A Challenge for the Laity
To The Editors:
In politics today it is a common practice when an awful scandal erupts for
the media manipulators, who favor the one adversely affected by the scandal,
to emphasize a concurrent natural disaster or human tragedy or scientific
breakthrough in order to take the scandal off the headlines.
Is it possible that the evil spirits would love to see the dire future for the
General Church to be as suggested in the Rev. Willard Heinrichs' pass-fail piece
and Peter Boericke’s wake-up call comments? Are they using the potential
disharmony in the Church of the women-in-the-clergy issue to divert our
attention from facing the real problem?
Is our solution to a problem in the Church less in the clergy and more in
the laity?
I think that over the past six or eight generations the General Church
clergy (even if handicapped by an outdated format) have done a pretty good
job: built churches, schools, libraries, held classes and special services and
other pastoral works, all to accept the “nunc licet” challenge.
Can this “good job” be applied to us, the laity? In the six or eight
generations that we have had the benefit of their work how have we done?
Have we used the tools given us in application to our lives to become “better
people” who may have a chance to reverse the present awful cultural decline
and “save humanity” (which is what the core goal of the New Church is all
about) by our presence and actions? I am afraid that the personal statistics
of newchurchmen/women compared to those of the general public would be
hard put to give more than a qualified “maybe.”
So – what to do?
Those of you who favor women in the clergy – keep on “ keepin’ on’”, but
spend a lot of your energy now joining with the clergy and New Church Life, the
Swedenborg Foundation and other modern communication techniques
figuring out a way to get more and more better people out of New Church
homes with more tools to start saving the world.
Is it perhaps time to update our focus from “nunc licet enterare
intellectualiter in arcana fidei” to include “nunc necesse est arcana fidei in vita
adhibere”?
Ben McQueen
Chattanooga, Tennessee
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