|
THE LIFE OF SMALL GROUP MINISTRIES
By Thandeka
Small Group Ministries work. They grow
congregations, increase pledges, re-energize congregants,
and transform our sense of calling and ministry. Most of us
doing Small Group Ministry have relied on Carl George’s
books to help us organize and make sense of this new model
of ministry. This, however, has presented us with a special
challenge: Carl George, who is the guru of Small Group Ministry
for conservative Christians. George’s theological explanation
of the power of small groups is classically Trinitarian, as
demonstrated in his chapter entitled “You Serve a Power
God” in Nine Keys to Effective Small Group Leadership:
When Christians come together in
the name of the Lord Jesus, there is a special sense of
His presence--a sacrament of sorts in the sense of outward
and visible signs of inward and spiritual graces. . . .
Beautiful expressions of the Holy Spirit also take place
as a person with one set of spiritual gifts interacts with
those who have received other gifts.
Carl George names the three-in-one
power source of small group work for most Christians: God,
the Holy Spirit, and Jesus. This kind of classic Trinitarian
God-talk makes little sense to most Unitarian Universalists
because our liberal theological heritage was born, in part,
from a severe critique of Trinitarian doctrinal claims that
include a universal doctrine of original sin and a salvation
restricted to an elected few. We are liberal religionists
who affirm the inherent dignity, worth, and salvation of all.
As UU congregants and ministers, we
are humanist, Buddhist, atheist, Christian, Jewish, pagan,
eco-feminist, and more. This diversity of religious ideas
and theological claims often makes it difficult to find a
common ground, a place where we might all stand comfortably
as Unitarian Universalists. This challenge is difficult, but
not impossible if we step outside the language of classic,
Christian theological discourse and undertake a social analysis
of group power as a religious phenomenon. We can then affirm
the foundation of our religious experience as the regenerating
power of life itself. This affirmation unites us all as one
religious people who have a diversity of theological perspectives
on the human experience universal salvation. We thus begin
with an explanation of the way in which we work together.
Accordingly, our theoretical task as
Unitarian Universalists begins with the work of Emile Durkheim,
the father of sociology, who undertook this task in The
Elemental Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim believed
that the collective energy of a group generates power in its
individual members. According to Durkheim, the members of
religious groups mistakenly attribute their new enhanced sense
of personal power to a religious totem, icon, or artifact.
Religious sentiment, Durkheim concluded, is thus the overflow
of feelings generated in the individual by the group. Durkheim’s
doesn’t explain the nature and source of the power generated
by the group. Something happens to the individual in a group
that engenders more energy within. But what is it? To answer
this question without recourse to theological discourse, we
need sociology of a higher order. Such a study of human beings
in groups entails a threefold analysis of power.
A threefold analysis of group power
begins with the most basic kind of human power, affect. In
short, affective power. Affective power is embodied
power. It refers to refer to an aspect of a theory discussed
by psychoanalytic theorist Donald Nathanson in his book Pride
and Shame. With Nathanson, I define human affect as the
strictly biological portion of emotion. Affective power
thus refers to the ways in which we, as biological organisms,
become internally aware of the impact of the presence of others
upon us.
Vivid examples of affective power are
at the foundation of our own Universalist heritage, the life
and work of Dr. George de Benneville, an eighteenth-century
advocate of Universal salvation in America. When de Benneville
was twelve years old, for example, he was sent to sea in a
war vessel to learn navigation. When the ship docked at Algiers,
he walked upon the deck to see the sights, and there saw “Moors,”
who brought him refreshments. But when one of them fell and
injured one of his legs, two of his companions kissed the
wound, shed tears upon it, and then turned toward the sun
and cried so loudly that de Benneville grew angry. And so
they explained their behavior to him: They kissed the wound
in order to sympathize with him, shed tears upon it because
the salt in their tears would clean the wound, and turned
to the sun to asks its creator to have compassion upon their
poor brother and heal him.
De Benneville was so moved by their
account that he felt his heart would break and he would die.
His eyes filled with tears, and he condemned himself for his
earlier reaction. He was compelled to cry out, “Are
these men Heathens? No; I confess before God they are Christians,
and I myself a Heathen! Behold the first conviction that the
grace of our Sovereign Good employed: he was pleased to convince
a white person by blacks, one who carried the name of a Christian,
by a Pagan, and who was obliged to confess himself a Heathen.”
De Benneville was initially flooded
with affect. His encounter with the Africans generated a series
of electrochemical changes in his body that led him to anger,
tears, the feeling of dying, and the need to cry out. These
physical experiences brought about an altered state of consciousness,
which de Benneville called a change of heart. His mind did
not transform him; his body did. His tears, pounding heart,
and torrential feelings constituted a revelation that challenged
the racial, class, and religious creeds that were core to
his self-concept. The feelings generated by his body soon
subsided, however, and De Benneville continued the normal
routines of his life, eventually returning to England. One
evening, he went to a ball, where he became overheated and
told his servant to bring a change of linen. As De Benneville
dressed, he fainted, had a vision of himself as a firebrand
burning in hell, and returned to consciousness crying, “I
am damned. ” Stricken with grief and fear, he was visited
repeatedly by the court ministers, who tried to persuade him
that he had not committed any great sins given his station
and rank. But de Benneville was inconsolable, and the ministers
finally gave up, concluding that he must not be one of the
elect but rather one preordained for eternal damnation.
The sorrow of his soul, de Benneville
tells us, was as heavy as death because he had seen that the
root of all his sins and iniquities was within his heart.
Now in extreme agony, he abandoned himself to the mercy of
God, and at that moment he was transfixed. He saw “a
most majestic appearance, whose beauty, brightness, and grandeur
can never be described: [The Savior] looked upon me with grace
and mercy and with a penetrating look of love; the fire of
which so embraced my soul that I loved him in return.”
De Benneville now felt that he had been saved by his “Savior,
Mediator, and Reconciliator,” who had interceded for
him with God. He felt that his sins had been forgiven, and
he was filled with “pure grace.” From that point
on, de Benneville preached universal salvation for all human
beings, a severe heresy. Both Protestants and Catholics divided
humanity into the damned and the saved using the orthodox,
traditional Christian doctrine of sin and salvation. All human
beings, from this orthodox perspective, are born bad and deserve
eternal damnation and punishment in hell.
Branded a heretic, de Benneville fled
first to France, then to Germany and Holland, where he preached
universal salvation for twenty-one years. Persecuted and often
imprisoned for his “heretical” statements, de
Benneville, at age thirty-eight, migrated to America and ended
up in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a German Pietist community.
There he established himself as a physician and devoted the
remaining fifty-four years of his life to preaching the doctrines
of Universal Restoration.
It is important to note here that de
Benneville did not found a church. Rather than create yet
another schism among Christian churches, he wanted to unite
the various Christian sects into small groups that Jacob John
Sessler calls "little churches within the church,"
all of which would be part of the "Invisible Church Universal."
Thus there could be Lutheran, Brethren, and Calvinist groups--all
united by the experience of a change of heart. The link between
them was thus not creedal. It was based on the power of the
body to experience transformation through encounters with
others. Creeds and beliefs were relegated to secondary importance.
What was the source of this power that
transformed de Benneville? He attributed it to Jesus, God,
and the Holy Spirit. But if we look deeper into the story,
we discover that the Trinity is first mentioned in the mental
images and ideas de Benneville experienced after the physical
effects of his revelation. He first saw a light, felt a change
of heart, shed tears, and experienced other bodily feelings.
Only after he had been flooded with feeling did he think about
what these experiences meant in theological terms. Thus, at
this second stage of his experience, he relied upon the theological
language of Christian discourse, slightly changed because
of the altered state of consciousness brought about by his
feelings.
De Benneville’s theological reflections,
in short, were secondary rather than a primary experience
of his actual human engagement with others. As such, his Trinitarian
discourse pertains to the power of human intellect. It is
ideational power, the ability of a human being to translate
what is felt into a doctrinal claim. Psychoanalytic theorist
Donald Nathanson calls this shift from affect to ideas a movement
from human biology to human biography. In short, we find here
the ways in which human affect is interpreted and explained
as a religious claim determined by one’s history of
encounters with others within a social setting. Theology,
as ideational power, is thus always a cultural phenomenon.
It is talk about religious belief as a way of explaining powerful
affective experiences.
Modern liberal religion is born of
this distinction between affective and ideational power. Friedrich
Schleiermacher, a nineteenth-century German Pietist, is called
the father of modern liberal theology because his systematic
analysis of the difference between feeling and thought, affect
and ideas, demonstrated how theological discourse begins as
ideational power that presupposes affective power. Schleiermacher
taught us how to pay attention to human affections, instead
of creeds or scripture, as foundational for theological reflection.
In the Christian Faith he referred to affective power as affections,
stimulations, and agitations. These movements of the body
were the pious affections that presupposed theological ideas
like the term God. In On Religion, Schleiermacher described
the body astir with feelings brought on by human encounter
as the first stage of religious experience. He called it the
“natal hour of everything living in religion.”
Schleiermacher described this experience as
the first mysterious moment that
occurs in every sensory perception. . . ,where sense and
its objects have, as it were, flowed into one another and
become one, before both turn back to their original position--I
know how indescribable it is and how quickly it passes away.
But I wish you were able to hold onto it and also to recognize
it again in the higher and divine religious activity of
the mind. . . . It is as fleeting and transparent as the
first scent with which the dew gently caresses the waking
flowers, as modest and delicate as a maiden’s kiss,
as holy and fruitful as a nuptial embrace; indeed, not like
this, but it is itself all of these. A manifestation, an
event, develops quickly and magically into an image of the
universe.
Schleiermacher thus defined religion
as this experience of encounter in which one is astir with
affect that binds the self to another as a manifestation of
life itself, “a moment of the infinite in the finite.”
As a place of encounter, this moment, for Schleiermacher,
is something living. It is an act of creation, the emergence
of a new relationship. At such times, we are conscious of
our life and all of life as one. This concept of affective
power as the first stage of religious experience makes liberal
theological reflection a secondary event. Its adequacy as
discourse is no longer dependent upon tradition, revelation,
or the Bible. Rather, if human relationship is not the first
reference for theological discourse, then the theological
ideas fail their primary test. Schleiermacher gave us an Affect
Theology. After Schleiermacher, liberal theological ideas
referred to the human experience of relationships that transport
us into the infinite expanse of life itself. The primary stage
of liberal theological reflection became human affection.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Schleiermacher’s
biographer, applied Schleiermacher’s theology of affective
power and ideational power to the human sciences. The first
science of the humanities thus became the science of human
consciousness (affect + ideas). Dilthey’s student, Martin
Buber, developed the science of human consciousness into a
philosophical anthropology. Here we find the articulation
of another kind of power that operates in small group work,
mutual power.
Mutual power is the power of living
relationship as rebirth. Relation is mutual, Buber tells us
in I and Thou. Thus all real living is meeting. It
is mutuality, “the cradle of Real Life.” Genuine
wholeness, Buber argues, “can become visible only by
the contemplation of all of [a human being’s] manifold
nature.” Buber thus developed a philosophical anthropology,
a sociology of human experience as it relates to “other
living creatures, other bearers of consciousness.” We
might say that Buber created a sociology of a higher order,
one that focuses on “living relationship.” Buber
developed the term I-Thou to describe this relationship
as an intuition of mutual relating. As he said in his essay
“The Nature of Man,” “What is peculiarly
characteristic of the human world is above all that something
takes place between one being and another the like of which
can be found no where in nature.” This sphere, as Buber
rightfully notes, is not a concept. Rather it is something
living. So Buber describes rather than tries to define the
place where this living relationship is found. It is found
in “the sphere of ‘between,” the “sphere
that is common to [two human beings] but which reaches out
beyond the special sphere of each.”
This “beyondness” that
is present when two or more persons meet is the sacred ground
of power and transformation that small group ministry reveals.
What is it? It is life itself, the affective power of the
human organism, the ideational power of the human mind to
relate meaning back to the human experience of encounter,
and mutual power, which is the cradle of human renewal. It
is the place where you and I meet as We.
What then, in sum, is our own most
direct answer to the question: Why do small group ministries
transform Unitarian Universalists? Our answer: They regenerate
the power of our bodies to feel the presence of others as
the natal hour of everything living in religion. The source
of this regenerating power is life itself, ever new.
Copyright © Thandeka.
back
to book page
|
featuring our latest books.
· Skinner House Archives