Playing Church v. Doing/Being Church

The LCI conference closed with an address from Dr. Peter Storey, past President of the South African Council of Churches and former Methodist Bishop in South Africa where he was part of the church’s struggle against apartheid. I thought his talk was the best and most awful thing I’d heard in a long time. I had to wait to blog on it until I had recovered.

Have you ever just been going through your life and suddenly the Gospel hits you in the face? It was like hearing a Pauline letter. I cried right there in front of the church staff and everything. Crying in public is something I try to avoid.

He talked about the struggle in South Africa, the Church on trial on trumped up charges by the government. He described church leaders from around the world descending on a dingy country courthouse to stand with the local church representatives, an example of what the Church can do when it takes its mission seriously and stands united.

But he also talked about white South Africa during apartheid in a way that drew some disturbing and accurate parallels with America today. Instead of seeing all humanity as one community, we are quick to divide along economic, racial and social lines. We are blind to those problems we do not want to see. We live in a big bubble of privilege that comes from being a part of a rich First World powerful country. If the church is to do its job, we need to begin to see the people we don’t want to see, to come to know them and realize that they are Christ for us.

He talked about many prosperous communities being like the man born blind, whom Jesus touched twice, once and the man could see shapes, twice and he could see clearly. Perhaps the American church needs to be “touched by Jesus a second time,” he said.

It made me ashamed for the ways in which I have become complacent–my own unwillingness to see and act in the name of the Gospel. When I called Eric afterwards, I said, “I feel wretched.” He said, “Honey, that’s great! What a gift!” (Yeesh). But what he meant was, the Gospel of Jesus is supposed to knock a person off her horse from time to time in order to bear some good fruit for God.

And in the end, I think God is working at Glen Mar to make sure we are about the ministry of Christ in the world, doing Church, not playing Church. Speaking truth to power, not talking to ourselves.

I think that’s why God has given us the new facility, to do and be the Church in new and kingdom of God sorts of ways. I pray that I might be faithful to those vows made at my baptism and that my own work in ministry would bear some fruit for God.

This entry was posted on 30 January 2008 at 13:29 and is filed under General Nourishment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.