As We Have Been Given

In the fall of 1975, representatives from several U.S. communities met to explore the possibility of a new relationship between communities from diverse ecclesiastical traditions, which were coming to share similar conclusions about the church's mission in the world (see "A Community of Communities," Sojourners, January 1980). A year later, a number of these communities entered into an intentional relationship, and the Community of Communities was born. In February 1984 this network of communities agreed to the following statement. —The Editors

Introduction

A new wind is blowing throughout the churches, creating an awakening among Christians. The central vision and vocation of this awakening is the joining of faith and history, the incarnation of the gospel in our particular historical situation.

People from divergent traditions and histories are coming together in a movement of biblical faith and Christian conscience, offering a message of hope. Drawn together by the Spirit and the historical crisis we confront, we believe that the unity we have come to share is the work of the God of history, who has knit us together in love, fellowship, and a common vision of the gospel.

The old divisions are beginning to break down—divisions between spirituality and politics, pastoral and prophetic ministry, worship and action, prayer and peacemaking, evangelism and social action, biblical study and political analysis. In more and more places, the voice of the church is being raised in a cry for justice and peace. The political and economic establishments can no longer count on the silence of the church when their policies crush the poor, deny human rights, and threaten nuclear holocaust.

The Community of Communities is part of a growing fellowship of people who seek to embody in their lives the changes and commitments the gospel calls for in our historical situation. Our commitments are simple: to deepen our discipleship to Jesus Christ; to study the Bible and pray together; to live simply, serve the poor, and make peace; to build community; to seek ever deeper conversion in our own lives; and to proclaim the good news of the gospel in the world.

Our network of faith, fellowship, and action is not a substitute for the church or a new denomination, but rather exists for the sake of the church and its renewal. We are committed to rebuilding the church both within and without traditional church structures and calling it to be a witness of the gospel and an agent of change in the world.

The growing network of communities that has evolved represents an exciting ecumenical experiment in the bringing together of traditions and races that in the past have been divided, but whose unity is, in fact, essential to the wholeness of the body of Christ. The Community of Communities represents fellowships of diverse ecclesiastical and theological origins: various Protestant denominations, Roman Catholic, evangelical, Anabaptist. We are local church fellowships, some of which are part of traditional denominational structures; we are located in both rural and urban environments, and in black, Hispanic, white, and racially mixed areas. While respecting the integrity of each local community, we are striving to be accountable to more than just ourselves and our own ecclesiastical traditions.

Since the birth of the Community of Communities in 1975, our relationship has been a place of both vision and nurture.We have learned that just as individual Christians need to be in community with one another to experience the wholeness that God has for them, so communities and renewal movements need to establish deeper community among themselves for continued strength, support, encouragement, and hope. We have felt a deep communion in the common venture of trying to apply the gospel to our particular history.

We are less an organization and more a network of fellowship that supports and nurtures our communities in a new way of life. Annual meetings, leadership conferences, intercommunity visitations, and regional gatherings take place for the purpose of exploring issues of common concern and offering pastoral support to one another. Over the years our theological reflection on the experience of community has grown and deepened, as has our commitment to one another. We find ourselves to be part of a growing number of Christians who want to understand their times more biblically and together seek new forms for the church's life in the United States.

Discipleship and Community

For us, Jesus is Lord, and that commitment supersedes all others. At the heart of our calling and vocation is simply a return to Jesus. That, in essence, is what we mean by renewal. Christian belief in our day has become tragically separated from following after Jesus. We wish to restore the vital, biblical connection between belief and obedience. We believe that discipleship is the only real form in which faith can exist.

The message of the gospel is that Jesus Christ wants to live his life in us, to be made present to the world through ordinary men and women. God intends to reproduce the incarnation in the world through a people—a people who have been called out of the world, restored to relationship with God and to one another, and then sent into the world to be ministers of the gospel.

At the outset of his ministry, Jesus preached repentance and proclaimed the coming of a new order called the kingdom of God. He boldly called men and women to change their whole way of thinking and living. He said that entering the new order would come about through repentance—metanoia in the Greek—meaning to have the form, the character, the orientation, the whole direction of one's life turned around and transformed.

Soon after preaching the gospel of the kingdom, Jesus called a band of disciples to follow him. Immediately they left their nets and followed. From the calling of the disciples to the inauguration of the church at Pentecost, the gospel of the kingdom invites the believers to community. The new order becomes real in the context of the Christian community. In the book of Acts and in the epistles, the church is presented as a community.

The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost caused a bold proclamation of the gospel, repentance on the part of those who heard, and the establishment of a common life. The gospel reconciled people to God in a new community. The good news is that those divided by race, class, sex, nationality, fear, hate, and mistrust have been reconciled to God and to one another through the work of Christ. So the preaching of the gospel is intended to create a new family. The church itself is to be part of the good news.

It is the ongoing life of a community of faith that issues a basic challenge to the world as it is and offers a visible and concrete alternative. The church must be called to be the church, to rebuild the kind of community that gives substance to the claims of faith.

The principal cause of the church's accommodation to the values, spirit, and structures of our age is the fragmentation of our corporate life. We have succumbed because we are rootless and confused. We are therefore easy prey.

Many places in the church today suffer from deep and brutal persecution. But in the United States our chief enemy is not persecution. It is seduction. We are not a persecuted people, but those seduced by a way of thinking, a way of living, that is irreconcilable with the lordship of Christ.

We have to create a foundation that is internally strong, that will enable us to survive as Christians and empower us to be actively engaged in the world. We have learned from our experience in community that we have no more to give to the world than that which we have come to experience together.

Jesus tells us, "Love one another as I have loved you." A simple definition of community is the extending to one another and to the world the same life we have been extended by God in Christ. We give as we have been given—the same love, the same forgiveness, the same peace.

In our own communities, a common life means the offering to God and to one another of our whole selves—our gifts, resources, joys, sorrows, strengths, weaknesses. We are committed to nurturing the gifts of the body in a common life of mutual encouragement, support, and accountability.

We believe that this includes the gift of pastoral leadership within the context of mutual submission to one another. We are committed to a leadership within our communities that is shared between men and women, clergy and laity, and that grows out of the authority of our life together; we seek to avoid hierarchical patterns within our communities and the network. Leadership is not based on ordination and formal structures, but on service and commitment in the community. We seek to model ourselves not after the world but after the servant-style leadership of Jesus.

We seek to develop peer relationships between and among our communities, to foster mutual involvement, the sharing of resources, and pastoring. We are committed to support one another in all kinds of needs and to maintain our relationship together.

Spirituality

We recognize that if our life and ministry are to demonstrate the characteristics of the people of God, then our life together must undergo a fundamental transformation. What has become central to us, therefore, is the building of community, the recovering of a genuine pastoral ministry, the renewal of worship, and the recovery of spiritual disciplines.

Our lives and our communities are not made by our own hands, but are the gift of God. Our worship together is at the center of our communities. Similarly, we are committed to the practice of personal prayer and other spiritual disciplines that root our lives more deeply in God. We seek to uncover and understand the spiritual roots of personal, social, economic, and political realities. Our faith is rooted in the Bible. We seek to interpret the Bible in the midst of our historical realities. Likewise, we seriously pursue theological reflection on our historical situation.

Our spirituality is contemplative, charismatic, and politically conscious. While actively engaged in the world's struggles and pain, we seek to nurture a contemplative and listening stance toward life and one another and to find the grace and joy to truly celebrate our life together in Christ. Celebrating life when death is the norm is to be a community of resistance. Discerning life from death and light from darkness requires the unmasking of the principalities and powers of this age as well as affirming the power of God.

Communities among us first known for their political commitment have now become places where worship is at the core; and those first known for their powerful worship are now becoming politically active. That should be expected: worship and politics have everything to do with each other. In their deepest sense both raise the same questions: Whom do we love? Whom will we serve?

The experience of community, regardless of tradition, seems to create fellowships where celebration of the Eucharist is central. That is because the Eucharist graphically reminds us of exactly what God has given us in Christ. It reminds us that the only authority we have as God's people is the presence of the life of Christ among us.

Justice for the Poor

The poor are being abandoned all over the world, including in our own nation. But at the same time, we are having our eyes opened to God's special love for the oppressed and to Jesus' presence among the poorest of our brothers and sisters. We have come to the conclusion that we North American Christians will find deeper conversion to Christ as we are converted to the poor.

We have seen what the Spirit is doing among Christians in poor countries and, as we have felt a growing solidarity with them, we have come to see that our calling is indeed the same. We are together a part of what God is doing in the world. The call for liberation in the poor countries is directly related to the call for repentance in the rich ones.

We want our communities to be profoundly shaped by the priority of the poor in our lives. Our biblical faith is slowly transforming our former cultural and class biases. We are learning to view our society and our world from the bottom up instead of from the top down. We want to become more like the communities of the early church, with their compelling evangelistic power and their reputation as radically open, inclusive, caring, and sharing fellowships, into which the poor and oppressed were especially welcomed.

We have learned that siding with the poor brings us into conflict with the institutions and arrangements that oppress them. Working for justice means overcoming the domination of some over others and establishing new relationships and institutions based on mutual respect, dignity, and equity. We cannot know the compassion of Christ until we have broken with the style of life that has hardened our hearts. In our communities, simplicity, sharing, and mutual accountability are beginning to replace affluence, indifference, and individualism as marks of the Christian lifestyle.

Together we are seeking to deepen our response to the economic imperatives of the gospel. We are working to disentangle ourselves from the cultural illusions and economic assumptions of the world. We are committed to a shared economic life within our communities, and to sharing our resources between communities.

Peacemaking

Perhaps the clearest evidence of hardness of heart today is the willingness of nations to wage nuclear war against hundreds of millions of God's people, as well as the rest of God's creation. The nuclear arms race has for us become an urgent matter of faith in which everything we say about our belief in God and commitment to Jesus Christ is at stake. As the nations move toward the brink of global suicide, it is urgent that Jesus' call to be peacemakers be renewed in the churches.

In Christ we are reconciled to God and to each other. In that reconciling work, God has created a new people. Christian community can put us in touch with the fear, hate, and violence still within and among us. It can help us to understand these same dynamics around us as well as teach us the means toward peace in our life together.

Knowing that forgiveness and reconciliation are the foundation of our life within community, we desire to extend that same reconciliation into the world. The healing work of Christ begins with our own hates, fears, hurts, and broken pasts and extends into the world. Reconciliation includes our friends those similar to us—but it also includes those who have been our enemies—those divided from us by class, race, sex, or nation.

These divisions are not just social, economic, or political problems. They are evidence of sin in our lives and in the world. The extending of Christ's reconciliation in the world always includes the establishment of justice and the making of peace.

Jesus teaches us to love our enemies. He bids us to follow his example in overcoming violence with suffering love. To do otherwise is to put limits on God's forgiveness and reconciliation. It is to put a wall around the work of Christ and to contain it within the boundaries of our own group. Our desire to share Christ's reconciliation with the world has led us to regard peacemaking as a central mark of the believing community, and has brought us to a firm commitment to non-cooperation and resistance to our country's preparations for nuclear war.

We are committed to nonviolence, not only as a tactic, but as a way of life that flows directly out of the teaching and example of Jesus. War necessitates defining others as enemies, as less than human, so that we may justify hating and killing them. But the cross of Jesus Christ has established the value of our enemies by turning each one into a brother or sister. The readiness to exterminate millions in a nuclear war is the ultimate negation of God's creative and redemptive work.

Conclusion

We see the people of God as pilgrims and sojourners in this world because of our loyalty to the kingdom of God. Our identity in this world grows directly out of the positive vision of a new order which commands more loyalty and obedience from us than we have toward any of the world's systems.

There is a deep hunger in us for restoration of our covenant with the poor, with our neighbors of different races and nations, with our marriage partners and our children, with unborn lives, with whole populations we now call enemies and threaten with nuclear destruction, with God's earth, with our sisters and brothers in Christ as we build community, and, at root, with God who loves us and is calling us back.

A new style of life is emerging in our communities that is a clear alternative to the political and economic status quo. Our commitments have taken the form of creating marriage and family patterns based on fidelity and mutuality, living among the poor, organizing for economic justice, laboring for peace, and evangelizing ourselves and others with the good news of the gospel. Together we are seeking to forge a new shape for the church's life.

The renewal of faith is finally the only thing with the strength to resist the economic and political powers now in control and to provide an adequate spiritual foundation for better ways to live. The tasks of regaining our proper identity and rebuilding our foundations have become central to our message.

It is time for profound, far-reaching conversion. We must turn from rebellious self-sufficiency to dependence on God. We must turn from isolated individualism to caring community, from greed to simplicity, from nuclear swords to waging peace, from selfish gladness to Spirit-filled joy, and from cheap grace to costly discipleship in the company of Jesus Christ.

The Community of Communities has become an extended family, with a growing kindred spirit. Vision, strength, support, encouragement, and joy have come from this fellowship. It has been for us an arena of struggle as well as a place for conversion. It has been, most of all, for all of us a sign of hope in a time that cries out for hope.