Forming a Community of the Spirit: Hospitality, Fellowship, and Nurture, Part 2 of 2, by Steven M. Fettke

This chapter is an excerpt from Steven M. Fettke, God’s Empowered People: A Pentecostal Theology of the Laity (Wipf & Stock 2011). Read Part 1 in the Winter 2012 issue of Pneuma Review.

Forming a Nurturing Community

A mother was preparing breakfast for her two sons, Kevin, age five, and Ryan, age three. The boys began to argue over who would get the first pancake. Their mother saw the opportunity for a moral lesson. “If Jesus were sitting here, he would say, ‘Let my brother have the first pancake, I can wait.’” Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, “Ryan, you be Jesus!”

Some people can get so caught up in their own agendas and schedules that they forget that there are others around who might be hurting. Sadly, they often come across as too selfish to take time out to help those who are hurting because that might mean they would get off their strict daily schedules or they might have to hurt a bit with someone. After all, don’t they have enough troubles of their own without having to take on those of others? Let someone else deal with those hurting people. I will deal with my own needs, thank you very much. Those other folks who are hurting can deal with their own hurts themselves, just as I do.

Other people simply find themselves stressed and in need of loving nurture to sustain their faith. They need the warm embrace of a loving and accepting community as they negotiate the difficulties of living in a fast-paced society that expects so much of them in terms of job success, family wholeness, and psychological health and well being without providing the necessary supports for these things to happen. They need warm and loving nurture themselves, which often means they are unable to extend the same to others. They do not mean to be selfish and self-absorbed; they are just needy and weary.

To speak of love and nurture without recognizing real human stresses and strains is to ignore a common ailment of a hectic modern society. People are not surprised to be treated shabbily by a store clerk or fellow driver on the roadways. Who has not complained about a bored teenager who checked or bagged the groceries or a surly auto service manager who was barely civil when servicing the car? In such an atmosphere people become defensive because of the meanness encountered. Believers try not to be apathetic or mean in return, but often the atmosphere gets the better of them. At least they try to conceal their feelings with the thought that no one cares anyway, and certainly they don’t want to contribute with their own cruelty to the overall meanness already prevalent.

In addition, the notions of love and nurture have been cheapened by casual sex in television programs and in most movies. It is also common for television programs and movies to present a casual view of marriage and relationship commitments, as well as to present scenes of friends in deep conflict and division; often perpetrating great acts of cruelty upon each other. It does not help when most adult believers can tell tragic stories of churches split over some sort of un-Christian and inhumane treatment of a particular group of believers or the unjust treatment of a capable pastor.

It takes great care to speak of love and nurture to believers who might be a bit jaded by a society so casual about love and relationships. These adult believers may have become cynics about love and nurture from hearing it widely proclaimed in churches they have attended where only anger and division was experienced instead. Speaking of love and nurture is a delicate task because so many have been hurt in some way by counterfeits or by selfish people whose words of love belied their selfish actions.

To speak of love properly—without sounding insincere or weepy and sentimental—is a difficult task. Appeals could be made to the “love chapter” in 1 Corinthians 13 or to Shakespeare’s famous sonnets or even to the best Hallmark greeting cards prepared for Valentine’s Day. Reading about love and declaring that love is the foundation of the two most important commandments is one thing, actually practicing that love is quite another when people are involved. As the old joke goes, “I could love the whole world if it weren’t for all the people in it!” This is why the word “nurture” has been chosen instead of love. Of course, nurture must have love as its foundation and focus, but only speaking of love is inadequate; love requires sacrificial action. The apostle put it this way, “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18). Tom Long has told this story, which illustrates the loving nurture proposed here.

Several years ago I was at a church in Alabama, scheduled to preach in the morning service. A few minutes before the service, the pastor got up from his desk and beckoned me to follow. “Come here,” he said, “There’s something I want you to see.” I followed him down the stairs and into the educational wing. We approached a Sunday school classroom, and the pastor pointed to the glass window set in the classroom door. “Look,” he urged. I peered through the glass into a kindergarten class full of activity. In one corner of the room, a teacher was reading a story to a group of children. In another corner, a teacher was assisting children in building something with blocks. In still another area, children were gathered around an adult with a guitar, learning a new song. In the middle of the room sat an elderly woman, calmly and slowly rocking in a rocking chair. Every now and then, a child would break away from a group and come to sit on her lap as she rocked. Occasionally, the woman in the rocker would say something to one of the teachers, and the adult would respond with a laugh and a nod of the head. The actual teaching was being done around the edges and in the corners, but this aged woman in the center was radiating grace around the room. “She used to be the only kindergarten teacher,” the pastor informed me. “But now that she is late in her life, others do the teaching. But she still comes every Sunday morning to sit in the center of the room and provide a blessing.”⁴⁰

Believers might get a warm feeling about the children being nurtured by the elderly woman, but, if hard pressed, might be persuaded to admit that they, too, need the kind of loving nurture she was providing the children. Were the children there because of the other children, the activities, or because of the nurture they received from the woman? What radiates from the center of my faith community?

Surprisingly, love—the true kind of love, God’s love—is not an easy or casual subject. The power of the gospel to bring genuine empathy and relief to the hurts of others seems so remote in a busy, agenda-oriented, success-guided world. Yes, the local church is supposed to be a repository of such nurture, but for people harried and wounded by a hostile world there is great hesitancy and doubt of the possibility of love and nurture. And when we have spent six days protecting ourselves from verbal and emotional assaults, it is hard on the seventh day to break with old habits and believe the promise of God’s nurture or make an attempt to lend another such promised nurture. After all, won’t the other be suspicious or expect payment in return? Truly loving someone with the kind of nurture intended by my emphasis in this chapter might mean believers become vulnerable, open, and even willing to help bear the pain of others. People are practiced in guarding their hearts because life often breaks open hearts. We don’t want to open our hearts and listen so that we do not run the risk of the hurts that can come in. Listening with our hearts can actually be risky because it means that we also might suffer with the sufferers.

… a life formed by love for others inevitably leads to one’s own suffering, and this is true in Jesus’ life and in the history of God … Jesus on the cross is God … made weak and vulnerable to worldly powers because of the perfection of divine love.⁴¹

The poet Perry Tanksley put it this way in his poem, “My Unbroken Heart”:

Regardless of the cost I sought to avoid

The tragic hurt of being annoyed

With a broken heart from loving someone

To discover too late my love unreturned.

Alas, I discovered while living alone

My heart, unbroken, had turned to stone⁴²

A story is told about Nouwen (now deceased), a Catholic priest and brilliant psychologist and theologian at Yale and, later, Harvard, who suddenly resigned his prestigious position at Harvard to become Director of Daybreak, a ministry to the severely mentally and physically handicapped in Toronto.⁴³ There were those who believed he had thrown away a brilliant career at Harvard to do something so insignificant and meaningless in regard to his gifts and talents—moving backwards from the way of society’s recommendations and expectations. But this was certainly not his attitude about his decision.⁴⁴ His reaction was to describe his resignation from Harvard and move to Daybreak as God’s call.

If handicapped people express love for you, then it comes from God. It’s not because you accomplished anything. These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self—the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things—and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.⁴⁵

It is a Spirit-enabled community that practices the first of the fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5:22: love. In such a community where love is practiced and people are nurtured in their faith, there has to be the realization that truly loving and nurturing others might usually mean that weak and sinful people are the ones most in dire need of loving nurture. We are reminded of what the apostle said: “Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:1–2). No one has described more eloquently love’s particularity implied by that passage than Martin Luther.

If there is anything in us, it is not our own; it is a gift of God. But if it is a gift of God, then it is entirely a debt one owes to love, that is, to the Law of Christ. And if it is a debt owed to love, then I must serve others with it, not myself. Thus my learning is not my own; it belongs to the unlearned and is the debt I owe them. My chastity is not my own; it belongs to those who commit sins of the flesh, and I am obligated to serve them through it by offering it to God for them by sustaining and [forgiving] them, and thus with my respectability, veiling their shame before God and [people] … Thus my wisdom belongs to the foolish, my power to the oppressed. Thus my wealth belongs to the poor, my righteousness to the sinners … It is with all these qualities that we must stand before God and intervene on behalf of those who do not have them, as though clothed with someone else’s garment … But even before [people] we must, with the same love, render them service against their detractors and those who are violent toward them; for this is what Christ did for us.⁴⁶

There are no secret or mystical formulas by which a nurturing community might be formed. It will require humble people who truly value what a nurturing community can provide, and value it above all else. Such a loving, nurturing community should be the natural product of Spirit-enabled fellowship. If God’s love is really true, believers cannot help but convey that love in authentic, tangible ways. “There is no wavering in God’s intent to love us, no matter what … [and] when we love and live in a community where love counts, we are at once ourselves and like God.”⁴⁷

The only “secret” to be addressed here is the reality of human selfishness and self-absorption. Eugene Peterson says it is necessary for believers to “unself” themselves, moving from self to community.⁴⁸ Commenting on the self-absorption of the psalmist in Psalm 77:4–9, Peterson has said, “The self meditating on the self is in a room without air, without oxygen. Left there long enough, breathing its own gasses, it sickens.”⁴⁹ People are, by nature, selfish beings who need gospel transformation so that they might become children of God who “ … use whatever gift [they] have received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms” (1 Peter 4:10). It is a kind of spiritual discipline believers acquire to be able to do this: “Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others” (1 Cor 10:24).

A life of compassion must be nurtured. This can only be done in the midst of hurt and pain, where wisdom is inaccessible to self-pity. God does not answer our self-pitying request but our need for unselfing. He enters our lives and provides prophet and priest to lead us into and through the wilderness of temptation and trial. Only then can we learn the ways of providence and discover the means of grace—a long, difficult, mercy-marked, grace-guided forty years that represents the middle of the journey for persons who live by faith. It is a journey through which we learn personal morality and social responsibility. Salvation is put to the work of building community, engaging in worship, encountering evil.⁵⁰

Concluding Remarks

Many believers would agree that their congregations should be more oriented to hospitality, fellowship, and loving nurture; however, just how these things are accomplished is the great mystery. I could outline some strategies by which such things might occur, but the reality is that no one congregation is the same and “cookie-cutter” approaches to ministry are usually not successful in every place.

To get believers to focus more on hospitality, fellowship, and loving nurture might mean extended prayer sessions, a call for fasting and prayer, a challenge to the congregation by both pastor and lay leaders to reorient their lives by these concerns, or all of the above. The whole church must ask itself, corporately and individually: What is the true focus of this congregation? What is the true focus of my life of faith?

The reality might be that many congregations just do not want change to occur; they are very comfortable with things just as they are, thank you very much. Angie Ward has written about this attitude which she discovered after she and her husband began their ministry right out of seminary at an older, established church.⁵¹

While that church on the surface valued outreach, character, and innovation, the no-rocking ethos meant that its actual directive was “Don’t offend anyone; don’t take risks; and don’t deal with hidden sin.” It took more than three years for us to figure this out, by repeated trial and error, but also by looking at our church’s history, the personalities of its leaders, and even the culture of our surrounding community.⁵²

She learned that believers resisted change with great fervor. They had become comfortable in the way things were and did not want to take any risks, make any changes. What was Ward’s advice about this?

Culture takes a long time to create, and even longer to change. Melting the tip of the iceberg does not eliminate the ice below the waterline. But in any church, the first step toward creating a healthy culture is identifying the existing ethos, whether positive or negative.⁵³

Naturally, “melting the iceberg” can be a strenuous and often painful process. People will cling desperately to their old ways because change can be frightening and require from believers more than they are ready to give. Indeed, Ward reported in her article that she and her husband were unable to make the needed changes in that church; however, in their next pastorate, they were able to recognize the unstated core values and begin right away to make important changes. Nevertheless, those changes came slowly.

From spiritual growth to evangelism to giving to ministry, a church that was founded as a safe place for those wounded by religion became a place for long-time Christians to be comfortable and inactive. Changing that culture, of course, is an ongoing process. Slowly, but surely, our church is beginning to reflect a renewed purpose of “Life-changing relationships with God, with each other, and with the world around us.”⁵⁴

If lay and professional church leaders would take my proposals for loving hospitality, Spirit-enabled fellowship, and a nurturing community seriously, they might have to consider first the hidden core values of the congregation as they try to “melt the iceberg” of resistance to change. The values I am proposing are most certainly worth the effort.

Such a faith community carefully formed with the values I am proposing just might provide the right environment for implementing successfully the mission of the local church as understood in the Pentecostal tradition: proclaiming the gospel to the local community. If effective gospel witness should occur and people were to respond to the gospel, it would be important to have a supportive community for new converts to the faith.

In concluding this chapter, I wish to emphasize just how important a solid, functioning, nurturing, loving community is. From such a loving and healthy environment, well-balanced and more mature believers will emerge to make significant impacts in their various workplaces in the local community. Like children reared in a loving and nurturing family who become well-adjusted and productive adults, believers in the local church—the family of God—can exemplify the love and nurture learned in their faith communities, becoming effective ministers for Christ in public schools, the business world, the factory, and government services.⁵⁵

 

PR

 

Notes

⁴⁰ Thomas G. Long. “Preaching in the Middle of a Saintly Conversation.” Journal for Preachers 18/2 (Lent 1995): 20-21.

⁴¹ Burton Cooper. “The Disabled God” Theology Today 49 (July 1992): 176.

⁴² Perry Tanksley. I Call You Friend. (Jackson, MS.: Allgood Books, 1972): 11.

⁴³ See chapter 4 under the subhead, “Creation and Imago Dei: Who or What are the ‘Embodied’ Made in God’s Image?” where the text describes L’Arche communities begun by Jean Vanier. See also Carolyn Whitney-Brown, Jean Vanier: Essential Writings in Modern Spiritual Masters Series, Robert Ellsberg, ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), 54.

⁴⁴ Arthur Boers. “What Henri Nouwen Found at Daybreak” Christianity Today 38, no. 11 (October 3, 1994): 31.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Martin Luther. “Lectures on Galatians” Luther’s Works vol. 27 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957):  393.

⁴⁷ Burton Cooper “The Disabled God” Theology Today 49 (July 1992): 173-174.

⁴⁸ Eugene Peterson.  Where Your Treasure Is:  Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community. (Grand Rapids:  Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989).

⁴⁹ Ibid, 103.

⁵⁰ Ibid, 108. Peterson’s summary comments on his study of Psalm 77:13-20.

⁵¹ Angie Ward. “Discerning Your Church’s Hidden Core Values.” Leadershipjournal.net (January 17, 2005): 1-2. http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/currenttrendscolumns/leadershipweekly/cln50117.html

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ See Robert Banks, “The Community as a Loving Family” Paul’s Idea of Community, Revised Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994): 46-57.

 

This chapter is from Steven M. Fettke, God’s Empowered People: A Pentecostal Theology of the Laity (Wipf & Stock 2011). Used with permission.