The wise sage once remarked that there is a time to tear down, and a time to build. In our self-proclaimed day and age of deconstructionism, it is ever so vogue to tear down, find faults, and leave whatever got in your intellectual way in a pile of ruin. Christians are not allowed this guilty pleasure. At least, we are not allowed to leave the mess where it all crumbled. Whether it be intellectual argumentation or flesh and blood institutions, or even nice garden areas in the back yard, we are required to build. In fact, all humanity has been commissioned to walk with God and expand his Garden sanctuary until the earth is full of his glory. In a poetic moment for Oliver O’Donovan, he provides us with the launching point for considering where we are to go after having handed Christendom her death documents: “the prophet is not allowed the luxury of perpetual subversion. After Ahab, Elijah must anoint some Hazael, some Jehu.”
Since the Church may not use coercion to impose belief, nor is she to accept her role as only to win souls who are concerned for their own private lives, and since the myth of a neutral environment is also an impossibility, the Church is to once again create a cultural ethos, a Christendom of sorts, by being the Church, focusing on living out the reality of the Kingdom community with a self-consciousness to her own unique story. “Its visible embodiment will be a community that lives by this story, a community whose existence is visibly defined in the regular rehearsing and reenactment of the story which has given it birth, the story of the self-emptying of God in the ministry, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.” The overflow of this presumably will accomplish the larger task of discipling the nations. In addition, the Church must be a humble learner in this process, constantly rethinking with wisdom how to apply the Gospel story in every new situation.
In fact, for Lesslie Newbigin, the overflow of “evangelistic campaigns, distribution of Bibles and Christian literature, conferences, and even books such as [The Gospel in a Pluralistic Culture]…are all secondary, and… have power to accomplish their purpose only as they are rooted in and lead back to a believing community.” “For the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.” Such manifestations of faithfulness are not to be tied to any particular paradigm, except the paradigm that is Christ’s Lordship over all things. The reason for this bold assertion is because of the fact that Jesus Himself did not leave us a book or paradigm, but formed a community.
The natural question that quickly arises, is what should this community look like? To this, Newbigin points to a community characterized by six elements based on her own unique practices and stories, a community wrapped around the proclamation of the Word and Sacraments, thus allowing Christ’s story to be their story in whatever given situations.
This community has at its heart the remembering and rehearsing of his words and deeds, and the sacraments given by him through which it is enabled both to engraft new members into its life and to renew this life again and against through sharing in his risen life through the body broken and the lifeblood poured out. It exists in him and for him. He is the center of its life. Its character is given to it, when it is true to its nature, not by the characters of its members but by his character. Insofar as it is true to its calling, it becomes the place where men and women and children find that the gospel gives them the framework of understanding, the ‘lenses’ through which they are able to understand and cope with the world. Insofar as it is true to its calling, this community will have, I think, the following six characteristics (227): 1) It will be a community of praise…(2) It will be a community of truth…(3) It will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighborhood…(4) It will be a community where men and women are prepared for and sustained in the exercise of the priesthood in the world…(5) It will be a community of mutual responsibility…(6) It will be a community of hope.
