myself, I can freely and openly share it
with others.
When I served as executive director of the West
Virginia Council of Churches, we provided liturgical
resources to ministers. Usually the resources
consisted of calls to worship, benedictions,
communion meditations, corporate statements of
confession, and occasionally pastoral prayers.
Sometimes the unity or social justice themes were
explicit; sometimes they were not. Sometimes I
wrote them in ways that made reference to issues
facing our state or nation. We started providing
these largely because when I began as director of the
WVCC, I was all of one month out of seminary. So,
while I felt reasonably confident of my ecumenical
theology—thanks to Lexington Seminary and the
Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland—I was
less than confident of what I should “do” as director
of a council of churches. Fortunately, the liturgical
resources hit the spot! Pastors needed this stuff
every week, so if what I wrote was decent, they’d use
it. So it served my purpose of getting messages to
congregants, and it served the pastors’ purposes of
accomplishing one of many tasks they faced each
week. Wonder if something like this would work on
a larger scale?
Briefly, for now, let me consider what activities
count as “prophetic witnessing.” What comes to
Wilson • Christian Unity and Prophetic Witness