Departments
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Week of 2 October 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 8 |
Feature Article
Working on a building
STH prof lays cornerstones of faith
By J. Nicole Long
New School of Theology Professor Bryan Stone and his wife have not yet found a church to join in Boston. He says maybe he'll just start his own.
"It's a fun thing to do," he says.
While he was a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Stone drove the 30 miles between Dallas, Tex., where he attended classes, and Fort Worth, Tex., to pastor the church he had founded. Now Stone teaches two graduate classes to instruct students in church planting. "There are people who are called by God, but who aren't equipped yet," he says. "That's part of what our program's here to do."
But initiating a Church of the Nazarene didn't depend solely on innovation. "It is absolutely essential that the person loves people, is deeply rooted in the traditions of Christian faith, and has a good sense of organizational skills and financial savvy," he says. "Most important, though, someone has to have a deep sense of call and mission."
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Bryan Stone teaches BU
graduate students the factors involved in starting
a church. Photo by
Kalman Zabarsky
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Stone had that call. In the beginning, his congregation of about 20 people met in a rented storefront. When the Church of the Nazarene realized he was serious, it purchased a church building that had been abandoned. "It didn't need much renovation," Stone says, "so we were able to start there."
There are three main avenues for funding the variety of social ministries that Stone's church wanted to provide: public money, corporations, and private foundations. To qualify for government and corporate support, Stone established a nonprofit oganization with a separate board of directors that makes funding available to organizations that have a strong sense of mission but don't proselytize, he says.
Although Stone's church has continued with a new pastor since he left, success does not always require establishing a nonprofit organization in conjunction with the church. "People can also start a neighborhood church, for example, and be self-sufficient," he says.
In addition to preparing students, STH is interested in Stone's experience because it plans to work with the United Methodist Church, and perhaps other denominations, to plant a church per year in New England.
There are at least three components of STH's evangelism training. "One is to plant churches, the second is to train people how to do that, and the third is to do research on congregational development," Stone says.
STH wants to start churches that commit themselves to vibrant worship, to solid discipleship, and to outreach in their communities.
As a member of the Nazarene Church, Stone says, he began to perceive that it had abandoned the inner cities and moved to the suburbs. The reason, he believes, is that the church had become affluent and white. "Where there's a lot of poverty," Stone says, "the Nazarene Church had tended to run in the opposite direction. It wasn't very adept at dealing with crime and deteriorated city services."
However, the Nazarene Church was originally founded as one that took its ministry to the poor. When Stone started his church in Fort Worth, he was trying to recover that tradition. "I wanted a church that was both personally and socially redemptive," he says.
Because Nazarenes are focused on personal salvation, Stone's interest in community outreach seems radical to some members of his church. "They think I'm Marxist, and sometimes that scares people. But I'm convinced," he says, "that the natural outgrowth of personal salvation is a personal responsibility to serve one's community, its spiritual and social needs."
Stone is the author of two books: Compassionate Ministry: Theological Foundation (Orbis Books, 1996) and Effective Faith, A Critical Study of the Christiology of Juan Luis Segundo (University Press of America, 1994). Segundo was a Latin American Jesuit liberation theologian, and Stone is attracted to the way he integrated evangelism with theology.
Started in the '60s, liberation theology remains rooted in Catholicism, but considers other religions and points of view, such as atheism and Marxism. Liberation theology argues that the central message of the Bible requires believing Christians to work for the liberation of the poor and oppressed.
In the beginning of the movement, it was a call to revolution. Many liberation theologians, however, have moved toward better integration of spirituality and evangelism.
Stone has also been influenced by the Catholic concept of a parish. "One of the things we can all learn from the Catholic Church," he says, "is that when it puts a church in a community, it belongs to the community. Too many Protestant churches seem to follow a military model: when the community changes, they pick up their tent and follow the people. That's what happened with the Nazarenes. A church should remain at a community's center and continue to be a congregation even while the community around it changes."