Yesterday I did an interlibrary loan form from my parent’s public library to the Vanderbilt Divinity School Library to check out a copy of Gerhard Lohfink’s Does God Need the Church?: Toward a Theology of the People of God on the recommendation of William Cavanuagh in his presentation to the Ecclesia conference (which I heard via an mp3 via Charlie Pardue)

Last night after I read Pastor John’s article in Conflicting Allegiances: The Church Based University in a Liberal Democratic Society (which Pastor John edited along with Michael Budde), I expressed some sense of wanting more “description” of what was said about the church polity into which the ecclesial-based university can form its students. That was the final sentence of the article.

That’s NOT meant as a critique, since the article dealt with its appointed topic. That’s also not what I meant to convey at all by what I wrote about that last night. Nobody indicated as such to me last night, but I kept fumbling around with it, and worried it might be construed as an accusation or something. Actually, it’s the deepest kind of complimetn that I wanted the article to continue, since it led me right into the conclusion that Pastor John intended to identify as the hoped for end.

But I was expressing a longing for the narrative of that ecclesial vision for formation. I mentioned last night how I am in what seems like a perpetual state of expectation that I can find that community in which such things happen, and such relationships are expected. I wrote about how The Church of the Saviour , via Elizabeth O’Connor’s books, provided the best stuff I have ever read that dealt in depth with the journey of a community in being church.

I have often found the same longing at the end of a particularly good Hauerwas article (which is many of them). I wish I could hear more of the fleshing out and examples of the kind of narrative of which he speaks, and the ways in which his church experiences have formed him. Many of these authors write and theologize very well, but I also want it continue on and do some of that narration for me. Perhaps, as was the case with Elizabeth O’Connor, that is to be left with someone gifted in that particular way of writing. Maybe these authors find this to be a writing challenge by which they feel humbled. I can relate to that. It is a seemingly improbable job to capture the stuff of community life in writing, at least in a way that does it much justice.