In September of 1997 there was a groundbreaking service for a Catholic cathedral that is going to be constructed in Los Angeles. The Diocese of Los Angeles commissioned the famous Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo to design the building. Their hope is that the cathedral will be completed by the beginning of the millennium. It’s to be a peculiar witness to the glory of God.
There were models of the cathedral at the groundbreaking service and on the basis of the models a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote a review of the cathedral. This is a part of what the reporter said:
“Moneo is creating an alternate world to the everyday world that surrounds the cathedral, a testimony to grandeur of the human spirit, an antidote to a world that is increasingly spiritually empty.”
Then he wrote this sentence: “The cathedral, set in the midst of the secular city, will be an enclave of resistance.” What an image . . . the Church an enclave of resistance.
My friend Mark Trotter, who shared that story, suggested that that word should be a part of the mission statement of every church in the city, “an enclave of resistance against all that diminishes human life” (“An Enclave of Resistance,” a sermon preached by Mark Trotter, First United Methodist Church, San Diego, California, October 5, 1997).
Whether it should be a part of the mission statement of every church or not is not my concern -- but that it should be a factor in our awareness of who we are as the Church is absolutely crucial. AS I have thought about the present state of the the church – and of the crucial juncture at which we are in human history – as I have pondered the churches history, her strength and weakness, and as I have sought to envision the effectual church of the future, this image has continued to force itself into my awareness. It is a powerful image that is shaping my thought about the church – the now and future church.
We must not forget that the church is not our idea, but God’s. The church has stayed, and missed the mark when we have sought to shape her apart from God’s vision. God called Israel to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”
Jesus was clear about ti. His church would be built on the faith commitment that he was the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.
So, the church is not our idea, it’s God’s idea. With that clearly in mind, let’s pursue this image of the church as “an enclave of resistance.”
I
Let’s begin by thinking about the nature of resistance. In one of my favorite Peanuts cartoons – you expected that, didn’t you? – Lucy demands that Linus change TV channels and then threatens him with her fist if he doesn’t.
“What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over,” asks Linus.
“These five fingers,” says Lucy. “Individually they’re nothing, but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they for a weapon that is terrible to behold.”
“Which channel do you want?” asks Linus.
Turning away, he looks at his fingers and says, “Why can’t you guys get organized like that? (Bruce Shelley, What is the Church, p. 38)
The Church has never been able to get organized in her resistance to the world. In fact, the Church has never been able consistently to understand what it means to be “in the world but not of the world.” We’ve known at every period of our history that the very nature of the Church provoked some form of resistance. There is always the sense in which Kingdom ideals are in conflict with the world in which the Kingdom is set. This expresses itself in different ways.
I don’t have time to discuss the ways of resistance – but I do want to register the fact that we are at war.
Paul was certain of it – but he also defined the nature of the war in which we are engaged. Ephesians 6:12 says, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” We are at war. Let me illustrate.
Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council recalls a newspaper article about a teacher who had taught in the public schools in Los Angeles. She had been a good teacher. But then she went to start her own family and left the profession. She and her husband had three children. They raised them well and not too long ago they sent the last one off to college. This teacher decided she wanted to go back to the teaching profession. She applied and was accepted and she wrote in the Los Angeles Times about her first day back in a seventh-grade class, after nearly twenty years.
She spoke about her anxiety. Would she be up to the task? Would she be able to handle the kids? She talked about walking into the classroom that morning and suddenly she remembered she used to begin the day by simply putting her books down on her desk and saying, “Good morning, class.” That would kind of quiet the class down. Then they would say, “Good morning, Mrs. Jones” and she should get on with teaching. So she put her books down on her desk, feeling a little bit more confident, and she said, “Good morning, class.” Some kid in the front row shouted back, “Shut up, bitch!” and everybody in the classroom laughed. This teacher asked the question in the LA Times, “What happened in America between ‘Good morning, Mrs. Jones,’ and ‘Shut up, bitch!” And who is going to do something about it? We are at war.
Last year in Brooklyn, or Queens, New York, there was a terrible accident. A seventh-grade student died on a Friday afternoon in a pool accident. The following Monday when the class came back to school, as you can imagine, they were emotionally distraught. Some of the kids were crying. One of the children asked their teacher, Mrs. Rezario, “Do you think Johnny is in heaven?” And Mrs. Rezario said, “Of course he is. God loves every one of you. Look, I am going over to the corner here and if anyone wants to come over with me I will say a little prayer for Johnny. And those of you who don’t want to do that, go on and turn your computers on and we’ll be with you in a moment.” Mrs. Rezario was fired the next day. No appeals. No second chances.
Put that incident over against the fact that there are teachers in the New York public school system that belong to the Man-Boy Love Association. They think it’s OK for adults to have sex with children. And they are teachers in the New York City school system.
There is a woman in the New York City school system, a counselor, who a couple of years ago took a fifteen-year-old girl to an abortion clinic without telling her parents, and the girl bled to death. She is still a counselor in the New York public schools. But Mrs. Rezario – she committed the unpardonable sin. She told her children God loved them, and prayed with them.
We would point to other places in our culture to verify that the war is on and the culture seems to be winning. Doesn’t the image demand our attention> The church – an enclave of resistance.
We must be careful however, about the nature and focus of our resistance. We must not deceive ourselves into thinking that if we can get the right king on the throne – if we can elect the right president, the right Congress, the right governor – if we can put “our people” in places of political power, then we can win the battle. My friends, there can be no kingdom without a king, and the Kingdom to which we’re committed has only one King – King Jesus.
So I believe the church needs to think more of transformation than confrontation. We need to think more about a “long obedience in the same direction,” than about a quick fix that might bring superficial change.
Our task as an enclave of resistance is to subvert the callused, materialistic, secular, godless culture of which we are a part – to subvert that culture at its root by living as though we believed that “persons do not live by bread alone” – that there is a Kingdom reality of love in which all those things that are expressed in Romans 12 are operative. Our love is without hypocrisy. We abhor what is evil and we cling to what is good. In honor we give preference to one another. We are able to rejoice in hope – but we’re also able to be patient in tribulation. We attend to the needs of the saints and we give ourselves to hospitality. We bless those who persecute us; we rejoice with those who rejoice and we weep with those who weep. We associate with the humble and we do not see ourselves as wise in our own opinion. We don'’ repay evil for evil; we seek to live peaceably with all persons. We feed our enemies, we give them drink -–we don't confront evil with evil but we seek to overcome evil with good.
We’re talking about counter-culture. We’re talking about power residual in the Christian community that would subvert the foundation of all that which is contrary to the Kingdom of Christ. Let me give it specific shape, asking ourselves the question, “How do we live as church --enclave of resistance with subversion that is transformational at the root rather than stereotypical “against the world as our tactic?
II
I want to paint in broad strokes now. I begin with a statement from John Wesley. It is printed on a plaque by the statue of Mr. Wesley preaching in the market in the quad at Asbury I had these words put there because I wanted our students to be constantly reminded of the peril in which we stand. I encourage our students read that plaque and pause often there in the presence of Mr. Wesley, and pay attention to what he said. Listen: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid, lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case, unless they hold fast the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.”
Speaking from my Wesleyan perspective, the Church has the awesome responsibility of holding fast the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which the Methodist movement first set out. I am bold now to suggest that the model for what is an enclave of resistance. The church of the 21st century, the now and future church must be a Church that is holy, charismatic, and apostolic. Now I know those are loaded words, charged with diverse meaning. So stay with me. We need a synthesis of holiness and charismatic experience. We also need an apostolic vision for the mission of the Church.
Let’s explore these possibilities.
There is no question – either in Scripture or in our Wesleyan tradition – the community of faith is to be a “holy people.”
Listen to another word from Mr. Wesley, “If you preach doctrine only, the people will become antinomians; and if you preach experience only, they will become enthusiasts; and if you preach practice only, they will become Pharisees. But if you preach all these and do not enforce discipline, Methodism will become like a highly cultivated garden without a fence, exposed to the ravages of the wild boar of the forest.” We are seeing it happen. The wild boar of the forest has been loosed not only in the highly cultivated garden of the Wesleyan movement but in all mainline churches, So there is
- experimenting with pagan ritual and practice
- consuming the world’s goods without regard for the poor
- accommodating the prevailing patterns of sexual promiscuity, serial marriage, and divorce
- resigning ourselves to the injustices of racial and gender prejudice
- condoning homosexual practice
- ignoring the historic Church’s long-standing protection of the unborn and the mother… 35 million abortions in the lst 2 ½ decades
- no discipline within the church and even bishops of the Church can’t hold each other accountable
So Wesley’s warning is an ominous possibility – certainly in this country -- that the Methodist movement and mainline churches would become a dead sect. We need a recovery of holiness for holiness by its very nature is an enemy of the relativism that is the operative dynamic of our culture. Francis Schaeffer has spoken a challenging word at this point. “If our reflex action is always accommodation, regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong. Just as what we may call holiness without love is not God’s kind of holiness, so also what we call love without holiness is not God’s kind of love.” (The Great Evangelical Disaster) So holiness, by its very nature, is an enemy of the relativism that is the operative dynamic of our culture – even the Church.
Holiness is not an option for Christians. Our God calls us – “Be holy as I am holy.”
Listen to Paul in his word to the Ephesians – chapter 5 verses 1 and 2:
“Therefore be imatators of God as dear children. And walk in love,
as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering
and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling aroma.”
Does that grab you as it does me – be imitators of God. How can we imitate God – the One who is omnipotent, all powerful – the One who is omniant, all knowing; the One who is
III
The Church as an enclave of resistance will be holy, and also charismatic. By charismatic I mean that the Church came to birth through the Spirit, thus the Church lives and functions by the Spirit. Now theoretically no one would disagree with that. But functionally we do disagree. Where is the mainline denomination or the classic evangelical denomination that incorporates this conviction as a core principle by which the congregation orders her life? The charismatic nature of the Church underscores not only a dependence on the power of the Holy Spirit for life and sustenance, but an ongoing expectation of a Spirit-empowered community, love and mutual caring where forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, restoration, deliverance, social witness, breaking down of racial, economic, and social barriers are anticipated as the norm, not the miraculous.
The churches I know in the United States who are
- winning the most people to Jesus Christ,
- abolishing social, economic, and racial barriers by bringing diverse people together in worship,
- most effectively freeing people from drug addiction,
- expressing care and concern for the poor
are churches that at least in some dimension know themselves to be charismatic.
Look beyond the United States.
The famous ‘house churches’ of Communist China are largely charismatic in their emphasis. The fast-growing Methodist Church of Korea, often cited by American United Methodist evangelicals, is infused with charismatic zeal. In Africa, Pentecostal preaching is winning people away from tribal religion. And in South America, Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God are converting nominal, non-participating Catholics and turning their lives – and countries – upside down. (Edmund W. Robb, The Spirit Who Will Not Be Tamed, Anderson, Indiana:Bristol Books, 1997, p. 14)
The church that does not pay attention to its intrinsic charismatic nature will be far less than God’s dream for her. What was Jesus’ last promise before his ascension? “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”
What an enclave of resistance the Church would become if these two crucial dynamics were realized – holy and charismatic.
IV
Add now this third dynamic: apostolic. If the Church is to be an enclave of resistance, it must see itself from an apostolic perspective.
Some years ago, Richard Halverson, then Chaplain of the United States Senate, in an address to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, described the evolution of the church:
“In the beginning,” he said, “the church was a fellowship of men and women who centered their lives in the living Christ. They had a personal and vital relationship with the Lord and it transformed their lives and the world around them. But then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. And then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. And then it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And now it has moved to America, where it has become an enterprise.”
What an indictment – the Church as a philosophy, as an institution, as a culture, as an enterprise – any of these violates God’s intention for the Church – the Church is to be that fellowship of people who have a vital and personal relationship with the Lord, which transforms their lives, and, as a result of that, becoming an enclave of resistance and transforming the world around us.
Here is a picture, outside our culture, the freshness of which may inspire our thinking about the apostolic nature of the Church. The picture comes from our work with World Evangelism of the World Methodist Council.
The first scene: every morning, early, his wife makes coffee, pours it into pots to keep it hot, and her husband, a Methodist minister in Macedonia, heads to a truck rest stop. The second scene: time after time, a man has climbed into his truck, driving it from Bulgaria to Albania. The same road again, wrestling with the wheel, keeping the vehicle on the road. His eyes are burning and tired. He needs sleep. He pulls into a rest area and falls asleep. The third scene: a tap on the window awakens him – hot coffee. A minister of the Methodist Church. He shares a cup of coffee in the name of Christ and the truck driver eventually becomes a trusting Christian. In the truck driver’s home village in Bulgaria there is no church. He travels fifty miles to find a Methodist congregation in Russmae. With the assistance of the pastor of that congregation, a new Methodist congregation begins in his home village of Tsenowo.
That’s apostolic! What we think of Christ and what Christ can do for persons will determine the shape of our congregations. To become apostolic as a Church we must give serious thought to:
- how Christian community is created and sustained;
- the nature of leadership and empowering laity;
- spiritual identity and formation in a totally secular context;
- a critical relationship with culture – especially technology;
- the language and resources of worship;
- experiential faith rooted in Scripture and tradition, yet freed from custom and cultural religious strictures.
Oh, for such a Church to arise – holy, charismatic, apostolic. Only such a Church – an enclave of resistance – is going to be the powerful Kingdom witness to challenge the “principalities and powers” that are holding sway in our day.
I close with this. Did you see the movie Amistad? It is a must. It’s based on real events of 1839. A group of Africans – men, women and children – have been kidnapped by slave traders. They stage an insurrection aboard their prison ship. When they gain control of the board, they thought they were headed home from Cuba, but instead they sail to the east coast of the United States, ending up in jail in New England, on trial for their lives.
During the time they are incarcerated, a small but persistent group of Christians keeps a vigil of prayer for the prisoners. We see these Christians kneeling outside the jail. We see them in the courtroom. We see them on the streets, walking alongside the shackled Africans. We see them dressed in rather severe clothes with comber countenances, so much so that at first the prisoners think they’re sick. Then it seems to the inmates that their advocates are upset about something.
They are upset about something. They’re upset that these men, women, and children, who are thought to be slaves, are being held in custody. The Christian group is upset that anyone could be made a slave of another.
Some of these Christian abolitionists carry Bibles, some carry small crosses. In one brief scene, the camera zooms in on a cross on a chain, held by one of the women. It hit me hard. That ancient symbol has been in so many places, in so many hands, clutched to so many hearts, bringing out in so many a courage they didn’t know they had for causes they didn’t know they cared that much about. It has always been the sign of something radically different from the prevailing ways of culture and human systems. It’s the Church’s most definitive mark – the cross. For the world – foolishness. But for those who believe, the power of God unto salvation. It labels who we are as the Church – an enclave of resistance.