Ok, that’s about enough of the posts on “political things”. I’m trying to limit my intake of numerous samplings in the news of “things which make me shake my head”). I determined back in November that I was going to change my focus, and I do believe I have siginificantly “reversed the flow”, so that now most of my “political” dissents or comments are the result of a theological concern finding examples of how those are “worked against” by the political structures we have so negligently built. It’s not that I think I can “separate myself” from the disgust that I feel over the all-tto-obvious “lacking” of true public welfare concerns in the Bush adminkistration (and in fact, their activity betraying their ultimate alleginaces that are very much to the contrary); the contrast in that kind of whitewashing of policies designed to benefit the largest contributors and their own elite interests is glaring when set beside that of the Kingdom (which results in no naive optiminsm about “alternatives” in this political system of ours, where “the other side” is also deeply entrenched in the system). I guess what fills me with such recoil is the participation of the church in America in this theological distortion which marries “American Values” with “Christian Nation” and outputs a “Gospel” which is NOT the “good news” Jesus had in mind. And on top of that, the glaring , unabashed enthusiasm with which my old denomination, the Southern Baptists, in this heretical mix.

The post on the Bonhoefer biography I made earlier highlights a lingering concern of mine: “what to do?” The answer lies in what for Bonhoeffer, was surely and clearly an ecclesiological one; balanced against what seemed to be in Bonhoefer a similar experience of a reticence to “abandon the world to the chaos”. But what do we offer as an “alternative”? I think of two things from my own journey, my own Youth Group, and The Church of the Saviour (the latter as a concrete example of a people working out a “Life Together” that assumes that no real participation in the needed responses are forthcoming from government powers, and simply proceeds to build a structure to address that need.)

Build it they did. I have begun to describe a few of those things in my posts about that church, drawing upon Servant Leaders, Servant Structures Supporting this extraordinary amassing of forces to build safety nets from the bottom up is the sense of ecclesiology that they have had from their beginnings in 1947.