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December 21, 2005

On making your congregation a center for reconciliation, and the leaders who can help along the way. This article first appeared in Trinity News. Use the "Share your thoughts" link to let us know you'd like a free subscription.

By Robert Owens Scott and W. Mark Richardson

On a rural road in Kentucky stands a church the pastor built — literally. Its neighbors will tell you that in the pastor’s previous church, the congregation split in two over some issue or other. After months of deepening conflict, the members of one faction all showed up at Sunday service toting firearms. The pastor and his contingent beat a prudent retreat, but he resolved never to let that happen again. So he built his new church with his own hands and now owns it outright. It would seem that if ever a group of people was in need of the skill — or call it gift or charism — of being able to move from a rigid insistence on “my way” to a wider, deeper, more compassionate vision based on loving inclusion rather than violent exclusion, it would be that congregation.

And one might expect that as they met week after week for Scripture reading, hymn singing, and preaching they would have drawn ever closer to the source of such reconciliation. Yet, put in cinematic terms, their resolution was modeled more on Gunfight at the O.K. Corral than The Greatest Story Ever Told.

While the story of the pistol-packing congregation may be extreme — or even apocryphal — it raises a vital question in an era when polarization seems to rule in all areas of society. When people visit local congregations, do they find communities enlivened by a healing vision of reconciliation? Or do they encounter Christians who are as intransigent as those in secular society — or even worse, ready to do battle on God’s behalf since they are convinced God agrees with them? The unfortunate realities of our current religious climate include frequent media reports of denominational conflict over issues such as sexuality and, less publicly but perhaps even more pervasively, congregations that are minefields of grievances, large and small.

Why should this be so? Doesn’t our faith offer abundant inspiration for reconciliation?

One reason is that we sense (correctly) that in order to achieve reconciliation we have to give up something. Sacrifice does not come easily, and never has. In Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus speaks about his coming death, Peter’s immediate response is to “rebuke” the very man he had just named as the Christ (8:29-32). Jesus swiftly confronts Peter with the source of his error: “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things….For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (33b, 35).

What is it we stand to lose when we seek to be reconcilers?

Our own pride, certainly. Letting go of that can be obstacle enough. But typically the problem goes deeper. We see ourselves as having to choose whether to hold on to something we profoundly believe to be true — and therefore having to exclude the other — or to embrace the other but give up on the truth.

A cheap way to escape from such an impasse is to hide in our own righteousness. “The Bible has been used over the centuries for nasty purposes,” Yale theologian Miroslav Volf told us in an interview last summer. “One of the ways…is an emphasis on purity: You’ve got to be pure and, therefore, everything that is impure has got to be driven out of our own midst. And various folks, fundamentalists, use the Bible in such a way.” But Volf, a Croatian whose theology was crucially formed in the context of the Serbian-Croatian violence, is also critical of what he sees as the liberal equivalent: “Fuzzy love. We try to include everything and everybody, but on our own terms. And inclusion of the other on our terms ends up being a form of exclusion of the other.”

For Volf, the central question is this: “What does it mean to keep the integrity of one’s own identity — and the integrity of one’s own boundaries, because really boundaries make us who we are — and yet practice that embrace?” He believes that our faith can help us to do exactly that. “One of the things that I find so powerful in the Christian tradition, one of the things that defined it from the very beginning, and one of the things that we very often forget, is this strange combination that you can name evil as evil, condemn evil as evil, and yet, at the same time, love the evildoer. And not just love as a fuzzy feeling, but actually be beneficent toward them. Actually do the work of trying to respectfully transform the evildoer from evildoer to a person who is generous to others.”

Whether we characterize our opponents as “evil” or simply “wrong,” the barriers to inclusion are high. The apostle Paul had his hands full trying to keep an assortment of nascent churches from splintering, allowing for differences without abandoning a truth he was willing to (and later would) die for. His faith gave him both the inspiration and the means. In chapter 12 of his Letter to the Romans he offers guidelines for living in community.

Echoing Jesus’ admonition to Peter, he roots his advice in a call for a transformation. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2).

If reconciliation is transformative — and can only be achieved by those who have been transformed — we must begin our work by looking not outward but within. Even (or perhaps especially) when we know we’re right, our first action should not be to rail to the Vestry about the wrong-headedness of those we disagree with. Instead we must do a kind of inner cleansing to discern whether we are setting our minds on “divine things” or “human things.”

This very shift from self- and worldly absorption to a self that is absorbed in God is reconciling in itself. Religious philosopher John Hick has described it as the thing that comes closest to a spirituality that all of the world’s religions can agree on.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, a veteran of the Civil Rights struggle and now a professor of religion, can attest to this insight. Raised a Southern Baptist, as an adult she adopted the practice of Sufism, the mystical stream of Islam. She found that one of the major obstacles in her spiritual journey was the anger she had internalized from her own experience of oppression.

In an interview at the University of Florida, where she teaches Islam, she told us, “I remember specifically [my teacher] Bawa telling me that I had to deal with this. I got angry at him, and I said to him, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be black in America. You’re not from here. You don’t know.’”

That exchange took place in 1971, and over the years she has come to embrace the importance of this inner work, which she views as an ongoing process. “The getting rid of [the anger] is good for you,” she told us. “And hopefully it also helps to create more space for this reconciliation to take place.”

The inner work is difficult, but the reward is freedom. “The real challenge is not to be run by the harm that someone is doing you,” says Roman Catholic theologian James Alison. Following the lead of scholar René Girard, whom he describes as “my guru,” Alison pursues an understanding of the Christian faith that mitigates our human tendency to see other people as the problem and to create peace (temporarily) through exclusion.

“As far as I can tell, the whole of The Sermon on the Mount is predicated on this principle,” Alison told us when he stopped in New York last summer on his way to his native England. “You want to be free? Don’t allow yourself to be run by the evil they do to you.”

As an openly gay Catholic priest, Alison has ample opportunity to practice what he preaches by articulating his own views of the truth but creating space for other opinions. “The one thing which I can make at least some effort to do is to say, ‘Okay, well if I’m wrong, how would I hope that someone would treat me?’” he told us. “I would hope that they would try to make me not lose face. I would hope that they would try not to provoke me and make me look silly. I would hope that they would be, as it were, reaching out for me and giving me a soft landing. And if that’s what I hope that they would do to me in the case that I’m wrong, then that is certainly what I must do for them.”

Asked about his experience in the middle of this contentious issue, Alison offered a simple observation that goes to the heart of church life: “The Christianity is not in the being right or wrong. The Christianity is in the helping each other out of the hole.” At their best, local congregations are where many have turned to find help out of sickness, grief, despair, and the myriad other holes into which we humans are prone to fall. In these deeply divided times, can they also be centers of reconciliation?

“I think the most important challenge is for the congregation itself to be an example,” Volf told us. “That goes all the way from very simple acts of nurturing people who in their own private and family lives are reconcilers, to designing various programs tailored to particular situations in which reconciliation can happen, to attending to the way the liturgy is structured, as a reconciling act.”

The challenge, finally, is one every congregation takes on by naming itself as a Christian community — transformation. To prompt the change of heart that enables us to set our minds on things divine, and that brings the kingdom of God that much closer.

Robert Owens Scott is the director of Trinity Institute. The Rev. W. Mark Richardson, Ph.D. is professor of systematic theology at The GeneralTheological Seminary of the Episcopal Church and Senior Theological Fellow at Trinity. They are collaborating on the Institute's upcoming conference “The Anatomy of Reconciliation.”