Copyright: © 2003 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

"Always be sincere." says Charlie Brown, the comic's endearing loser. "Even if you have to fake it."

I've served for most of my professional career as Campus Pastor, university chaplain. So my Sunday morning congregation, from week to week, was in the main made up of post-adolescents: post-secondary undergraduates with a sprinkling of grad students and sometimes their spouses and families, and on occasion a set or two of parents of students.

But I made it a point, from my earliest days in that ministry, to "pretend" that my congregation was more varied. I pretended each week that there were old folks there with grey hair, little kids, even "street people" with minimal education. Sunday after Sunday, I invented in my own head a community out there in front of me with the widest possible range of diversity: black and white, old and young, male and female, gay and straight, privileged rich and disadvantaged poor, committed believers and questioning agnostics, right-wing conservatives and left-wing liberals, Quakers and Orthodox --even Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and atheists. This was my fantasy each Sunday: that I was leading worship and preaching in that sort of diverse setting.

Of course that kind of "catholic" diversity was never present at any one time, or even over the course of weeks. On most Sundays I faced a congregation of fresh- faced, well-educated, upper-middle-class Protestant post-adolescents. Period. And I like to think I loved and respected the distinctive gifts and challenges they presented every week to my preaching and planning.

But I also felt it was necessary to invent in my head --to pretend to-- a more catholic diversity in my little campus parish. I felt it would make a difference in my preaching, in the way I planned and conducted worship. And I like to believe it did make a difference. (Curiously, as the years went by, I didn't have to pretend so strenuously. Many from these diverse groupings began to show up on Sunday mornings, in person, in front of me.)

These paragraphs are written in the conviction that every parish, every Christian congregation, every assembly of believers, should pretend to that kind of catholicity. (For my definition of "catholic", see Essay 29 above.) I'm proposing here that this type of "pretending" is salutary. It's not insincere. It's simply a matter of eschatological prolepsis. See Essay 30.

And I like to believe that my own situation, on a university campus, was not all that different from yours in a more traditional setting. Most parish assemblies on a given Sunday morning are not at all very catholic in composition. Each assembly of believers on a Sunday morning will take on distinctive characteristics over time. Sensitive congregational leaders will want to respect their own distinctiveness, in preaching, in programs, and in worship planning. Even within a single congregation scheduling multiple services on Sunday, the "nine o'clock people" are usually a quite distinct population from the "eleven o'clock people" --a separate sociological grouping, you'd have to admit, that bears honouring. See Essay 20. But I'm proposing here some kind of balance between present distinctiveness and proleptic diversity.

The good news is this: Such diversity as there is among us on Sunday morning is totally unknown today in North America apart from your assembly of worshipers. Nowhere else in North American society these days will you find the kind of diversity you'll easily find on any Sunday morning at worship in a church: cultural diversity, sex diversity, economic diversity, class diversity, educational diversity, political diversity.

And that's one of our glories. That kind of diversity is not a liability for the Christian church; it's an asset. I've heard an anthropologist remark that no human society in the world is as segregated as contemporary North American society: segregated by race, by age, by sex, by economic background, by political opinion. But not on Sunday morning in church. Hurrah!

The bad news is this: None of our worshiping assemblies is diverse enough. I'd argue that most worshiping assemblies on Sunday, in their demographic make-up, are incomplete, fractured, and flawed, if what we're talking about is true catholicity. That's why we have to invent all those others who may be different from "our crowd". We want to --I for one want to-- make sure we don't fall into thinking that the Christian community is co-terminus with "our kind". And the degree to which my congregation or yours is totally homogeneous --just "our kind"-- is the degree to which it falls short of being truly catholic.

That's why I'll continue to pretend I'm more catholic than I am. That's why I'm urging you to come to your responsibilities on Sunday morning with a sense of "as if". As if those others are present. As if we're a truly catholic multitude.

Sure: It's the devil's own job (to coin a phrase) preaching to such diversity as I've outlined in the third paragraph after my title, above. And the devil's own job to plan and lead worship so that all those diverse groups feel welcomed and embraced. But we're sunk if we don't. That is, if we allow our Sunday morning assembly at worship to become a spiritual lobby for this or that opinion, for this or that special interest group, for this or that slice of the demographic pie. Then we're not catholic any more.

So, get busy: Start pretending!

Years ago I heard a winsome witness on TV from a handsome young man dying of AIDS. He said this: "No matter what happens, I am determined to live life as it should be, not as it is."

Eschatological prolepsis, indeed!