Good Marginal Thinking
The heroes of church history began as reflective Christians who doubted
what
everyone else took for granted by Brian McLaren
Your skin color can make you marginal in some settings. Your level of
income or education can do it
in others. Your wor****p style or theological persuasion or political
party can put you at or beyond
the fringe in still others. Being, thinking, looking, or acting
different from the majority can push
you to the margins.
I'd like to speak up on behalf of a group of people in our churches who
feel different pretty often,
and therefore feel marginalized pretty often. Dan Taylor, in The Myth of
Certainty (IVP, 2000),
calls them "reflective Christians." Less sympathetic people call them
doubters.
As nearly all Protestants know, in the 16th century, the Roman Catholic
Church was excited about
issuing indulgences-ways of reducing people's time in purgatory through
religious actions,
especially giving money to the church.
Despite the church's enthusiasm for it, a number of people couldn't help
but question the
"indulgence program." They doubted what the institution held with such
certainty.
Something about it didn't make sense to these reflective Christians. If
they remained silent, they
would feel dishonest and frustrated, but if they raised their questions,
they would be seen with
suspicion-not "team players," you know? Some, like Martin Luther, spoke
up (in the form of 95
theses) and found that reflective Christians of his sort didn't have a
future in the church at that
time.
About a hundred years later, Galileo looked through a telescope one
night and saw moons positioned
like dancers orbiting Jupiter. He realized the church was wrong in
upholding the traditional
worldview it had inherited from Aristotle and Ptolemy.
Unfortunately, when he became a doubter of the party line, he discovered
what Martin Luther did:
reflective Christians weren't welcome in the church at that time.
A similar story could be told about John Wesley, who doubted what
everyone "knew": sacred duties
(like preaching) needed to occur in sacred spaces (like pulpits).
Or we could talk about reflective Christians like Phineas Bresee
(founder of the Nazarenes) who
doubted that poor people should be avoided by respectable Christians, or
Menno Simons (leader among
the Anabaptists) who doubted that Christians should kill other
Christians in Christ's name, or
Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu who doubted that race should be a
factor in fellow****p, or Bill
Hybels or Rick Warren or maybe you.
The heroes we study in church history began as reflective Christians who
doubted what everyone else
took for granted, and as a result, were in almost every case marginalized.
When communities habitually marginalize or exclude their most reflective
members-who ask tough
questions about things that are completely normative for the majority-of
course those who are
stigmatized are wounded.
But so is the community that excludes, because in so doing, it cuts off
resources of growth and
renewal. It builds resistance to exactly what it will soon need.
Which raises an urgent question: Who are the reflective Christians in
your sphere who may feel
they're already on thin ice at the margins, who may be close to being
edged out completely?
What would it take to tell them they are wanted, needed, respected-that
their differentness isn't a
problem to be solved by pressuring them to conform, but that their
questioning is a resource?
Here's a suggestion: listen to them. Try to understand their questions,
frustrations, and fresh
ideas. You don't need to agree with them. Just be attentive, give them
space to be who they are,
even if they think differently from the majority. At times you may need
to stand between them and
their most vocal critics, to defend them from the forces of boundary
maintenance and exclusion.
These forces can be brutal for reflective Christians, but a kind heart
and a listening ear can keep
our reflective Christians within the community, even if at the margins,
not edged out. If every
community eventually needs renewal, and if renewal comes from the
margins-as it nearly always
appears to do-then by amputating our margins, we do what the chief
priests and scribes did when a
needed voice showed up at the margins of their community. Are we
listening?
source: http://lists.christianitytoday.com/t/10023548/4778173/142882/0/
--
Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/
(20,000 articles 4000 humor)
Blogs - http://rowlandsblogs.blogspot.com/
Justice for Dawn Rowan - http://dawnrowansaga.blogspot.com/
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