Hanging around the premises, or standing-and moving--with the promises?

The Church as God's missionary people

The focus on mission at the 58th annual assembly of the Kentucky Council of Churches was intentional: the modern ecumenical movement began with the world missionary conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1910. The International Missionary Conference brought together church leaders from around the world because, during the great 19th century expansion of Christianity into Africa, Asia, and South America, the missionaries had encountered great difficulty in communicating the gospel due to the divisions within the church: the churches were competing with one another; their competition was itself a reason for people to reject the Gospel, because clearly, if the Gospel was one of reconciliation, these missionaries were not reconciled with one another. They were not living the story they proclaimed.

In May of 2005, the WCC called together the 13th international Conference on World Mission and Evangelism. At that conference, the participants concentrated on the new challenges that come from the need for reconciliation between East and West, North and South, and between Christians and people of other faiths. They declared again their painful awareness of the mistakes of the past, and prayed that the churches may learn from them.

The Council returned to this basic concern about mission. We gathered as churches in a nation where 85% of our people say that they are Christians, and yet we are more divided than ever before. The Kentucky Council of Churches was founded in response to the great prayer of Jesus, that his followers might be one, "in order that the world might believe."

But believe what? Is the purpose of the church to save souls, converting them to accept the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death on a cross for the guilt and sins of the world? And if we save souls, what then? What does a saved soul do?

Is the Church not also called to convert people from a self-centered materialism to be followers of Jesus Christ, in this life, with implications not merely for the eternal state of their souls, but also for the state of their civic and social lives? Are we not called to testify to the love of God and our call to love our neighbors as ourselves? Do we have any responsibility to one another that would hold us to accountability to the Gospel that Jesus proclaimed, a gospel of a kingdom, a "kin_dom", the reign of God breaking into this world and all its political, economic, and social structures?

When John's disciples came to Jesus to ask him if he was the one they were to expect, Jesus didn't say: I am the one whose death will guarantee eternal life for all who believe. He said: Go and tell John what you see: the lame walk, the deaf can hear, the blind see, the hungry are fed.

I think many of us worry that too much of Christianity in our Commonwealth is portrayed as moralistic, rather than moral, as judgmental rather than transformative, as narrow and petty rather than generous of mind and heart; as only private rather than also including our public life.

We are called to be proclaimers, meaning to "claim-for". What are we to proclaim, to claim for? For the way of Jesus whom we profess to be way, and truth, and life. We are witnesses, witnesses to the way of Jesus. Witnesses do not keep silent. They speak. They act. They break noisily into deadly silences. A witness must be, in some unalterable way, always public, or it is no witness at all.

To witness is surely to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love, and it is to tell the story in deeds of kindness and generosity as well as in words--but not to coerce others with that story. Jesus never coerced anyone into following him, nor did he perform magic tricks to make them believe, nor did he say that following him would make life be a life without struggles, suffering, only that in that life there would be joy without measure, hope without end, and love without fail. His love was never exclusive, always inclusive, never belittling or demeaning, always transforming.

Those adjectives are important for they form the basis of what we understand to be the good and just society. To witness is to engage the loveless powers and principalities of evil with the powerful love that creates good. To witness is to DO the actions that will heal and transform a broken world, in the name of the one we follow. Our task is not just to give the poor some money and send them out of our way, as the disciples wanted to do when that crowd of 5000 had gathered. No, Jesus says, YOU feed them.

For too many people, the Church has become an end in itself, the purpose or goal of the Gospel. The Church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the Gospel, but rather its instrument and witness. Mission is not just a program of the church. Mission is what defines church as God's "sent" people. Either we are defined by mission, or we reduce the scope of the gospel and the mandate of the church. Our challenge, if we are to claim people for Christ, is to see that the issues of our time are not only matters about which we disagree, but are the frontiers for planting God's vision for creation. As one of our former Council officers, the Rev. Leticia Rouser, used to say: we've got to quit hanging around the premises, and start standing--and moving--on the promises.

Michael Kinnamon suggested at that International Conference on World Mission and Evanglism in Athens in May that "an ecumenical movement that doesn't involve conversations between people who disagree would not be an ecumenical movement." Let us be clear: we are NOT here because we agree. We disagree about methodologies, and reasons for evanglization and mission. We do not, however, disagree, about the fact that mission is essential to the very essence of what it means to be church.

From my perspective, looking at all our churches, and reflecting on our common life together as Christians in Kentucky, I see lots of evidence at the local level of people alive with and excited for mission. Sadly, I also see a lot of churches that are focusing more on serving the people in the pews, making their lives stress free, comfortable. I see our denominations distracted by moral issues that have to do with the more personal and intimate concerns of our humanity--which is not to say that doing the hard work of ethical reflection about those issues is unimportant. But it is to say that we seem to have too little to say about the major social moral issues of our time: the new growing threat of nuclear proliferation and the fact that nuclear weapons can only be understood as weapons of genocide and weapons that terrorists will one day use, unless we begin to get busy destroying them; about the use of pre-emptive warfare to intervene in some places where people are oppressed or pose a threat, but not in others; about tax cuts for the rich while services to our children, our poor, our elderly are slashed; about our profligate use of fossil fuels and what it is doing to the environment; about the unrelenting scourge of racism even as we mourn the death of one of the great icons of the civil rights movement; about the poverty that afflicts as many as 20% of our children; about the fact that Kentucky produces more marijuana, and probably has more Meth addicts than 49 other states in these United States; that the numbers of people without health insurance keeps increasing; and that the health of our people-the physical health of people who also sit in our pews-is deteriorating to the point that we are #1 in lung cancer; #4 in obesity; #2 in diabetes in this state-just to mention a few ugly statistics.

The Church is the servant of God's reign, of God's kin_dom. It exists to serve the world whom God sent Christ to save, not to be served. If we are serving only what makes us feel good, that narcissistic style of being church numbs us to the disasters taking place in world events and city streets around us. If it makes us feel self-righteous and comfortable, then the church is asking God to serve it, and it has missed its high calling.