“The Ministry of Reconciliation as Spiritual Fellowship”
Editor’s note: the following is an essay on the Second Great End of the Church and was the basis of a sermon preached by Rev. Kim September Stated Meeting of the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area, on September 12, 2009 at First Presbyterian in Shakopee, MN.
For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. - 2 Corinthians 5:14-20
In January of 2004 a group of mostly second generation members of a Korean immigrant congregation in Minneapolis was blessed by our “mother church” to launch a multicultural community called Church of All Nations. We were chartered with great expectations by our presbytery and denominational leaders, but no one knew if one hundred mostly young Korean-Americans could actually become a Church of All Nations; many thought the name was a bit premature, if not presumptuous.
Today, we are a healthy, midsized congregation that is roughly 30% Asian, 37% white, 22% black, and 10% Latino, with more than twenty-five nations represented in our membership. Our pastoral staff includes people from Korea, Kenya, Sudan, Brazil, China, Japan, Cote d’Ivoire and the United States (both Euro- and African-American). Our session and board of deacons also fully reflect this diversity.
We are one of a handful of congregations in the U.S. with no ethnic majority and sizable groups of the four major racial categories of white, black, Asian and Latino. But we actually have even more denominational background diversity than ethnic diversity, drawing as many Catholics, Episcopalians and Lutherans as we do Pentecostals, Baptists and Evangelical Free. Our highly visible commitment to ecumenical unity may be one reason why, out of the twenty-five new members we recently welcomed, the vast majority had no Presbyterian background. We also draw equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, and we address politics, racism, the economy, war and peace head on.
Our central mission is to live into the ministry of reconciliation, and it is happening in all kinds of wonderful ways here. For instance, in January of 2006 we moved from our Korean “mother church” into the building of a declining white PCUSA congregation, Shiloh Bethany Church, which had plenty of room. We rented space for a few months, but then Shiloh Bethany asked if they might merge with us. At the end of July the congregation that was founded in 1884 was dissolved, and all of its members became members of Church of All Nations.
Incidentally, 1884 is the year that PCUSA missionaries first arrived on the shores of my home country of Korea. So we came full circle, historically speaking. One of the key reasons for the union of Shiloh Bethany with the Church of All Nations was the growing recognition of the need to be a new kind of church for an increasingly multicultural population in Columbia Heights and the entire Twin Cities area. Church of All Nations fit that need very well. After more than three years together, all of the original Shiloh Bethany members remain members to this day - praise God!
We witness many signs of growth in our midst, but the most important thing is that people are filled with joy, hope and genuine love for each other across all kinds of lines, dismantling barriers erected by church and society, history and culture. For decades, Shiloh Bethany members had prayed that their sanctuary would be full again, and that the building would be restored to its original condition. Who knew that God would answer the prayers of this typical, small white church through a young, multicultural church? Who knew that a new church would own a beautiful, sizable building overlooking a gorgeous lake debt-free within three years of its existence? Who knew that by committing to the ministry of reconciliation, that two congregations would form a new spiritual fellowship that would shelter and nurture so many of God’s children from around the world?
Many of us who began this journey assumed that we would be dealing with much more conflict as many cultures and worldviews added to the complexity of congregational dynamics. What we have discovered, to our delight, is the exact opposite. The very decision to join a church in which one chooses to be a minority seems to draw the kind of people who are willing to “lay down their sword” of power and privilege. The Korean American founders had to set the example first. Today, all of us seem to be caught up in a virtuous cycle of lifting up and valuing other individuals and cultures, “considering others better than oneself.” The culture of public confession, corporate repentance, joyful celebration and vulnerable relationality that we have cultivated here is key to understanding the dynamism and eschatological hope evident in our life together.
We live in the time between the “already” and “not yet.” Our church sees itself between Pentecost in Acts 2 and the coming kingdom in Revelation 7, when all nations, tribes and tongues will glorify God together in one voice. We feel called to be an ecumenical church that embodies the major spiritual roots of the early church - to be simultaneously Rational, Sacramental, and Pentecostal. We are also convinced that only intentional movement away from rigid denominationalism toward visible unity will lead the global church to recover its identity as “one holy catholic and apostolic.” We are a high-risk, low-anxiety church where anything is possible, including the possibility of failure. The only poverty we fear is the poverty of imagination. We feel so blessed with God’s abundance and grace.
I want to describe now something of the theology and practice of our congregation, giving particular attention to the way our diverse community engages in the ministry of reconciliation. In this way we become a place where all children of God find “shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship.”
Reconciliation as a Central Theme
The Church of All Nations intentionally transitioned from an ethnocentric ministry to a multicultural church not for the sake of aesthetic diversity, but for the compelling call of racial and cultural reconciliation. Reconciliation is more a mystery to embrace than a technique to perfect. It is a word both mundane and otherworldly. We reconcile our checkbooks, but can we really be reconciled to God and to one another this side of heaven?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Letters and Papers from Prison captures the mysterious nature of reconciliation in this passage:
Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship - all these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture any more to speak of them. In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it.
The ancient practices of confession, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation have become remote in the modern church. Obviously, the church has not been untouched by the materialism, hedonism and nihilistic spiral of radical individualism in the West. The pragmatic arrangement between church and state in Europe and North America has also conspired to weaken the church’s prophetic witness. Bonhoeffer continues, “Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world.”
How does the church speak with authority on a subject as radical as reconciliation if it has been domesticated by the surrounding culture and the political establishment? John de Gruchy puts it this way: “The problem was that the Church in Germany, and by inference elsewhere, had become captive to bourgeois culture, and thus its use of biblical concepts confirmed rather than challenged the status quo.” Karl Barth felt compelled to write the Barmen Declaration because the German Church had neither the theology nor the courage to counter the radical nationalism of Hitler’s regime. This is a chilling reminder that the co-optation of the church and its holy scriptures can lead to devastating results.
De Gruchy, a South African theologian, also helps the modern church to understand that the word reconciliation became current in Christian discourse through the Latin reconciliatio, a Vulgate translation of the Greek katallagé. In the New Testament, Paul used this word as an allusion to ‘God’s saving work in Jesus Christ.’ It is an important word that encapsulates God’s cosmic enterprise of eschatological salvation. De Gruchy notes that the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams refers to reconciliation as ‘a seductively comfortable word, fatally close to “consensus”.’
Reconciliation, however, is much closer in meaning to redemption (God’s saving work) than to consensus. In that light, reconciliation is at the core of the biblical narrative and the gospel embodied in Jesus Christ. De Gruchy reminds us that Karl Barth made reconciliation the central theme of his Church Dogmatics. About reconciliation Barth wrote, “We enter that sphere of Christian knowledge in which we have to do with the heart of the message received by and laid upon the Christian community, and therefore with the heart of the Church’s dogmatics”. And in his work, Evangelical Theology, a sort of theological swan song of lectures delivered in the United States a few years before his death, Barth claims, “The new event is the world’s reconciliation with God, which was announced in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New Testament by Jesus Christ.”
A relatively recent document incorporated into the Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church (USA) is a confession ratified and adopted in 1967. The introduction to this confession states, “Modestly titled, the Confession of 1967 is built around a single passage of Scripture: In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.” The Presbyterian Church confessed in that turbulent time of American history that reconciliation is a mandate for the church in all times: “God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ. Accordingly, this Confession of 1967 is built upon that theme.”
The Confession of 1967 goes on to claim that since “God was reconciling the world to himself,” therefore the church calls men and women to be reconciled to one another. The Church of All Nations has a strong sense of missional calling, a sense that we have been called out (ekklesia) from the world to minister to the world. We are not to focus on security or self-preservation, but called to risk our money, time and talents, indeed our very life for the sake of sharing the good news in Jesus Christ with the world. The Confession of 1967 articulates this concept most clearly in the section entitled “The Mission of the Church.”
To be reconciled to God is to be sent into the world as his reconciling community. This community, the church universal, is entrusted with God’s message of reconciliation and shares his labor of healing the enmities which separate men from God and from each other. Christ has called the church to this mission and given it the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Belhar Confession 1982-1986, produced by churches suffering from apartheid in South Africa, also makes reconciliation its central theme. Previously, the Dutch Reformed Church had segregated itself from all non-white Dutch Reformed Christians, who then were subdivided further into Coloured, Black and Indian Dutch Reformed denominations. The Belhar Confession states clearly:
We believe that Christ’s work of reconciliation is made manifest in the Church as the community of believers who have been reconciled with God and with one another; …that this unity can be established only in freedom and not under constraint; that the variety of spiritual gifts, opportunities, backgrounds, convictions, as well as the various languages and cultures, are by virtue of the reconciliation in Christ, opportunities for mutual service and enrichment within the one visible people of God.
In experiencing the joy and wonder of becoming a reconciled community, the members of Church of All Nations seem to have a growing passion to share that message widely - in the local community, in the larger church, across denominational lines and across national borders. The mission of our congregation is wholly in agreement with the Confession of 1967 and the Belhar Confession - that the ministry of reconciliation must be at the very heart of our existence as a Christian community.
Trading Places and Creating Spaces
Although the Greek word for “reconciliation” or “reconcile” appears only fifteen times in the New Testament, and mostly in the Pauline letters, it serves an important purpose in helping to unravel God’s ultimate plan of salvation (51). According to John de Gruchy, “All of them are compounds of the Greek allassō, “to exchange,” and this in turn is derived from allos meaning “the other.” So, reconciliation carries with it the sense of exchanging places with “the other,” and therefore of being in solidarity with, rather than against “the other.” (51) Put simply, reconciliation begins by asking the simple question: What would it be like to walk in the other’s shoes?
Reconciliation is to exchange with the other, and the beginning of exchange is through the act of hospitality. My hunch is that people show hospitality to another because they can imagine what it would be like to be in the other’s place. Hospitality is motivated by imaginatively trading places with a stranger or a guest. Hospitality is a central feature of what it means to be a genuine Christian community modeled after the life and teachings of Jesus. Even the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper can be understood as an extension of God’s hospitality and friendship to God’s creation.
Henry Nouwen says, “Hospitality . . . means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.” Trading places, even evocatively, will move us to have compassion in “creating space” and granting freedom for the stranger in a way that we would wish for ourselves. This space is not to be confused with isolation and loneliness. Nouwen goes on to say, “The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations. Hospitality is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own.”
Hospitality is the fertile soil upon which reconciliation can flower. In our congregation, hospitality is preached, practiced and embodied first and foremost in the Sunday worship service. Our practice of worship is specifically crafted to create and sustain spiritual fellowship.
In our proclamation of the gospel we use the gift of imagination to trade places with the oppressed in the Bible, in history, in the world, and in our midst. In our proclamation we create space for the marginalized by naming the injustices, fears and hardships that they confront everyday. If our congregational culture was such that it was not ‘polite’ to speak openly of racism, sexism, personal prejudice and structural sin, there would be no ’space’ for those seeking hospitality to be themselves with their histories. Instead, they would be expected to accommodate the prevailing culture, to “adopt the lifestyle of the host.” This would not lead not to reconciliation, but to sterilization. At the Church of All Nations, we believe that the Christian Community must proclaim reconciliation everywhere - from the rooftops as well as from the pulpit - as God’s good news for humanity.
Our worship service also regularly includes testimony. This is a practice we borrow from the great African American church tradition. In line with the Reformation principle of the “priesthood of all believers,” we find that it liberates all God’s children to minister to one another. To make space for testimony, the preacher ‘trades places’ with a congregation member. When a testimony requires a significant portion of time, the sermon is replaced entirely by the congregational testimony, but more typically, our members give a brief testimony during the offertory as an offering to the Lord. At least twice a year, the entire service will be devoted to congregational testimonies from the floor as members rise up spontaneously to speak of God’s presence and activity in their lives.
Almost always, these have been profound moments of an outpouring of compassion, tears, laughter, understanding and transformation, resulting in the deepening of spiritual fellowship. Many of our members have taken great risks to reveal their brokenness and shame before the entire church, wondering if this act of vulnerability would become one more wound. Happily, this has not been the case. If people had judged others for being poor, black, white, barren, pregnant out of wedlock, alcoholic, depressed or diseased, judgment was replaced quickly with hospitality and reconciliation through the power inherent in testimony, through the strength to be vulnerable. Jesus died naked on a cross. The fundamental message of our congregation in this regard has been: Go and do likewise, and we, through Christ, will cover you with compassion, forgiveness and love.
We have also discovered that reconciliation can and must take sacramental form. In baptism God takes the initiative in reconciling the people to God’s self. The Confession of 1967 states that, “By humble submission to John’s baptism, Christ joined himself to men in their need and entered upon his ministry of reconciliation in the power of the Spirit.” In baptism, not only has Christ joined himself to humanity, but all the baptized are joined to one another in the fellowship of Christ’s body. In our brokenness we are joined to Christ’s broken body, a sign of God’s reconciling and heartbreaking love for us.
The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is also an opportunity to experience divine reconciliation. The Confession of 1967 says that, “The Lord’s Supper is a celebration of the reconciliation of men with God and with one another, in which they joyfully eat and drink together at the table of their Savior.” Sharing a common meal is one of the most ancient expressions of hospitality. This simple act has profound and even historical implications for the church’s witness in the world. Consider the history of the church in South Africa. John de Gruchy relates that, “Holy Communion itself became the critical testing ground within the dominant Dutch Reformed Church in the mid nineteenth century when, because of the ‘weakness of some’ white members, it became permissible to allow segregation at the sacrament. This eventually led to the segregation of the Dutch Reformed Church itself and provided theological support for what later became the policy of apartheid.”
How different is the history of the church in America? Yet despite the persistent disobedience and rebellion of the church to carry out the ministry of reconciliation, God has not given up on the church. In the simple act of breaking bread and drinking the cup, God demonstrates God’s commitment to reconciliation with humanity. Since we have been reconciled in our communion with God, therefore, in gratitude to God, we are compelled to be reconciled with our neighbors. God’s initiative in reconciling with humanity makes possible reconciliation in sacramental community.
We have come to understand that the worship service is the locus of hospitality, spiritual fellowship and reconciliation, a creative space for welcome, healing and wholeness. The worship service can too often be reduced to a form of individual penance, or consumer driven entertainment, or a self-improvement seminar, or institutional requirement. Nothing less than the liberation of the church’s corporate imagination is required to transform the traditional service from mindless ritual to a space hospitable to the redemptive reconciliation of all God’s children. In proclamation, testimony and sacrament, the Church of All Nations strives to create such a sheltering and nurturing space.
Reconciliation as Ecclesial Practice
The local congregation is the primary locus of discipleship and Christian formation. In baptism, God welcomes us into his family through our incorporation into the body of Christ. In the Lord’s Supper, we become a community that experiences shalom, a profound sense of peace and well-being, because our reconciliation with God in Eucharist makes possible our reconciliation with one another. The church cannot be reduced to serving as a repository for individuals to be randomly reconciled privately with other individuals as a form of individual penance. Missiologist Inagrace Dietterich stresses that, “Reconciliation - confession, judgment, and forgiveness - is not an individual and private matter, but an ecclesial practice that fosters, shapes, and sustains missional communities. . . .While central to the biblical understanding of the nature of salvation, reconciliation may be the most difficult practice for contemporary Christians even to consider, much less to actualize within their congregations.”
Few would argue against the notion that reconciliation is a “most difficult practice,” and yet we have been called to be the church engaged in the ministry of reconciliation. The church of Jesus Christ is nothing less than the “provisional demonstration” of “God reconciling the world to himself.” The constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is so bold as to claim, “The new reality revealed in Jesus Christ is the new humanity, a new creation, a new beginning for human life in the world: Sin is forgiven, reconciliation is accomplished, the dividing walls of hostility are torn down.” What is shocking about this claim is the declarative way in which it is written: “Reconciliation is accomplished.” Our experience tells us that no such thing has been accomplished in the church or in the world. However, in Christ, the new reality has been revealed and is even now unfolding. In Christ, and only in Christ, reconciliation is accomplished through the power of the cross. The church is called to live boldly into that new reality.
Reconciliation is a messy affair. Reconciliation is a costly affair. It is not a “technical rationality” but a “possible impossibility.” The ministry of reconciliation is God’s mandate to the church so that the church may be a gift to the world. The church is challenged not only to merely preach, but to model reconciliation parabolically as a worshiping community that creates and sustains spiritual fellowship of all God’s children. As God is both immanent and transcendent - God With Us and God the Wholly Other - so reconciliation is both inviting the other and releasing the other, mutual embrace and mutual release. In the reconciled fellowship of sheltering, nurturing and sending, may God be worshiped and glorified by all the children of God. Amen.
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