557 - What's Right With the Church

What's Right With the Church
By William H. Willimon
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1985. 144 pp. $13.95.

William Willimon is a gifted author who not only writes well, but who has something to say. His book on the church is written in a readable, often conversational, style and should be provocative for ministers and laypersons alike. Willimon is not concerned with a theory of the church, but with the concrete reality of the church as he has experienced it: where it is, what it is, and how it is nourished and sustained.

The book offers the reader a commendable argument. One of the most provocative chapters represents the author's attempt to come to terms with how the church can be in but not of the world. He does not sound a retreat from the social and political witness of the church, but he does call the church to rethink what it has to offer the world. Willimon suggests that the primary task of the church is not to be an expert in social policy. This is a task that is often beyond the church's competence to fulfill. The church, its faith and its common life, is social policy. The church best criticizes the world by being the church.

Another strong part of this book is the chapter on preaching. Willimon suggests that few pastoral activities are more difficult and more important for the gathering and upbuilding of the church than preaching. Preaching, more than any other pastoral occasion, requires the minister to put up or shut up, to lay his or her faith on the line, to put the cards face up on the table, or else to pass to someone who has something important to say to people.

Even though the author indicates in advance that the book grows out of his personal experience, there are in excess of 300 references to "I" or "me" in this book, focusing the attention of the reader more on the author at times than on his material. Furthermore, the author loosely quotes numerous theologians (Rahner, Luther, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Niles, Thielicke, Keck, Calvin, Wesley, and Barth) without identifying the sources, making it difficult for the critical reader to assess the validity of the argument.

The most serious deficiency of the book, however, is the lack of a controlling theology. The existence of the church as the context of the divine activity is always a matter of faith, and can never be equated simply with the sociological reality we experience. There is always a tension between the church as the divine initiative and the church as the ambiguous human response to God. Any attempt to assess the particulars of the church as an incarnational reality must be clear as to the nature of revelation, as well as the identity and uniqueness of the one in whom reality was incarnate, or else it will surely fall victim to the error of equating the church with the extension of the Incarnation. The church is not "God among us," as the author suggests (p. 29), but the believing community's witness to God among us. That distinction marks the freedom and the hope of the church and the world.

It is always easier to criticize a book than it is to write one. This is a good book, which will be stimulating and helpful to all who share the author's passion for the integrity of the church.

Wallace M. Alston, Jr.
Nassau Presbyterian Church
Princeton, N.J.