Who is the Church Paperback – May 1, 2013

Who is the Church? An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century written by Cheryl M. Peterson is a neatly packed manuscript where she curates the reader through the nuances of what could be causing church decline. It is also important to note the book was from her 2004 Dissertation entitled, “The Question of the Church in North America Lutheranism,” this fact helps one understand her lens. The book has a well-developed introduction, and I caution the reader not to get stuck there with the assumption that it sums up the book. The six chapters that follow weave together a tight-knit tapestry of well thought out assumptions to church decline. The history of American mainline Protestant ecclesiology, the emerging and significance of missional ecclesiology, and narrative analysis serve as the foundation of this work.Ultimately, Peterson proposes an “ecclesiology from below” that begins with the Holy Spirit’s agency in the movement of God’s economy known as the Missio Dei, as she states in the introduction. Peterson’s central claim is that the church finds its identity in the Holy Spirit’s activity.As a pastor intimately interwoven in the practice and conversation of understanding the Church's identity reading the book, I found this work to be timely. I was most captivated and intrigued with chapter six of the book, starting with the spirit and me Spirit-breathed Church. It examined the idea of returning to the "Story of the Church," which begins with the spirit. The imagery used from John 20, where Jesus sends out the disciples for ministry, but He first breathed into the Holy Spirit. It took into account the Church's narrative through the lens of the Apostles Creed and Martin Luther's small and Large Catechisms. The Attributes of the Spirit-Breathed Church in the Nicene Creed introduce what Petterson calls the "masks of the church." The analysis of the masks: one, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic served as a thread to aid to further the conversation and to apply constructive ideas in discovering the Church's identity amidst the times we live.

Comprehensive chapters; well written and documented. It offers a proposal which needs to be considered. Certainly not only a conversational piece but also a challenging one.

This latest volume by Cheryl Peterson is a bold venture away from the familiar "Second Article" tendencies of Reformation Christians such as myself. She suggests that the Third Article of the Creeds (the Holy Spirit) is a resource yet to be discovered and "mined" by traditional or mainline churches. She seems unafraid to embark upon this task, as she invites readers to do the same. Discontented with the American Neo-Pentecostal version of the Holy Spirit, Peterson begins charting into new directions in her project. This book did grab my attention and I do look forward to future volumes.

She’s......... fine at writing. She’s mildly accurate, historically speaking. It’s mostly a synthesis of others’ writing.

Very informative.

Last weekend at synod assembly you were discussing the decline of Protestantism in America. On Facebook your theology-nerd friend was proclaiming, once again, the Barthian notion that the church is a Word-Event. Meanwhile, your child moves home from college with a book on communio-ecclesiology, and says the source and norm of church is the Eucharist.Then Brian McLaren comes and knocks on your door and wants to talk about emergent Christianity. That night, you go to an art exhibit and Alan Hirsch is there discussing the missional church. Some Pentecostals walk in and start singing in tongues.Okay, so this never happened in reality. But if you are paying attention to reflections on ecclesiology (theologies of 'the church') then in all likelihood you've had at least some exposure to almost every single one of these streams.So which is it? Is the church a word-event, or communion, or missional, or emergent, in decline, or what?Here's where Cheryl M. Peterson's recent work, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0800698819/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0800698819&linkCode=as2&tag=lutherconfes-20">Who Is the Church?: An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-first Century</a>, gets to work. In four laconic chapters, Peterson walks the reader through Protestant decline, neo-orthodox Word-Event ecclesiology, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox inflected communio-ecclesiology, and missional/emergent theologies of the 21st century.Many readers will not find anything especially new hear, but the one thing that will be new is itself worth the time. Peterson ably lays each of these ecclesiologies side-by-side in lucid detail. The early part of her book is analysis, after all, rather than innovation.So first, Peterson wants us to stop dreaming Christendom dreams. Many if not most people are no longer looking to the church for the kinds of volunteer and community resources they did in the last century. There are many contexts to volunteer and build community in the 21st century. The church is just one. To stop dreaming such dreams, the church needs to discover once again what it is for, and who it is.One faithful push in this direction is an approach to church as Word-Event. Informed by theologies of Barth and Forde, this ecclesiology sees the church as in a sense "created" by the proclamation of the gospel. This places emphasis on the God who acts, and centers the church in the Word. Peterson's primary concern with this model (a model she views primarily positively, it should be added) is that it focuses on the Spirit's work of gathering the church rather than sending the church.Vatican II, especially in the work of Yves Congar, centered much of the global conversation on ecclesiology in communion ecclesiology. Here there is a quest for the unity of the church, grounded in God's communion as Trinity, and our communion with God in the Eucharist. Engaging the work of Robert Jenson and Phil Butin (my neighbor here in Fayetteville!), Peterson notes how communio-ecclesiology both centers and de-centers the church. "The gracious privilege of participating in the koinonia of God's trinitarian life cannot be possessed or kept by the church" (Phil Butin, 76).Which leads us to the missional/emergent tradition currently shaping much of present-day ecclesiological conversation in North America. Engaging especially the work of Craig van Gelder and Darrel Guder, Peterson argues that Van Gelder's Spirit-led ecclesiology offers sufficient critique to the Guder emphasis on the missio Dei in that it notes that the missio Dei begins with the Spirit.--In the last two chapters, Peterson offers her constructive argument. Drawing on "Pentecostal" insights, Peterson begins with a narrative method, allowing the story in Acts and the creeds itself to narrate a pneumatologically informed ecclesiology.Building off of George Lindbeck's Israel-like ecclesiology, and taking this "interfaith" and ecumenical approach with full sincerity, Peterson proposes that the church "receives its particular identity and purpose through the Holy Spirit, which in the Acts narrative is promised by Jesus after his resurrection and received at Pentecost" (105).From Acts, Peterson takes her cue, and proposes three roles for the Holy Spirit in relation to the church:1) The Spirit is mission director, guiding and directing the church's witness by giving prophetic speech to various leaders in the church, who are described as being 'filled with the Spirit' in order to witness to Jesus.2) The Spirit as 'verifying cause' by which certain groups are incorporated into God's eschatological people.3) The Spirit as supervisor and sustainer of those in Christian community or koinonia.After a brief chapter illustrating how the ecumenical creeds teach us to develop our ecclesiology "starting with the Spirit," Peterson offers an epilogue, a vision for revival. This is quite different from a "plan for survival" (another type of ecclesiology Peterson warns readers away from in her first chapter). For Peterson, a Spirit-breathed church will reflect the experience of new life that the Holy Spirit brings in and through us.Peterson's book is a great starter book on a pneumatologically-informed ecclesiology. I look forward to her next book, which I hope will be an even more in-depth constructive theology of the church that starts in the Spirit.

The focus on the church as the work of the Holy Spirit within a life in the Trinity, and the approach from a missional narative contributes fo the new insights in this book. This is done within a deep yet novel approach of confessions of faith. An important contribution.

Very difficult to understand.