“No”

by Graham Edwards.

The life of faith and the church can be demanding. It can of course be rewarding and liberating, but for many of us, I think, there is no doubt it can be demanding.  It often seems to be the case that in church life, we ask more and more of those who share that lived experience and are committed to it. In my experience as a Superintendent Minister and various roles I have undertaken, I have felt the pressure both to ask people to take on new or additional work and have been asked to take on new and additional things myself. This phenomenon may reflect something of the context much of the church lives in, facing challenges with building, finances, and volunteers, and the response to this which Michael Jinkins (1999, p. 9) calls the “hyperactivity of panic”. He notes that this “manifests itself in clutching for any and every programmatic solution and structural reorganisation in the desperate hope that survival is just another project or organisational chart away”. My primary concern here is that when asked to take on new or additional work, there is a sense that the proper, faithful response should be “yes”. However, I would like to argue that “no” is an equally faithful response in the life of the church.

Defining God is naturally a complicated endeavour. Søren Kierkegaard begins an attempt to explore, rather than define, the nature of God by claiming that God “cannot be an object”(1970, p. 99) to be examined since God is beyond any position or image we might try to suggest. For Kierkegaard, argues Kline, God is “an open-ended movement of longing and passion that refuses closure”(2016, p. 4). What we can do then is attempt to understand what God is not. This is sometimes called Apophatic or Negative theology, which Rowan Williams explains:

denies that there is a concept of divine reality which can serve as the sort of clear identifying set of ‘essential’ attributes that we use in making sense of the realities around us because we are dealing it a limitless agency … it is not … a prescription for general agnosticism … [it] invites us to look at the models of knowledge we employ in theology and the underlying assumptions we make about personal being (2021, pp. 19 – 21).

I don’t wish to argue that we must lay aside all other understandings of God, rather simply to acknowledge that exploring what God is not can offer a window into the nature of God, and I suggest that saying “no”, might equally offer a window into our experience of faith and call of God.

Firstly, “no” as a way of embracing fruitful patterns of life. In his well-known work Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann argues that observing sabbath leads to a new or renewed way of living:

In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by production and commodity goods (2017, pp. xiii – xiv).

Because God rests in the creation narratives, it is clear that “the well-being of creation does not rest on endless work” (2017, p. 6) argues Brueggemann. The observance of sabbath suggests a renewed way of being, which acknowledges the need for rest, and at least implicitly saying “no”. Perhaps we can see “no” in this kind of positive way when it enables a new or renewed sense of call or service in the church, and therefore a faithful response to God. The opposite would be the endless expectation that “yes” is the right answer – even if it feels wrong and damaging.

Secondly, “no” as the performance of call. Steph Lawler argues for an understanding of identity as something to be “done rather than owned” (2008, p. 121). In this understanding, forming a sense of identity is an ongoing process in which the experiences of life are integrated into the performance of identity to, and with others. Butler (2004) and Goffman (1990) accept that identity is ‘performed’, but they challenge any perceived distinction between ‘being’ and ‘acting’, arguing that the two cannot be separated. Therefore, our identity is a lived thing, which is deeply contextual, as different parts become prominent in different places. The lived experience of the whole is where we see the fullness of our self. The sense of call in the Christian life is important, as it enables us to find our place within the community and tradition of the church. “No” allows us to honour that sense of call and give it appropriate value as we seek faithful ways of responding to God. This isn’t, of course, to suggest that something we might initially say “no” to, could not be something to which we are called, rather that the culture of “well, no one else will do it” might need to be challenged.

“No” is often an unwelcome answer in the life of the church as we seek to fulfil the functions and requirements of living as a church community. Perhaps, though, “no” allows us to embrace a more honest sense of vocation and call, and as such it offers an authentic expression of faith and a faithful response to God.

Brueggemann, W. (2017). Sabbath as Resistance. Westminster John Knox Press.

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. Verso.

Goffman, E. (1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin.

Jinkins, M. (1999). The Church Faces Death. Oxford University Press.

Kierkegaard, S. (1970). Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Volume 2, F-K (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Ed. & Trans.). Indiana University Press.

Kline, P. (2016). Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Apophatic Theology [PhD, Vanderbilt University]. Nashville, Tennessee. https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/11242

Lawler, S. (2008). Identity. Polity.

Williams, R. (2021). Understanding and Misunderstanding ‘Negative Theology’. Marquette University Press.