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Message from Nancy Ingelson

Living Faith into the Future

By Nancy Ingelson, learning ministries

In the past few weeks, I’ve listened to some present-day prophets inviting us to look backwards as we grapple with what it means to be the Church for tomorrow. It seems there’s a revival going on when it comes to the thinking of saints like Hildegard of Bingen, Gregory of Nissa, Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard. Now lest you think I’m name-dropping here, except for but a few of the above, I’ve been pretty much in the dark about what these people had to say about faith and the mission of the Church — in their own time.

Until now. Let me introduce you to a prophetic voice for today, who is very much alive and passionate about what she’s finding in mainline congregations (like ours), also very much alive.

Her name is Diana Butler Bass — a woman, spouse, mother, lay theologian, and anthropologist of sorts. Her mission is a call and a clamor to bear God’s name to the world by what we practice as faithful people. As she stands, rather dances, before her listeners, waving her arms and slapping her thighs, you get the sense she’s undergone some kind of an electric jolt. Whatever it is she’s finding in the Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ congregations in her study, it’s pumping her up!

Her work these days is to take these sights and sounds and mysteries on the road. At her stops along the way, to whoever will listen, Bass says things like “talk the walk.” Talk the walk? This means tell others about your encounters with God, and tell them loud and often. This is testimony. Go public with your faith stories and see what happens in your congregation. She says things like “you have to pay attention when you are not entirely sure where you are going,” and “…practice discernment through the rhythm of prayer, silence, conversation, reflection, and more prayer in sensing what God is up to in your life.”

Giving voice to the importance of hospitality, she celebrates the Christian practice of welcoming others like God does, not just others like us, but all people. Radical claims like “justice is spirituality” and “doing justice goes beyond fixing unfair and oppressive structures… to engaging the powers — transforming the ‘inner spirit’ of all systems of injustice, violence, and exclusion.”

Bass ventures that worship “needs to be an experiencing of God, not a reflection about God; that it celebrates the life, teaching, and acts of Jesus, and (changes) the heart.” Reflection is daring to think theologically, that is, from the questioning perspective of who is God and where is God in our insights and awareness.

Are you catching her electric current here? These things are faith practices that carry their own goods. They do their own work and own good thing simply in the engaging of them. By you and by me. They don’t require planning, only intention; they don’t call for strategy, but on-the-spot response to the needs of a hurting world. They show others what faith looks like without judgment or criticism. They change us as they reveal God’s grace.

Diana Butler Bass is a living, thigh-slapping, arm-waving saint who invites all the saints of old into the present. She sachets to the left to make room for Mother Teresa. She sidles to the right to bow low to Martin Luther King, Jr. She looks back over her shoulder to see who’s nudging her from behind. All their voices blending with her own in a chorus of joyful proclamation — living lives that point to the God who gives life! And this takes practice, practice, practice!

Who speaks God’s grace into your ear? What voices do you really listen to? What do these voices look like in practice? When we clear away the clutter, what really matters is what faith prompts us to say and do. Will you whisper into someone’s ear, nudging from behind? Go ahead… Love your neighbor… Try that new idea for the sake of the world… And remember — you don’t do these things alone.

Practicing along with you,

Nancy Ingelson,

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