This blog is a conversation people have who labor in hard places; it provides a communion for those who bear a love and longing to live and work among the least, last, lost and left out. We ask each other, will we be able to sustain “the long obedience” inside the sufferings of our community?
This blog takes for granted that there are people who have gone before … who have trampled the rough ways; knowing it’s a strengthening force when we find them. And finding them ignites the ancient and biblical practice of looking at the saints’ lives for inspiration:
Therefore then, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [who have borne testimony to the Truth], let us strip off and throw aside every encumbrance (unnecessary weight) and that sin which so readily (deftly and cleverly) clings to and entangles us, and let us run with patient endurance and steady and active persistence the appointed course of the race that is set before us ... (Hebrews 12:1 Amplified Bible, Classic Edition)
This blog looks at 12 such saints who were on the front lines of social and cultural upheaval, injustice and suffering, whose faith and spiritual practice was their source of hope and strength. They were also members of the body of Christ, most of them prominent leaders. They spoke on behalf of the church, addressed the church prophetically, wept over the church’s complicity with sin, suffered, standing with the oppressed church, all the while changing the world for Christ. For the next nine months, a whole school year calendar, we are asking these wise, gifted and spiritual leaders, how they answered and lived the question:
“What if the church were the church”.
The results will neither be critical nor cynical, for these mentors imagined and re-imagined the church that they deemed … was beloved.
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
The longing for how the church expresses God’s reign by living differently -- by living as a distinctive covenant community -- is as the song goes, “as old as time”.
We get glimpses now and then of this beloved community. Charles Marsh and John Perkins take on one such sighting in their book, Welcoming Justice, God’s Movement toward Beloved Community. Their reference point is the Civil Rights Movement with it’s promises and revelations. Martin Luther King, Jr. remembered his old theology courses[1] where the language and the theological premise of the “beloved community” captured what it would look like for the church and a movement to manifest the kingdom of God with love and power. MLK, jr. popularized the term, attempting to name what was going on all around him and his community. He wrote that the:
[Beloved Community is the very goal of God’s movement in the world]. God gathers us into the family of faith not only for our own sake, but also so that we might welcome justice and build beloved communities for the sake of the world. That is the purpose that drives followers of the risen Christ. It is the movement of the Spirit that began at Pentecost and has continued in faithful communities of discipleship throughout every generation. It is the theological vision that we need desperately to reclaim in our time.[2]
For Marsh and Perkins, the underpinnings of the beloved community are theological: theology has a place. Theology is lived. And it has a home, sustained by its vision, whose anchor is the church. Pretty lofty, for sure!
What if … our mentors were on the front lines of these same ideas, living them themselves in communion and solidarity, and the effect was a world transformed? What if there is something for us, in our longing for how the church expresses God’s reign, by living differently? Well, that’s our vision with this year’s blog series.
Here is the year at a glance:
