The Confessing Community

To raise the question of the confessing community and where it can be found today is to raise the fundamental question of the church's very identity and visibility. Who do the people of God think they are? How do they live? Where can the confessing community be found whose confession bears concrete relationship to its daily life? Is the community's relationship both to God and to its historical situation clear in its mind and actions?

Such clarity of relationships is precisely what is most lacking now in the American churches. It's hard to find the church who knows what its confession must mean in America at the present moment. Confessing Christ, instead of being an act of words and life which prepares one for personal risk, sacrifice, even martyrdom, has become, in the American context, a positive asset--socially and even politically. In recent times we have seen that such a confession might even help one win the White House.

The growth of a certain kind of evangelical religion in the United States has greatly blurred and reduced the meaning of the gospel to terms which are culturally and politically acceptable. Born-again religion is "in." It is everywhere. It is a media phenomenon. The cultural majority of "confessors" includes former presidential aides and former revolutionaries, football and movie stars, politicians and Miss Americas. The marks of such faith are evident--success, fame, prosperity, influence, and above all, loyalty to the American way of life.

In this situation the American churches are in danger of losing any sense of their true identity. The New Testament vision of the kingdom of God is easily replaced by an American civil religion where the church's life becomes so wedded to the realities of the present American order that the sense of preserving the holy, of bearing true witness to the evangel, of living under the word of God, is lost.

At present, the American churches suffer not from persecution but from seduction both by the culture and by the state. The capacity for political dissent or for alternative social vision is almost absent when local congregations become so conformed to the predominant American culture and so controlled by the economic and social system. The vision of a "Christian America" held by a growing number in the U.S. means the sacrifice of the radical demands of the gospel. The identity of the church becomes synonymous with the identity of the nation.

In such a situation of political and cultural idolatry the creation of truly confessing communities becomes crucial to the recovery of the church's lost identity. These communities have the task of establishing a whole new style of life in the United States which is at once a rebuke to the particular principalities and powers which now dominate the American and global scene as well as being a sign of hope and change. Confessing Christ in ways that are authentic and biblically faithful will only emerge as the daily existence of the Christian community becomes a countersign to American wealth and power.

The resurgence of a confessing community in the United States has already begun. The key to it is the integration of spiritual and social renewal. This radical renewal which is now occurring in the American churches is based on Bible study, worship, prayer, recovery of pastoral life, and a renewal of the Holy Spirit from which is flowing anew sense of social mission and political resistance. The connection between the healing of our own lives together and the healing of the nations is beginning to be made.

Reordering the Church
Fundamental changes are now called for in lifestyle and structure of the local churches. For a new style of life rooted in the gospel at least two things are basic: reorientation of the churches' life from the social and economic mainstream to the marginal sectors of American society--among the poor and dispossessed. This will change our "view" of things as we learn to look at American reality from the bottom up instead of the top down. Our social analysis--our view of the world--depends more on what we see when we get out of bed in the morning than upon mere sociological study. The poor become our friends and brothers and sisters and not merely objects of our concern.

Second is the need for redistribution of the churches' economic resources and social power. Key to all this is the churches' relinquishment of their privilege and control--being willing to risk their position and their very social legitimacy for the sake of the poor.

We will find ourselves recovering and relearning the identity of the confessing community through service among the poor and through suffering as we become more marginalized. Our compassion must take us from sympathy and guilt to action. Compassion means to change the way we live, make decisions, work, spend money, establish priorities and expend our energy.

In the American frenzy with born-again religion, the question must be asked, "Conversion to what and at what cost?" The oft asked question, "How are you born again?" must be followed by "What do you do after you are born again?" Is conversion merely from one private state of existence to another, of being unhappy to being happy? Or is conversion from one world to another, one reality to another, one community to another?

In the American situation conversion must increasingly mean conversion from loyalty to American wealth and power to loyalty to the kingdom. The two are at odds. Growing faithfulness and fervency in regard to the gospel will mean growing resistance to the present American order--the church becoming a loving adversary to the American regime. Evangelism and conversion in the American context, will therefore produce the spread of social deviance.

The confessing community will find its confession transforming it into a community of exiles. The biblical metaphor of pilgrims, sojourners, aliens, strangers who seek to sing the Lord's song in a strange land will become real in our experience. The American church must accept its rightful minority status and refuse to sacrifice the gospel for majority acceptance.

Confession is to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and it must be made specific. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not, the Pentagon is not, Gulf Oil, Exxon, and General Motors are not, national security is not, the consumer society is not, the good life is not. Jesus is Lord and our visible confession of him will make us a confessing community.

Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article was written. This article was taken from remarks on the meaning of the "confessing community" delivered to the annual meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches at Geneva, Switzerland, on July 29, 1977.