Mediating Faith

Faith Formation in a Trans-media Era

Clint Schnekloth

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451472295
• eBook ISBN: 9781451479713
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The church struggles with media. Whether it is a denomination negotiating the 24 hour news cycle or a church evaluating how Facebook or online games are influencing the youth group, media is raising questions and placing demands on communities of faith in ways that could not have been imagined just 20 years ago. Thus the importance of understanding media for the church has never been greater.

In Mediating Faith, church leaders of all kinds will find Clint Schnekloth an engaging and insightful guide to this new and sometimes wondrous world. In doing so he offers an evaluation and theological response to the trans-media era that highlights its potential to transform our work and world.

Far from frightening, Schnekloth highlights the opportunities and the riches of this fascinating time.

2

Trans-Media Effects

3

The Procedural Rhetoric of the Catechumenate

A newly baptized catechumen testifying

A new group [at our church] named “Our Lives This Text” was formed in order to help candidates through the progression of baptism and affirmation of baptism. I was going to be baptized, and Tim decided to affirm his baptism during an Easter Vigil ceremony. Support from the “Our Lives This Text” group was extraordinary. Group leaders and sponsors dedicated so much of their time and passion to the candidates. Linda and Stan became sponsors for Tim and me. Every week, the group seemed to grow. New candidates joined the journey and new sponsors committed to them. We shared a meal and discussed the weekly gospel in small groups. Our Sunday evening gatherings were enlightening and motivating. I enjoyed the growth of new friendships. The Easter Vigil sounded beautiful as described by Pastor Clint. I felt proud to be part of it. All candidates were gifted with the Lutheran Study Bible and the Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymnal to assist in their journey. I will always cherish and utilize these gifts of knowledge.

I became extremely nervous during the morning of the Easter Vigil. Tim and I arrived at the church around 6:10 p.m. and waited for more people to turn up for the 6:30 p.m. start time. We waited in the car for a few minutes before walking into the church. We found the commencement bonfire on the opposite side of our entrance. A large group gathered, and as the ceremony began, individuals lit candles from a paschal candle ignited by the bonfire before the procession into the sanctuary. Scriptures to honor and remember our Lord were read. The baptismal ceremony began with babies and children. Three adults were blessed with baptism. My name was called, and I moved toward the baptismal font. As I leaned down, the aroma of the Easter bouquet surrounding the font was welcoming. I was consumed with happiness and faith as the baptismal blessing was given by Pastor Clint while water flowed over my head.

—(http://lutheranconfessions.blogspot.com/2013/04/guest-post-cyndi-maddox-shares-her.html)

This chapter necessitates another brief autobiographical illustration. The story I share here serves as an important example of how the theological worldview one is trained into or imbibes^[1] can be undermined by the technology of the formation process that is seeking to convey that very content. In fact, the content and the form can either mutually contribute to their coherence or incoherence. Messages can be their own kind of formation that modifies how the formative technologies a learner encounters might encounter them in the first place—and vice versa.

The Catechumenate at Phinney Ridge

During the same internship year in which I began to learn to preach extemporaneously, I also had my first exposure to the catechumenate. A neighboring congregation was in its first few years of hosting a catechumenal process.^[2] In fact, Seattle was serving as an incubator for a variety of experiments in reappropriating ancient faith formation practices for the life of the twenty-first-century church. Many emergent churches in Seattle and elsewhere were engaged in various kinds of recovery—not just recovery or revitalization of the church itself, but recovery of historical practices for the contemporary church. The catechumenate is especially well suited for this kind of recovery: it allows nerdy romanticists (I include myself in this category) the ability to do emergent church mission while still endorsing Christendom, because most historical analyses of the catechumenate locate the formation of it at ground zero for the formation of Christendom (fourth-century Christianity). Phinney Ridge is simply one of the more vibrant and enduring examples of this trend.

At about this time, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (hereafter ELCA), the denomination to which Phinney Ridge belongs, published a set of resources for churches to incorporate the catechumenal process into the life of their congregations. This Lutheran resource, modeled on the Rites of Christian Initiation for Adults (hereafter RCIA) of the Roman Catholic Church,^[3] offered practical advice on the foundations of ministry to the newcomer: Bible study, personal prayer, communal worship, and service in daily life. It was an early attempt at describing and implementing an apprenticeship model for adults preparing for baptism or adults returning to the life of faith. During that internship year, I intermittently read the materials Welcome to Christ: An Introduction to the Catechumenate^[4] but regret that I did not go observe the catechumenal process in action at Phinney Ridge. In retrospect, I have come to the realization that this was a mistake I was trained to make, informed as I was at the time by the formation process in which I was currently enrolled (seminary). I assumed all or most learning can come from book learning, and that immersion is not necessary if the topic of study has been encapsulated and captured adequately in book form. Somehow, in spite of seminary including internship, immersion, and clinical components, I failed to digest the obvious lesson that participating in a formation process is considerably different from reading about it.

This was the bias I had at that time, a (now greatly tempered) bias I still carry with me, that books themselves can or should stand in for experience itself as a resource for learning and formation.^[5] I assumed at that time that I could read about the catechumenate rather than participate in a catechumenal process, and that the reading would be roughly equivalent to participation. Although I had an excuse (the congregation in which I was doing the internship had events at the same time, and recent resources on the catechumenate had just been published), I also did not have an excuse. I was on internship, after all, in close proximity to a flagship congregation implementing the catechumenate in a Lutheran context, and internships are designed for experience-based learning. I could have asked for (and would have been granted) time to visit Phinney Ridge.

I admit, however, that some of my reluctance also had to do with the heightened profile our denomination had recently lent to this (in my view) obscure process for faith formation, as well as my presumption that the catechumenate included a spirituality around growth in faith that ran counter to my own (at that time) radical Lutheran spirituality.^[6] I was suspicious of a process that expected people to learn and study over a long period of time before being baptized, when baptism was supposed to be about God’s grace and gifting. In other words, it seemed to me at the time that the technology in place to welcome people to Christ corrupted or undermined an emphasis on grace I supposed to be at the heart of a radical Lutheran theological understanding of the sacrament of baptism. I was, in a nascent and preliminary fashion, beginning to assess the integral relationship between media and message.

The catechumenate as presented at that time (or as I understood it at that time) was also beautifully complicated. It was an entire and all-encompassing program, involving many weeks (often as much as a year) of work, mentors for each catechumen, and a level of investment in a formation process and worship narrative most congregations would find substantial. Like learning to read, formation in faith in this model is assumed to take time, intentionality, and repetition.^[7] Any process that engages the whole person and a whole community in a wholesale realignment of life and faith in preparation for baptism and initiation into the life of the church is, by its very nature, encompassing, and so the idea of beginning such a process in most Lutheran congregations is intimidating, especially when the initial benchmark is identifying adults who have not yet been baptized who are interested in preparing for baptism.^[8]

It further complicated matters that this was also the year when I read Alasdair MacIntyre. The confluence of my reading habits and the experiential learning of my internship context resulted in a kind of practical and theological “schizophrenia” from which I am still recovering. Some of that schizophrenia is exhibited in how this book is proceeding. To oversimplify, MacIntyre, in a series of seminal books (After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry), argues that all forms of virtue or ethical life are situated within specific traditions and are shaped by the habits. “Moral goods” arise within a community of practice.^[9] This understanding of the embeddedness of moral goods within a place of traditioned communal practices is quite different from other rival understandings of the location of ethics, such as a deontological approach that emphasizes moral obligations or a utilitarian approach that emphasizes the consequences of actions. MacIntyre’s understanding of action and practices arises out of his deeper philosophical notion that who we are is shaped by where we come from. He writes, “What I am therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present.”^[10]

Although much of the catechumenal process as designed and implemented predates twentieth century reflection on virtue ethics, it is likely influenced by an Aristotelian worldview, and so it is not surprising that the approach taken to faith formation in this early period in the church’s life is modeled after and informed by an understanding of moral formation that assumes a community of practice as integral for formation of individuals. This stands, unfortunately, in contradistinction to the habits of the North American Lutheran community. Lutherans emphasize life together as the body of Christ, but much of our faith formation curriculum is premised on culturally popular notions of the autonomous status of the individual. Furthermore, the radical Lutheran theology I was imbibing while on internship and at seminary emphasized the dangers of all forms of religion or moral habits that imply climbing a ladder toward God. Radical Lutheran theologians are quite skeptical of methodologies that purport to guarantee formation, transformation, sanctification, and growth in grace, because each (at least from the perspective of strict radical Lutherans) disregards a core slogan of Lutheran theology: simul iustus et peccator.^[11]

The irony of such claims is readily apparent, for in order to come to a solidly radical Lutheran position, one must be formed and trained in such a position. I regret that the tension between these two theological motifs kept my participation in the catechumenal process at Phinney Ridge at “second-hand,” but blame no one but myself for going the “bookish” rather than the immersive route.^[12] Perhaps this book is simply one long exercise in making up for that early failure.

In spite of the fact that I never did visit or participate in a catechumenal process at Phinney Ridge that year, somehow consideration of processes like the catechumenate have remained germane to my thinking. I regularly analyze to what extent the core practices of the church where I currently serve as pastor form people in faith, noting the failures and celebrating the successes of diverse practices and approaches. I have read deeply in the history and development of the catechumenate, always keeping the proper tensions in mind. Perhaps I can most succinctly indicate my habitus by saying that, as much as I believe that we can grow in faith, hope, and love, this work accomplished by the Holy Spirit is always simultaneously masked by the continuing persistence of sin. I will attempt to keep this healthy skepticism front and center in what follows. As interesting as formative practices are, they do not guarantee everything, and even the most formed among us still fall into sin so frequently and in so many ways often unknown to us that to elevate what has been accomplished through formation beyond a proper level will be circumspect. All of that said, faith really is formed. Brains and hearts are changed. It is simply important to keep the very real eschatological tensions of what one is studying in mind as one studies them and remember that abusus non tollit usus (“the abuse does not disallow the proper use”). Just because certain approaches to faith formation can be misconstrued into various types of overrealized eschatology, this does not mean that every approach does so.

Two steps are necessar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Mediating Faith
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Emerging Media Contexts and Minority Reports
• Trans-Media Effects
• Inspired Mediation
• Summary and Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index