A Sent, or a Served, Community?

Earlier this week, I sat down to write my 15th annual report to this Council. All I can hear thundering in the silence of my heart is Jesus's plaintive lamentation:

"...for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me."

and the earlier warning from the prophet Isaiah:

"Announce to my people their rebellion"...and "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house...."

This country, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, is facing the largest disaster on our shores, the largest dislocation of any of our people since the Civil War. Weather casters, like ancient prophets, warned it was coming. And when it came, it showed for all the world to see the terrible reality of poverty. Katrina displayed America's shame to the world, the shame of so many poor people in the richest nation in history. The people living in the path of Katrina were twice as likely as most Americans to be poor and without a car. Three dozen of the hardest hit neighborhoods in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were disproportionately of minority ethnicity and had incomes $10,000 below the national average. So when they started drowning, it seemed like it didn't matter enough for the swift delivery of aid.

Around the country various voices have tried to blame the victims: but if all you have is in a small rental apartment, if you don't have a credit card and you don't have any form of transport other than public transport, if you are old, or sick...why would you try to leave, or how could you even make the effort? Those who have never known grinding poverty should not be so quick to judge. And the failure of aid to be swift, was, as far as I can determine, because of racism and classism, and because our federal government has had more political objectives than practical ones.

Moreover, as we plan for a national telecast from Lexington on Sept. 11 about the response of religion to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, a telecast that will be an interfaith event, to show how compassion builds bridges to hope and bridges to understanding, forging a unity that we desperately need, and giving aid to our neighbors, I have received a sad e-mail from someone calling themselves as Christian that says about our urgent advisory, released on Sept. 2: "This makes me sick...calling Hindus and Moslems 'great faith traditions'...they are worshipping idols and false gods--pagan-- and should not be mixed in a church with followers of the Christ...who Himself, said, "No MAN COMES TO THE FATHER EXCEPT BY ME"... Who do you follow, anyway ??? "

Could there be any clearer evidence that Christ's anquished prayer that we all be one must have some kind of organized and ongoing response?

Who will speak for the poor, for economic justice, against racism? In a time when people bemoan the polarization in our country over such issues as religion and politics, the role of a council of churches is to signal that there can be unity amid diveristy, that there can be civility and decency and respect. These are the functions that a Council of Churches plays, and that the staff and committees and commissions try to fulfill in our work together.

Our theme for our upcoming Annual Assembly is "Mission: The Key to Unity". Our mission is the increase of the love of God and love of neighbor. If we do those things, we are first all being the Church, the body of Christ in the world, and secondly, we will know with shame that our divisions only place more stumbling blocks-and not the sort of stumbling block that Paul identified the cross of Christ to be-in the spiritual seeking and development of human beings.

We are either a "sent" community, or we will rot in our own self-centered and self-satisfying temples. So we find ourselves, as Sojourner's leader Jim Wallis puts it, "co-opted by the Right and dismissed by the left." In his book, God's Politics, Wallis asks the important questions of how it is that "the faith of Jesus came to be known as pro-rich, pro war, and only pro-American." [Wallis, Jim. God's Politics. 2004., p. 3]

Somewhere along the line, we in American churches got things turned around: rather than understanding our very essense to "be mission," we made mission a "program we have", one activity among others. We made the Church the purpose or goal of the Gospel, but the Church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the Gospel, but rather its instrument and witness. Our challenge, if we are to "re-present the kin_dom, or reign of God, on earth" in our own time, must be to see that the issues and doctrines which get us so divided, are the frontiers, the horizon for planting God's vision for creation. We made mission, something we assigned to a committee in our congregations and then hoped that they would keep quiet, and just occupy themselves with the pittance of money that they are allotted out of the church budget, rather than seeing that the church budget -the whole of it-is a sign of a congregation's commitment to witness, to justice, peace, unity, and to representing the reign of God on earth.

Unless we struggle together, unless we serve together in mission, we will continue to have no one to hold us accountable to those deeper convictions of our ecclesiastical callings. And we will grovel in our narrow perspectives.

America needs today the voice of the conscience of the churches, united in saying: it is a disgrace that we should allow the poverty rates in this country to grow; it is shameful that 30% of New Orleans' people lived in poverty. It is embarassing, and unnecessary, that Kentucky continues to fall further and further behind....educationally, economically, and in terms of opportunity. Our first mission should be a mission of prophecy to ourselves and one another about the way we use resources in our denominations. Our second mission should be the prophetic word and action that will say that we can no longer stand by while our neighbors continue, generation after generation, in poverty. Our third mission should be the mission of koinonia, of community: of building new communities of care and hope for those who are so beaten down that they had no place to turn with the winds blew and the rains fell and the waters rose. Racism and poverty are two terrible scourges that bloody the back of the Christ of the church, as well as beleaguer our neighbors and our world.

Much of our church life mirrors a consumer model, as if the church, or even a Council of Churches, is an organization that creates and markets religious products and services. We even believe that you get what you pay for, so you get better products and better services if you pay more for them, in a travesty of what ministry and being church are supposted to reflect. We think of church, or the Council of Churches, as existing for the benefit of and service to its members. No wonder the church, and its Council of Churches, is struggling. It should fail, if that is its raison d'etre. The sending and receiving mentality has got to go. We are all sent, and in that sending we find our unity, our strength, the beauty of God's delightful creative diversity in making us and using us, and we find the life abundant that Christ promised. If we gather as church, or even as an association of churches, seeking God to serve us, then we are doomed.

The Council is your servant for God's mission. We should not be perceived as something that the churches designed so that they wouldn't have to be bothered with mission, or with concern about Christian unity or our appalling disunity, or about justice and injustice. To this extent, the Council was created by your forebears in Kentucky nearly 58 years ago to be a thorn in your side, constantly pricking your conscience, and calling you out from the comfort of our air-conditioned and well-appointed sanctuaries to see the poor, the halt, the lame, the little ones who need our love, care and nurture.

The Kentucky Council of Churches does not exist to serve you, but to be your sign in the cause of unity of all humankind in God's beloved community, God's beloved household. When you ask us to provide services for your churches, the service we see ourselves called to provide is that of provocateur--those who call out those who are in a rut. Our calling is to be the means by which we may together work to create a more perfect union in this great country, and a more perfect world that belongs to God, whether other people on this planet acknowledge our God or not.

In hope always for justice, peace, and unity in the bonds of love, Nancy Jo