MAJOR ARTICLES (Copies of this issue are $7.50, which includees S & H. E-mail the Administrative VP or the Editor. The entire issue is available in over 60 seminary libraries which subscribe to the journal.)
Using Archetypal Analysis to Explain and Counter Organization Conflict. by Dr. C. Jeff Woods, APC. When either left alone to pursue their natural course, or in some cases when prodded with appropriate facilitation nutrients, most conflicts will strengthen an organization. It is through conflict that we discover one another's preferences, strengths, values, attitudes, and expectations. Yet, some conflicts extend beyond their natural state and must be attended to with the goal of lessening the impact of the conflict. Typically, the decision point for this type of intervention is when the conflict has shifted from a discussion of the issue to a battling of the personalities. Woods describes using archetypes to understand motivations. Out of the 12 patterns as identified by Carol Pearson, the warrior, the destroyer, the ruler, and the orphan are more likely to drive individuals into conflicted situations. This article can be the basis for one or more case studies involving clergy in congregations. An extensive bibliograph is part of this article. C. Jeff Woods, APC, is Associate General Minister for the American Baptist Churches.
What Makes for Healthy Clergy, by Rev. Kent Siladi, is based on his presentation to the 2009 APC Annual Conference in February in Orlando, FL. The author presents three clergy/congregation situations each of which are an amalgam of some of his experiences as an ordained United Church of Christ pastor for 28 years. Raising the question of "self-care," he quotes from the Feb. 12th edition of Call and Response: "Ultimately, the notion of self-care does not work because we don't have in us what is required. Self-care is the Band-Aid we put on spiritual exhaustion, dark nights of the soul, and the disappointment of consecutive losing seasons in a long ministry. . . . We take a spiritual problem that affects a community and give it an individualistic and therapeutic answer." Each of these three situation would make for a colleague group case study. Rev. Siladi is Conference Minister fo the United Church of Christ in Florida.
The Church that Nurtures Us to Return to Our World, by Celia Allison Hahn. Most seminaries have taught pastors little or nothing about guiding people spiritually. . . . Although people volunteered to serve on their church boards hoping to enhance their spiritual growth, at their term's end they often went away disappointed because they had experienced only a secular "Roberts Rules of Order" mentality. A church can engage in changing the world through nurturing laity. How many people I have heard say, "The hour of church is the one hour where I can just be!" As one worshiper put it, "I go to church to be patted back into shape." Others say, "I've been upheld by the everlasting arms" in Sunday worship, and then sent back to the world "equipped for the battles of life." Celia Allison Hahn is the Alban Institute's former editor-in-chief as well as the director of the Institute's Congregatiional Spirituality Project.
Talking With the Deafened Preacher, an Interview With Rev. Lawton W. Posey, FAPC. While a young pastor, Rev. Posey discovered his increasingly significant hearing loss. This interview is about his and his congregations' coping with his hearing loss. "It is a serious deprivation. It is largely an invisible handicap." With increasing hearing loss among pastors and parishioners due to greater ambient noise levels and people living longer, this article would be helpful to such people and to a congregation dealing with pastor and parishioners suffering from hearing loss. NOTE: The author has recently received a cochlear implant. It is too soon to report on its success. Rev. Posey, FAPC, is a retired Presbyterian pastor living in Charleston, WV.
BOOK REVIEWS, abbrevited from the journal, Sharing the Practice. (Copies of this issue are $7.50, which includees S & H. E-mail the Administrative VP or the Editor. The entire issue is available in over 60 seminary libraries which subscribe to the journal.)
A NEW CLIMATE FOR THEOLOGY: God, the World and Global Warming, by Sallie McFague. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. 198 pp. For Sallie McFague, the human impulse to consume lies at the heart of our global climate crisis. This book follows her earlier work entitled Life Abundant (Fortress, 2001). Here McFague reminds readers that when it comes to climate change, how we think about God and the world really matters. Our unconscious and implicit theologies control our actions and decisions. They justify our personal and political actions. The book's Part Two outlines components of an ecological systematic theology. The author's anthropology moves readers away from an individualistic, mechanistic model, towards a community model. Dr. McFague now serves as the Distinguished Theologian in Residence at Vancouver School of Theology after retiring from Vanderbilt Divinity School. Matthew Braddock , APC, United Church of Christ, Trumbull, CT.
THINKING THEOLOGICALLY: The Preacher as Theologian, by Ronald J. Allen. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. 95 pp. This widely published author in homiletics provides ministers a helpful resource in determining one's own theological tradition among the many options present today. After a historical review of preaching, Allen briefly but thoroughly examines eleven major theological perspectives to help the preacher determine one's own understanding of the Bible, authority, the unique characteristics of sermons preached from that stance and what may be the strengths or weaknesses of that approach. The Luke 7:11-17 text (The Window's Son at Nain) is used throughout the study in all the preachign traditions - most helpful in seeing how disciplines can vary and interpretations differ. Dr. Allen is the Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Praching and New Testament at Christian Theological seminary in Indianapolis.. William Powell Tuck, FAPC, Baptist, Ralaeigh, NC.
LIGHT FROM THE EAST: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, by Alexei V. Nesteruk. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. 287 pp. The intricacy and depth of Nesteruk's presentation is amazing. If one seeks to know what the thinking of the Greek Fathers of the Church was like, read this book and be prpared for an engrossing and, for the revieweer, difficult read. Yet the reviewer highly recommends is as the best he has eveer read about the cosmological thinking of those early Christian centures, linked to modern terminology. For instance, Chapter 4 illucidates the understanding of the transcendence and immanence in the logoi of created things. Dr. Nesteruk is Lecturer at the University of Porstmouth, Great Britian, and Visiting Professor of St. Andrews Theological College, Moscow, Russia. R. E. Langford, Jr., FAPC, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Charleston, MD.
THE AUDACITY OF FAITH: Christian Leaders Reflect on the Election of Barack Obama, edited by Marvin A. McMickle. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 2009. 169 pp. The editor garnered 33 different perspectives on the nation's multi-faceted president who is in a unique position of being viewed from many angles, like a jewel. The book does this. In five sections (1 - My Soul Looks Back and Wonders How We Got Over; 2 - Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr.; 3 - Prophetic Rumblings for President Barack Obama; 4 - Barack Obama and Post-Racial America; and 5 - Biblical and Theological Perspectives. Contributors come from "church" people, so none are "political" people. Especially interesting is William Willimon's essay on "Preacher-Prophet Obama" and how our new president fits and doesn't fit our understanding of what a prophet is and does. Editor McMickle is passtor of Antiioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, OH, and also professor of Homelitics at Ashland Theological Seminary. Forrest Fitzhugh, FAPC, Book Review Editor, Presbyterian Church (USA), San Antonio, TX
GOOD MOURNING: Getting Through Your Grief, by Allan Hugh Cole, Jr. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 102 pp. In prose form, the author has written a comprehensive handbook on grief and mourning. He makes a helpful distinction between the two, advancing the understanding that Granger WEstberg initiated in his best-selling book Good Grief (republished in 1997). Despite the book's title, "Grief describes how we respond to loss, inclluding how we feel, think and behave. Mourning refers to the process whereby we loosen the emotonal attachment (bons) to a loss, relocate the loss inour emotional life, and create emotional space fdor investinganeew in relationships and other aspects of living. There is a lot of overlap between grief and mourning." The book is written directly to the peerson who is suffering any kind of loss, not just through death. This is one of its strengths. The book may be seen as a self-guided tour or journey for those who grieve and mourn. A thorough book on the subject. Allan Hugh Cole, Jr., is Nancy Taylor Williamson Associate Professor of Pastoral Care at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Paul Binder, APC, United Church of Christ, Sarasota, FL.
THE BLUE PARAKEET: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, by Scot McKnight. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing Co., 2008. 236 pp. The author uses "blue parakeets" as a metaphor for those biblical passages and concepts that stick out and create ackward moments for people of faith. The primary question he raises is the way one picks and chooses - or "adapts and adopts" biblical texts. Analyzing three traditional methodologies of interpretation, two of which are problematic and the third with its own set of problems, he wants to abandon a legalistic approach and suggests a relational approach. This book expands and supports this in a manner maybe more oriented toward conservative Christians, but valuable to all Christians. Dr. McKnight is a New Testament scholor and Karl S. Olsson Professor of Religious Studies at North Park University. Robert D. Cornwall, APC, Editor of Sharing the Practice, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Troy MI.
GOD DOES NOT . . . entertain, play "matchmaker," hurry, demand blood, cure every illness, edited by D. Brent Laytham. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009. 160 pp. Consisting of six essays, written by seven Duke Divinity School Ph.D.s whose religious links range from Catholic to United Methddist, the book challenges misconceptions and misunderstandings about the nature and work of God. The focus is on God's activities, rather than God's identity,although the concluding essay speaks to the Trinitarian nature of God. This is the sort of book a pastor could hand to a thoughtful layperson, or a study book for a youth or adult study group. Laytham is Associate Professor of Theolog and Ethics at North Park Theological Seminary. Robert D. Cornwall, APC, Editor of Sharing the Practice, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Troy MI.
AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD: A Geography of Faith, by Barbara Brown Taylor. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009, 209pp. Taylor here reflects on spiritual life for the "religious" and the "spiritual, but not religious" alike. "What is saving my life now is the conviction there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth." That is, one's life, even the mundane, is meant to connect with the numinous "More" for which the religious and "the spiritual, but not relligious" alike hunger. While writing out of a Christian background, this is a helpful book for persons of all faiths. The author offers clergy another path to those consumed in institutional activities. Taylor teaches Religion at Piedmont College in rural NE George and is an adjunct professor of Spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary. Jerrod H. Hugenot, First Baptist Church (ABC/USA), Bennington, VT.
SURPRISED BY HHOPE: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, by N. T. Wright. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008. 295 pp. (The Academy of Parish Clergy's "Book of the Year" for 2009). Two questions shape this book. "First, it is about the ultimate future hope held out in the Christian gospel: the hope . . . for salvation, resurrection, and eternal life, and the cluster of other things that go with them. Second, it is about the discovery of hope within the present world." In the first, the claim is that our future hope is in the present world - on the resurrection rather than a flight to a heaven that is beyond this world. The second is that God is positive about thie world. There is a third theme - the signs of the New Creation are to be found in social justice and beauty. In conclusion, salvation is for the entire cosmos, not just for individuals. Wright is Anglican Bishop of Durham, Great Britian, and one of the best known biblical scholars in the world. Arland O. Fiske, FAPC, Evangelical Lutheran Church in American, Moorhead, MN.
ORIGINAL SIN: A Cultural History, by Alan Jacobs. San Francisco: HarperOne Publishers, 2008. 286 pp. (One of the Academy of Parish Clergy's "Top Ten Books of the Year" for 2009). Jacobs explores both the repulsiveness and the explanatory power of this "single strange idea." This is not a book of theology, though much theology is found here. Rather, it is an exemplary history of original sin through extended narrative case studies reflecting aspects of culture, "from poetry to movies, from psychoanalysis to the rearing of children . . . all aspects of culture upon which theology impinges." The author is a dynamic story teller as he moves from the ancient to the modern. A well-written, light in mood, and stimulating read while dealing with what could be a heavy and dense topic. Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College and the second of his "Top Ten Books" (2005 - The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis) chosen by the Academy. David Nash, FAPC, Presbyterian Church (USA), Asheville, NC.