BLOG 6/26/18. CHURCH AND STATE IN AN EVER-CHANGING CONTEXT
The evidence is everywhere that that there is a quest for stability, for the familiar, and for the illusion that life can somehow stabilize and be predictable, that we can make yesterday permanent. Politically, it evidences itself in the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) mantra of those of conservative temperament. But that can never happen. There can no longer be autonomous, self-sufficient nations. The world is now too inter-linked in every way, so that to attempt to fulfill some illusion of economic, political, communications, ideological autonomy is an impossible dream. Tomorrow’s world requires cooperation and sensitivity to what happens here and happens half-way across the world in humanitarian, economic, political realms. We need each other.
I’ve been reading a fascinating book about the ethical journey of the humanitarian medical organization Doctors Without Borders / Medicines Sans Frontiers. (Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders). This is an international organization (with several national chapters) whose design is to get adequate and skillful medical help to areas of crisis (natural disasters, plagues, famine, etc.) as quickly and efficiently as possible. What they have encountered along the way in their forty-some year history is that nothing is ever the same. Local circumstances are different in every new mission. Ethical challenges are never easily resolved. What was valid yesterday is not valid today. Personnel requirements change. The challenges are endless. What is remarkable is that the organization has factored-in this reality and regularly seeks to fine-tune the current situation to the realities of their mission. To fail to be sensitive to this fact makes the organization more and more inefficient in its operation.
I’m a veteran of church leadership for decades, and I’ve watched this in the self-image of so many church communities who look back to “the good old days” or to “the old-time religion” and to the comfortably familiar, seemingly oblivious to the cultural realities and challenges around them. Institutional Christianity is notorious for this. It assumes that what was useful and acceptable in the era of Christendom is still valid in an era disinterested in such institutions. Tribalism, self-satisfied humanism, increasing suicides among those who evidently have no hope, the dominance of economic principalities and powers, and in general, something of a ‘cultural whitewater’ is the context, and when this is not understood, those communities fade into non-existence, and their venerable sanctuaries are demolished and replaced with high-rise office or apartment complexes, or become green-spaces.
There are those Christian think-tanks that attempt to do what the Doctors Without Borders teams do, and seek to keep the church attuned to its mission, but so many of those Christian communities have long-since forgotten their calling to be God’s missionary agent in a world so often indifferent, even hostile, … and ever changing from day to day. So often we watch ostensibly Christian people and communities doing exactly what the apostle said they should not do, they are being conformed to the world rather than transformed and continually transforming by the renewing of the minds. But such transforming is often painful, and requires leaving behind patterns that were satisfactory yesterday, and engaging in the challenging and often painful role of being faithful in their role as aliens and aliens in a culture that demands continual exegesis.
We can never rest in this quest to be culturally alert. I’d love your feed-back.
