I Have a Dream

 

I am no Martin Luther King. Still, I have chosen his inspirational words for my last Dean’s column in our beloved Seed & Harvest. King did as much as any American to defend the importance of dreams as aspirations, especially in his spell-binding speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But he did not invent the idea. Dreams of aspiration are everywhere in the Bible, to say nothing of literature, poetry, drama, and everyday life.

 

Let me tell you about my dream. My dream is a wonderfully renewed Church that makes a lasting impact on the world. It is a Church made up of people who regularly pray alone but also regularly come together to celebrate the risen Lord in word and sacrament, because they genuinely love God and genuinely love each other.

 

A global church

 

The Church I dream of is not best known for huge congregations. But it knows that it is linked with believing people who circle the globe, people of every color and tongue, and every denomination.

 

It is Anglican, but not only Anglican. Anglicans are valued and respected as a genuine part of the whole. But gone are the days when Anglicanism was synonymous with elitism, snobbishness, and theological and moral compromise.

 

The Church of my dream is global. It thrives in China where millions live out their faith in secrecy, in Indonesia where believers face angry Muslim mobs who want to burn down their churches, in India where only the lowest caste folk tend to be members, in Angola where believers worship in makeshift chapels built on the city’s garbage dump, in England where trumpets echo across great cathedrals, in Chile where people humbly hear God’s Word and are delivered from years of superstition, and in America where people in the media, politics and business meet for Bible study and prayer in modern downtown offices. It is a Church where the material resources of the West are not hogged for ourselves but shared sacrificially with other struggling Christians, while the spiritual resources of the South and East are honored, rather than denigrated as simplistic and naïve.

 

Truly saying, “I’m sorry”

 

I dream of a repentant Church. The terrible excesses of the Church’s dalliance with the sexual revolution are things of the past. Churches that permitted easy divorce and the elevation of active gay men and women to high office, and dismissed fornication as inconsequential, have come to think better. I am thinking here of churches that rejoice when bishops marry their homosexual partners. They seem indifferent to the things that have always grieved Christians. For example, one male bishop recently married his lover of two years – a man who had previously wed four different women! These are things of which the church has become ashamed.¹

 

At the same time, the conservative wing of the Church I dream of has repented of its own sins, such as the worldliness that measured ecclesial success in terms of numbers, budgets, buildings, and clergy salaries. Those churches that deeply grieved other churches by their strident independence and their prideful promotion of private agendas have seen the errors of their ways. They have repented in true humility, and unity has been restored.

 

Holiness

 

I dream of a Church where holiness is prized. Believers seek the face of Christ through prayer, reverent and exuberant worship, study and submission to God’s Word, and care and compassion for the needy. Visitors to congregations sense the difference. Love and obedience characterize the spirit of the church’s gatherings. Healthy and wholesome boundaries are respected. The days are over when members of the congregation winked as church leaders, including clergy, divorced wives to marry parishioners, indulged their appetites for food, drink, and swearing with impunity, and affected a formal professional posture toward fellow church members. In this Church, God is known and adored as the wholly Other, whose name is holy – not as an Earth Mother of “creation spirituality” where “holiness” is sought in the fast-fading smile of a Dalai Lama.

 

In my reverie, I listen to a wise conversation among the theologians of this renewed Church. They are not discussing whether Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, or whether he was a wandering Jewish cynic philosopher, confused about his identity in the world. They are talking about ways to make Scripture come alive to post-modern people, ways to understand providence in the light of sustained evil, and ways to apply the insights of the Great Tradition of faith to knotty problems such as epistemology and hermeneutics. They are women and men under authority, humbly seeking to bring gifted minds under the governance of the Holy Spirit for the sake of the faithful. These scholars’ lives radiate with authenticity and communicate both the brilliant and the simple.

 

Mending the wounded

 

In my dream I see a Church that knows about healing. It is open to the healing ministry. It trusts the Holy Spirit to do the extraordinary in bringing people back from illnesses of various sorts through the concerted prayers of faithful people. But this renewed Church also cares about the walking wounded. It helps the addicted (sex, gambling, food, alcohol, drugs) through support groups and 12-step programs. The emotionally burned-out, the alienated young, the lonely stay-at-home moms, the forgotten seniors are all cared for and made to feel welcomed and included. People struggling with disordered sexual desires are not rejected. They are welcomed as “fellow penitents,” as much in need as all of us for the transforming grace of God. My dream Church is not a convocation of the perfect, but a gathering of people who are honest and humble enough to receive God’s grace. Here, as Bonhoeffer said in Life Together, is a place where it’s safe to admit one’s struggles and one’s sins.

 

Seminaries, too

 

In my dream, I discover that this Church even has seminaries. They are leadership training centers, not ivy-covered monastic institutions far from the bustle and dust of life. They flourish in the midst of need and are surrounded by communities where the Church is reaching out with care and love. Students truly love to be there and hate to leave when the time comes. They wrestle with pursuing the heart of God, even while they juggle the responsibilities of marriage and family life, making mortgage payments and still covering the cost of heat. At my dream seminary, students are impassioned with a vision to plant churches where the Gospel is not yet known, to revive dying congrega-tions, and to bring the Good News to the worlds of business, industry, education and the media. They want to engage the culture with evangelism and apologetics.

 

Students at these seminaries love and trust their faculty. The faculty makes them think, but does not make them run a gauntlet of skepticism in order to prove themselves intellectually sophisticated.

 

A rude awakening

 

I awake from my dream and realize how far the Church of today is from this ideal. Theological wars are tearing its fabric apart. Differences over worship styles turn Sunday mornings into scheduled conflict. Revisionists eat away at the foundations of the faith, and traditionalists hide their heads in the sand.

 

But as I awake, I also see a reformer here, a zealous young pr eacher there, a budding evangelist here, a gifted worship leader there, a bright faithful young theologian here, and a warm pastor there. I am not consumed with pessimism, but with hope. I see that the Church of the future may be more like my dream than the sad reality that passes for church life in many places today. And I get out of bed in the strength of that hope.

 

Peter Moore steps down as Dean and President of Trinity on July 31 of this year. He will travel, write, teach, preach, and continue to seek to build up the Church as opportunities arise. He and Sandra will continue to live in Sewickley. He is scheduled to teach a D.Min. course in preaching at Trinity in 2005. For a fuller vision of the Church, Seed & Harvest readers may wish to obtain Dean Moore’s A Church To Believe In (2nd ed., rev.) from the Trinity bookstore, 800-874-8754.

 

¹ The New York Times (5/9/04) stated that Bishop Otis Charles had notified Bishop William Swing of California prior to his illegal wedding. Bishop Swing’s diocese denies this.