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The POWER of the laity
By Diane Knippers

Last spring, my parish bookstore launched what we call Truro's Great Books program. Each month for one year we are encouraged to read a book that is either a Christian classic or about a monumental Christian leader. I'm about to start a biography of Martin Luther, called appropriately Here I Stand. But during the recent Episcopal General Convention, I was reading a biography of John Chrysostom. Perhaps it goes without saying that I didn't have a lot of time for personal reading during convention. But on several nights I read a page or two about church fights in the fifth century. It was wonderfully bracing and strangely comforting as I was engaged in our own tragic church conflict at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

In light of this controversy, I want to take a brief look at the particular role and responsibility of the laity in the preservation of authentic Christian teaching. Some students of church history will be alarmed at my earlier Chrysostom reference in the context of examining the role of the laity. Let me assure you right now that I will not be advocating riots in the streets, one response of the faithful in fifth century Constantinople!

The first thing I want to emphasize about the laity is that we are the church. One thing of which we laity must repent is our tendency to be cowed by clericalism. Of course we respect our godly leaders, and of course we respect the offices and roles of bishops and priests. But the model that Scripture gives us for the Church of Jesus Christ is not a corporate flow chart or a military chain of command. It is a body. All the members are necessary, all play a role, all are to be honored. And let's face it, we are a very big part of the body.

So, what is our role in preservation of Christian truth?

Have you noticed that you can go almost anywhere in the world, and when you begin talking to Christians, you find that you share basic assumptions about the Christian faith? You worship a Trinitarian God, you know that Jesus is God incarnate, you see the Cross as the pivotal point in history, you share a hope in the resurrection of the Body. How has all of this been preserved, across the centuries and throughout the world? In times like ours, when basic doctrines are being questioned and even contemptuously dismissed, how do we even know what is Christian truth? We have scripture as God's revelation. But how do we interpret scripture with integrity?

One of my mentors in these matters is the theologian and patristics scholar, Thomas Oden. After convention, I reread some sections of his recent new book, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy. Dr. Oden introduced me to the rule of Vincent of Lerins: "Authentic Christian doctrine and teaching is that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone."

Vincent was an obscure, but well-informed and well-traveled monk who lived in the fifth century. Shortly after the third ecumenical council, held in 431 in Ephesus, Vincent withdrew from his travels to a monastery in southern France. There he began to summarize what he had learned about the classic ecumenical method for discerning Christian truth. The rule he discovered and identified is a method of consensual recollection-that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone.

The question Vincent asked in his travels was this: How does the whole church come to distinguish the truth of Christian faith from falsehood amid conflicting opinions? He was astonished to find everywhere the same answer: Scripture, and the central tradition that guards Scripture. But why do we need the tradition, if we have Scripture, he asked. The answer was that all agree that the scriptural canon is authoritative. But what if there are disagreements about what Scripture teaches? So, Oden writes, "Vincent concludes that the trend of the interpretation of the prophetic and apostolic texts must be understood in accordance with some general rule-a rule plausible cross-culturally to the church universal as to what constitutes the mind of the believing church." Everywhere, always, by everyone.

"Everywhere" means worldwide. Authentic Christianity is universal; it inhabits cross-cultural space. Everywhere means we listen to our fellow Christians around the world.

"Always" means from the beginning-faithful to the teaching of the apostles. This apostolic message is recorded in Scripture. Our bishops have a particular duty to preserve the apostolic teaching of the church.

"By everyone" means the consent of the whole body of Christ. That's us-the laity, the people of God. This doesn't mean 100 percent agreement. In fact, it really doesn't mean a majority vote. Because this isn't a legislative process-it is a Spirit-driven process. Indeed, the heart of consent is within the act of worship. When we gather at the altar, we give assent to the apostolic faith.

When innovations are proposed, when the Church is confronted in history with particular challenges and questions, it is substantially the role of the laity to determine whether or not a particular teaching will be received.

Will the actions of the 2003 Episcopal General Convention-voting to confirm Gene Robinson, a self-avowed, practicing homosexual, as a bishop-be understood as a part of the general consensus of the Christian faith? The laity have a responsibility to say, "No. We will not receive this innovation." 

"Those in the office of elder.or pastor.voluntarily offer themselves to obedience to the teaching of general lay consent, ordinarily under the guardianship of the episcopos.," writes Thomas Oden. "Yet regrettably, in recent times, the offices of overseer, elder, and pastor have too frequently been used as a weapon for demeaning and rebuking orthodox teaching. Little will change in this regard until the larger body of laity insists that its highest leaders guard ecumenical teaching."

Some cynics have said that the history of orthodoxy is a history of winners in a game of power politics. Oden soundly refutes this. "The fourth-century Arians lived by collusion with political oppressors. They had plenty of intellectuals and power manipulators on their side, while orthodoxy had to be defended largely by nonscholars and laypeople, by modest men and women of no means, by lowly persons who had no training or special expertise but understood their lives in Christ," he writes. "The power of numbers and votes in those days was clearly on the side of the Arians, who insisted on reinterpreting scriptural texts on the Son of God in a new and diluted sense. In response, God put in his A-team: not scholars, but saints; not elite agents of power, but poor, uneducated, ordinary men-and a great many women-willing to die for their faith."

So, what is God's A-team doing today?

How are we, the laity, saying, "No. We will not receive this innovation?"

We are engaging in acts of disassociation. We are signing statements, we are showing up at diocesan meetings, we are holding prayer vigils, we are writing articles and letters to the editor, we are writing our bishops and the Presiding Bishop. Some have painted out the word Episcopal on their church signs. Some are resigning diocesan and national commissions. One man and his wife posted seven theses on the door of their bishop's cathedral. "Here I Stand." Thousands of us are saying, firmly and strongly, that we will not support ungodly teaching with our time and talents and treasure.

Others are engaging in acts of new association. A professional singer, a tenor in the Army chorus, held a benefit concert last Sunday to aid the work in the Anglican Communion. Local parishes are considering new classes on marriage and human sexuality. Mission teams are being organized and ministries strengthened.

I'm also hearing from laypeople who are beginning to realize what is at stake in terms of church property. They are willing to fight for it, but not sacrifice their faith for it. We do not want valuable resources to be at the disposal of those who have abandoned the faith. But we are willing to sing:

"Let goods and kindred go,
this mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God's truth abideth still,

His kingdom is forever."
Since April, I have been struggling with cancer. Quite naturally, the parallels between my own battle with disease and the church's struggle with an affliction of unfaithfulness have been quite obvious to me. Let me share three of those lessons with you.

Lesson one. In its early stages, the treatment is far more difficult than the disease appears. I didn't even know I had cancer. I felt fine. Minor problems could be easily overlooked. But the treatments are not fun. They are inconvenient, discouraging, humiliating, exhausting, and painful. It's tempting to say, "The disease isn't that bad. Let's abandon the treatment." But without intervention, the disease will kill the body.

Lesson two. We are sustained by prayer. Affliction is a school for Christians. Like a crash course in another language, it is a crash course in spiritual growth. We focus on what really matters. What really matters is Jesus-to love him, to cherish him, to be ready to face him-and to spend eternity with him.

Lesson three. It's a day-by-day journey. Some days the news is good and encouraging and some days it is not. I've had days when I've realized that I've been miraculously touched and days when I've planned my funeral. I don't know what the future looks like. I have to take it a day at a time. I have to be patient-to do the next thing I know to do in prayer and treatments, without knowing how it will all end. I don't know what God has for me-healing here or in heaven. But I know that he is my sovereign Lord and he holds my future in his hands.

Brothers and sisters, we know that he is our sovereign Lord-and he holds our future in his hand.

"Let goods and kindred go,
this mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God's truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever."

Dianne Knippers is the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C. This article is adapted from the address that she presented to the American Anglican Council's "A Place To Stand" Conference in Dallas, Texas, on October 8, 2003.



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