Reflecting together on the Introduction and Chapter 1: Agility and Innovation

By Bishop Alan Scarfe

Bishop Alan Scarfe

If you were to look back at the Convention addresses of recent years, you would see that we have been consistently focusing on the question, “Who is God calling us to be for a time like this?” We accept that the place of the Church in society has changed; that there is a generation missing from our ranks; and that the rising generation, though interested in spiritual practices, is not convinced that joining an organized religious institution for its own sake is the answer. We have also toyed with the idea that God’s mission, for which the Church is invited to be the primary agent, is actually taking place beyond the Church walls, which is where we should fix our more permanent gaze.  

In The Agile Church author Dwight Zscheile describes it this way: “Churches face dramatically changing cultural surroundings in which established patterns of Christian life and witness no longer connect with many people in the neighborhood. Forming and restoring community with these neighbors for the sake of Christian witness and service requires learning new ways of embodying and communicating the gospel” (Introduction, page X).

We cannot simply do more of what we have already been doing, but must become a learning community that seeks, first and foremost, to listen to those around them, and then learn both from what we hear and from how God leads us to incarnate the Good News of Jesus in ways this rising generation can hear it. Becoming agile is to be “marked by a ready ability to move with a quick and easy grace” (page 1)—to be “nimble, adaptive, flexible, responsive and alert” (page 1). Most significantly it suggests “dynamism,” which recalls dynamis, the Greek word for power that is often associated with the Holy Spirit and can at times be used in place of pneuma, Greek for spirit. So perhaps say word connected with Spirit. Zscheile’s questions are “What would it look like for the churches to embrace agility today? To attend prayerfully both to God and to a changing world? To adapt their lives in response to deep listening and relationships with those who are not part of them? To move with quick and easy grace, to be led by God in a dance?” (page 1).

The key words here for me are “prayerfully” and “with God” and “those who are not part of us.” This is a book that invites us to experiment, even to fail, or to at least make good mistakes. A good mistake is to try new things—in contrast to the bad mistake of doing nothing. Hidden underneath the urgency and passion of the author is a profound love and belief in the Church as God’s agency for mission and for the transformation of the world around us and of ourselves. He does not throw the baby out with the bath water, but reminds us that Jesus points to “treasure what is new and what is old” ( Matthew 13:52). We are asked to engage what might be called “traditioned innovation,”—innovations that are “rooted in the riches of Christian wisdom and practices from other times and places in order to offer deep, sustaining, faithful gospel witness” (page 6).

The question to be asked as we enter into this study together is, Why? Why do you want the church not only to survive but also to flourish? “The answer today is not to hold on to existing forms of church life and practice unyieldingly when they no longer function well, nor is it to jettison established patterns wholesale. It is a matter of careful discernment, the cultivation by Christian leaders of the treasures of the tradition and the community’s life so as to invite people into life-changing discipleship and witness. It is a matter of translation… This is the deep logic of incarnation” (page 8).

We may feel too tired and weary for such an endeavor. We are also facing the burden of grief for a way of being church which is not being supported or appreciated, and we seem to be losing the struggle. In such circumstances, we recall that at the center of our faith stands a cross—a massive failure, or so it would have seemed. But the cross is God’s good mistake. We know the cross is the symbol of God’s love for the whole world, and it is in praying to discover such love that our own capacity to bear our own cross comes. As The Rev. Thomas Brackett of The Episcopal Church often says, “It is only a greater love that can overpower the paralyzing effect of a sense of loss.” For our neighbors’ sake more even than our own, dare we discover the agile church?