By Marius Bressoud
[Marius is a shareholder at Trinity Bethlehem]
“I’ve been
thinking.”
Whenever I spoke those three words to my wife, Harriet, her immediate
reaction was one of alarm. “What kind of a wild idea are you off on now?” she’d
respond.
Well, let me tell you. But don’t say you weren’t warned. I’ve been thinking lately about two kinds of Christian church members, those who take the role of consumers and those who assume the role of shareholders. I’m describing now not just Episcopalians but also other Christians I know, representing many different ways of being “the Church”.
There are those who assume the role of customers of the Christian enterprise. They attend church with the expectation that they will receive what they want and in return pay their church pledges. It seems natural to them that that is enough.
There are others who assume the role of
shareholders, responsible
co-owners of a corporation. Isn’t it interesting that Webster’s New
World
Dictionary defines
“corporation”
first of all by its Latin root, corporatio, as “assumption of a body, incarnation” before
it goes on to cite its
obvious business and economic implications?
That seems to me profoundly theological. For,
in fact, the whole of the
New Testament makes it clear that we, as Christians, are the incarnate
body,
the corporatio of Christ in
the
world.
I went on to imagine us also as shareholders,
not in a publicly owned
corporation but in a family owned one.
We are sons and daughters,
sisters and
brothers, who are all inheritors of a share in the eternal enterprise of
the
Holy One who is the founding Mother/Father of the Corporatio. As in some family corporations that I’ve
known, a
few family members with talents for the work are also employees and
receive a
salary for that special function. But every family member has an equal
share in
the business and just as big a stake in its long term interests.
We are all expected to think and work, to worship and to give, so we can better serve a hurting world. I’ve noticed that family corporations usually fail when its members want it only for what they get out of it. How are we doing at Trinity? Marius Bressoud
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