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approach systemic injustice. It is easy to say that German clergy should have spoken out against injustice; the pressing question is why we might believe this to be true. In my view, it is misguided to say German clergy speaking out against injustice would or might have prevented the horrors of the Holocaust. Ultimately, this is wishful, uncritical optimism that teaches us nothing. Rather, we can view the failure of the German clergy not as
a failure to prevent all that happened but rather as a failure to insist that Jews were fully human, suffering, and worthy of empathy.
In my view, the mission of the modern church and its clergy is not simply to advocate for
a vision of justice or to operate within the acceptable and encouraged channels of advocacy and organizing. This essentially relegates our obligations and our duties to government services and non-profit organizing. The church and its clergy are not called only to provide material and monetary resources. We are called to speak out against injustice and humanize through our presence. We are not called only to food drives that ship cans of food we don’t eat to people we don’t know but to bring together those who have enough and those who do not. We are not called only to advocate for more resources for the homeless but to be those resources for them. We are not called only to demand moral institutions but to be a moral institution. Rather than simply point out and denounce injustice, we the church and we as clergy should intentionally seek out, know, love, and be present with those who suffer—because nameless, faceless justice might as well be known as a prolonged, more comfortable injustice.
My return from FASPE brought me back into the ongoing struggles of the United Methodist Church concerning same-sex marriage and openly gay clergy. Its general conference, held only a few months prior, could easily have been described as a retreat into theology. I felt deep disappointment and frustration as I watched the church that shaped me into who I am today descend into backbiting and underhanded political maneuvers. Feeling defeated, I decided to skip church on a Sunday morning and run errands instead. Walking around the store with my wife, I paid attention to the other people walking up and down the aisles:
a mother buying food for her family, a father never making it more than a few steps without a child running down an aisle or telling him to look at this or that tired, bleary-eyed employee. It dawned on me that these people likely have no idea about my frustrations with church infighting over the election of an openly lesbian bishop, and most likely wouldn’t care if I told them. I was struck by how the all-consuming division of my church seemed disconnected from the realities of the people I passed in the store. This is, of course, an assumption. The church’s treatment of gay people has produced real pain and suffering. Perhaps I was witnessing the retreat, the distance, and the disconnection that enable insulated insiders to fight over power and money and think they are fighting about something else. Theological retreat may speak deeply to particular communities, but in practice it does not reflect the full range of possibilities and realities. It seems to me that the cost of a modern retreat into theology via a relentless pursuit of some sort of facile, pyrrhic theological purity is the failure to be present within and reflective of the lives of everyday people. This is not to say that theological understanding is unimportant, but the pursuit of theological purity can be a form of abstraction that further removes the church from the lives of people, especially those who suffer. While I can offer no set formula for how to use or implement theology across a church body, I think it is important that it not become an academic abstraction but that it be used, questioned, and continually reexamined to ensure that it remains sound enough to guide actions and flexible enough to accommodate both the messiness of life and the God that declares “I am making all things new.” Theology must not be a retreat away from the world but rather become that which pushes clergy and the church into it.
As I contemplate graduating from seminary and pursuing ordination, speaking out against injustice and retreating into theology are but two of my reflections on my FASPE experience. Despite my frustrations, my questions, and my doubts, both prior to participating in FASPE and after my return,
I remain committed to ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church. As a result of my experiences with FASPE, however, I will approach my ministry and vocation differently. I am convinced that the church must orient itself with a theology that pushes it into the world to speak out against injustice through its presence because I believe that the capacity to commit the terrible evil I saw at Auschwitz is in all of us. It begins with the tendency to be silent in the face of injustice, to be indifferent to the suffering of others, to dehumanize “the other.” These reflections have substantially shifted how I view my future, my personal faith, and myself as
a person, and I am thankful for the opportunity to have participated in FASPE and to have reflected on such important issues that will surely continue to engage me and help to shape my studies and my ministry in the years to come.
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Rev. Justin Mikulencak was a 2016 FASPE Clergy Fellow while an M.Div student at Yale Divinity School. He serves as pastor of Parkway United Methodist Church in Sugar Land, Texas.