They Could Speak Better

It was a big move for the Pentecostal World Conference to have an official from the World Council of Churches, wrote a Pentecostal friend responding to my  Need They Speak This Way? , and both sides must have feared that the relation could fall apart before it had really begun, if he said the wrong thing. “The real work,” he said, “took place in all the conversations that happened just to get Tviet to that point.”

The new relation is a good thing for both groups, he said.

Pentecostals need to be pushed by sacramental traditions while they need to be pushed by the spirituality in Pentecostalism, and the liberal end of the spectrum needs to see that pentecostals know how to be progressive politically while remaining deeply orthodox.

Need They Speak This Way? was, wrote my friend, a little snarky. I don’t think it was — grumpy, perhaps, but not snarky. How we speak to each other across our divisions very much affects the future of Christianity. It’s no small matter. We need to talk about it when the chance arises.

I understand the political sensitivities in building new relation between groups that have long held each other in suspicion if not contempt. The speaker knows that at least some people in his audience are just waiting for the slightest excuse to say “That’s it! We can’t work these people! We’re outta here! ” He will feel he’s walking on eggshells. Yet he is less likely to break them, I think, if he speaks honestly, and if he does break them, dealing with the mess will if handled rightly increase understanding. (All right, the metaphor doesn’t really work, but you get the idea.)

There is some value in the symbol of a WCC official speaking to the leaders of the world’s Pentecostals, but clerics and ecclesial apparatchiks over-value symbolism, especially when the symbol proceeds to say nothing substantive or concrete. He greatly increases his value as a symbol when he speaks plainly.

The kind of dead language in which Dr . Tviet spoke does not help, even if it does not obviously hurt. It isn’t a language that communicates with the transparency with which Christians ought to speak to one another. It may keep people in their seats, and not send them heading for the exits, but does it move them to go forward? No, almost certainly not.

Think what Tviet could have said. He could have said: “Thank you for inviting me. It’s an important step in bringing together our long-estranged traditions. We have thought this about you, and you have thought that about us. From our side, we would want to explain the things you criticize this way, and we want to hear what you would say about our criticisms. Here are some of the things my tradition can learn from yours and here are some of the things I think yours can learn from mine. Here are the ways our friendship can bear fruit. But we only discover this as we proceed in friendship. Thank you.”

He could have said something with real substance, however carefully he had to say it and with however many qualifications, expressions of good will, confessions of failure, etc., of the sort that help you speak to suspicious or hostile hearers. He could have told the truth. He might have — would have, I am sure — found hearts and minds opening to him. Instead he offered the dead, dreary, meaningless language of modern ecumenical relations.

The Pentecostals are grown-ups. They could have taken it.