St. Lesslie

So you know how can hear about someone, all your friends talk about them & you kind-of reckon that you'd get along if you ever met. Such has been my relationship with Lesslie Newbigin ... until last night.

Lesslie Newbigin is a stalwart of Christian mission and ecclesiology.  Since both of those themes resonate loudly through the church's current "missional" impulse, you can appreciate how I felt I knew him even before picking up a small work, Is Christ Divided? A Plea for Christian Unity in a Revolutionary Age, that was left in my new church office by my predecessor.

The title (well, that and the fact that it was 40 pages & I was mighty sleepy) spoke to me, especially in advance of our Election Day Communion effort next Tuesday. The pastors who initiated this effort had hoped for 300 participating churches.  So far, there are 700 and more joining by the day.  Why would this gesture be met with such overwhelming, positive response? What is it we are hungry for, after all?

"In the middle of this world God has set His church as His witness.  He expects His Church to be recognizable as His family. He expects that the glory which He gave to His Son, and which has been given to us, will be visible to the world in the common life of a redeemed brotherhood. He expects that the world will be able to recognize that the Church is the place where His love is actually at work drawing together into one men every sort and kind." -Lesslie Newbigin

He goes on to tell of his missionary service, preaching in remote villages of Southern India.  He says that the Christians there would meet inside the church building but then would gather all the other villagers eager to hear Newbigin's message. As he preached out from the church onto the streets and sidewalks, he always felt keenly aware that, if the people inside the church weren't living lives shaped by the Gospel he was preaching, his words would inevitably fall flat as people glanced over his shoulder, into the church thinking, "But that is the most mean-spirited woman in the village." Or, "That man regularly swindles us at the marketplace."

We needn't buy a plane ticket to engage missions in this day and age.  We are all quite proximate to one another now.  But proximity itself has not bred unity, otherwise why would virtues like tolerance and understanding need to be taught?  For many, this effort can feel a bit mired.  It's all well and good to say something along the lines of "let's focus on the essentials that unite us," until we realize that we cannot even properly manufacture that list without argumentation and factions and prejudices.  

"How can the Church give to the world the message the Jesus is able to draw all men to Himself, while it continues to say, 'Nevertheless, Jesus is not able to draw us who bear His name together'? How will the world believe a message which we do not appear to believe ourselves?" -Lesslie Newbigin

As I read this, I understood why Election Day Communion felt like the right step for me to take.  As I proposed it to Church Council and others, I heard echoes of Newbigin's refrain in their responses as well.  Let's be a counter-witness.  Certainly not on the strength of our own charity toward one another.  Certainly not on some saccharine ideal of humans tending toward the good.  Let us reach out to one another, fumbling and incoherent as these efforts may regularly be, because we cannot live with the way things are.  And we long for the day when Christ himself will put all things to rights.  In the meantime,

"None of us knows exactly what we ought to do, exactly what kind of unity He wants for us...But we do know - unless we shut our eyes -- that these divisions are contrary to His will, and that we ought to repent of them and turn together to Him." - Lesslie Newbigin

On All Saint's Day, I am grateful to celebrate the faithful legacy of Lesslie Newbigin. I look forward to enacting not only his ideas but also the words of Scripture itself:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.  Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith ...