Renewal is a hopeful word. Like renovation, taking something as it is, keeping what is of value in what it was, building what is now necessary to make it even better. Church renewal is a phrase that likewise opens up more hopeful perspectives. When speaking of the Church I think I'm coming to prefer the word "renewal" to "fresh", or "emergent", probably because it holds two important sine qua nons together. [What is the plural of sine qua non? :))] The Church is what it has been, and its long storied tradition, its history, can neither be ignored nor made normative. But the Church is also a living spiritual reality, the Body of Christ, and growth, change and movement are definitive of life.
It's probably fruitless to ask what Bonhoeffer would make of the Church's task in a post-Christendom and post-modern (at least post-Western modernity) culture, in an age of cultural flux, globalised economics, ecological crisis and the irresistible urge of the Church to reinvent itself in order to survive. Which makes the following extract from the Letters and Papers from Prison all the more intriguing as a perspective on the renewal of the Church at one of the darkest moments in 20th century history:
That is our own fault. Our Church, which has been fighting in these years 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. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among humanity. All Christian thinking, speaking and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action.
Letters and Papers from Prison
(London: SCM, 1971) (pp 299-300)
Bonhoeffer isn't giving up on the earlier vocabulary of the Church. He is arguing that they must be born anew out of a Church which provides lived evidence of what it is these older words bear witness to. "Prayer and righteous action amongst humanity" implies reconciliation, love of enemies, cross and resurrection proclaimed through lives which are cruciform and vivified by resurrection hope. The great words of the Gospel are not redundant, they need translation into something much more persuasive than what is now a forgotten discourse – communities embodying the Gospel they preach, prayer and righteous action, empirical demonstrations that the love of God for a sinful world is given credibility by what God makes the Church – forgiving forgivers, reconciled reconcilers, peaceable peacemakers, grace bestowers because grace receivers. And perhaps, out of such retranslation of the Gospel into Gospel-demonstrative Christian community will come the old words to be reminted in new language that again has meaning, credibility and a recovered capacity to communicate the love of God in Christ.
And how to do this? Only if through the cross and resurrection of Christ, we have learned ourselves the Gospel we preach, and its great realities have remade and renewed our own humanity in Christ. Renewal has its deepest and most permanent roots in hearts that are made new, in what Paul calls "new creation", and in that changed worldview that looks out on the broken, fragmented world at odds with itself and God, and believes "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself", – "making peace by the blood of His cross". And then to own and surrender to the great apostolic affirmation of the Church "He has given us this ministry of reconciliation". I have no doubt, a ministry of reconciliation, energised by faith in the cross and in the resurrection, is one of the primary imperatives of the Church today.
Leave a Reply