Semper reformanda

By Paul Escamilla

In his novel Midnight Man, David Tomlinson creates a delightful scene in a church service in which a warm and folksy Oklahoma preacher has just ended his sermon and is inviting the congregation to pray. An elderly parishioner named Opal Jefferson has, up until now, been dozing in her seat. (We all know the adage that defines a preacher as someone who talks in other people’s sleep!) The moment the preacher says, “Let us pray,” Opal stirs from her slumber and lets out a resolute “Amen!” The good-natured preacher is quick to respond: “That’s right, Mrs. Jefferson. Amen doesn’t have to mean we’ve reached the end . . . Sometimes it means we’re just getting started.”

In the 1940s Karl Barth, the German theologian, revived a phrase from St. Augustine to describe the process by which the church, in the light of new understandings and contextual realities, must perpetually challenge itself, adjust its doctrines, scrutinize its dogma: Ecclesia semper reformanda est. “The church must always be reformed.” Figure some things out; establish a new path, a new approach, a new set of standards and missional priorities. Then, just as soon as things seem to get situated in our polity and missional understanding, new questions, challenges, and insights emerge, and we are compelled to begin the process all over again.

What is true of the church is surely true of the churched. Self-reflection, self-assessment, and initiating practices and patterns for living faithfully—these are life-long endeavors both for the church we’ve been given to love and serve and for ourselves individually as disciples of the Christ who makes “all things new.” Finish a process of establishing a certain practice and accountability based on a new or revised set of intentions, and it’s time for further reflection toward possible adjustments in our established plan. And then again. Perhaps this is what Thomas Merton meant when he wrote that “the spiritual life is starting over.” His words suggest that a fundamental characteristic of the journey of faith is a sequence of beginnings and “re-beginnings” in a never-ending process of growing in grace, what the Wesleyan tradition calls “sanctification.” The Oklahoma preacher had it right—Amen doesn’t have to mean we’ve reached the end . . . Sometimes it means we’re just getting started.” May it be so.

Grace and peace.