Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, Unexpected Destinations: An Evangelical Pilgrimage to World Christianity.

Clements, Keith

Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, Unexpected Destinations: An Evangelical Pilgrimage to World Christianity, Grand Rapids/ Cambridge, William B. Eerdmans 2011, ppxvi, 296.

This is a highly unusual book. There is no shortage of histories, official or otherwise, of church and ecumenical life down to the present. Nor are we lacking in the personal memoirs of people who played leading roles in such developments. The histories, however, often leave one asking what it was actually like to live through the dramas, and why people acted as they did. Equally, the memoirs tend to be only superficially "personal", little more than write-ups of diaries and travelogues, and selective ones at that, and so remaining on the surface. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, in contrast, has written a life-story of very public engagement in church and society yet which leaves few stones unturned in his inner life of faith, emotional struggles, spirituality, and personal relations with family, friends and colleagues: in his own words (pxv) "how one's interior journey shapes and moulds the exterior events that constitute one's history."

The exterior history can quickly be told in outline. Wesley Michaelson was born just after the second world war, in Chicago where he had a decidedly evangelical upbringing. Even at an early stage however he was wanting an evangelical witness which would not be confined to either the conservative religious ghetto or the nationalist fortress of the political right. College and Princeton Seminary were followed by several years as assistant and speech-writer to the Republican (but anti-Vietnam war) Senator Mark Hatfield, an experience which took him into to the corridors of power in national and international affairs and, if circumstances had transpired differently, could easily have introduced him into the White House itself. Increasingly however he felt called to Christian leadership though not necessarily within the traditional, institutionalised church. Deeply formative for him were the radical Church of the Saviour in Washington D.C., and the Sojourners movement led by Jim Wallis with whom a close and lasting, if for a time turbulent, friendship developed. Marriage to Karin Granberg, a holistic health-care specialist, brought about not only the hyphenated surname Granberg-Michaelson but a deeply fulfilling family life which, with its challenges and tensions as well as joys, forms a central strand in the narrative. Based in a community church in Misssoula, Montana, in the early 1980s he was searching for a form of pastoral ministry rooted in community yet was also increasingly engaged with the theological and ethical issues presented by the ecological crisis. In 1984 he was ordained to the ministry of the Reformed Church in America (RCA). His burgeoning interest in creation-related issues coincided with the conciliar process on justice, peace and integrity of creation (JPIC) initiated at the WCC Vancouver Assembly in 1983, and not surprisingly Granberg-Michaelson found himself drawn into it. Not only so, but he was appointed to the Church and Society desk of the WCC in Geneva where the then general secretary, Emilio Castro, told him that however strongly Granberg-Michaelson might protest his ecumenical commitment, "Here, I want you to be an evangelical". Indeed, quite apart from his work for JPIC, to which he was deeply committed, Granberg-Michaelson's most evident concern during his Geneva time was the lack of relationship between the WCC and the huge and growing Evangelical and Pentecostal worlds outside its membership. He was also to be fully involved in the work of the Special Commission set up after the 1998 Harare Assembly on Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement. No less, in these and later chapters he has candid comments to make on internal problems which in his view were of the WCC's own making, at the level of inter-desk rivalry and staff relationships as well as its style of governance. Nevertheless these comments manifest a critical loyalty to the WCC, and not being appointed to head the new Unit on Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation in 1993 came as a genuine disappointment.

Instead, back in the USA there came the call to the general secretaryship of the RCA to which after much heart-searching Granberg-Michaelson offered himself in 1994, and in which he served for 17 years. This is a whole story in itself, of the transformation--not without tensions, controversies and set-backs--of a very traditional denomination into a much more (in every sense) inclusive and missional enterprise. In fact "Mission comes first" is Granberg-Michaelson's motto and in large measure it became that of his church as a whole. He did not, however, forego his ecumenical commitment, and in 2003 was persuaded by friends from a wide variety of traditions--Orthodox as well as Protestant--to be nominated as a candidate to succeed Konrad Raiser as WCC general secretary, and only at the last minute withdrew his name from the short-list.

This, then, is a story of recent American church life and international ecumenism told from the inside. Granberg-Michaelson has no doubts as to where the real ecumenical future lies: in the Global Christian Forum and its embrace of the non-WCC Evangelical, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic constituencies, of which he has been a passionate advocate, just as he was a prime mover of the attempts within the USA to widen the ecumenical table beyond the membership of rthe National Council of Churches. But still more fundamerntally, his own conviction is that for everyone on this journey there has to be an inward pilgrimage as well, and his account is a deliberate and remarkable self-revelation of the heart in pilgrimage. Always built into his schedule has been space for private prayer, meditation, self-examination and spiritual direction. Retreat houses and monasteries feature no less than offices and meeting-rooms. Occasionally the inward note sounds a shade too introspectively at the expense of narrative clarity, and a welcome addition would be a more precise chronology of the events and experiences, public and personal, which are described. But this is a courageous and challenging testimony, and it is to be hoped that others may write their ecumenical stories with equal devotion and candour.

DOI: 10.1111/erev.12015