Ministry to the Competent

After reading Ken Tanner’s Ash Wednesday comments, I was struck by how necessary it is for us to keep the standards of our publishing venture high—to offer the best we can find and do so without apology to the urge to “popularize.” Popularization in the realm of Christian publishing may or may not be difficult, but it is certainly easy to come by. Rare is the well-crafted Christian journal intended for people whose competencies place them high enough in their fields to be suburban commuters to Chicago, and who can recognize similar levels of accomplishment in Christian ministry, including the publishing ministry. This is not snobbery, and I am not speaking of appealing solely to academics, but of the ability to speak to those who by patient effort have brought themselves to the place where the popular journal no longer serves, and who find themselves asking if orthodox Christianity has no meat to offer them.   

People like this are too often confronted in the churches with intelligent heterodoxy—or at least the show of intelligence, for this is how heterodoxy normally presents and justifies itself—or, in conservative congregations, fairly rote, often crude, and consistently unpenetrating orthodoxy.  (Chestertons voice reminds me here that we can’t really call this “orthodoxy.”) I have often wondered what the accomplished businessman, musician, student, physician, tradesman, broker, attorney, or academic thinks when sitting before the preaching and teaching ministries of his church and recognizing, as some of them must, that the vocational servants of the Word in many conservative churches are operating in their own fields on a much lower level than he must in order to stay competitive in his own. Christianity must have organs of encouragement and edification for those who have heeded the masters of their crafts, labored under them to become very good at something, and wish to rise also in the understanding of their faith.

Now having said this, I must also respond to the Apostle who said, “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” I will do so with another apostolic observation, on “our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him has written to you in all his epistles . . . in which there are some things hard to understand. . .” and of whom one sophisticated observer said that much learning had driven him mad.