BLOG 6/1/18. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IS DEEPLY HUMANITARIAN

BLOG 6/1/18. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IS DEEPLY HUMANITARIAN

This Blog is triggered by my reading of a book, Lives in Crisis, which is a very thorough and provocative study on the ethical crises encountered by the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. This amazing organization is composed of a company medical personnel who are deeply humanitarian and ethical, and who engage in dangerous and complicated crises and emergencies around the globe. This is not a ‘Christian’ organization (though it contains many Christians), but is deeply humanitarian. The study is very detailed and complex as it details the origins and struggles of the organization. In some ways, it origins were provoked by the silence of other humanitarian organizations in the face of such highly charged political issues as their silence over the holocaust. The organization, evidently continues to be an ongoing and intense debate among its gifted and intense personnel over the continually emerging ethical issues it encounters in its humanitarian quests.

Reading that alongside my daily readings in the gospel of Luke reminds me of how radically humanitarian also is the true community of Christ’s disciples. One has only to look at what engaged Jesus and his followers, and what are his radical social and ethical teachings and practices: … feed the hungry, heal the sick, set prisoners free, take the stranger into your home, etc. More than that, Jesus is, on one hand come to inaugurate God’s new creation in the midst of this fallen creation, and he was intent on going to Jerusalem where he would reconcile us to God by his blood, and so give us his forgiveness of sins, and all of those redemptive mercies made possible by his suffering and death.

At the same time he was challenging the destructive and deteriorating forces of darkness all along the way. The Christian faith is, in its very essence, deeply humanitarian, and to identify with him and to become a part of the community of his disciples, the church, is to embrace this radical sense of mission, to acknowledge that all men and women are our neighbors, that there are no ‘ordinary’ men or women. The very people we rub shoulders day by day are our neighbors, and to be indifferent to them is to contradict our profession. This is costly. Just as no doctor joins Doctors Without Borders who is not committed to the dangers and challenges of its mission, so we read that in the first-generation church, among the populace of Jerusalem none of the rest dared join the Christian community though they respected its participants.

Those who are followers of Christ are, in effect, a true resistance movement. We are those called to move toward the destructive works of darkness, toward the evidences of this creation’s brokenness, with the redemptive presence of God’s love for the most unlikely. Even as Doctors Without Borders began primarily as a movement staffed by youthful rebels, … so if one reads the accounts of the church in its God-given power, it is inhabited by those who have embraced a radical ethic and so become redemptive rebels.

Whenever a church community/institution seeks ‘acceptability’ or approval by the larger community (i.e., tax-deductibility?), and to be given ‘status’ as it becomes the religious and institutional expression of that culture of darkness, … then that church is effectively a failure, it is neutered, it has forsaken its calling to be radically and redemptively humanitarian and radically ethical in incarnating the teachings of Christ in his love for all humankind.

That is sobering, considering how conformed the church is to the world, and how easily it embraces the promises of Christ while effectively ignoring the gospel’s demands! What would it look like if a Christian community were composed of redemptive rebels formed by the teachings of Christ?

[If you find these Blogs helpfully provocative, recommend them to your friends. Thanks.]

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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