About the author: Rev. Catherine Tobey is a current PhD student in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Drawing on Karl Barth’s theology, her research centers children as the dynamic, interpretive key to the Church’s understanding and enactment of the Kingdom of God. Catherine is a graduate of Whitworth University and Princeton Theological Seminary, and is a Minister of Word & Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
As one might expect, Barth’s last written words describe the Church. Christ is not only its foundation, but he who draws the Church into constant movement; indeed, the Church “looks and moves toward his new and glorious coming.”1
Almost as if imagining some great adventure, Barth describes the Church as constantly “starting out” in a movement he conceives as “positive, goal-oriented, and orderly.”2 Reflecting on these words, Eberhard Busch encourages readers with the idea that we too “shall let ourselves be invited and summoned joyfully and humbly, prayerfully and confidently, to start out . . .”3
As opposed to starting a race or a trip, I think they are speaking about something more akin to the process of change. Barth explains, “Starting out takes place when something already there has grown old and must be left behind, when the night is past, when something new replaces it and a new day dawns.”4 He goes on to state the need for “a resolute farewell . . . to what is familiar, what is close at hand, what has its own advantages,” calling for “a resolute turning instead to what is distant, to what is affirmed in hope, to what has disadvantages, to what is still largely unknown in its glorious form.”5
Barth is clearly enamored by this good future, and he hopes the Church is too. I swear I have goosebumps when he describes the Church as “refus[ing] to be homesick for what it leaves behind.”6 This is not to say the past was bad, but that we are to love where God calls us next even more.7
It makes me think of season two of The Bear, as Carmy (played by two-time Golden Globe Award winner Jeremy Allen White) sets out to transform his dead brother’s restaurant. He is consumed by everything that needs to get done—taking down the old sign and photos of the past, crunching numbers and making lists, getting rid of the things that do not work and will not be used; they need specialists, certifications, and safety tests, and then there is all the overdue cleaning. Is it overwhelming? Yes, but Carmy can jump in because he has such a strong vision of what is yet to come. To put it in Barthian terms, it’s like Paul and the Corinthian church: “[Paul] groaned; and yet he was of good courage. He had a vision of the Resurrection.”8
But what about someone who has not glimpsed the good that follows “starting out”? This brings us to The Bear’s Richie, Carmy’s lifelong non-biological cousin (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach). When Carmy finds him moping in the restaurant’s basement, reminiscing about the old days, Richie tells him, “Yo, um, I'm trying really hard to be on board with all this new s***, cousin. I'm, uh, I'm reading a lot. I'm trying to learn about who am I to my history.”9
He goes on to tell a story about this person who gets left in the dust, after his friends “outgrow” him. Richie explains, “one's like a sick athlete, one's a genius. This other one's nasty on the keys. Then, this other one, she's got, like, charisma…And one day, out of the blue, boom. They drop his a**. They just cut that m*****f***** off.”
Together, Carmy and the viewer wonder why. Richie responds: “‘Cause he's got no purpose.” Then he goes on to explain, “I'm afraid one day, I'm gonna wake up and you guys are all just gonna cut . . . just drop this a**.”
As I was watching this, I could not help but think of the folks who resist change in churches and other organizations, whether clergy or laity. Are they just being stubborn? Or, could it be that, like Richie, they are scared they might be left behind.10 In any case, the answer is not to stay in the basement, wishing you could go back in time; it is to move forward.
For The Bear, this means closing down the old restaurant and opening a new one. Carmy explains, “I love this place. I love this city. I wanna start our first business here. I want it to be a real business, an honest business with-with-with honest partners.” Syd, the recently promoted chef, chimes in excitedly, “We wanna do high-level dining and hospitality and-and-and beverages. And we can and we will because we know that any good restaurant starts with dedication to service and taking care of the customer.”
Cicero, their funder, is less than convinced, asking, “How many times you've done this, Carm?” “None times,” he responds. “And what's your track record, Syd?” “Not great,” she says. When Cicero scoffs at them, insisting, “Hey, you throw a rock, you hit five great restaurants,” Syd insists, “We're going to be better. Um, this is going to be a destination spot. This is going to be an excellent restaurant. And I know that because we're going to get a [Michelin] star.”
This kind of vision, this determination that things are going to work out—and not just work out but be absolutely stellar—is a beautiful thing. It is what makes people want to risk change.
The Bear has a way of making you wish you worked in a restaurant and at the same time hope you never do. I feel this same way with churches; it is so complicated and messy and difficult, but also so exciting and life-giving. At least, it can be.
While we can find great rhythms and stability in our church life, particularly in liturgy, the true distinctive of the Church is not its sameness, but in its continual transformation. In order to be faithful to God and the community, in each time and place, our churches must actually be ever-reforming—not tweaking our sermon illustrations and the font of our bulletins, but truly starting out over and over again.
When I was younger, the vision I had for a good and thriving church was written off as idealism or naïveté. But the truth is, I had bought into God’s mission for the Church as a kid—hook, line, and sinker—and I could not let go. Barth gets at this feeling, while preaching on 2 Corinthians 5, that there is something more than our current reality. Just like the Corinthian church, Barth says, “the real source of our problems and groans is not the transitoriness of our life; their reason is the fact that it has not yet appeared what we shall be.”11
Shall we look forward to a good, eternal future? Sure, but there is something more for us (and our neighbors) in the now too! Especially in Eastertide, let us not be bound by the great “No,” but God’s greater “Yes” as “the first and original word of our life” and the “the final and abiding fact of our life.”12
Let us keep groaning, like the Corinthians, not because everything is vanity, but because we believe so deeply in the good things yet ahead. Let us groan when we see things that need to change and move forward in the work of changing them.
In Church Dogmatics, Barth describes the purpose of the church as “call[ing] the world to [a] very different accounting” for it “still lives as though the old had not yet passed away and the new come.”13 As those who can envision the Kingdom of God, it is ours to imagine something new and different than the brokenness all around us.
This is both a constructive call to new actions on behalf of our neighbors, and a deconstructive call to stop being complicit in those things that are harming our neighbors. It means we cannot stifle pastors or squash ministries that, rather than repeating the past, seek to start out. Indeed, according to Barth, “as Christians we cannot think or demand or expect too much . . . of [humankind].”14
The sky is the limit when it comes to a prophetic imagination, and this is good news! It is time to come up from our metaphorical basements and do the hard work of building a new restaurant . . . I mean church! In any case, be careful, because the more you catch a whiff of what is yet ahead, the less appealing the good old days will seem. Put another way, once you get a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, anything else will just not quite cut it.
Karl Barth, Final Testimonies (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1977), 54.
Barth, Final Testimonies, 54.
Barth, Final Testimonies, 67.
Barth, Final Testimonies, 51.
Barth, Final Testimonies, 51.
Barth, Final Testimonies, 51.
If we struggle to understand this yearning for what’s next, Barth asks us to consider if God’s promise "Behold I make all things new” has “not penetrated to our very marrow.” See Karl Barth, Come, Holy Spirit: Sermons (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 121.
Barth, Come, Holy Spirit, 277.
All references to The Bear were pulled from the TV show transcripts.
There are more options than these, a common one (unfortunately) being that folks can be deeply unhealthy; lacking self-differentiation, they may feel any critique of the organization as if it were a personal attack. Thus all their energy is put into fighting back, resisting change at any cost. See Howard S. Schwartz, Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay (New York: NYU Press, 1992) as a particularly interesting read that has institutional churches in mind.
Barth, Come, Holy Spirit, 273.
Barth, Come, Holy Spirit, 274.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), 77.
Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 91, emphasis added.