Half truth and partial vision

According to the elderly Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, one of the burning questions of the day concerns what he terms "the trouble with preaching." This trouble is the failure to relate the Christian message to the everyday world. "Many leave the Church because the language flowing from the pulpit has no meaning for them; it has no connection with their own life and simply bypasses many threatening and unavoidable issues."*

I suggest, then, that a well-trained ministry can be properly defined only in correlation with the general nature of the surrounding culture. What I mean may be stated simply. It is this, that the ministry's capacity to make the gospel relevant to the human situation determines how well-trained it is. Our contemporary experience sufficiently proves that if the gospel is not made relevant, it will not be heard. Not being heard, it will not be heeded—and so will not be saving truth to those to whom it is directed. It is the irrelevance of the average message and ministry to the human situation to day that renders them sometimes boring to their practitioners and ineffectual to their patients.

To be sure, a ministry is not well trained unless it has a sound knowledge of the biblical faith. It is not well trained unless it grasps the central pillars of the whole gospel. It is not well trained unless it knows well the long course of Christian history—its recurring pitfalls and errors, but also its triumphs and its glories.

A ministry is not well trained unless it comprehends the centrality of Christian worship, which reenacts in word, sacrament, and song the drama of man's redemption in Christ and through which successive generations participate in and appropriate that redemption. A ministry is not well trained unless it knows and honors the doctrine and discipline of the church.

But a ministry can be ever so well trained in these and other respects, and be woefully ignorant of the human situation—the peculiar crisis of the human spirit and culture in the era in which it undertakes to proclaim the saving Word. When this is the case, those enmeshed in the labyrinthine ways of the world can not hear the message of Christ's church; and the saving relevance and power of the gospel is grievously blunted and spent. 

Often, in such circumstances, the church smothers the gospel in cloistered, pious routines. When plagued by ineffectuality, it frequently happens in church and churchmanship that motions accelerate and become hectic, programs multiply, and with them the machinery of their implementation. And shortly the community of faith becomes more and more an institutional organism that is greatly preoccupied with maintaining it self.

It is not wholly true, but it is partly true, that when the church's presentation of the Christian message has been ineffectual, the expedient course has been to turn the ministry into administrators instead of authentic servants of the Word and godly shepherds of the flock. Having much to do relieves, in part, the frustration of not knowing what to say.

A well-trained ministry, then, is not only one that understands and firmly holds to the great truths of Christian faith and life. It is, as well, a ministry that so comprehends the import of those truths for the changing but recurrent needs of people that it is inspired and impelled to relate them savingly to the character of human need and, conversely, human need to the saving power of the gospel. This work is correlation; it also is relevance; and it is power.

A well-trained ministry is one that keeps in focus both the gospel and the world. Not the one in independence of the other but, just exactly, the one in the light of the other. John's Gospel offers testimony enough that we do not comprehend the darkness of the world save in the light of the gospel, nor do we fully grasp the import and power of the gospel until it illuminates the darkness of the world. The one without the other yields but half the truth and partial vision. —Rex D. Edwards.