Sally Douglas, The Church Triumphant as Salt: Becoming the Community Jesus Speaks About, Coventry Press, ISBN 9780648982265
For writers and speakers the central task is to identify your audience, anticipate their initial response to you and what you want to say, and to find words, style and tone that will engage them. All that assumes, of course, that you have something fresh that is worth saying.
Sally Douglas, a Uniting Church theologian and congregational minister addresses primarily members of her own and similar congregations. Many are wary of exhortatory and authoritative Church language, are ready to dismiss the documents of the tradition as dead, and fear that the decline in membership and public influence of the church is the herald of its dying.
In her book she tackles these fears head on, agrees with them and argues that they are a source of life, not of death. In the process she calls on ancient church writers as addressing matters of modern concern. She writes persuasively, attends to the details of ordinary church life and finds powerful metaphors to encapsulate her thought. What she has to say is certainly worth saying.
As the title of her book suggests Douglas wants to replace a view of the Church that begets discouragement and replace it with a view that brings life. The fear of decline is rooted in the conviction that numbers and public esteem matter. To view the Church as salt highlights other qualities that a church rooted in Jesus has.
She explores the idea and implications of a salty church, contrasting the homeliness but importance of salt with the blandness, tastelessness and self-importance of a church drained of salt. The saltiness of tears suggests the importance of acknowledging grief and going out in compassion to those who grieve in the congregation. The salt of the womb in which life grows hints at a model of growth that is hidden and fragile, as distinct from a picture of planning and selling church growth. Preserving with salt brings out the importance of ordinary and often unnoticed patterns of prayer and companionship within church congregations, and the use of salt as seasoning brings home the importance of small and simple relationships and initiatives within the larger community.
In all these aspects of salt Sally Douglas stresses the importance of the Church mirroring God’s love for the wide world. This lively and well written book illustrates the saltiness of the Church with stories of current initiatives in her own and other congregations.