God’s work of salvation can be construed as creating ‘a liberated and forgiven community, a faithful, loving, and peaceable people empowered by the Spirit to bear witness to the holy character of God, to God’s own faithful love and shalom’…Embarking on community building is to enter a cruciform yet hopeful space.
-Stefan and Paas and Hans Schaeffer in “Reconciled Community: On Finding a Soteriology for Fresh Expressions”
When I sat down to write this post, I intended to publish a short piece on the “Serving in the African Church” course we are planning to host; a course centered around Conrad Mbewe’s book, God’s Design for the Church. However, that isn’t what this post is about. Or at least, it’s about more than just the course. Over this weekend, God led me to reflect a bit more on the church and the outworking of our salvation in community.
On Friday, I read an article in a back-issue of Ecclesiology by missiologists Stefan Paas and Hans Schaeffer that challenged me to consider more deeply the way in which our salvation is worked out in the context of the community in Christ (church). Paas and Schaeffer refer to the practices that make up missional community formation (MCF)–shared meals, hospitality, worship, prayer, protest, celebration, and mourning–as a “social soteriology” that provides an integrated lens on the various dimensions of salvation found in Scripture and Christian theology. To enter into MCF is to step into a cruciform yet eschatologically hopeful space in which God is doing his redemptive, reconciling work to bring about a foretaste of the Kingdom, the goal of history: “a reconciled humanity, living in peace with one another, with God and his creation.”
Through participation in MCF, we work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), being led to rediscover the “paradoxes, promises and messages bound up with the cross and resurrection of Jesus,” and being holistically reoriented in thought, word, and deed towards the Kingdom. As a result, the practices of community building become not merely expressions of belief but rather “formative in the sense that they shape our beliefs.”
All of this resonated with the words of Elizabeth Oldfield from a video served up to me on Saturday night by the YouTube algorithm entitled, “PROOF: The God Conversation Has Changed.” The video is a commentary by Glen Scrivener on a recent UnHerd LIVE conversation on the topic of “Christian Revival: Fantasy or Reality?” In it, Oldfield speaks to renewed spiritual interest among people dealing with the cultural existential crisis of the day (as well as the opportunity and struggle the church faces in knowing what to do with such people):
We need collective formation. We need to immerse ourselves in communities of moral formation that call us to be better than we are. If we have any hope of rising to the challenges of this moment, we have to learn how to be becoming more together…Ritualized, communal, emotional, embodied forms of practice literally make it easier for you to see [and know] what is really there. God is really there.
-Elizabeth Oldfield
To be becoming more together. Forms of practice in Christian community so that we can [taste?] see and know the God who is really there and who, in Christ, sets about to redeem, reconcile, and renew our lives and the world. Scrivener ends the video with an equally powerful statement:
You submit yourself into that [Christian] story…and you find yourself being formed in community; being formed existentially; being formed in embodied practices; being formed sacramentally. And your beliefs are not the end result of climbing a ladder of logic, you find yourself believing in the community of faith. You don’t think yourself into a new way of life, you live yourself into a new way of thinking. So come to church.
This is what a social soteriology is about; what missional community formation looks like. It is to enter that cruciform space–a community of other sinful, broken people receiving the means of grace, doing life together, and participating in Christian mission–through which God brings about transformation. In a line that could have come from Oldfield herself, Paas and Schaeffer write:
It is through the cross and the resurrection of Jesus that God heals, forgives, and transforms us so that we are able to love. We can only become ‘persons’ when we grow into the awareness that we are truly loved, that the powers are judged and conquered, that no sin in us is stronger than the kingdom, that nothing on our part is needed to bring about God’s future, and that all evil will work out for the good. All this and more is what the cross communicates–not primarily in words but in a deeply emotional, transforming, heart-rending drama that is meant to draw us in and to move us toward love.
Echoing Hans Rookmaaker, the article ends with the invitation that missional community formation offers our post-christian (and, perhaps more significantly, post-secular) world: not to become more religious but to become more human. Something that our individualistic, shallow, siloed life experiences and our flattened views of the world cannot offer.
Which brings me to Sunday and attending the Uniting Reformed Church in the nearby community of Kylemore, where Nola, the cleaning woman at our office worships. She warmly greeted us when we arrived and, with a gleam in her eye, she led us into the church. We were the only white people in the congregation and the service was in Afrikaans. I could follow the liturgy and sing the songs, but not much beyond that. Restless and struggling her way through the service, my daughter asked why we were there. I responded by telling her that it was a way to honor Nola and show our love for, and unity with, these brothers and sisters in Christ.
As we drove home, it would have been easy to say we “got nothing out of that service” but I knew that this wasn’t true. With that Ecclesiology article and the words of Oldfield and Scrivener still swirling in my heart and mind, I realized that our presence in that space, and participation in–our submission to–their practice of worship (despite the barriers), was itself formative. Christ uses such experiences to further his reconciling and renewing work within us and between peoples within his body.
And then there is the small international church I serve–Stellenbosch International Fellowship (SIF)–and how these various strands come together to form the fabric of our own efforts at community building. As a church with people from across the continent and around the world, from different cultures, classes, and church traditions, I have experienced the struggles, felt the tensions, that can threaten our life together and our united witness before a conflicted, warring world. But it is in the cruciform space of this church that God graciously continues his work in us: reminding us of the surpassing greatness and glorious riches of grace in Christ, reconciling us to one another, reforming us according to God’s Word, and renewing us together so that we might embody something of our own foretaste of the Kingdom.
Which brings me back to this course, “Serving in the African Church,” and what I see as the importance of weaving together a reformed confessionalism with the praxis-oriented, social soteriology found in missional community formation. Something I believe international churches, churches like SIF, are uniquely positioned to accomplish with their incredible diversity, strong emphasis on community, sending potential, and their ability to offer a prophetic witness to the kingdom in their worshipping life.
We need leaders and laypeople alike who know and love Scripture, the rich faith expressed in the reformed confessions, and who can pass this on to the next generation. We need healthy churches that can thread the needle between the moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD) of many charismatic and evangelical churches on the one hand, and the liberalism of the mainline churches on the other, while also offering a robust engagement with traditional religion (ATR) and protecting God’s people from false teachers and “Christian” cults.
But we also need leaders and laypeople who understand that there is another form of catechesis taking places as God forms people in community, through embodied practices, by the means of grace. Churches that can embrace being a witness to the reconciling, unifying power of the gospel as well as being spaces of incredible social, political, cultural, and theological diversity as people live their way into a new way of thinking–through life together under Christ and in the Christian story (with all the tension, messiness, and mistakes that come with it). Strong churches that refuse to exist as silos, peer groups built on existing social categories of class, ethnicity, political views, or language, but instead are willing to sacrifice these for the sake of inviting “the other” into community, formation, and life.
This weekend was a reminder and call to recognize the ways belief and practice inform one another and of the ways God is working through community and practice to bring salvation and give us glimpses of the kingdom even now. As one of my seminary professors once said: Orthodoxy and orthopraxy lead to doxological living. That is my hope for this upcoming course and my hope for the church; to see a new generation of confessional, practice-oriented Christians raised up for South Africa (and beyond) who bring these two together in the community of the church to the glory of God.