A House Divided
How is the church in North America rising to the challenge of pluralism? Ferguson provides a framework for the answer; the results have been mixed at best.
James Davidson Hunter, in his book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, has named pluralism as one of the biggest challenges facing the world, and Christianity, today. How is the church doing in rising to the challenge? The results have been mixed at best.
Take Ferguson, for instance. Ferguson was, among other things, a flare that threw a stark light on the deep faults that run through not only the American society at large, but also through the American church. Conversations — or rather, pronouncements — ensued, and cumulatively exposed our harsh reality. We live and worship in segregated and divided churches, inhabiting different worlds, at odds with each other, and unable to see what the other can see; we do not live in the one body of Christ giving united witness to the kingdom of God, according to the confession of our faith: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” (Eph. 4:4–6) The slippage in these communiqués from different realities told a tale of brokenness that cries out for the gospel of reconciliation under the administration of Christ the Prince of Shalom. We are in desperate need of the gospel at work in our world(s).
However, the tale has not been one of unmitigated fracture and dissolution. As the new year dawned, I was at a standing-room-only gathering of believers from various congregations in Philadelphia, including Blacks and Whites, Hispanics and Asians. Its purpose was to convene diverse believers who would worship, converse, and pray for the issues of racial divisions that have so recently resurfaced — yet again! — in our society. It provided a flesh-and-blood glimpse of the Christian hope of redemption, and those who gathered gravitated towards this hope with great yearning.
Nevertheless, questions remained. During the open forum, more than one White person asked, “I see that there is a deep problem. But I’m at a loss as to how I can make a difference. Tell me, what can I do?” Various answers were given: “Get to know, really know, a Black person.” “Learn to listen deeply to Black people and their concerns, even if you can’t understand them at first, before you start speaking.” All good action items for healing and reconciliation that are sorely needed in our time. But the group also wondered aloud if these admittedly individual and private acts of grace would be enough.
We are thus moved to posing structural questions, searching for collective action in the face of a system whose main forces include segregation. How will the church in North America work towards becoming a shalom community that reflects more faithfully the eschatological society of New Jerusalem? Is there more than marching and protesting? Surely one of the crucial needs of the day is for the church to address the segregation which exists within itself.
I have often wondered whether our church growth strategies of targeting consumerist niche markets (or “Homogeneous Units”) end up contributing to the segregation of our world. Could what’s good for the local church be bad for the kingdom of God? Churches that have experienced enviable growth and success in the last half century may have done so largely due to migration patterns like white flight, which is almost directly responsible for the creation of isolated and impoverished communities like Ferguson, with all its attendant ills such as under-resourced and underperforming schools and a security methodology which mimics a police state or a military occupation.
How can the church exercise its prophetic imagination so that it no longer uncritically accepts and imitates the status quo but leads in a different way of the kingdom? Is it high time that churches in a community or a metropolitan region start looking to other congregations across the socioeconomic, racial, cultural, and denominational divides as fellows and equals in the kingdom of God, and dream of coalitions that can intentionally work against our segregation? Can they perhaps organize to minister to the most hurting of our communities in visibly diverse yet united ways? Could they perhaps work together to commission and support joint local missionary efforts and church plants? Is it possible to cultivate and nurture such cross-cultural relationships, both individually and corporately, and close the racial and socioeconomic gaps by being on mission in our own backyards together? Would it be too much to imagine ethnic churches (White churches included) finally working together to form multiethnic ministry teams and congregations? Could believers from the dominant culture join with those from subdominant cultures as one fellowship, truly embrace the cost of unity that requires becoming more than oneself, repent and forgive, and join the worshiping throng?
One can dream. Indeed, we must not give up dreaming, if we are to struggle against the darkness, if the gospel is true.
What keeps us from dreaming, and acting? For one, we come to realize that the cost is far greater than our naive idealistic selves can imagine. Ferguson left a such deep imprint on our collective psyche because we saw how deep this divide was still. Working for shalom community will challenge us deeply. We will have to face our own prejudices and self-righteousness to which we have been blind. We will have to face our anger and hatred. We will have to face our fears and our ugliness. It won’t be a trendy short-term special project; it won’t involve a simple window dressing of “diversity” and tokenism. It will mean joining an ages-long struggle of redemptive history that demands our very lives. It will mean re-covenanting to church — not the form that has devolved into another form of tribal churchianity, a way of life from which increasing numbers are walking away, disillusioned. But I am speaking of the church that Paul dreamed of in Eph. 1, which we too must dream anew in our time.
Sin — both personal and corporate — is more radical than we are usually conscious of. We are inherently selfish and fearful beings, fallen and at odds with other fellows made in God’s image. No less a cost than the cross is required for our strife-torn world to be made whole. So believers are called, once again, from a “cheap grace” of consumerist spirituality to joining Christ in carrying the cross, to deny self, to struggle against our present world system, and to welcome the future world to come. “[Unless] a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24) The cost of the kingdom has already been paid by Christ, but we have yet to carry our cross; his followers are invited to share in the sufferings of Christ, and form alternative and prophetic communities of faith.
The great scholar of world Christianity Andrew Walls has said in his essay, “The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture” (collected in the book, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith), that there are two seemingly contradictory principles at work in the ongoing mission of the Church: the “Indigenizing” principle and the “Pilgrim” principle.
On the one hand, God accepts us, and our cultures, as we are. The good news of the gospel, especially to those who find their own cultures marginalized or subdominant, is that God has drawn near to us where we are and identified with us even in our cursedness. This is the indigenizing principle. On the other hand, God accepts us into his presence in order to transform us. The gospel “whispers to [the believer] that he has no abiding city and warns him that to be faithful to Christ will put him out of step with his society; for that society never existed, in East or West, ancient time or modern, which would absorb the word of Christ painlessly into its system.” (8) This is the pilgrim principle, and it compels the people of God to swim upstream in a world moving towards segregation.
We are strangers and aliens in this world; we are looking forward to a city that is coming. May the church not rest and be at peace in this world; may the church keep seeking the City of God.
