EVENT HORIZON
Is it possible to write a paragraph so dense that useful information can’t escape from it? Some Anglican bishops who recently met in Toronto came pretty close. Their meeting communiqué included the following:
We affirm that mission is a meeting-place with God and with others. Mission isn’t something we do to another, but a way of being together in the presence of God as God transforms and reconciles the world to himself. To be in mission is to assume a listening stance – listening for how God is at work in the world, for how others are responding to and participating in that work, and for how we might offer ourselves and our gifts into partnership in that work.
If you’ve read enough of these things, you’ll recognize what I like to call intentional seriousness. That is, the bishops couldn’t say, we met in Toronto, we heard about our various ministries, we exchanged ideas, we think the Anglican Communion is a good thing and we’d like to keep it around, etc, and stop there. Any lay idiot can say that.
But we’re Anglican bishops so we have to include something that sounds all deep and spiritual and bishopy, if I may coin a neologism. That one paragraph probably took twice as long to write as the entire rest of the communiqué. As most writers instinctively know, the single best way to make yourself look like a complete jackass is to deliberately try to be profound.
Works every time.
We affirm that mission is a meeting-place with God and with others. Mission isn’t something we do to another, but a way of being together in the presence of God as God transforms and reconciles the world to himself. To be in mission is to assume a listening stance – listening for how God is at work in the world, for how others are responding to and participating in that work, and for how we might offer ourselves and our gifts into partnership in that work.
If you’ve read enough of these things, you’ll recognize what I like to call intentional seriousness. That is, the bishops couldn’t say, we met in Toronto, we heard about our various ministries, we exchanged ideas, we think the Anglican Communion is a good thing and we’d like to keep it around, etc, and stop there. Any lay idiot can say that.
But we’re Anglican bishops so we have to include something that sounds all deep and spiritual and bishopy, if I may coin a neologism. That one paragraph probably took twice as long to write as the entire rest of the communiqué. As most writers instinctively know, the single best way to make yourself look like a complete jackass is to deliberately try to be profound.
Works every time.
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