There is much reason for celebration as we witness a growing body of Christian conscience across our land. It is exciting to see more and more people discovering the implications of radical discipleship. But as we grow together, there are dangers and temptations to be avoided. We at the Post-American are more than ever of a mind to resist suggestions and efforts that would organize and institutionalize the movemental spirit. The model we have chosen to follow is that of voluntary horizontal relationships between communities and people rather than the model of top-down decision-making structures. The Post-American seeks to serve as a forum for the growing thought and experience of this movemental church spirit. We seek to facilitate communication and relationships, not to create institutions.
We think it is true that politicization of the church can result in the church becoming a power of the world and exercising her influence as such rather than seeing herself as that eschatological community that bears witness to the presence of the kingdom in the common life of the world. We must be aware of the dangers of so focusing on “politics” that we forget to struggle with the issues of our discipleship— the need for prophetic witness and resistance, identification with the oppressed, the idolatry of civil religion, the priority of community, lifestyle, etc. A possible danger in the exciting growth of awareness in the church is the tendency to embrace a liberal political philosophy which also accepts the economic, political, and value assumptions of the status quo, as do conservative philosophies. We must put primary importance on the active affirmation of the new order in the midst of the old. Political action is vital but only when it is flowing from a proper understanding of discipleship and witness— in other words, from a proper basis (which is provided by neither social conservatism nor liberalism). Our discussions of “politics” must flow from a prior consideration and understanding of the ethical priorities of the kingdom, which of course have political implications. The gospel demands political involvement that addresses the needs of people, that is directed against all these things that bind and oppress people, that confronts the political and economic causes of human hurt. But in our political involvement, we must first seek to be a kingdom-conscious movement of Christian people who by their very existence, presence and action call into question the values, assumptions, and very structure of our society and free people to live in alternative ways.
The church must once again become alien, pilgrim, prophet—a counter-cultural community of outsiders living out their discipleship in a process of continual disentanglement from the values that dominate this age, sensitive to those cultural blind spots that mold its thinking and shape its actions to the standard that is passing away, proclaiming the great refusal to be squeezed into the world’s pattern, pledging allegiance to the coming reign of God.
The nature and shape of our discipleship cannot be discovered by individual pursuit alone. We must struggle together to determine the values and priorities of our discipleship as we seek to live out our life in Christ in the midst of the counter-values and priorities of our society and culture. To help facilitate this corporate struggle, the Post-American staff and community is convening a summer education-action seminar that will focus on the dimensions and cost of Christian discipleship in
We affirm the priority of awareness—awareness of the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ, awareness of the world in which we live, awareness of ourselves as those who seek to serve the Lord and serve each other.
We affirm the orthodoxy of involvement. Awareness makes meaningful involvement possible by providing the context and volatile atmosphere in which new styles of living can be formed and in which creative and concrete Christian responses to the needs of our day can be made.
The summer seminars will emphasize the priority of awareness and the orthodoxy of involvement.
The Priority of Awareness
(1) Biblical-Christocentric basis: Awareness of God
We have suppressed the Bible, reduced it to an item in our doctrinal statements, dismissed it as apolitical, relegated it to a private sphere of holy neutrality in relation to social conflict. We need to become a biblical people once again and to search out biblical lifestyles. We need to be Christ-centered people whose values and ethical priorities stem from the gospel and the entrance of the God-Man into human history.
(2) Societal-cultural analysis: Awareness of World
Christians too often have maintained an isolated, cloistered posture in the midst of a crumbling, chaotic world. We have failed to grapple biblically with the serious issues of the day, or even to understand them. Much of the summer program is designed to address itself to this awareness-gap among Christians. Only by understanding the myths of our age can we understand how they stamp us with their image and begin to resist the forces that blunt the distinctiveness of our discipleship.
(3) Communal-contemplative context: Awareness of Ourselves
Our society is one where other forces alien to the gospel seek to live our lives for us and make demands on us which will compromise our discipleship. We cannot hope to resist these demands unless our lives become collected and grounded through prayer and contemplation. We must become contemplative critics who will be spiritually sensitive as we seek to understand ourselves and our world. Only then can our chaotic reactions become creative responses. We must not only proclaim an alternative, but seek to live and be that alternative. Thus we affirm the necessity of community as the context for constructing new models of living and for growing in awareness of ourselves and our world.
The Orthodoxy of Involvement
The Christian is called first of all to be a sign of Christ’s presence in the world rather than an ecclesiastical reproduction of the twisted values of technocratic society. Jacques Ellul writes, “The situation of the Christian in the world is a revolutionary one.” It is clear from an examination of the prophets and apostles that true faith necessarily revolutionizes the conditions of life into which it comes. But our concern is for a revolution affecting the world, not only the State or government. We are concerned with change not just in the form of the political system or the economy but with the very framework of our civilization and society—its values, assumptions, and institutions— all of the cultural givens which ought be continually examined and tested. The Christian belongs to two cities. We are in the world but must not be of the world. We are citizens of a different kingdom, servants of another master, those whose allegiance is to a new order from which we derive our ways of thinking, feeling, and judging. We cannot give ultimate allegiance to the world because our first duty is obedience to our Lord. The central life commitment for a Christian must be to the lordship of Jesus Christ. To proclaim Christ as Lord is a profoundly political act. To give one’s ultimate allegiance to the imperatives and priorities of Christ’s kingdom is to live in denial of the idolatrous claims, necessities, and demands of institutions, governments, parties, movements, and ideologies. With the priorities of the kingdom guiding our struggle to be in the world but not of it, we must enter the political process where the spiritual and moral issues at stake demand our involvement. The two orders cannot be equated with one another but live in fundamental tension. The Christian must live in this tension and recognize the opposition between this world and the
The church must be on the cutting edge of society, stirring conscience, raising questions, acting in resistance, struggling for human life and values, making change. The Christian response to our revolutionary age is to stand with the exploited and the oppressed. Jacques Ellul writes:
The place of the Nazarene’s followers is not with the oppressor but with the oppressed, not with the mighty but with the weak, not with the free but the enslaved, not with the opulent but the poverty-stricken, not with the well but with the sick, not with the successful but the defeated, not with the comfortable majority but with the miserable minorities, not with the bourgeois but with the proletariat.
Awareness of God, of our world, of ourselves makes authentic involvement possible. Unless such awareness issues in involvement, we betray that awareness.
Just as we are committed to being on an inward journey for all of time, so are we committed to being on an outward journey, so that the inner and the outer become related to one another and one has meaning for the other that helps to make the other possible. If this does not happen then those who are critical of the contemplative man are rightly so.
Elizabeth O’Connor,
Journey Inward, Journey Outward
Some of the issues to be dealt with in the summer program are: community, lifestyle, biblical politics, violence, militarism and war, American nationalism and civil religion, institutional sexism and racism, the structure of American wealth and power, the challenge of
The summer seminars are not designed to be a passive learning experience. We must be careful not to be trapped in what Martin Luther King called “the paralysis of analysis.” We could spend forever becoming aware and never act, or never come to even understand our own personal complicity in the problems we discuss. The program, consequently, is meant only for those who are willing to take change seriously. It will accomplish its design only to the extent that it changes our personal lives and lifestyles and evokes creative and concrete Christian responses to the new awareness of our own selves, our world, and our God.
Jim Wallis is editor in chief of Sojourners. Bob Sabath was assistant editor of the Post-American when this article appeared, and is currently web technologist of Sojourners.
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