Wide Welcome: How the Unsettling Presence of Newcomers Can Save the Church.

Nessan, Craig L.

Wide Welcome: How the Unsettling Presence of Newcomers Can Save the Church. By Jessica Krey Duckworth. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-8006-9939-0. vii and 128 pages. Paper. $19.00.

How refreshing to read a book with such imagination for welcoming newcomers into the church! Jessica Krey Duckworth explores with creativity how congregations may draw upon the historic practice of the catechumenate for the renewal of the church in our time. Building upon solid theological foundations, enriched by empirical study, and made practical by concrete examples, this book deserves widespread attention as the ecumenical churches, including the ELCA, reinvent themselves in our time. If the community called church is itself a means of grace for the life of the world, as I concur that it is, the key to vibrant outreach (and in-reach!) through ministry with newcomers must, at the heart, be based on relationships. Relationships are what give us life and the church is nothing if not a community immersed in life-giving relationships with the Triune God, one another, and all the creation. These relationships are fostered wherever we together engage in the faith practices, including new capacity for speaking the language of the Christian faith with one another.

Duckworth deepens these claims by insisting that the church community lives together under the sign of the cross: "... the ecclesia crucis becomes the locus--the space--in which communities of practice arise by designing opportunities for learning through a cruciform catechesis" (75). This entails openness to grappling with the unanswerable questions that are inherent in the faith, what Kathryn Tanner calls "engagement as disarticulation." Only by living together--"oldcomers" with newcomers--can we incarnate communities of practice that constitute themselves through mutual engagement toward a shared repertoire of faith and competence in the central Christian things. The case material interspersed in the text assists the reader in envisioning the several ways in which core practices of welcome might be implemented. Three priorities for effective ministry with newcomers include: 1) listening to the newcomers' questions, 2) facilitating participation of newcomers alongside oldcomers in discipleship practices, and 3) accompanying newcomers over time in learning the resources and repertoire of a given congregation (96).

This book deserves a wide welcome among church leaders as a sign of hope and practical wisdom for the future of the ecumenical churches at this moment in time, ripe for renewal.