Wild, Wide, and Deep

[Ken Gray] An excellent reflection from Carmen Lansdowne, theologian and former Moderator of the United Church of Canada. Returned from a conference hosted by The International Association for Mission Studies which gathers scholars who have spent their careers thinking about what it means for the church to go outward — and, just as often, repenting of the forms that going-outward has taken. It is a strange and clarifying place to be while preparing myself for the upcoming school year.

[Carmen Lansdowne] writes] I assigned a book to a DMin student I’m working with in Calgary. The book is Aaron Perry’s Lay Leadership for the Care of Souls. Its governing image is deceptively domestic: the church is ordered, Perry says, so that good can run wild. Leaders exist not to manage the laity but to commission them — to arrange the common life so that the gifts God has scattered through a congregation can actually get loose.

But the idea that caught my attention this weekend is the one that refuses to let ministry point in only one direction. Ministry, Perry insists, runs wild in the church, wide in the world, and deep in the believer — and you cannot have any one of the three without the other two.[1]

He is blunt about what each exclusion costs. Wild and deep but not wide, and the church has no mission. Wide and wild but not deep, and you get activity without transformed disciples. Deep and wide but not wild, and the local body quietly stops showing the world the lordship of Christ. Three directions that are mutually load-bearing. Pull one and the structure doesn’t lean; it falls.

What I find useful here is not the triad itself. Plenty of models arrive with three tidy legs. What’s useful is the question the triad forces: not whether your ministry has all three in principle, but which one your particular tradition is most tempted to saw off while insisting it hasn’t.

I can only answer for mine. The tradition I serve and study — The United Church of Canada — is, on the whole, wide. We are comfortable in the world. We know how to write the letter, join the coalition, show up at the legislature. We know how to host a strawberry tea or a bang up rummage sale. And in our better moments we are deep: we have not entirely forgotten contemplation, spiritual direction, the slow interior work that keeps activism from hollowing out.

It is wild we have trouble with.

I teach church administration and governance, which sounds like the least wild subject imaginable — and that is precisely the misunderstanding I’ll spend the winter semester trying to dismantle. Perry has it right: order exists for the sake of wildness. The bylaws, the board, the careful commissioning of gifts — these are not the opposite of the Spirit’s freedom. At their best they are its trellis. A congregation (as well as a denomination) can become so well-managed, so proceduralized, so allergic to surprise, that “good running wild” starts to sound like a threat to the annual budget. When that happens we have not become more faithful stewards. We have tamed the one thing that was never ours to tame.

A church that is wide and deep but not wild is Perry’s third case exactly: the local body that has stopped showing the world anything it could not have found at a competent nonprofit. I recognize us in that sentence more than I would like.

And yet the leg I most want to defend is the one this week has taught me to distrust.

“Wide in the world” is the phrase mission studies has spent most of it’s energy defining and promoting. Because “the world” was too often a map to be claimed, and “mission” the theology that blessed the claiming. As an Indigenous woman in Canada, I’m citizen of a country that remembers, in its soil and its statutes, precisely what it cost when the church went wide as conquest. I come from a people, on the underside of that world, who remember it too.

So I want to add a caution to Perry’s frame. The wide leg is not innocent, and it is not reconverted by the other two automatically. Width practiced as domination is not wide at all — it is the narrowest thing there is, because it can only make the world into a copy of itself. It goes out to speak and never to be changed. True width receives as much as it gives; it expects the God it speaks of to be already ahead of it, at work in the very places it presumes to bring God. That is the missiology I have argued for elsewhere — one that centers the underside, that treats intercultural encounter as conversion rather than conquest, that assumes it has as much to unlearn as it has to teach.

Which returns me to Perry’s real gift, the one I did not see until I sat with it a while: the three directions do not merely hold each other up. They hold each other accountable.

The deep leg is what keeps the wide from becoming conquest — because disciples who are being formed in earnest, converted and re-converted, are harder to weaponize than disciples who are merely busy. The wild leg is what keeps the deep from curdling into private spiritual connoisseurship — interior depth that never becomes a visible, communal sign is only self-improvement with better vocabulary. And the wide leg is what keeps the wild from becoming a holy huddle, a congregation delighting in its own liveliness while the world burns outside the stained glass.

Pull one and you don’t only lose that direction. You corrupt the other two.

So here is the question I am carrying home from South Africa, and it is not the flattering one. It is not whether my tradition is deep enough, or wide enough. We will always find evidence for those. It is whether we still believe good can run wild among us at all — whether we have built a house so orderly that the Spirit has been left no room to embarrass us. And it is whether, after everything the word “mission” has meant, we can go wide again in a way that looks like the crucified Christ and not like the empires that kept crucifying in his name.

Wild, wide, deep. Perry is right that you cannot separate them. What he leaves to each of us is the harder confession: naming the one we quietly let go. Which is it in your tradition?

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