The essays gathered in Testing the Spirits are the work of the Congregational Studies Research Team (CSRT) of the Church Innovations Institute (CI), an expression of CI's commitment to ‘renewing the church's focus on God's mission in the world’. This team of seven Lutheran scholars (five of whom are faculty of Luther Seminary, St Paul, MN) set out to bring the ‘everyday realities of congregational life into conversation with theology’ (p. 1) in order to ‘study . . . how congregations engage in talking, deciding, and acting on difficult topics, especially moral issues confronting them and their communities’ (p. 3). Their goal was to bring ‘people to a public identity in Christ’ (p. 8). The resulting essays are a stimulating and challenging contribution to the broadening discussion of the church's mission in the West after Christendom.
As the editor, Patrick Keifert introduces the research methodology that would implement the team's desire to do serious theological reflection on the congregation ‘as its primary subject matter’. His discussion of ‘the Bible and Theological Education’, informed by many years of partnership with New Testament scholar Donald Juel (whose premature death we all mourn), is complemented by Dan Frederickson's excellent essay on ‘Congregations, Democracy, and the Action of God in Philippians 1–2’. He draws on Greek traditions of democratic process in public assemblies (ecclesia) to develop a convincing argument about the importance and meaning of the church's ‘engaging politically in a manner worthy of the Gospel of Christ’. Professor Juel's concise appendix on ‘The Use of Scripture in Congregational Research’, helpfully rounds out the biblical focus of the research team's work, explaining how the CSRT used scripture and what the implications of their approach might be for biblical interpretation.
Essays by two systematicians continue the theological reflection on the congregation's public witness. Gary Simpson asks how congregations in our context can ‘hear again the call to a public vocation’ (p. 67). He argues that civil society is the public space in which that vocation should be practised, that ‘communicative moral practice’ can best evoke the ‘moral possibilities of civil society’ and that the basis for Christian communication in civil society is ‘the Trinitarian doctrine of the crucified God whose freeing agency empowers Christian vocation’ (p. 68). That trinitarian doctrine is expounded in a rapid theological survey which starts with Nicea and Athanasius and then focuses on Luther. Lois Malcolm focuses on ‘discerning the Spirit in congregational studies’, and draws on Karl Rahner and Karl Barth to explore ‘the dialectic of idolatry and profanation’. Her analysis intends to guide congregations that are unavoidably confronted by this dialectic to engage it as a way of discerning ‘God's presence in actual congregational practices’.
Four essays focus upon such actual practices of ‘congregational moral discernment’, calling on a large and generative body of research. In two essays, Pat Taylor Ellison describes very accessibly how to foster new ways of learning in congregations by training them to ‘dwell in the Word’, to ‘listen deeply’ and to engage in ‘faith-based moral conversation’. Her work bears the distinct authority of broad and well-reflected practice. Ronald Duty investigates the use of scripture, Christian imagination, and the ‘testimony of experience’ to deal with challenging conflicts in congregations. The balanced discussion of congregational struggles with human sexuality issues is very germane today!
The readership envisioned by the team includes theological students, their teachers, local pastors and judicatory officials. All would benefit from its methodology, its insights and its challenges. This research could also be enriched by interaction with the significant and rigorous theological reflection on missional congregational practices offered by Newbigin, Barth and Yoder, among others.
