Sorting out discipleship
By Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann

I was edgy in my pew, filled with Kellermanns, all of us except for Gary Kellermann, my partner Bill's Dad -- who had died nine months earlier. This was the annual Methodist memorial service and the preacher was a white-haired woman in her sixties, whom Bill whispered was a great family favorite. The homily was essentially about how our ministerial families understood discipleship, largely in terms of suffering. Beyond that, it seemed to me lacking any real substance about what discipleship might mean.

"I STARE AT IT ALL AND WONDER WHAT THE CONNECTIONS ARE TO DISCIPLESHIP. BILL LOOKS OVER MY SHOULDER AND WONDERS, TOO."

Lying on my desk now -- a couple years later -- are several items: a letter to Rosemary Radford Ruether accepting her article; a fax from Anne Cox saying she'd be happy to hunt for poems for this issue; an e-mail from Herb Gunn about a consecration sermon; and a press release from the National Catholic Reporter. There are other things in the pile: five pages of online movie listings (remember, we here in Detroit are five years into a newspaper labor dispute); a letter to Bill from his friend, Jeanne, part of a group with whom he once lived in community (it came apart painfully, but now they are attempting a reunion); a short e-letter for Bill regarding his current urban work; a couple of our recent updates about my health and Witness work. It goes on. I stare at it all and wonder what the connections are to discipleship. Bill looks over my shoulder and wonders, too.
Perhaps the press statement from the NCR, the independent newsweekly based in Kansas City, helps make it clearest. It's about a competition they recently initiated for an artistic image of Jesus suited to the new millennium. According to editor Mike Farrell, there "was an extraordinary response" -- 1,678 entries from 1,004 artists in 19 countries on six continents. The submissions were in oil, acrylic, mixed media, cloth, sculpture, drawings, computer creations and such esoteric variations as burnt toast. The prize-winner, "Jesus of the People" by Janet McKenzie, is remarkably feminine. This Jesus was, in fact, modeled on a dark, gypsy-like woman. (I notice a trend in the U.S. toward people, even men, dying their hair blond. When we were in Hungary last fall for medical treatment, our doctor who was careful to be respectful of the Jews, spoke contemptuously of the dark, numerous, and untrustworthy gypsies!) The NCR release commented on the many tensions (particularly in the Roman Church) that such an image of Jesus, truly embraced, might help resolve -- even, perhaps, ordination.
What exactly does it mean to walk and risk with such a Jesus? What does it mean that's more than suffering?
In this issue we share a sermon by Kelly Brown Douglas (see her conversation with Carter Heyward in TW 3/2000) which takes its title from a Tina Turner Motown song. What it's got to do with is radical discipleship and a "manger kind of love." She preached it last February in Detroit at the consecration of Wendell Gibbs as bishop coadjutor.
We review Carter Heyward's recent book on Jesus which argues for a relational Christology where discipleship is not a matter of following a Lord, but walking with a brother.
Anna Hernandez meets up with discipleship in the pastoral side of "customer service" at the Episcopal Church Center's bookstore in Manhattan and at a piano in Hell's Kitchen. Ken Sehested bumps into it on a football field in college and notices how it makes him odd. Rosemary Ruether finds it in a collection of women caring for the earth. And author James Carse gets at it from the inside, by attempting to write a new gospel -- in the voice of a Samaritan woman.
So what is the connection between these wonderful and diverse experiences of discipleship? I've got to think that sometimes it hurts, but it's more about life than about death.

Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, co-editor of The Witness, has been living with brain cancer since September 1998, <jeanie@thewitness.org>. Her husband Bill worked with her on this editorial.