faithasawayoflife: I'm Started on the Faith as a Way of Life Book!

I've been working towards a book on faith as a way of life for the last few months as our national working group has finished its regular meetings. Now I'm moving into writing and will be posting here as I move along. I'm hoping to find some dialog partners out there who'll help me write at the edges of my ability, pressing me to say as well as possible the good thing this book needs to say. Of course, the inspiring pastors and lay-people who were part of the national working group will be good conversation partners, but they are implicated already! It would be nice to have fresh perspectives, as well. So if you are moved to engage, please do! At this point, I'm especially interested in seeing other books on pastoral leadership that have similar themes.

Here is a sketch of the ideas driving the book, as well as a table of contents. We're planning on a mirror format on our website with lots of usable and practical materials for congregations to grab.

Forthcoming from Eerdmans, 2007 (title tentative, and responses welcome)

Gathered to be Scattered:
A New Vision of Pastoral Leadership For Faith As A Way Of Life

Christian Scharen
Foreword By Miroslav Volf

Summary:

Pastoral excellence centers on the ability to shape persons and communities for living faith as a way of life. There are two immediate problems in doing this, however. The first is that many pastors struggle to grasp faith as a whole and to have it ‘at hand’ as a coherent vision of a way of life. As a consequence, pastors often revert to other powerful languages for orienting their work but covered with a veneer of faith language. The interpersonal emotion-driven therapeutic mode and the organizational results-driven managerial mode are especially powerful for pastoral leaders and the congregations they serve. Tending to feelings and effective results are often highly rewarded skills among clergy yet when they dominate, faith becomes a weak sibling, doing little of the work as a community lives in daily life.

The second problem is that the spheres of modern life have a semi-independence, each operating according to its own logic and values. Because we each live in and through them all, we internalize the value-conflicts between them and too easily fall into a pattern of compartmentalization. Faith has its own tidy sphere on Sundays and in my soul; but work, family, politics, school, & the arts are disconnected from faith. While love of neighbor may rule my soul, love of a bargain rules my shopping, love of power to effect my interest rules my politics, and so on.

These two worries combine to form a scenario where pastors focus on the church as gathering, offering effective management and empathetic presence within that gathered community shorn from a lively sense of its purpose in gathering: the empowering and equipping to be scattered out into the world as salt and light and yeast, transforming the world just as we have begun to be transformed by the Spirit of Christ that lives in us.

As an antidote, the book examines successive spheres of life such as family, work, politics, and the arts. For each sphere we describe the problems and prospects of congregational leadership for living out a faith that matters. As we move through these spheres, which we often experience as fragmented pieces of our lives, we practice thinking theologically. This is, we believe, crucial to a full understanding of pastoral excellence. By encouraging the practical skill of thinking theologically about everyday matters, we intend to aid pastors (and those to whom they minister) in finding a way faithfully in the world.

The book concludes with a vision of the congregation as a busy intersection, a nexus of lives that touch every part of society, but in this one place find space for incorporation into and rehearsal of another way to live where faith in Jesus Christ rules all in all.

Contents

Forward: Gathered and Scattered 10

1. Introduction: Living Faith? 15

2. Marriage and the Family 15

3. Work and the Economy 15

4. Citizenship and Government 15

5. Leisure and the Arts 15

6. School and Education 15

7. Church Gathered and Scattered 15

Total Pages: 115+notes