Sunday, June 5th, 2005
Spent five hours yesterday with a group of church leaders coming to terms with a declining membership and the loss of ordained ministry. We used the Jeremiah 29 material throughout the day to work through what it might mean to walk through the transition from denial through to acceptance and adjustment for the future.
As we read through Jeremiah 29 we used two resources:
Four tasks of grief - (based on William Worden’s work in Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy.)
- Face the Loss
- Face the Pain
- Face the Emptiness
- Face the Future
Six Responses to Despair
Walter Brueggemann’s reflections on the exiles’ reality, as in hs book, “Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles“.
1. Grieving for a lost world - the need to develop honest sadness
2. Rootlessness -permission to express hunger for roots
3. Despair � doubting God’s faithfulness & power to save - a resolve to find hope together
4. Profaned Absence - become aware of God’s presence in new environment
5. Moral incongruity - face up to chaos
6. Self-preoccupation - find strategies for shaping the environment
We sang - “Rivers of Babylon” - and we prayed. We mourned. We took another look at the new environment of an increasingly multicultural community. We touched base with the passions for shaping the community that were already there. We considered the exhaustion of singles in their fifties and sixties and considered the options of shared living. Maybe these people could consider engaging with a new form of monastic life that energises people in mission.
At the end of the day a dazed group of despairing church members emerged as a hopeful band of mission agents.
Tags: grief, Jeremiah, Leadership, Spirituality, Theology, Walter Brueggemann, William Worden
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Sunday, May 29th, 2005
I am using Jeremiah’s letter to the Jewish people living in Babylon, found in Jeremiah 29:1-14, to explore the experience of being the church in exile. I have used Jeremiah 29 in worship and study workshops for leaders in a variety of congregational and judicatory settings, along with parallel passages, Psalm 137 and Jeremiah 4:23-26.
I have drawn heavily on insights shared by Walter Brueggemann and Gerald Arbuckle. Both writers link the future of God’s people with the gradual process of moving through stages of grief towards hope and action.
William Bridges material on change and transition reminds leaders that the introduction of any change involves a process of letting go, in-between (neutral) time, and the launching of a new beginning. I have used the framework of grieving tasks, outlined by authors such as William Worden, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and John Westerhoff and echoed by Scott Peck in his study of community formation.
Jeremiah 29 stands alone in the gathered writings and sermons of the Jewish prophet Jeremiah. It is addressed to all those who were deported from Jerusalem to Babylon in 598 BCE. Jehoiachin, son of Josiah, has become the exiled ruler of the Jewish people, while Zedekiah, his brother, remains in Jerusalem. Jeremiah’s role up to this point has been to warn the people about the consequences of their complacent and rigid responses to God’s call for obedience and trust. Jeremiah is now writing to a group who, while experiencing low morale, are likely to be looking for a fresh sense of vision. He has identified this group of exiles as the ones who will take the Jewish faith and culture into future.
Brueggemann has written that visionary leadership is integrally linked with the prophetic phrase, “It could be otherwise”.[1] The prophet Jeremiah believes that no matter how desperate the situation, there is a future. That belief is expressed strongly in his letter to the exiles in Jerusalem. In this letter Jeremiah is able to talk about the past in ways that releases people to live in the present and prepare for the future. If the exiles continue to spend their lives pining for the past, they will either dwindle into an insignificant family-based cult or disappear altogether, subsumed by the Babylonian culture. These people cannot afford to passively wait for the day of their return to the glorious days. The time of mourning is now over - the work of grief has begun. Now is the time to live again, to put roots down in the new context. Jeremiah outlines the practical implications of living as residents of Babylon - and in that context he presents the hope of future generations going home.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Unmasking the Inevitable, From The Other Side Online, 2001 The Other Side, July-August 2001, Vol. 37, No. 4.
Tags: exile, Gerald Arbuckle, grief, Jeremiah, Reading, Theology, Walter Brueggemann
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