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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- 16th Annual Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year - Culture We live in conflicted times. Our newsfeeds are filled with inequality, division, and fear. We want to make a difference and see justice restored because Jesus calls us to be a peacemaking and reconciling people. But how do we do this?Based on their work with diverse churches, colleges, and other organizations, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill offer Christian practices that can bring healing and hope to a broken world. They provide ten ways to transform society, from lament and repentance to relinquishing power, reinforcing agency, and more. Embodying these practices enables us to be the new humanity in Jesus Christ, so the church and world can experience reconciliation, justice, unity, peace, and love.With small group activities, discussion questions, and exercises in each chapter, this book is ideal to read together in community. Discover here how to bring real change to a dehumanized world.
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PRACTICES FOR REVITALIZING THE CHURCH AND RENEWING THE WORLD
FOREWORD BY WILLIE JAMES JENNINGS
To my family, who teach me what it means to be new in Christ:
my spouse, Perry, and my three children, Theodore, Elisabeth, and Joshua.
And to my very special friends:
Graham Hill, who continuously inspires me to become new in Christ,
and Donald K. McKim, who encourages me every step of the way.
GRACE JI-SUN KIM
To Grace Hope Park: I thank my God for you, and pray you’ll
grow to love Jesus deeply. I pray you’ll live a full life,
shaped around God’s grace and hope.
To Felicity, Madison, Grace, and Dakotah:
I’m astonished by how much you love me, and so
thankful to be doing life together with you.
And to Grace Ji-Sun Kim: your friendship is dear to me,
and a source of inspiration.
GRAHAM HILL
Contents
One
Reimagine Church
Two
Renew Lament
Three
Repent Together
Four
Relinquish Power
Five
Restore Justice
Six
Reactivate Hospitality
Seven
Reinforce Agency
Eight
Reconcile Relationships
Nine
Recover Life Together
FOREWORD
Willie James Jennings
My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness,” says 2 Corinthians 12:9. These words spoken by the Lord to Paul capture both the dilemma of Christian existence and its promise. Our dilemma is our weakness. We, the disciples of Jesus, are weak in relation to worldly power, whether it be military power, or the power of nation-states, or the power of corporations. Indeed, we are always immersed in the flows of worldly power. As Jesus said, we are inescapably in the world (Jn 17:14-16) and subject to its chaotic winds—economic, military, social, and environmental. Yet we do not belong to this world. We are not children created or sustained by worldly power. We are created and sustained by the Word of God (Jn 1:1-4; 1 Jn 1:1-3). The strength we live and move by is of God’s only child, Jesus, who through the Holy Spirit works in us to do God’s good will.
Our dilemma is our weakness, but so too is it our promise. God works in and through our weakness. The condition of our weakness is the stage on which God elects to work to overcome despair and hopelessness and to bring life out of death. Weakness works. But weakness is not a divine ploy, a façade that God uses to operate in worldly power. Our weakness points to the very shape of creaturely life. We are created for deep and intimate communion with the divine life. God desires to fill us with God’s own strong life, a strength that is the source of life and a triune life that is the source of strength.
Paul articulated for us a life turned toward, not away from, weakness, and thereby a life turned toward, not away from, oneness with Jesus Christ. Paul experienced his weakness under the harsh conditions of real-world discipleship to Jesus, wherein violence confronted him on every side—from the Roman Empire, to various Jewish communities who saw him as a threat to their very survival, to rival leaders within Christian communities in the form of superapostles (as he called them), who challenged his theological vision and the orthodoxy of his teachings. His astounding statement that he is “content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10 NRSV) could only be made by someone who has entered into the urgency of God’s moment and has yielded body and soul to the Spirit of God.
Paul’s witness of strength in weakness has never been fully received by the disciples of Jesus. Indeed, our temptation has always been to seek to overcome our weakness by contorting ourselves to receive worldly power. We are created to receive the strength of God, but too often we mutilate ourselves in order to receive a different kind of power, a power that only leads to death. This mutilation is at heart the legacy of modern Christian colonialism. Many Christians since the beginning of the colonial period in the fifteenth century have presented themselves as worldly power brokers, not only capable of handling its power but also eagerly willing to attain such power by any means necessary. Forming themselves into nations, intoxicated with their unprecedented control over indigenous peoples and their lands, they brought into the world the horrors of racial reasoning and racial identities, new and more virulent forms of patriarchy, death-dealing forms of sexuality and intimate life, and ways of seeing the planet that reduced our world to a giant bowl of commodities created for the sole purpose of extraction, manipulation, and consumption.
The authors of this book understand this history very well, and they also know that the only way to move forward from this legacy is by returning to Paul’s good witness of strength in weakness. Is it possible to overcome the contortions of mind and body brought to us through colonial modernity and a church that has lusted after worldly power? Is it possible to draw us away from ways of life that fit us for the power that leads to death and toward life in God’s strength? The answer is yes. This is not an easy answer but one that can only be offered in faith, hope, and love, and one that requires lives aimed at following Jesus. To follow Jesus brings us to the practices of faith that clarify who we are and who we belong to, and that show that while we are in this world we do not belong to this world.
Christians have always talked about the practices of the faith, of piety, of mercy, and of justice. It is not new news that in order to be real, Christian faith has to be a faith practiced, for as James reminds us, faith without works is dead faith (Jas 2:17-18). Indeed, faith alone does not distinguish us from the demons. They believe too! (Jas 2:19). Throughout the centuries and across the globe, this has been a point driven home in sermon, song, and exhortation. In recent years theologians and philosophers and a whole host of other Christian intellectuals have made a profound intellectual turn to practices as the way to understand the very character of theology, the point of theological ethics, and even simply a meaningful life. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in the theological academy or in Christian communities who is not in favor of emphasizing Christian practices and the importance of practice. But the problem with this focus on practices has been its blindness to the colonial world formed by practicing Christians.
Colonial settlers from the very beginning were practicing Christians. They practiced their faith fully and completely, with orthodox intention and execution. Their liturgies, their prayer lives, their almsgiving, their repentance, their building up, their tearing down, their singing in hope, and their dreaming in faith—all these practices of the faith existed, thrived in fact, in the formation of the colonial world such that we feel their effects to this moment. From our place in history we can look back at these Christians and claim we see the contradictions in their faith, a colonializing, slaveholding, earth- destroying faith, but that would be too easy a way out of the horror that gave rise to colonial modernity. Faithful Christian practice was part of colonial history and was made into the training ground for forming people fit for worldly power. But that is not the only story of faithful Christian practice. Many people of the old world and the new world formed faithful Christian practices that resisted colonial power. These were Christians, both colonial settlers and indigenous peoples, who resisted worldly power and sought to redirect the operations of the world toward the good in God. They shared together in the witness of Paul, of strength made manifest in weakness.
So we are the inheritors of a legacy of Christian practice; on the one side are Christian practices that form people to operate in worldly power, and on the other side are Christian practices that form people to live into their weakness and their journey in God’s strength. Let me be clear: the difference is not one of occupation. The difference is not between those involved in politics, government, industry, business, entertainment, the academy, and a host of other fields and those who are not. The difference is not between those who carry an optimism into these fields of endeavor and those who look at all operations of the world with a cunning cynicism. Indeed, one of the foolish things that has plagued the contemporary turn to practices has been people who have tried to approach faithful Christian practices as an alternative set of operations of politics, government, industry, business, entertainment, the academy, and so forth. They take isolation as a goal of faithfulness, an essential element of Christian identity, and a characteristic of witness. Their folly comes from their blindness to colonial history, which has irreversibly connected this world together through a fabric of commodity chains, ecological manipulation, and violence. More importantly, this approach does not yet grasp our weakness—we are in the world, but we don’t belong to it.
The difference between Christian practices that form people to operate in worldly power and practices that form people to live in the strength of the Spirit of God through their weakness is a difference not of quality, or consistency, or even knowledge, but of community. Faithful Christian practices today that follow Jesus are practices done in and among diverse communities where the histories of colonial wounds are addressed. No Christian practice done inside segregationist ways of living and thinking will draw us into our true strength in God. This was the fundamental flaw born of colonial Christian practice, a vision of Christian life comfortably separated along lines of gender, race, land ownership and land dispossession, national affiliation, neo-tribal designation, and money.
Kim and Hill in this courageous book are not simply offering us another account of Christian practices, but Christian practices that necessitate diverse communities for their performance. The crucial matter today for Christian discipleship is not what you practice but who you practice with. Who is present in our confession and repentance, in our lamenting and our justice work, in our offering hospitality and renouncing power? Whose stories, voices, wisdom, authority, guidance are missing when we gather to do church? Who is not present in giving shape to our prayers and praise, our advocacy and proclamation? Show me a Christian who sits comfortably in segregated ecclesial life, in a homogeneity of Christian practice, and I will show you someone who is formed for worldly power, that is, someone whose work in the world, in whatever endeavor they have chosen, always bends toward maintaining the status quo of segregation, of white supremacy, of Western imperialism, of the propagation of violence, and of the destruction of the planet.
Harsh words, yes, but true nonetheless, because there is no other option for Christians engaged in the practices of our faith. Either we are being formed toward worldly power or we are being formed toward our strength-in-weakness with God; either we are moving toward faithful practices that deform faith or faithful practices that actual form faith in God. It may seem strange to use the designation of “faithful” for deformed faith, but in truth there is an integrity to Christian practices even done under the conditions of colonial power, patriarchy, white supremacy, Western imperialism, and planetary destruction. Yet the integrity, consistency, and orthodoxy of Christian practices have never been enough to actually make them Christian. What makes them Christian is Jesus, following him into the lives of people different from us, drawing us through the Holy Spirit into that crowd of pleading people looking for help and release from the bondages of this world.
Too many people today are abandoning the church and imagining other spiritual practices that can heal themselves and the world. There is something good to be said about learning from the traditions of spiritual life beyond Christianity. But the tragedy in the efforts of too many is that they have never understood the great riches and overwhelming joy of Christian practices that touch the heart of Jesus and join us through the Holy Spirit to the world. Too many people have never learned how the church is not a door to shut out the world but a door to enter more deeply into its beating heart. If through our practices we follow Jesus into the depths of the world, then we will learn that the healing we all seek for ourselves and our world is offered to us not in our own strength but in God’s power, if only we would seek it together.
INTRODUCTION
Nine Practices That HealOur Broken Humanity
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died after a police officer put him in a chokehold for almost nineteen seconds while arresting him. Garner was a forty-three-year-old African American man. He was wrestled to the ground by four police officers on suspicion of selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. While one officer put his arm around Garner’s neck, three others pinned him to the ground. Garner repeated “I can’t breathe” eleven times while lying facedown on the pavement. He then lost consciousness, and the officers did not perform CPR at the scene. Garner died that day due to the brutality of his arrest.
In 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a public letter to his son. In it he writes, “Here is what I would like for you to know. In America, it is tradition to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”1 He then asked readers of The Atlantic to share their stories of racial prejudice. Many stories of racism and its consequences poured in. These are personal stories of racism, and public accounts of the brokenness of humanity.
We are living in a broken world. Western societies are struggling with the rise of racism, misogyny, nationalism, conflict, violence, and more. Many African Americans, Native Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, and other minoritized groups think that systems are unjust.2 Political, judicial, policing, and other systems seem stacked against them. Hundreds of thousands of people are displaced globally due to poverty, discrimination, climate change, or political and religious upheaval. They seek refuge, hope, freedom, and a new life.
Many political and public figures are making the most of these turbulent times. They appeal to xenophobia, nationalism, and antagonisms. These messages have been magnetic in parts of North America, Europe, Australia, and other settings. The conditions seem ripe to support racism, misogyny, exclusion, injustice, conflict, and division. Nations and peoples that once enjoyed unrivaled global power and influence now feel like they are in decline, and they don’t know what to do about it.
A large percentage of the population feels disenfranchised from political and other systems that seem to support wealthy individuals and institutions. These systems seem deaf to them. They feel anxious, worried about the future, angry, and disoriented. They see themselves getting poorer. They see their neighborhoods becoming racially and religiously diverse. So they are looking for others to blame. Muslims, “foreigners,” or undocumented immigrants are easy scapegoats. Societies that have been told how to speak about race, gender, and religion haven’t really changed. They’ve just pushed these feelings and animosities down deeper, resulting in collective anger, prejudice, and fear.
Unfortunately, many Christian leaders and churches are going along with these currents. The church is no longer at the center of culture, power, economics, and politics, as it was in Christendom. Some Christian leaders are anxious about their waning influence. They worry about their loss of power and status. They’re easy to woo because they want their chance in the spotlight and their access to power and the powerful. Various tribal allegiances too often form Christian identity. Confident, charismatic, successful, misogynistic, nationalistic, Christendom-courting, loudmouthed demagogues have filled the vacuum.
But here is the bright side! The church of Jesus Christ can speak life and hope into this situation. It can proclaim and embody the new creation in Christ, and show a different ethic and way of life in the world. God enables us, as God’s one, new, and transformed people, to recover our humanity and help change the world. After all, we follow the one who goes into the storm saying, “Peace, be still.”
The way the church embodies this new way of life in the world is its shared practices.
The Power of Practices
I (Graham) grew up in a suburb and family full of craftspeople and tradespeople. These were people skilled in a range of functional, decorative, or specialized crafts and trades. These included carpenters, tailors, stonemasons, builders, bricklayers, and electricians. It included floorers, landscapers, plumbers, roofers, welders, truck drivers, automotive mechanics, architects, and cabinetmakers. All plied their craft with skill. They made commitments to apprenticing one, two, or three others in their craft or trade. All honed their expertise. They saw their craft or trade in the light of the broader community of artisans. They worked together, building or renovating houses, sculpting landscapes, restoring automobiles, or fashioning garments or pieces of furniture.
The finished product was rarely the result of one craft or one artisan working alone. At times these tradespeople or craftspeople were only skilled in one area. But often they were multiskilled: carpenter-floorers, plumber-electricians, architect-landscapers, truckie-mechanics, or teacher-builder-electricians. My father restored houses from time to time—including my own house, after my wife, Felicity, and I moved to Sydney, Australia. When he did this he used an array of carpentry, electrical, plumbing, construction, architectural, roofing, flooring, and landscaping skills. And he called on the skills of others he trusted.
In that environment I learned the importance of discipline and practice, both personal and in community. A person becomes a highly skilled craftsperson or tradesperson (or dancer, musician, theologian, pastor, writer, etc.) through many years of hard work and personal discipline. This person, and the community the person is a part of, performs important, disciplined practices countless times, over many years. These practices form people personally, build the community’s life together, and shape the fruit of people’s lives and shared efforts. This is a community of discipline. It is a practicing community. These practices often lead to extraordinary and beautiful results.
I (Grace) have a teenage daughter, Elisabeth, who’s an example of the power of disciplines and practices. Elisabeth has been taking ballet lessons since she was three years old. When she turned eight, her dance became more and more serious, and she had to focus and become a disciplined dancer. She goes to ballet four to seven days a week. When there are performances such as The Nutcracker or the spring dance, she is at her ballet studio for three to five hours per day to warm up, stretch, rehearse, and learn new routines. It takes skill to dance, but also lots and lots of practice to become a good dancer.
Elisabeth takes her classes and rehearsals very seriously. In class the dancers are not allowed to talk unless the instructor asks them a question. They are expected to quietly follow directions and practice new moves. There is a lot of repetition; the instructor makes them do movements over and over again until they have mastered them. The teacher points out what dancers are doing right or wrong and also uses a hands-on approach to lift or stretch their legs or arms properly. After hundreds of repetitions of the same movement, the students come to learn it.
Furthermore, after Elisabeth’s dance classes and rehearsals, she comes home and does her homework and studies for her tests. Before bed she spends thirty minutes stretching and exercising. She is very careful about what she eats, doing her best to stay away from junk food and to eat fresh fruits and vegetables. She recognizes that a healthy body is needed to be a serious dancer.
Elisabeth’s classes, routines, rehearsals, and healthy lifestyle are crucial to becoming a dancer. They have become part of her lifestyle, and they are all essential. The rest of us, whether we want to become a dancer or a faithful disciple of Christ, need to engage in similarly transforming practices.
Stanley Hauerwas says that formation happens in community.3 This is because character is at the center of formation, and community forms character. Today we as Christians need to recover, as Hauerwas writes, “the integrity of the Christian community. Here is a community breaking out of the suffocating tyranny of American individualism in which each of us is made into his or her own tyrant. Here is an alternative people who exist, not because each of us made up his or her own mind but because we are called, called to submit our lives to the authority of the saints.”4 Hauerwas believes that we are called to submit ourselves to Christ and to a faithful community that practices its discipleship together.
In this community of character are individuals. They form an ethical life together and in the world through discipleship practices. These include Eucharist, simplicity, generosity, economic sharing, hospitality, creation care, reconciliation, peacemaking, and acts of justice. They include prayer, baptism, celebrating the liturgy, reading Scripture, fasting, serving with the mentally handicapped, and embracing asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented neighbors. Importantly, they include immersing ourselves in the Gospels as the training manuals for Christian discipleship.
Formational practices need disciplined communities. But, as Hauerwas notes, shaping disciplined communities isn’t easy. It’s especially hard in modern, liberal-democratic, consumeristic, and individualistic societies. So much in these societies pushes back against discipline, accountability, stability, and community.5 But discipleship and community must go hand in hand.6
Hauerwas draws on the metaphor of bricklaying. He says the church needs to learn to lay metaphorical bricks and to make disciples. Laying bricks involves “learning myriad skills, but also a language that forms and is formed by those skills.”7 It’s about learning the craft from those who’ve gone before. It isn’t primarily about gathering information. It’s about discipline, training, craft, language, patience, character, and formation in community. This is how the church must make disciples. Discipleship involves learning a myriad of skills through personal discipline and by immersion in community. We also learn a language—words such as faith and hope and love take form in our mouths and shape our hearts and minds. And, so, discipleship practices and new ways of conceiving and speaking about God and the world shape our life together. Together, we learn fresh discipleship practices and vocabularies.
Nine Transforming Practices
This book shows what it means to be the church, the new humanity in Jesus Christ, as Paul writes about in Ephesians 2:15. This is the biblical basis for our understanding of what it means to become new in Christ. The church shows the world God’s perfect design for humanity, which is a reconciled, unified, whole, multiethnic, peaceful, loving life together. As a beacon to the world, the church shows the world what God calls it to be. The church shows the world its destiny and future. In an era where Christian identities seem so enmeshed with race, politics, nationalism, and material goods, we need to imagine a different reality.8
In The Christian Imagination, Willie James Jennings has shown how the Christian social imagination is often diseased and disfigured. It’s wedded to racialized, individualistic, privatized, and rootless identities. We find ourselves in this place because of historical events. We need to confront this situation head-on and theologically if we are going to demonstrate a compelling witness and life together in the world. The church needs a compelling vision of a healed and whole Christian community (and a redeemed Christian social imagination). The church needs fresh practices before a watching world.
Too often our theological or intellectual posture is one of power and control. We expect others (e.g., indigenes, marginalized groups, and outsiders) to be adaptable, but we refuse to be so ourselves. In our attachment to power and control, rigidity, superiority, and staleness grow. This diseased posture stops Christians from forming habits of humility, fluidity, embodiment, and engagement, which lead to transformation. Yet, as Jennings says, we live in hope:
Christianity marks the spot where, if noble dream joins hands with God-inspired hope and presses with great impatience against the insularities of life, for example, national, cultural, ethnic, economic, sexual, and racial, seeking the deeper ground upon which to seed a new way of belonging and living together, then we will find together not simply a new ground, not simply a new seed, but a life already prepared and offered to us.9
Race relations is one area where the church and Christianity can offer hope and a new way of life together. Race is a modern construct and problem, and such disciplines as biology, genetics, philosophy, history, political science, economics, feminism, cultural and postcolonial studies, and more are examining it. We need to understand “whiteness” and how whiteness is a construct to subordinate others. Yet, strangely, Christian theologians have been largely silent about race. A theological account of race is profoundly absent.
A few theologians and authors are seeking to fill this void. Willie James Jennings, Daniel Hill, Soong-Chan Rah, Christena Cleveland, Kwok Pui Lan, J. Kameron Carter, Drew G. I. Hart, Brenda Salter McNeil, Rick Richardson, Jim Wallis, Emmanuel Katongole, Ken Wytsma, Paula Harris, and Doug Schaupp are examples. They call the church to a new way of life together in the world in terms of race relations. This is a way of life characterized by justice, love, reconciliation, and peacemaking. These authors exemplify Christian hope for society in regard to this important topic.
This book unpacks what it means to be the new humanity in Christ, as we embrace nine transforming practices that we hope you can adopt into your life. The practices aren’t necessarily sequential. You don’t need to practice the fourth before you can go to the fifth, for example. These practices may be taking place concurrently, and different people might have different entry points.
1.Reimagine church as the new humanity in Jesus Christ.
2.Renew lament through corporate expressions of deep regret and sorrow.
3.Repent together of white cultural captivity, and racial and gender injustice, and of our complicity.
4.Relinquish power by giving up our own righteousness, status, privilege, selfish ambition, self-interests, vain conceit, and personal gain.
5.Restore justice to those who have been denied justice.
6.Reactivate hospitality by rejecting division and exclusion, and welcoming all kinds of people into the household of God.
7.Reinforce agency by supporting people’s ability to make free, independent, and unfettered actions and choices.
8.Reconcile relationships through repentance, forgiveness, justice, and partnership.
9.Recover life together as a transformed community that lives out the vision of the Sermon on the Mount.
These nine practices enable us to be the new humanity in Jesus Christ. These nine practices transform the church and the world. They lead to reconciliation, justice, unity, peace, and love.
Who We Are and Why We Are Passionate About This Book
We want to take a moment to introduce ourselves and explain why we wrote this book. We’ve known each other for a few years now, since we first met when Graham did some filming with Grace for the GlobalChurch Project. Graham spent almost six months filming Asian, African, Latin American, indigenous, and diaspora Christian leaders about faith, witness, prayer, and more, and he caught up with Grace in New Jersey in early 2015 to do some filming with her on her writings. Over a couple of years, we shared stories about our passion for listening to the voices of minoritized people. We discovered a shared desire to invite often-unheard voices from around the world to enter into a powerful conversation about the shape of faith, reconciliation, and justice in the twenty-first century. In the process we became close friends and decided to write about these things together.
I (Graham) teach applied theology and world Christianity at Morling Theological College in Sydney, Australia. I’m the founding director of the GlobalChurch Project. I’ve been in Christian ministry since 1987, including church planting, pastoring local churches, and teaching at theological colleges. I’m passionate about the local church and about seeing neighborhoods and lives transformed.
I (Grace) am an associate professor of theology at Earlham School of Religion in Indiana, and I am an ordained Presbyterian Church (USA) minister. I have written several books on marginality, racism, sexism, and the need to embrace all people. As I grew up in Canada as a young immigrant child, it became very clear that my voice was often ignored. I experienced this firsthand in my elementary school. Because my first language isn’t English, kids made fun of my accent every time I opened my mouth. This made me feel self-conscious about speaking out loud in the classroom. So even though I wanted to speak up and answer questions that the teacher was asking, I felt that I couldn’t participate as I wanted, and as a result my voice became more and more silenced. In addition my voice was ignored in the Korean Presbyterian church that I grew up in. It was quite evident that male voices were welcomed, and women’s voices were considered unimportant and a nuisance. The blatant silencing of women’s voices was a painful reality for me and for other women in the church.
I (Graham) first became passionate about the transforming practices covered in this book in the late 1990s, when I was speaking at a conference in Manila in the Philippines. I was staying in a backpacker’s hostel at night and speaking at conference sessions during the day. One morning I was woken by the sound of sobbing. I looked down from my bunk to see an elderly man weeping beside his bed. During the week I got to know this remarkable man. He was an elderly Vietnamese pastor who’d planted a church of a dozen people in his home thirty years earlier. That church had grown to tens of thousands of people. He told me stories from this Vietnamese church that sounded like something from the book of Acts. These were stories of miracles, lives transformed, persecution, and a growing, vibrant, underground church in communist Vietnam. But I noticed something. All the speakers at the conference in Manila looked like me: white men. So I started thinking about the injustice of this. Why weren’t people like my elderly Vietnamese friend asked to speak, or at least to tell their stories? And I started wondering about the thousands and thousands of stories that are never heard: Christians whose voices are ignored, silenced, or marginalized. How do we start to hear these voices? How do we hear their cries for (and stories of) justice, peace, hope, and reconciliation? How do we learn from them and embrace new practices that can transform the world? That was the beginning of my journey, and these nine practices come out of listening to thousands of Christians from all over the world talk about the practices that they know can heal our broken world.
Our hope is that this book will be used by small groups, ministry professionals, activists, and laypeople. We hope this book will help you discover new, transforming practices that revitalize the church and its mission and that transform the world. We hope that through these nine practices you’ll discover fresh expressions and depths of reconciliation, justice, unity, peace, and love.
How to Get the Most Out of This Book
This book can be read individually, but we also believe it is helpful to read in community. We encourage you to read this book in your small group, as a ministry team, as a college class, or in some other group setting. You may choose to gather a group of friends and read this book together in a home or a coffee shop.
Here’s how your group can get the most out of this book.
Figure 1. Practices for getting the most out of this book
Pray for open hearts. Spend time together in prayer and meditation, asking God to prepare your hearts as you read the chapter together. Ask the Spirit to make you open to what God wants to do in your lives, group, church, and neighborhood. Ask God to give you an open and receptive heart.
Read the chapter. Before your meeting, read through the chapter for the week. Many of the chapters refer to Scripture too, so read with your Bible open. Read slowly, reflectively, and prayerfully. Take your time and allow the ideas and challenges to sink in. (If you are reading this book together in your small group, you might choose to do one practice per week over nine weeks, or two practices per week over four weeks, and then one in a final week.)
Journal your thoughts. As you read the chapter, journal your thoughts. Journal what God is saying to you. How is God asking you to respond and change? What impresses or challenges you? What do you agree or disagree with? What questions do you have? How is the Spirit trying to get your attention and change your life? What is he saying to your group, church, and neighborhood? How is God calling you to think or act in response to your reading?
Discuss what you are learning. Meet in a small group or college class, with some friends at home or at a coffee shop, or as part of a ministry team. You will get a lot more out of this book when you read it with others. Together you can think about the book’s challenges and implications. Discuss the chapter you read that week (or the two chapters you read that week, if you’ve decided to work through this book over five weeks). What are the key ideas? How does the chapter invite your group to respond? What does the chapter mean for your ministry, church, agency, family, or team? Appendix one has some questions for discussion and application.
Act on the suggested practices and activities. At the end of every chapter, there are three or more practices, challenges, and activities for small groups. These will help you explore and apply the practice discussed in that chapter and turn ideas into habits. Choose one of the suggested activities to do together that week. Set aside some time to do that activity together. (If an activity can’t be completed that week, set aside some time in your calendar to do that activity later on. Some of the activities will take quite a few weeks to complete, so set aside some time to do that exercise this year.)
Reflect on what you are learning. As you do the small group practice or exercise together, talk through what you are learning. When you meet to read the next chapter, reflect together on what God is saying to you and how God wants you to respond personally and as a group. What did you learn and discover as you engaged in the small group activity together? Engage with each other’s ideas. Listen and learn from each other’s insights and experiences.
Encourage each other to change and grow. We all find it easier to change and grow when we are encouraged and supported. Find creative ways to encourage each other to pursue deeper discipleship and faith and to overcome old habits and prejudices. We encourage each other by (1) discerning together what God is saying to us, (2) spurring each other on to deeper faith, (3) challenging each other to change, (4) nurturing each other’s faith, and (5) holding each other accountable.
Here’s one way you can keep each other accountable. Appendix two has the “Nine Transforming Practices Accountability Form.” Keep a copy of this form in your Bible or in your bag or journal.
Once a week, pull out this form and write some answers to the questions on the form.
Once a month, ask everyone in your group to pull out their forms, and then discuss each of the nine practices. Hold each other accountable for the commitments you make. This accountability will help you continue to change and grow.
Grow through further reading. It’s important to keep growing and learning. Appendix three has resources for recovering our humanity. These are a few books on each of the nine practices that will help you learn more about the practice and how to apply it.
Small Group Resources in This Book
To help your group get the most out of this book, we’ve included the following four resources:
Small group activities are proposed at the end of every chapter. These will help you apply the nine practices in your church and neighborhood.
Questions for discussion and application are in appendix one. These will help you dig deeper into how to apply and understand each of the nine practices.
The Nine Transforming Practices Accountability Form is in appendix two. This will help you keep each other accountable as you seek to live out the nine practices personally and together.
Resources for recovering our humanity are offered in appendix three. These will help you to learn more about each of the practices and help you continue to grow.
Figure 2. Resources in this book
With God’s help, we can recover our humanity and pursue love, peace, justice, and reconciliation. These nine practices help encourage us to transform a dehumanized world into God’s world.
One
REIMAGINE CHURCH
Jesus calls us to reimagine the church as the new humanity in Jesus Christ (Eph 2:15).
This is about learning together and anew about injustice and division in the church and the world. It’s also about learning mutually and afresh what it means to be the new humanity in Jesus Christ.
What Is “the New Humanity in Christ”?
As a child I (Graham) had the opportunity to visit the junction where the Darling and Murray Rivers meet and join in New South Wales, Australia. These are some of Australia’s longest rivers. There’s a viewing tower at the junction. A huge sign declares, “You are at the junction of Australia’s Two Greatest Rivers.” From the tower you can see the distinct difference between these two great rivers. Surrounded by majestic eucalyptus trees and the laughter of kookaburras, you look down on these rivers. The Darling River stretches 915 miles. It’s a clay-based river and has a rich milky color. The Murray River is 1,558 miles long, and it flows through Australia’s highest mountains all the way to the sea. It’s a rich ecosystem of fish, turtles, shrimp, and platypuses, and it’s a vibrant blue.
At the Darling and Murray Rivers junction, these two rivers become one great river. This is a stunning testimony to the God who creates, sustains, and restores all the heavens and the earth, and who makes the two into one.
What does Paul the apostle mean when he speaks of the new humanity in Christ?
