Bad Words IV: "A Sense of Community", aka, Corrosive False Peace in the Church

I don't know the person who wrote this, but it is bang on. It is a bit of rant, but makes a good point about what today's franchised church-ianity too often settles for and even advertises, as if community and hospitality are "things we feel rather than things we participate in." Feel free to go read it.

But lest I turn this fourth instalment of "bad words" into a cop out by letting someone else's blog do all the work for me, let me try to explain with an excerpt from an email I just sent this morning. My friend and I were discussing the alarming verses littered throughout the gospels about forgiving and loving others as Christ forgives and loves us. On one hand, if you have a full-bodied idea of what forgiving and loving look like, that seems impossible. On the other hand, if you have a kind of sentimentalized idea of forgiveness and love, that seems too shallow and easy. In my email I was trying to explain that I think Christ is calling us to what Paul would later call the ministry of reconciliation:

"One thing I'm exploring in my dissertation is this idea you mentioned, about "straight up forgiveness". I think that's been a problem in the church, basically because of our generalized and privatized notion of justification. We tend to think that we are called to cover everything in blanket forgiveness and move on. But I don't think this is a biblical conception of forgiveness. Forgiveness is wedded to too much else in the grander scheme of reconciliation.

So it isn't a matter of confrontation being a plan B for when you can't forgive. But it is that you do forgive---and therefore you engage with a person and with the community (as appropriate) toward full reconciliation. That includes naming the sin or the enmity (confrontation and confession), agreeing on it (repentance), and aiming to together be caught up in God's work of healing and witness in the world. This is the opposite of false peace. It can be messy. It won't feel like the community we advertise on our church websites. But it would be communion."

Feel free to stop here if you've read enough, and want to comment or question or think on what I've proposed. But if you want to read a little further, here is Karl Barth's argument along the same lines from The Doctrine of Reconciliation IV/3.2. I know I have put some lengthy excerpts on here, but if this grabs you in any way, I do encourage you to read on carefully:

"It [a church's witness] can have the appearance of a true message of Christ, a true preaching of the kingdom of God or true praise of free grace. It can ostensibly be a proclamation of justification by faith alone and a warming reference to the spiritual conversion and moral renovation needed by humanity.

And why should it not proclaim this with genuine emotion and true zeal? In this corrupted form only one thing will be carefully left out and therefore lacking.

The impartation will not be intended nor go forth as an invitation to or demand for a concrete decision of faith and obedience .... In spite of all its profundity and eloquence, at the point where it ought to do this, it will come to a halt and become an inarticulate mumbling of pious words.
There will be talk of inward regeneration by faith, of the struggle for a new awakening by the Spirit of God, of the solemn prospect of a distant "world of Christ," but there will be no demand to grasp the nettle and to make a small beginning of this regeneration and awakening in a specific act of will here and now.

There will be prayer for peace, but prayer committing no one. When the time comes for steps to peace which commit anyone, there will be quick withdrawal into neutrality, into a safe avoidance of the fatal problems and the even more fatal freedom from problems of the existing present, followed by a new and powerful and sincerely meant but blunted and generalised and therefore impotent assurance that Jesus Christ is risen, that He will come again at the last day and put everything right, and that faith in Him is the victory which overcomes the world.

The community which wants to adopt this attitude will never be at a loss for practical reasons in its favour. . . . But would it not be better if, when at what is perhaps a critical moment for the world and therefore for itself the community finds itself in the disturbing position of not knowing what to say or what not to say, or of being divided on the point, it should at least refrain from regarding itself as excused or even justified for these reasons? . . .

[O]ught not such an attitude to give it a very definitely disturbed or bad conscience which will not allow it to persist in its neutrality but will impel it rather to become a new and perhaps more attentive hearer of the voice of the Good Shepherd? It is this disturbed conscience, however, which it does not seem to have so long as it can find such good reasons for its neutrality, its empty generality, and the consequent blunting of its word, of its supposed attestation of the Word of Jesus Christ" (pp. 813-815).

I think this is really well put. Rather devastating, actually. If Barth is right, we are back on our knees before the grace of God, even if we do stand in joy and walk again in the over-abundance of that very same grace.

This is not a church-bash. Please don't take any of my posts in this series that way. If anything, it is hidden people of the church (and certainly not our blandly tolerant society) that have taught me to strive to deeper understand and articulate what is true community. You've likely met them. They are generally the people who didn't leave the church when they got burned but stuck it out and found the grace in the gravel. They don't have blogs and they don't advertise themselves. They just are. They are the people who continue to go to church despite the shallow promise of a "sense of community" and actually live in the substance of communion so becoming an outpost of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Jesus, I'd love to be counted among them.