McCormick's Place

Place is powerful. Places are important. McCormick needs to find its place.

I will soon be attending the 2012 McCormick Theological Seminary Commencement, Board meeting, and Alumni Council meeting. During these meetings there will surely be much talk about “sharing the vision” and the “telling the story”. Sharing and telling the vision and story of McCormick will be offered as a way to increase recruitment and donations to the seminary.

The elephant in the room; however, will be place. McCormick has a long history of moving locations. Founded in Indiana, it has institutionalized itself in several places and buildings across the American Midwest. Many alumni remember fondly the campus on the North Side of Chicago. McCormick now finds itself in a relatively new and expensive building in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. (Learn more here). The surprising announcement made several years ago that the seminary was putting the new building on the real estate market, and other subsequent announcements concerning the selling of other real estate owned by the seminary, have produced copious amounts of confusion amongst alums. Is McCormick going under? What is the future of McCormick? Anxiety about place has become anxiety about McCormick’s future.

Rest assured -- McCormick is not going under. It continues to have a sizable endowment. The Board, President, and other leaders within McCormick are making the right financial and strategic decisions that will not only keep McCormick a going concern, but will have McCormick become a recognized national leader in theological education for the emerging cross-cultural Church.

However, I do not believe that McCormick can truly find its feet until it finally resolves its sense of place. McCormick has to be more than a story and a vision for it to be an embodied community. It cannot tiptoe around this incarnational issue forever. We need bones, sinew, muscle -- living breathing beating flesh -- before we can be a community of our Risen Lord. We need concrete, steel, glass and stone before we can be more than just a good idea. We cannot treat our current body like a commodity.

Easier said than done. Yet there are some significant ways in which McCormick’s location have already granted McCormick unique opportunities. McCormick is not a neo-gothic campus in a leafy White suburb. Being located in Chicago, and in the South Side in particular, gives McCormick access to thousands of churches and religious communities. These communities are flush with innovation and vision. McCormick has strong relationships with Chicagoland congregations, and McCormick is creating innovative ways to serve Chicago’s large Christian communities and their leaders. While location and place have been problems for McCormick, location and place may well be its saving grace.

Questioning George Carlin

By now you may have read this quote from George Carlin:

Which leads me to question the wisdom of his quote.

To question a text is to assume a relationship with the text which puts the reader in a position of authority over the text. An individual who questions every text makes himself (or herself) the ultimate critic of every truth claim. In this system, only individuals have authority over truth. Other claimants to truth, such as the larger community or the larger tradition, find themselves stripped of any authority.

Theologically, this is like a man who reads the Bible only to find whether the Bible agrees with his already held notions. Geographically, this is like a woman who travels the world only to question whether other lands and other peoples measure up to her home town. Having discovered that Paris is a lousy replica of Saint Peter, MN, she returns to the culinary delights of The City Grille. Having discovered that the Bible does not say everything he would have said, he returns to his own prejudices.

Skepticism, like tourism, has value when we allow the texts we read and the places we visit to question us. What is it about Paris that might cause me to rethink my home? What is it about sacred text that might cause me to rethink my priorities?

Materialistic Enough?

Americans aren't materialistic enough.

"What's that" you say, "We consume more resources -- more minerals, land, water, we pollute more of the sky -- all in the name of having more stuff, than any other country in the short history of this small planet. How could we be not materialistic enough?"

Consider this link from NPR. It shows that in 1947 we Americans spent 11.7% of our income on clothes. Now we spend just 3.6%. The 1940s was a decade of well dressed men and women -- of sports jackets, ties, hats, dresses, and a certain degree of formality. People bought nice clothes and they took care of them.

Now our closets are piled high with junk. We grow tired of clothes and buy cheap new clothes to replace them. We don't dress as well or take as good care of our clothes as we once did.

Perhaps if we were more materialistic (and a bit less spiritual) we would take care of the nice things God has given us and would have less junk in our lives.

Perhaps if we understood that stuff is God's gift to us we would treat it with more care and respect. And if we took more care of the gifts we have we'd consume fewer resources.