Jason Micheli Reviews The Fitch Option – Patheos (blog)

Jason Micheli is the author of Cancer is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage Serious Chemo. Hes a United Methodist in Alexandria, Va, blogs atwww.tamedcynic.org, and hosts the Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast.

How Resident Aliens Live: Or, the Fitch Option

David Fitchs Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines that Shape the Church for Mission

On Ash Wednesday I suffered my monthly battery of labs and oncological consultation in advance of my day of maintenance chemo. During the consult, after feeling me up for lumps and red flags, my doctor flipped over a baby blue hued box of latex gloves and illustrated the standard deviation of years until relapse for my particular flavor of incurable cancer. I wrote a book calledCancer is Funnybut it didnt feel very funny looking at the bell curve of the time Ive likely got until I make good on the promise that begins every Lenten season: To dust you shall return.

Leaving my oncologists office, I drove to the hospital to visit a parishioner. Hes about my age with a boy about my boys age. He got cancer a bit before I did. He thought he was in the clear and now it doesnt look like it will end well. The palliative care doctor was speaking with him when I stepped through the clear, sliding ICU door. After the doctor left our first bits of conversation were interrupted by a social worker bringing with her dissonant grin a workbook, a fill-in-the-blank sort that he can use to insure that his boy knows who his dad was. We were interrupted again only moments after she left by the chaplain, dressed like an old school undertaker, offering ashes to us without explanation. It was easier for both of us to nod our heads and receive the gritty, oily shadow of a cross. Remember, he whispered, to dust you came and to dust you shall return.

As if the truth that none of us is getting out of life alive wasnt already palpably felt between us.

The chaplain stepped over the tubes draped off the bed and left as quickly as hed come. I sat next to the bed. I know from both from my training as a pastor and my experience as a patient, my job was neither to fix his feelings of despair nor to protect God from them. It certainly wasnt to dump on to him the baggage Id brought from my doctors office.

I listened. I touched and embraced him. I met his eyes and accepted the tears welling in my own. Mostly, I sat and kept the silence as though we were adoring the host.

I was present to him, with him, buoyed in the confidence that in this discipline of being present with him, naked and afraid- certainly one of whom Jesus calls the least among us, Christ was with us too, present in an almost tangible way that augers a permanent presence God will perfect in the fullness of time.

Heres a question for the clergy types out there and, even, for ordinary non-pensioned Christians:

The confidence I have in the practice of being present in a hospital room, the trust I have that through the practice of presence Christ is present, why does it not extend to the other disciplines Jesus has given us?

Why is it that in the hospital room Im content to be present, faithfully, and trust Jesus to show, yet everywhere else in my ministry I run (until I drop) on the unexamined assumption that its up to me to change my parishioners lives and then, with them, to change the world?

I trust Jesus not to be AWOL in the cancer ward but otherwise I typically operate as if God is the object of a curriculum program (for which Im always scrambling to find the latest, shiniest product in the Cokesbury catalog) rather than the active agent in the world who calls us to participate with him and to do so not through the latest thematic teaching series but through the concrete practices he gave to us. Its an assumption that in trying to conform people to Christ leaves them consumers instead and leaves me exhausted.

Taking his title from the coda of James Davidson Hunters significant bookTo Change the World, inFaithful PresenceDavid Fitch unpacks the communal Christian disciplines by which God changes the world.

Whereas Fitch worries that James Davidson Hunters faithful presence proposal too easily becomes a prescription for individuals embodying the faith in the hopes of transforming culture, thereby underwriting the privatization and loneliness of the culture, Fitch notes how Hunter also misses, as perhaps a sociologist must, that we are not the active agents of mission.

InFaithful Presence, Fitch makes explicit that God is the subject of Christian speech; mission and transformation- theyre what God does.

Faithful presence then names a set of practices of the community but, more foundational, it names aparticipationin what the Living God is doing antecedent to us. Continuing the premise ofProdigal Christianity, where God the Son forsakes his inheritance to venture out into the Far Country that we call the sinful world in order to return all that belongs to the Father back to the Father, Fitch exposes the anthropological assumptions lurking behind how we conceive of the practices of the Church. They are not our means to God, for, in good Barthian fashion, scripture does not narrate our journey to God but Gods relentless journey to us. Nor do the practices simply equip us to engage in mission as though the mission was our mission. Rather the practices of the Church are the means God in Christ has given to us to locate God at work in the world and to join with God in what God is doing in the world. As Fitch writes, the practice of faithful presence is only intelligible because God is present in the world and God uses a People faithful to his presence to make himself concrete. Gods presence in the world, Fitch adds, cannot be apprehended generally or without mediation.

Fitchs emphasis on the disciplines echoes a bit with James KA SmithsYou Are What You Love. in that both authors lament the degree to whichGodin the Enlightenment got relegated to an idea or a belief in the individuals head. Smith attempts a recovery of the practices of the faith because our formation comes through habituation not information. While Fitch would no doubt concur with Smith about the Enlightenments reductionism of discipleship to belief, the practices for Fitch are not merely habits to form us in our faith. They are the promised locations in which Christ is present with us and through which Christ changes the world. As Fitch notes, the Great Commission itself not only promises that Christ will be present to his people (I am with you always) the charge to make disciples of all nations assumes disciplines by which will be present to form disciples. The disciplines, as Fitch identifies them, bear resonances with the Catholic sacraments:

The Discipline of the Lords Table

The Discipline of Reconciliation

The Discipline of Proclaiming the Gospel

The Discipline of Being with the Least of These

The Discipline of Being with Children

The Discipline of the Fivefold Gifting

The Discipline of Kingdom Prayer

IfFaithful Presencestopped there it would be a helpful theological corrective to how we treat the disciplines, reminding us theyre vessels of Gods activity not our mediums to God, but it would not enliven Christian imagination to broaden what we mean by engaging in Gods mission.

The unique contribution Fitch makes inFaithful Presenceis arguing that each of these disciplines given to us by Christ have three interrelated and complimentary manifestations in the social spaces of our lives.

Precisely because God is the active agent of mission, on the move in the world, these disciplines should likewise force us to be on the move in a dynamic that avoids the familiar Sunday to Monday, in here-out there connection that bedevils Christians. Fitch denotes these spaces by illustrating three circles: a closed circle. a dotted circle, and a semi-circle. The closed circles represents the social space of the church. The dotted circle is an extension of the church, our friends and neighbors; like the closed circle, committed Christians still comprise the dotted circle but the dots show how this social space makes room for strangers and seekers too. The semi-circle meanwhile is what we might refer to as a third space where Christians go into the world, into their community, as a guest.

In the case of the Eucharist, for example, the closed circle is obviously the celebration of the sacrament during gathered worship. Because God is on the move, the presence of Christ in the sacramental table extends into the community so that, in the dotted circle, a Christian leader hosts friends, committed and curious, at a table in their home and, over food and wine, they pray together, make themselves vulnerable to one another, discern Gods word, and submit aspects of their lives to the lordship of Christ. Finally, in the semi-circle, the mutual vulnerability at table gets extended out into the community where the Christian is not the host but risks being the guest of neighbors and unbelievers. As Christ is present at the ornate lacquered table in the sanctuary, Christ is present at this profane table too, at work to nurture all that is the Fathers back to him.

I taught a PDF version ofFaithful Presenceto a group of local pastors at Wesley Seminary last summer for a two week course on mission.

In my own United Methodist tradition, mission has gotten redefined as good (social justice) work someone else does, be it the denominational apparatus or the credentialed missionaries funded by it. Not only does this demote our denominational connection to a funding relationship, it disempowers local churches fromdiscerning where God is at work in their local communities. Rather than three increasingly widened circles through which we extend presence, it assumes only two closed circles, the local church celebrating the sacraments and the global church doing good works. Its an arrangement that encourages maintenance mode ministry, which in a post-Christian culture necessarily leads to exhaustion. Whats more, it leaves pastors ill-equipped to extend the disciplines into their homes and community.

Every pair of eyes in the classroom popped open as they begin to revision their ministry, asking what it would be like for them to gather neighbors and community members around the dotted circle of their table, trusting that Christ will be there to call people over time into submission to him. The possibilities multiplied for them as they applied these three social spaces to the other disciplines in Fitchs book. And, it should be noted, these local pastors all served small congregations. The conventional way of construing mission had only disempowered and discouraged them that churches their size could not meaningfullydomission. They could neither send lots of money to the denomination nor could they execute expensive, volunteer-heavy mission projects for the less fortunate.

In the same way the limitations of a small canvas can provoke the most creative art, Fitchs explication of these particular disciplines extended across the ordinary social spaces of their lives exploded imaginative possibilities for their ministries.

As much as Christ is present in and through a funded missionary in Cambodia, they realized, Christ is present when they sit with someone like me in the hospital room. If God is the active agent of mission and not us, then its silly to distinguish between real mission and ordinary practices like breaking bread and forgiving sin.

As a preacher, I thinkFaithful Presenceis worth the read just for the theological framework. Our Christian speech needs reminding always that God is the agent not us.

As a pastor, I believeFaithful Presenceis exactly the sort of manual that maintenance modeled mainline churches need in order to learn how to engage with Christ in their post-Christian contexts. In many ways,Faithful Presenceis the handbook for how resident aliens live. It offers the praxis Stanley Hauerwas sequel toResident Aliensnever quite managed to flesh out.

As a closet Anabaptist, however, Im left with a question.

Id like to see Fitch engage howFaithful Presenceinteracts with John Nugents equally good bookEndangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church.While agreeing with Fitch that God is prodigally at work in the world, my reading of Nugent makes me wonder if Fitch has made the Church too instrumental and not a good and an end in and of itself; that is, is the Church the means through which God is changing the world or, as Nugent argues, is the Church the change, the better place, God has already made in the world?

While I hope to see future engagement between Fitchs and Nugents complementary work, I suspect FitchsFaithful Presenceis a needed companion to another book in everyones queue at present, Rod DrehersThe Benedict Option.

Dreher sees Western culture as lost and, in the wake of the Obergefell decision, antithetical to it. In the light of this development, Dreher recommends Christians imitate the witness of St. Benedict of Nursia, retreating into disciplined enclaves of like-minded, like-valued Christians in order to weather a new dark age.

Despite my sympathies for Drehers proposal, I think theBenedict Optionmay be a curious option to commend to Christians in this moment because, in fact, St. Benedict was not retreating from culture. Rather, he was also safeguarding the best contributions of elite and secular culture during the dark ages. Benedict helped change the world not simply by retreating from it, as Dreher suggests, but by preserving the best contributions of culture-makers. St. Benedict, then, corroborates James Davidson Hunters thesis that culture is changed only from the top down, from the culture-makers outward to the culture-consumers.

I believe FitchsFaithful Presenceoffers a middle way between the concerns of Rod DrehersBenedict Optionabout Christians now living as strangers in a strange land, on the one hand, and Hunters argument, on the other, about how cultures undergo transformation through its culture makers. In particular, Fitchs 3 Circles of faithful presence provide Christians with a more balanced rhythm of gathering in disciplined, intentional community with other Christians, for the sort of formation and preservation Dreher seeks, but also venturing out into networks of friendships and neighborhoods to join in what God is already doing among them.

What Fitch helps us remember, even Dreher, is that discipleship is not only about practices, which can be preserved and practiced apart from culture, it is as much about participation too.

With God.

The agency of God is perhaps the fatal flaw in Drehers book for he forgets, or neglects to make clear, that God is active in the world (a world Dreher would characterize as lost to the Church) apart from the Church and God is waiting for the Church, who are Gods sent People, to join him in his work.

Because so many now are discussing the latter book, I cannot recommend the former with heartier enthusiasm.

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Jason Micheli Reviews The Fitch Option - Patheos (blog)