Throughout the years that I’ve been writing, I’ve received lots of criticism. Sometimes it’s bitter and mean-spirited, and some of it is sincere, thoughtful, and genuinely challenging.
One such critique has to do with my approach in general: “Why,” people sometimes ask me, “do you write the way you do, invariably with some kind of secular bent? Why don’t you focus more on catechesis, on teaching church doctrine, on explaining the creeds, on defending the church’s position on moral issues such as abortion, and on doing apologetics for the church?”
My answer: Because I am trying to be a missionary and missionaries have been asked, by Jesus himself, to leave the ninety-nine and go after the one.
The lived reality and attitude of many persons, including the majority of baptized Christians today, at least inside of our highly secularized culture is that are indifferent to, or turned off by religion and the church. These are the “strays” that Jesus told us to search for lovingly in the desert, even if it means not being able to focus as much as we’d like on the ninety-nine who are being faithful.
But Jesus’ mandate is still there: Leave the ninety-nine who haven’t strayed and go after the one who has strayed. Today, however, the default seems to have shifted and it’s perhaps more a case of leaving the one and going after the ninety-nine.
More and more people feel themselves thoroughly disconnected from our church circles and our church language, and the fault isn’t all on their side. We need missionaries to the world, people like Henri Nouwen, who can stand solidly within the church and invite the world, with all its desires and grandiosity, to join us, not as adversary but as family.
The language we need to do this isn’t simply out there, in our catechisms and dogmas, to be picked up and deployed. Much of the language we need has to be created anew by our own generation which, like every generation, needs itself to eat God’s word, digest it, and then enflesh it so that God’s written word becomes a living word, inside our own flesh.
I don’t claim to have accomplished this, nor to be anybody’s expert, but I do know that Christ’s mandate is to reach out to the world and not just to those who are coming to our churches.
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