Tuesday afternoons I spend two hours at Jump Start
a county program designed to help local juveniles who have gotten into trouble with the law learn to make more positive life choices. For most, it is also an all-too-rare chance to receive the undivided attention of community adults who listen rather than lecture.

Much of our time together during these sessions is spent puzzling out responses to various fictional dilemmas in the hope that the students will begin to gain insight into how to handle the confusions of their own lives. These exercises get a mostly lukewarm reception from the students--all of whom would admittedly rather be somewhere else--but recently there was a qualitative shift. The case study under discussion had to do with Joe, a general laborer who had been on the job for only a month. In this hypothetical situation, Joe's boss puts Joe in charge of getting a crew to dig a trench while the boss goes off to a meeting for two hours. But when the boss leaves the site, the other workers sit down and begin playing cards. What should Joe do?

Initially, I was as uninspired by Joe's problem
as the students seemed to be. One of the other Jump Start mentors looked the same. But Woody, a longtime mentor whose normally outspoken manner can be intimidating, lit up. Eagerly, drawing on his own history in the construction industry, he began urging the students to note the key points of the problem. Joe was a "new hire," a general laborer. Someone, in other words, in a position in which any one of them might well find themselves sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Woody's genuine enthusiasm in this instance was engaging rather than overwhelming. Illustrating his points with amusing real-life examples, he step-by-step made Joe's dilemma come vividly alive. Students and mentors alike slowly adopted Joe's problem as our own, eventually reaching unanimous agreement about how Joe could best proceed with integrity.

It was a deliciously satisfying moment.
Thanks to Woody's unexpectedly skilled tutelage, our solution to Joe's dilemma is not one I will soon forget. More importantly, I suspect our Jump Start students won't, either.

Reflecting on Woody's mentoring role in that Jump Start circle, I've found myself thinking of the Jews who were "astounded" because Jesus taught "as one having authority," while the scribes, those charged with mentoring the community and guarding its religious traditions, did not (Mk. 1:22; Matt. 7:29; Lk. 4:32). I don't see Woody as a Jesus figure, but in that Jump Start situation, he, too, taught with the sort of authority that changes lives.

And, as was true for the scribes of Jesus' day, I believe it is very difficult for the institutional church today to accept this sort of authority from its members.

I have no doubt that both the scribes and the priests
and elders who later question Jesus' right to step forth as a teacher and healer cherished the religious tradition they were charged to guard. But I wonder if they hadn't lost touch with an important truth: That a faith tradition meant for saving lives isn't for guarding, but for engaging--for engaging everyone's "empowerment" as persons of conscience.

I also take as significant that, while Jesus taught with authority, his parables and puzzling sermons apparently frequently left people buzzing among themselves. The medium, I imagine, was much of the message. Jesus probably never countenanced that God's ways might be closed to questioning and interpretation. Or that insight would require anything less than a communal effort. His focus, it seems to me, was solely on helping his neighbors and friends live lives free from the power of death, self-possessed as God's own--like Jump Start's fictional Joe, with integrity intact.

The stories in this issue testify to both the struggle and the progress
attending the church's efforts to free itself of the scribes' error and accept itself as a living, changing people of faith--a body with no useless parts, no inferior members and no single source of understanding about what its present vitality requires. As biblical scholar William Countryman points out, Anglicans long ago rejected the idea that there was any single, absolute this-worldly voice of authority for our denominational life. Questioning authority, one might even say, has been our founding vocation. That, I can't help thinking, is something to which my young Jump Start friends--who have an embarrassingly accurate fix on the clay feet of most of the authorities in their lives--could all too easily relate.

Julie A. Wortman is publisher and co-editor of The Witness, <julie@thewitness.org>.
Illustration: ©1942 Joseph S. Travato, Notice from the Draft Board

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