Seeking God's Design

Description

Seeking God's Design honors the 50th anniversary of The Design. It is focused around a series of audiotaped interviews that Disciples of Christ Historical Society President James Seale conducted from 1989 to 1993 with Disciples leaders who played important roles in Restructure. It provides historical context and offers a series of reflections from key Disciples leaders today, as we honor and critically evaluate the work of our predecessors while looking ahead to the next 50 years of our life as a church. Seeking God's Design is the first volume of the James and Mary Dudley Seale Series on Disciples and Public Engagement, a partnership between the Disciples of Christ Historical Society and Chalice Press.

Sujets

• History of religions
• Christian Church
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Christian Board of Publication
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780827235472
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Disciples Historical Society.
All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], www.copyright.com .
Bible quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible , copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ® . NIV ® . Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version.
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Foreword
Teresa Hord Owens
General Minister and President
In the 1960s, Disciples of Christ engaged in a careful, thoughtful process of church “Restructure,” as our leaders called it. At the 1968 International Convention of Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ), two key documents, “A Proposed Recommendation on Principles of Merger for the National Christian Missionary Convention and the International Convention of Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ)” and “the Provisional Design of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)” were approved, giving birth to a restructured church, a new “denomination.”
The Merger Agreement formalized a process that had been proposed in the 1940s by influential Black leaders such as Rev. Robert H. Peoples, longtime pastor of Second (now Light of the World) Christian Church in Indianapolis, my home congregation. That process continued through the 1950s and early 1960s, uniting the offices of the African American NCMC with the offices of the United Christian Missionary Society (UCMS) and the predominantly White International Convention. This was not a situation of the church looking at this as a “mission project.” It was two groups of people within the church coming together to the table as whole groups of people saying, “let’s show the world what this could look like. Let’s model a reflection of God’s unity on earth.” It was a bold and prophetic witness for racial reconciliation and justice at a critical time in American history.
The Design brought to fruition a process that began in the aftermath of World War II when the newly formed World Council of Churches called on its member communions to take a careful, critical look at their structures with an eye toward more effectively accomplishing mission and promoting justice and peace in the world. Under the leadership of Granville Walker, who chaired the Commission on Brotherhood Restructure, and A. Dale Fiers, who served as President of UCMS and, later, as Executive Secretary of the International Convention, and who became the first General Minister and President, Disciples designed a church they hoped would be true to our long-standing commitment to Christian unity as a “harbinger” of God’s in-breaking realm. Restructure was about much more than church structure. It was about our mission and our witness to God’s healing, redeeming work in the world.
As we commemorate a half-century of ministry as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada, it is appropriate that we celebrate our accomplishments as a church and continue the process of theological reflection, spiritual growth , and renewal that is the legacy of these great leaders of Restructure. As we embark on our next 50 years as a church, may we continue to ask the questions that guided them: “What is God’s design for the church? How are we structured? Does it still make sense? Does it still help us to live out what we now believe in this moment and in this context to be God’s design for the church?”


Introduction
Rick Lowery
I have long wondered about the name of our church’s structuring document, The Design of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) . Why “Design”? Why not “Constitution” or “Bylaws”? Dean Kristine Kulp of the University of Chicago Divinity School, whose essay concludes this book, gave me an important clue in her response to a comment I made at the “ Design at 50” Symposium 1 at Brite Divinity School in January 2019. I argued that The Design is deeply theological in character. She agreed and pointed out that the theme of the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam in 1948 was “Man’s Disorder and God’s Design.”
The papers for that Assembly—by such prominent theologians as Gustaf Aul é n, Karl Barth, and H. Richard Niebuhr 2 —written in the immediate aftermath of world war, racist and fascist nationalism, Nazi genocide, and the development and use of nuclear weapons, offered ample evidence of the horrific “disorder” human beings were capable of creating in the world. It was plain to see in the ruins of “Christian Europe” and the apocalyptic devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the faith of these Christian leaders from around the world led them to argue that human “disorder,” this bitter fruit of human sin, was not the final word. God, they professed, dreams of a better world and in fact is at work in history to make the dream real. The term they used to describe this divine initiative was “God’s Design.” It was a key theological concept, “a fundamental basis for the self-understanding of the ecumenical movement during those years,” wrote Odair Pedroso Mateus, the Director of WCC’s Faith and Order Commission and a leading historian of the WCC, in a recent email to me. Post-war ecumenists, he said, understood human history in light of God’s history of salvation, God’s oikonomia (“economy,” in the root sense of “household rules”)—i.e., God’s “Design” for the world.
“God’s Design” for humanity and for the whole creation is the eschatological fulfillment, the end and purpose of history, what the gospel writers quoting Jesus describe as the basileia tou theou : the “kingdom” or “realm” of God. God’s “Design” is God’s just and righteous alternative to the mess created by human sinfulness, nationalistic arrogance, racist fantasy, and heartless greed. The church is called to be a witness to this “Design,” this “new creation,” that God intends for a world struggling to rise from the ashes of disorder.
Disciples, of course, were very much involved in the creation of WCC and were active participants in that first Assembly. 3 Disciples leaders would have been very familiar with the key themes and concepts that emerged from these ecumenical gatherings. So the first serious stirrings of Disciples’ denominational “Restructure,” including the Merger Agreement that brought together the predominantly African American National Christian Missionary Convention and the predominantly White International Convention of Christian Churches—Disciples of Christ took place in that ecumenical context. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the architects of Restructure used the language of ecumenical theology to describe what they sought to accomplish. When the Commission on Brotherhood Restructure held its first meeting in Chicago in 1960, they asked these questions: What is God’s design for the church? How are Disciples organized for mission? How does that fit or not fit God’s design? And what are we going to do about it? 4
In 1830, Alexander Campbell launched his theological journal Millennial Harbinger , which he named to highlight his conviction that, just as John the Baptist “prepared the way” for the coming Messiah, the Christian unity movement Campbell and others had started on the American frontier was in fact a sign, a “harbinger” of God’s coming reign in the world. The adoption of the language of “Design” in 1968 continued that Campbell tradition. The church of The Design would stand as a sign, a witness to God’s redeeming work in history—to God’s dream, “God’s Design” for the world and the whole human family. This church, in a fundamental sense, was “restructured” to more effectively be an eschatological sign of God’s in-breaking reign.
Standing as a sign of God’s alternate plan for the world is not easy. In fact, the church was put to the test before The Design and the Merger Agreement were even brought to a vote.
John Humbert, our third General Minister and President (GMP), was Deputy General Minister before he became GMP. He served as the program director for the 1966 General Assembly in Dallas, Texas. He was instrumental in gathering the principals for what is now an iconic Disciples photograph of Dale Fiers and other Disciples leaders standing in front of a communion table with one of the Assembly participants, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. From our viewpoint five decades later, the decision to invite Dr. King may seem to have been a “no-brainer,” an amazing “get” for Disciples—which it certainly was. In Dallas in 1966, however, it was not so clear-cut for everyone. It was risky, bold, and very controversial. Still reeling from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, the local arrangements committee had serious concerns about and objections to having King address the Assembly there. They pleaded with Fiers to rescind the invitation, but Fiers and the planners of the Assembly stood firm. The local arrangements committee, for the most part, resigned and had to be replaced. Fiers and the Assembly planners were, of course, right, but John Humbert told me that Fiers worried that the controversy over that Assembly would derail the years-long process of Restructure, which was heading toward final votes on the Merger Agreement and The Design a couple of years later. And yet our leaders persisted. In the end, Disciples’ witness to justice, and particularly our witness to racial equality and economic equity, w