Archbishop and Missionary

There is an inherent tension in the life of the Church, and it is very much one in which we live today.  It is the tension of stability and change, of being settled and being a traveler, of safety and adventure.  It is this, the tension between safety and adventure, with which I am most concerned.  Ministry can, if one is not careful, be more about being stable and settled than about change, traveling, and adventure.  Mission is the counterbalance.  Being a missionary is inherently about change, traveling, and adventure.

I refer you to a medieval saint of the Church, Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg and Missionary to Denmark and Sweden.  This tension between safety and adventure played out in Anskar’s life in an interesting way.  In the course of his ministry, in 845, the Danes sacked Hamburg, rendering Anskar’s nascent archdiocese unviable, thus leaving Anskar without a base and, more importantly, without revenue for his work.  Here is where it gets interesting.

In order to solve this problem, the king decided to combine the more prosperous district around Bremen with the now ransacked diocese of Hamburg.  It was a sensible solution except it did not make the Bishop of Cologne, whose diocese had included the wealthy town of Bremen up to that point, happy.  It was no small controversy in Anskar’s day, and it finally required the intervention of the Pope himself to resolve.  My guess is that the Bishop of Cologne got a cash settlement from someone.

Now, here’s my point.  Archbishop and missionary.  The reason they do not go together without tension is that one can be very much about vested interests and the other is always about upsetting vested interests.  Fundamentally, the missionary effort is about upsetting vested interests.  It is about upsetting vested interests in a distant place by the proclamation of the Gospel.  Even more importantly, it is about upsetting those vested interests within ourselves by living it.

The fact that vested interests resist the missionary imperative of the Gospel was not new in Anskar’s day, and it is not new in our own.  It has always been so.  But that being the case, we must not let it be the last word.  We must, like Anskar, be willing to, indeed insistent upon, upsetting the vested interests in the service of the Gospel.  Here is the difficulty.  The Gospel and the Church are not synonyms.  The Church is full of vested interests that prefer safety.  That’s the archbishop part of Anskar.  Not so the Gospel, which prefers adventure.  That’s the missionary part.  And it’s why salvation is in the Gospel, even more than it is in the Church.

 Peace,

+Stacy