There’s a nice interview in the current Christian Century with Josh Carney, Teaching Pastor at University Baptist Church, near Baylor University. Carney is a young pastor in a demographically diverse evangelical / free church congregation that attracts many well educated students — sounds familiar! A few excerpts:
What has the transition toward more age diversity been like? Any bumps?
It’s been exciting. My heartbeat is for families, and as this group grows it presents an opportunity to get to know and love more people. The major hurdle has to do with congregational identity. An increase in families means a need for more resources for them, and when we shift resources we make statements about mission and identity. We are trying to figure out who we are in a way that both affirms the historical and makes room for the new.
What other parts of being in ministry have been challenging?
Working out how specifically to pursue our mission as a church. It hasn’t been difficult for us to identify how God would have us be kingdom people in the world. What’s been harder is determining the best way to accomplish this. For example, we might all agree that the kingdom that Jesus proclaims compels us to work to alleviate suffering. But what is the best, most responsible way to do this?
Is the debate about prioritizing what kinds of suffering to address? Or about direct service versus systemic change?
Both. Because we’re close to a university, we’ve had to learn that on just about every issue—theological or otherwise—our community is full of opinions that are both extremely educated and extremely diverse. A lot of people have had experiences that shape the way they see the world—and what they think the solutions for the world’s ills are.
The challenge is to engage and serve the world in a distinctively kingdom way. Instead most of us quickly let our political ideology dictate how we do this. We need to continually pray that the Holy Spirit would illuminate the countercultural love option that Jesus offers—the third way that comes through gospel imagination.
What’s something important you’ve learned in ministry?
As the world changes, people don’t. Folks do lots of things they didn’t do ten years ago: carry iPhones, send Facebook messages, buy fuel-efficient cars. But people are hurt the same way and need the gospel the same way they did ten years, 100 years or even 2,000 years ago.
There is much within evangelical culture that is now seen as unhealthy and misguided. We at UBC have rejected much of our immediate past. In the constructive phase, the natural tendency seemed to be to look back further by exploring the liturgy of the church. Here we found much that was helpful—and we found that some of our objections had already been addressed.
Slowly, we’ve begun to reidentify what was useful about our immediate, painful pasts as well. It’s been refreshing to create new liturgy and find gifts from all of the church’s seasons.
Has this process of exploring the past been largely about worship and liturgy, or has it touched other areas of the church’s life as well?
I’d say that all the changes we’ve experienced have fallen under the umbrella of ecclesiology. A pastor friend says that everything comes down to ecclesiology, and the longer I do this ministry, the more I agree.
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What developments would you like to see in your congregation’s mission? In the wider church’s?
I hope that the church—both our local expression and the larger one that we’re part of—learns to be more creative. I feel that a lot of our problems come from a lack of imagination.
When the pesky Pharisees try to trap Jesus by asking if he thinks they ought to pay the temple tax, he offers one of those answers that turns the question on its head. Caesar’s image is on the money, so it belongs to him. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. But what has God’s image on it? Well, we do. The creation testifies about God. In fact, the creation exists because God breathed it, and all of this creation belongs to God.
Jesus both critiqued the world and loved it. He was never satisfied to give a response that lived within the parameters of the question. He found a better way, a third way to respond—and the world stood in awe as it saw God move within history. Our lack of this kind of imagination is evident in our politics, in our wars and unfortunately even in the church. But this can change. My prayer is that Christians will be imaginative Jesus people.
Describe an experience that made you think, “This is what church is all about.”
A lot of what I’ve said so far is about the church’s immanent ministry, how it engages the world. But this has to be rooted in transcendent ministry, in the worshiping community.
One Sunday at UBC the last song the band played was the doxology. It was time to make the transition to the learning portion of worship, but something within me was profoundly content to sit in God’s presence. I found myself standing in the peace of God which transcends understanding, filled with an inexpressible joy and overwhelmed by love.
All the community gardens, mission trips, relationships with local school districts and low-income housing complexes—if all that work is not about this kind of moment, if it’s not about participating in the divine dance that has been going on for all eternity, then it misses the point. We are because God is.