Cultivating Gardens of Well-being in the Desert of Exile

Adaptive Ecclesiology - Part Two

“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Jeremiah 29:5-7 NRSVUE (italics mine)

In Gardens in the Desert, Bishop Carter and I suggest that contextual awareness and diagnosis are key competencies within adaptive ecclesiology. The adaptive approach helps us recognize that the church is not a monolithic entity but a living, breathing organism embedded within specific cultural, social, and geographical contexts.

German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas expanded upon the concept of “lifeworld” first conceived by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. For Habermas, lifeworlds include the conceptual background, the assumptions, the linguistic fields, and the social imaginaries that people inhabit as a living space, which contain assumed structures of meaning that are largely unconscious. They serve as the basis of any efforts at communication and cooperative activities. These lifeworlds are the ways people imagine their social existence, how they relate to each other, including normal expectations.^[1]

Enter the lifeworld of the prophet Jeremiah. The Babylonian captivity refers to a period in Jewish history during which a large number of Judeans were forcibly relocated to Babylonia by the Neo-Babylonian Empire (598 - 538 BCE). The prophet Jeremiah is one voice speaking from this milieu, and his wisdom echoes down the halls of history to us now.

While many prophets are soothsaying, assuring the people it will all be over soon, Jeremiah’s message is different. He instructs the people to dig in, start families, plant gardens, and prepare for the long haul. He instructs the people to embrace the new lifeworld where they find themselves, and “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer 29:5-7).

Jeremiah, prophet and sociologist, is offering a “social diagnosis” which helps the people recognize the interplay between larger social structures and individual or community illness manifestations. From within this diagnoses, he encourages a people in exile to seek the well-being and flourishing of their new neighbors—to be a people who embody the compassion of YHWH.

We could translate the heart of Jeremiah’s instructions and how they might inform our situation today in the following way:

1. Adopt a posture of permanence: build houses and live in them. In Jeremiah’s context, this was about not trying to run off to Egypt or anticipate returning to Israel anytime soon. It was a call to embrace the new lifeworld of exile. For us, this is about learning new ways to do life with the people, neighborhoods, and networks where we dwell. Our lifeworld has changed, and we must learn how to adapt.

2. Plant green spaces and eat. For Jeremiah, this was about settling in. Utilizing the land. Embracing the new ecosystem as home. But also, it’s about experimenting with planting new kinds of gardens in new soils. For us, cultivating green spaces is about finding ways to form incarnational community with the natives. To see mission as ever-widening circles of all-inclusive love. It takes on a short-term, experimental approach to life. Let’s plant new things, share our recipes, and eat our own cooking.

3. Establish families among the people. Essentially, many people in the Babylonian captivity would never return to their homeland. Jeremiah encourages them to start families and multiply in the reality of exile. This would require more than surface level interaction with their captors; they would need to work, form partnerships, and flourish in these conditions. Churches can slip into a mindset of presentism and exclusivism. We neglect the calling to pass our faith onto emerging generations. It becomes all about our preferences. We can also function as a closed system with no interaction with the larger community. This is a call to enter the lifeworld of the other as humble learners and embrace a posture of vulnerability and interdependence. It’s a commitment to think generatively.

4. Seek the well-being of the other = the city where you are. This is breaking away from the lex talionis—the law of “measure for measure; an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-tooth” kind of thinking (Exodus 21:24). This is moving toward a “love your enemy and bless those who persecute you” kind of posture. Jeremiah is encouraging prosocial behaviors that cultivate the common good. It’s hard to imagine the experience of watching foreign invaders destroy our sacred spaces and parade us as captives out of our homeland as trophies of war, but this is exactly what happened to Israel. James Cone, widely considered the father of Black liberation theology, demonstrates that the Black diasporic experience through four hundred terrible years of the transatlantic slave trade is a kind of captivity and exile that persists to this day.^[2] For an exile of biblical proportions, inhabitants in the United States need to look no further than their own blood-soaked backyards.

   
   So today, to use the term “exile” to describe the state of most Christians lacks sociohistorical sensitivity. Christians in the West are not in that kind of a hostile takeover, and yet the church has certainly found itself in a kind of exile of irrelevance and decline. Thus, George Lings suggests that the analogy of exile is helpful for the Western church, in the sense that we have moved from a culture where being a Christian was either expected or tolerated, to a culture that is now largely indifferent or hostile.^[3] Some of this is the result of the church’s self-inflicted wounds, and the harm we have done to one another. Thus, we find ourselves in a new space. We must go beyond our attractional Christendom mentality of imagining that “they will come to us.” We must genuinely find ways to inhabit our communities and seek the well-being of the entire ecosystem, not just our church habitat. We must ask the questions, Who is my other? and How can I be with them? As Margaret Wheatley suggests, we who seek the well-being of the people are likened to little “islands of sanity” and healing in a sea of trauma.^[4]

5. Disregard the dominant nostalgia. It is deception. Jeremiah’s greatest opponents came from within his own religious and political system. He had to oppose the priests of his day and the institutional big guns who were giving a sugarcoated prosperity narrative about the way things were: “Listen, Hananiah! the Lord has not sent you, and you made this people trust in a lie” (Jer 28:13-15). The religious leaders were essentially saying, “Everything will be just fine; we will be going home real soon!” Jeremiah’s bold counternarrative was “No! This is home now.” 

As he listens to God’s voice, Jeremiah’s courage leads him to an alternative diagnosis. Modern day prophets in the school of Jeremiah help us to name our affinity for nostalgia; if we keep doing what we have always done, surely the people will return to pack our pews again. This is a profound example of work avoidance.

The people in exile found themselves in an adaptive challenge, and they learned to become an adaptive community.

While clearly many of us are unable to even imagine the horrors of subjugation and exile, perhaps we can still learn from this scenario. The reality of post-Christendom has been well documented. Theologians, philosophers, and sociologists concur that societies have now entered a post-Christian or post-establishment Christian reality in the Western world. Yet Willie James Jennings pushes against the common assumptions of what this often means in the Anglosphere. He concurs that clearly the easy alignment of Protestantism with the quasi-religious sensibilities of the nation-state has vanished. But he writes,

Whatever the claimed cause of this situation for the church in the modern ‘post-Christendom’ world, the conclusion is the same: Western Christians are a minority, an exilic people in a strange land. While the old Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony may be over, such readings of the reality of Christian existence in the West are painfully superficial. They bypass the deeper realities of Western Christian sensibilities, identities, and habits of mind which continue to channel patterns of colonialist dominance.^[5]

A true adaptive ecclesiology cannot accept this superficial reading of post-Christendom. It must confront and discard the harmful elements in the very DNA of Christendom itself. It must come to terms with racism, patriarchy, ableism, and homophobia. The church must see its legacy of oppression and colonialism in our own lifeworld.

Thus, diagnosis and adaption involves preserving what is of God: the essential DNA, and letting go of what is not of God: the non-essential (and even harmful) DNA. This is how we cultivate gardens of healing, in a desert of harm, decline, and exile. Stay tuned for the next post!

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[1] Jürgen Habermas. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

[2] James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999.

[3] George Lings, “A Golden Opportunity: Revisiting the Story So Far,” Encounters on the Edge 50, Church Army, 2011.

[4] Margaret J. Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017.

[5] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 8.