On the Edge Between Church and World

Marsh's wrap-up chapter, entitled The Contours of an Activist Faith for the 20th Century has a lot to say about the fluid movement of God in and out and in between the ecclesia and the activism; one might say there is an interdependence, even so much as the church drawing some lessons and challenge from the willingness of the "movements" communities to challenge the status quo, and to insist on the communal roots whcih seek sustenance for the activist journey. The following segment expresses some complexities of the relationships between ecclesia and healthy , community based activism. I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to say that I wouold say everything just like this, but I like Marsh's thesis of the absolute neccessity for the spiritual community base.

While the church as a worshipping community exists for the specific purposes of confessing, proclaiming, and worshipping Jesus Christ as Lord, the beloved community quietly moves from its historical origins into new and unexpected shapes of communion and solidarity. To be sure, the church has an obligation to nurture and fortify the beloved community, even though it often fails in this task. But the church's failure, its concessions to expediency and comfort, does not limit God's action in the world. At such times when the church chooses the easy way over the narrow way, God may nurture and fortify the beloved community through the activity of the Holy Spirit. Beloved community may then become a source of knowledge and conviction for the church, which the church in turn must acknowledge and appropriate in humility. But beyond humility, Christians should rejoice in the fact that when the church defaults on its mission in the world, the Spirit places the beloved community in the embracing arms of the kingdom of God.

In this manner, the Christian regards the peaceable reign of God as the hidden meaning of all movements for liberation and reconciliation, the hidden meaning that "brings us together for these days as strangers and yet as friends" (as the theologian Karl Barth wrote in 1919).6 We should not collapse the kingdom into the church, nor should we diminish the full energy of the church to radiate outward into a gathering more inclusive than the confessing body. As we have observed throughout the pages of this book, beloved community is a way of talking about the redemptive and reconciling spaces whose real history is the church but which cannot be contained by the church or brought fully under its management. Beloved community overflows the boundaries of the church in a way analogous to St. Augustine's description of the divine love overflowing the triune God in tile creation of the world. The logic of the church (as one might say), like that of the beloved community, moves always and everywhere beyond itself toward the peaceable reign of God on earth.7 For this reason, we should also note that the Christian church has no monopoly on affirmations of the human; that movements, agencies, and persons outside the church often understand and appreciate affirmations of human dignity with greater attention to the detail and scope of their application in the world. (Who could doubt, for example, that Amnesty International operates with greater attention to human suffering than the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which regards its mission as the saving of lost souls from eternal damnation?)

Importantly, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered this matter of Christians and "good people" in his late meditations on justice. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and dissident, had joined an organization in the Gentian resistance called the Abwehr, and his writing, ponderous now in its intent, strains toward exceedingly difficult theological notions in a fragmented and unfinished beauty. For Bonhoeffer, those who come to the work of mercy and justice from places outside the church are drawn by a power that the church most eloquently bespeaks. The "children" of the church, who have left the church for reasons that are not only understandable but sometimes noble, and who have gone their own way in the world, return to their mothers They do not return to their mother out of guilt or weakness, or out of an anxious realization that they could not make it on their own; whatever need they feel is based on shared concern for humanity. "During the time of their estrangement their appearance and their language had altered a great deal, and yet at the crucial moment the mother and the children once again recognized one another," Bonhoeffer writes. "Reason, justice, culture, humanity and all the kindred concepts sought and found a new purpose and a new power in their origin. "9

p. 208 The Beloved Community