What's Tony Thinking

What Churches Can Do

I very much liked this piece on Substack from David Fitch. If I were a still the pastor of a church I would be encouraging us to reflect on this piece and consider implementing those practices to which we felt called. In the meantime, I encourage those of you who are pastors or lay people to consider these suggestions and share them with others in your church. I will be talking with the pastor of the church I attend about this tomorrow.

ON BECOMING CHURCHES OF RESISTANCE
While living peaceably, faithfully to the person and work of Jesus Christ
David Fitch (Mar 31)

Can one’s local church be a resistance to authoritarian forces at work in our society without being violent, or stoking the antagonisms of political divide that perpetuate the ideological dynamics that keep Donald Trump in power? I say ‘yes’. I propose at least six practices that can make space for the Holy Spirit to work among us, in our neighborhoods, villages and beyond, to disrupt the evil and draw people to Christ, and shape justice in our midst.

1. We can go be with immigrants. Let’s renew our commitment as Christians to stand with immigrants. Not hide criminals, gang members, etc. But be with the 99.5% who are not. Provide legal services. When you see fearful immigrants, let’s train our people to befriend them. Help them when you can (like get groceries when they’re scared to go out), when ICE agents come, get your phone cameras out. Lev 19:33-34. Let’s train all our believers in how to stand with immigrants.

2. Speak truth sincerely. Let’s prepare Christians to speak sincerely, not argue, not inflame. Make observations, and then ask questions. This is what is repeated referred to in New Testament with the Greek work parrhesia. This approach to truth is inter-relational. It always breaks the ideological hold. We need to steadily, peacefully, learn how to speak truth out of love for the other, not disdain for the other. Eph 4:25 Also see ppp.158ff in Reckoning with Power on parrhesia in the NT.

3. Provide social services to help those in distress. Let’s say there are people put into financial distress because of a disruption of social security. Let’s say there are elderly struggling with food because of inflation. Let’s join people together to provide a meal for the elderly, and pray for them/with them, and show them they have support. We’ll get through this. Zech 7:8-10

4. Town hall meetings. I know the congressional representatives are having town halls (although some Republicans are not), but churches in towns can hold town hall meetings too. Here our goal is: how can we help each other through this time. Let us discuss the politics in peace, expose duplicities, explain what we’re seeing. Authoritarians play on fear and isolation. They loathe assemblies that give a community a place to express truth.. Let’s resist that by having community gatherings to hear truth and find ways to support one another as we navigate this time. See how the word ekklesia is used repeatedly in the New Testament to describe this kind of presence by the church in a village. 

5. Special Prayer Meetings. Famously, in the 1980’s in Leipzig, Germany, prayer meetings, led by pastor Christian Fuhrer at St. Nicholas Church, led to demonstrations that brought down the oppressive communist rule of East Germany behind the iron curtain. Of course, we don’t know or even want to predict where a prayer meeting for our country might lead. But it seems to me that prayer is a fundamental practice of a church of resistance.

6. Embodied Presence. Some might call this a demonstration. But I want to emphasize how the church gathers people in large groups to be present physically at a site of injustice, to pray, and invite the Spirit to reveal and convict. We go peacefully (the Spirit refuses to work in violence), and bear witness to, point to the injustice. Then when we speak, and we speak from an embodied presence. Our words mean something deeper, gain gravitas, and take on flesh. This takes some training (As MLKjr was famous for).

This all may sound daunting. But I want to emphasize that all of our churches have different gifts. Many will be skilled at easily doing one or two of these. Most churches will not be large enough to some or all of these things. Of course some churches may be able to pull together and do some of these things together for a town or village. But all churches of Jesus Christ can choose one of these practices to start. Doing just one, can give a start to being a witness for resistance, and put a wrench in a moving machine that has become a looming dark evil in this land.

I like the way Bonhoeffer puts it in his famous 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question” because he recognizes that the church byt its very presence can and should be a resistance to the evils of the state, not through direct violence, but through its daily faithfulness in the everyday matters of life. And in so doing, we do not “simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice”, but we “drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” It will be the church’s faithfulness as a social presence in the days ahead that shall gum up the works of the machinery of evil, and make space for Christ to work. It is in this spirit of Bonhoeffer I offer these suggestions.

Let’s pray together for a hundred, maybe a thousand churches to become places of resistance in America out of faithfulness to Christ.