Moderator’s view: Feeding miracle was ‘sharing’ food
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, August 1, 2005
MORGANTON, N.C. – “Listen now for the Word of God,” General Assembly Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase said in his preface to reading Matthew 14:15-21, the story about the feeding of 5,000 men and untold numbers of women and children.
Speaking on July 30 to Presbyterians gathered for a workshop sponsored by the Presbytery of Western North Carolina, Ufford-Chase disdained the traditional interpretation – that Jesus miraculously turned five loaves of bread and two fish into enough food to feed the multitude.
Instead, the moderator said, “I believe this is a miracle of sharing.” He suggested that what really happened – although there is no hint of it in the Matthew text or the parallel story in John 6:1-14 – is that the disciples, one at a time, added their food to the collection so that it totaled enough for the haves to provide for the have-nots with leftovers.
“‘I’ve got a little bit here,'” one disciple supposedly said, according to Ufford-Chase, and others followed suit.
He used his interpretation to conclude that the Presbyterian Church (USA) needs to use the miracle by men to solve the problems of globalism, economic and ethnic isolation and evangelism.
“We cannot do the kind of evangelism we need to do by sitting in the pews on Sunday morning,” he said, urging his fellow Presbyterians to work “so that the gulf between those who have and who don’t have will become smaller.”
Even so, he added, “the doors have to swing both ways. It’s not enough to give a handout. We have to be willing to invite others into our places of worship and fellowship.”
Ufford-Chase didn’t define evangelism, but he did summon Presbyterians to the kind of economic and ethnic activism that, he said, will attract young people to an aging and declining denomination. “Will we engage you people in the world in a way that is meaningful?” he asked. “No one smells hypocrisy faster than young people.”
Noting that he recently spent a week at a leadership conference sponsored by the National Network of Presbyterian College Women, Ufford-Chase said he asked several of the participants, “‘What does the church mean to you?’ The answer I get from most young people is that if the church is not willing to engage the world, I’ll go find somebody who is.”
Ufford-Chase briefly mentioned the divisiveness in the PCUSA and the battle over theological diversity. “Young adults … are as theologically diverse as you and I,” he said. They tell us “not to try to grab us for one side or another.”
He talked about the need to change. “We must be attentive to the new thing,” he said. Ufford-Chase recalled his own experiences growing up in a church in which his father was the pastor. “One way or another, the church has always been the center of my life. Still, talk of evangelism always made me nervous.”
For a long time, he said he did not understand “how to be forthright about our faith.” But Ufford-Chase, who directs a program called BorderLinks, added, “I have been converted by the movement of Latin Americans. All of us have something to learn about what it means to be evangelists.”
He told a story about being in Guatemala and traveling in a crowded van. One of the passengers was carrying a burlap sack filled with corn. After being tossed atop the van, and while the van was under way, the sack broke and the kernels fell to the ground.
“The driver stopped,” Ufford-Chase said, “and together we picked up every kernel of corn we could find. Few of us live in the kind of economy where every kernel of corn counts.”
He used that story to argue that “we’ve been brought up to believe a lie, that we have no responsibilities for those who are on the underside of the global economy.”
He cited the “challenge of those on the underside of the global economy” – people who worry about “How do I feed my children? … Is it possible to keep my kids in school? … Will they live past age 5?”
The greatest challenge for the church, he said, is “how will we stand against fear … We are afraid of losing what we have.”
The second challenge, he said, “is to fight the dominant culture. Do we have it in us to become a new kind of church?”
Third, he added, is the “challenge of reaching the next generation with something beside cultural pabulum” – “that you are what you wear, that you are what you drive. These are not Christian values.”
Ufford-Chase said he recently attended the Conference on Spiritual Activism at the University of California at Berkley where “my colleague and friend Jim Wallis said the church is in desperate need of revival.”
What kind of revival? Wallis “told me the altar call was originally designed to invite people into the abolition movement. We’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we?”
Ufford-Chase also talked about a recent trip he made to the Congo, where he and Vice-Moderator Jean Marie Peacock asked a Congolese pastor, “What can we learn from your church?”
He said he took notes from the pastor’s answer after it was translated.
- 1. “Begin with prayer … the first, continuous and last act.”
- 2. “We should be grounding our work in Scripture.”
- 3. “Be with people in their difficulties.”
- 4. “When someone gets upset with him, he doesn’t let the sun go down before he attempts to reconcile. He asks, ‘What did I do and how can I make room for him?'”
- 5. “Our greatest strength is reliance on the traditions of the church. It is also potentially our greatest weakness.”