An Interview with Tony Jones: Part 1

Tony Jones has been the national coordinator of Emergent Village (www.emergentvillage.org). He is currently theologian-in-residence at Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. We spoke with him recently about some of the topics in his latest book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier—as well as his understanding of ministering to others through our daily work.

Can you tell me a little bit about your time as a police chaplain? Do you have any good stories from that?

I have this one story that got cut from the book that is incredible. I got this call late at night, like on December 22 or 23, for a DOA. The guy who died was about 480 pounds, and he hadn't gotten out of bed for 3 or 4 years. His room was floor to ceiling, wall to wall, homemade shelves full of food. Cans of beef stew and bags of Fritos, and it had a stench like nothing I'd ever smelled before. And, this was not the stench of death, but it was a stench that long preceded his expiration. The cops and firefighters were trying to resuscitate him and roll him off the bed.

Then there were five single guys living in his house with him, all down on their luck. Then, someone said, "His wife is in the basement." So, I go downstairs, and there's his wife. She's probably 5 feet tall, 105 lbs., from Thailand, and she's crying. Then their two little kids come running out from this bedroom behind a sheet that's strung up across the kitchen, and they don't speak English. His wife barely speaks English. But she just starts crying out, "He no too fat for me! He no too fat for me!"

Oh, that's sad.

Yeah, and it struck me to the heart that this woman loved this guy. He was very special to this group of seven or eight people on the margins of society. Ironically, they were a block away from the biggest church in my town, so the cul-de-sac is stacked with cars of people who are parking and walking down to go to this megachurch for service. And here this guy is basically eating himself to death who has a mail-order bride from Thailand and five buddies who live in his household.

Being a police Chaplain, it's story after story after story like that. I could tell you about making death notifications in the middle of the afternoon to totally unsuspecting people to tell them their spouse has died or their child has died—hanging out with cops who are suicidally depressed because of what they've seen on the job, struggling with dispatchers who are going through divorce and trauma.

So you would definitely consider your work a ministry?

Those kinds of categories bother me—something is ministry and something else isn't ministry. It's not very helpful to draw those lines. But sure, my work is ministry. I just don't think what I do is any more ministry than what someone else does.

At TheHighCalling.org, we often say that all work can be ministry. It can be hard for people to see how everyday work is ministry, though. How about the policemen in your story, for instance. Were they ministers?

Police officers are in such a strange role in our society. They almost never spend time with people at their best. Whether they're pulling you over for a ticket or coming to your house because your spouse just had a heart attack. They have to deal with domestic abuse and suicide and massive car wrecks. These are the worst moments in life, and that's when police officers are with people. So, it's a very traumatic role for them. And you know, some cops are not the least bit pastoral, but a lot of them are very sensitive. It's funny. They say, "We really need these Chaplains to help us with death notifications, because we're no good at stuff like that." But most cops are really good with people. Everything they do—when they pull somebody over, when they arrive at the scene of an automobile accident, how they carry themselves, what kind of words they use, what kind of tone of voice they have—it all becomes ministry in their daily lives.

So, I hear you talking about ministry in terms of relating well to other people—treating other people right. What does the Trinity teach us about relationships in our daily lives?

Some people say, "Anytime you talk about the Trinity, you're a heretic." Because it's impossible to talk about the Trinity without overemphasizing the threeness or overemphasizing the oneness. For me, I definitely err on overemphasizing the threeness. The beauty is the relationship between the three. And the eternal loving relationship between the Father, Son, and the Spirit flows into all of creation. That becomes the calling of all Christians—to be in true, deep, loving relationship with other human beings and with God and even with all of creation.

Boy, there's so much interest in the Trinity right now. People are talking more and more about what the church really is and how we develop communities where people care for one another and live in reconciliation with one another. A lot of this is driven by a newfound love for the theology of the Trinity.

That's a good thing, right?

Absolutely! A lot of Christians in America talk about the Trinity, particularly church people and professionals who get paid to be Christian, like you and me and pastors and seminary professors, and people like that. We talk about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but we don't act as if the Holy Spirit is up to stuff. I imagine this is true in other industries as well. We talk about the Spirit, but when it comes to growing our church or business, it's all about us.

Let's make sure we have better JumboTron screens in our worship center! Do we have enough visitor parking? Do we have beepers for the moms for the nursery? It becomes all about technique and method. But you know what? The Holy Spirit is the author of church growth, the Holy Spirit is the author of salvation, not human beings, not us. Yet we keep saying, "Let's hone our methods. Let's get better at this. Maybe if we had better coffee."