Jim Wallis’ sense of the locus of that adventure being in the church has been built out from an initial sense of outrage at racism and the injustices perpretated by the US in Vietnam. The church experience he initially received was that of accomodation to all that injustice, whch drove him away. HIs experiences of reading the gospel again with new eyes came through such people as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King. He came back to the church, and Sojourners has emerged from the call to let some OTHER stories be told, and then to help those who wanted to do something about that express this in terms of church and misison (Inward and Outward).

This has had a HUGE impact upon a nation of people who have hirtherto dismissed the church as irrelevant and unsympathetic. To be sure, MORE needs to be done, and more churches need to recognize the boundaries between church and “the world”, not only so that as Hauerwas says: “The world can know that it is the world”, but so people in the church can learn what is the world, so they can go about being the church. Indeed, James KA Smith, an outspoken critic of Wallis, even acknowledges how Wallis “woke him out of his social slumber”, but now it seems that Smith is all too happy to announce how he has advanced beyond and above that, and franlkly, it comes across as too judgemental to proclaim that Wallis , ” whatever [his] earlier stance might have been, he’s really just ended up as a humanist. ” (from here). Such attitudes disturb me coming from obviously intelligent folks, deeply committed to the church as Smith is, and who also attributes much of their own “awakening” to the “social issues” and how they are relevant to the church to the activity and writing of Wallis. I don’t understand why it seems to difficult for him to see such “awakening” and “bringing to light” as a calling and a role of value to the church in America. What makes that even stronger for me is that Sojourners and Call to Renewal have always been closely aligned and supported by ecclesia, and constantly erncourage its supporters to find a communal home in some local expression of church; in a people “called out” and called to discern together where they will join God’s activity.

I almost think that this statement in Resident Aliens speaks to RO as well:

As we have said often, the fundamental challenge before us is ecclesial. Clever new theologies may keep seminary professors from being bored, but they will also distract them from their central mission as seminary professors and they will certainly not renew the church. The roller coaster of clever new theologies has subjected clergy to one fad after another and has misled pastors into thinking that their problem was intellectual rather than ecclesial

Resident Aliens (ebook) p.203

(even though RO claims to be centered on church, it becomes “intellectual” when so much of their criticism of “activists” seems highly “specialized”; which doesn’t make it wrong or untruthful or even prove them wrong, but it takes a certain level of education and then, within that, a certain “strain” or brand of education, and a certain schoolng in liturgical traditons, to even occur to the majority of folks in the church. And it seems that sometimes the RO proponents blind-side the ones they accuse of stepping over the line. For me, with two Seminary degrees, these options really hadn’t been explored in two very fine theological programs. For the RO folks to expect the Wallis’s and the “peace and justice” people within Christendom to joyfully abandon their language and emphases as mistaken and misguided and ignorant of how far they had fallen into “statecraft” is not something that most would take too very kindly when confronted so matter-of-factly as some RO theologians seem inclined to do (even Hauerwas is often guilty of this, I think)

Enactment is truly the final test. This is why the most valuable theology I have ever read is that which is witnessed to by The Church of the Saviour. It is out of their life together and the sheer faitfuleness and amazing impact they have with such “small numbers” (this is the observation about them from a world of people who have been trained to see the largest churches as the most effective and “successful”) that their theology gains currency, and makes me seek out the ways and means of formation they have followed. Their modus operandi of assuming that God has gifts to bestow upon the people, and that God calls them to mission, and that mission derives from and arises out of life together; from a people devoted toone another in love. And not just this “nice” “how are ya’?” and “nice to see you” we get Sunday after Sunday (although there’s not neccessarily anything wrong with uttering those words, of course). But as Bonhoefer bemoaned the “thousand fold hullo” that is somehow seen as a substitute for discipleship and the demands of life together, it is not the extent of the kind of friendship we are called to embody. We are to act and live as if we truly belive that God has something very adventurous and demanding and something which will shake us to our very depths. It is with such a people, who show by their very structures of being church that there is something powerful and holy about what God is doing amongst us, and into which we are called to particpate on that Journey Inward, and Journey Outward.

I end with this further quote from the idea quoted above in Resident Aliens:

The biggest problem facing Christian theology is not translation but enactment. No doubt, one of the major reasons for the great modern theologians who strove to translate our language for modernity was that the church had become so inept at enactment. Yet no clever theological moves can be substituted for the necessity of the church being a community of people who embody our language about God, where talk about God is used without apology because our life together does not mock our words. The church is the visible, political enactment of our language of God by a people who can name their sin and accept God’s forgiveness and are thereby enabled to speak the truth in love. Our Sunday worship has a way of reminding us, in the most explicit and ecclesial of ways, of the source of our power, the peculiar nature of our solutions to what ails the world.

So why can’t we look at “enactment” as indicative of healthy theololgy? For without it, what is it worth? What is its value? As intellectual exercises?

I also recognize that I am not , in and of myself, a “unit” capable of a sustaining faithfulness apart from the church. Without such a church in which to be “called out”, I feel a bit trapped; trapped in my own “routines” of work-get home-back to work, no church on Sunday, and then back again. While we have visited numerous churches, I seem unable or unwilling to get past the absence of an independent and confessing church, able to sdtand apart from the world and from “America” as that world, and the absence of a serious stab at discipleship and the community neccessary for it. The absence of such an intentional structure of radical discipleship, and the absence of much of anything in the way of seeking what God is calling us to do other than live lives free of anxiety and being nice and well-adjusted (harken back to some of my Hauerwas reading of late and Pastor John’s “Rants” on “therapeutic” notions in our culture).

While there are a couple of churches I know of that are critical and independent of “America” as the guiding principle, they lack in the formative and life together skills I believe absolutely essentiaL to truly offering viable realities of faithful living. As the RO camp has already recognized, activity without a grounding in the apparatus that God has ordained for us to accomplish great things and be faithful , the church, is something other than faithfulness. How am I to “accept” such a state of affairs? Sometimes , and often, I try once again, to go and “be there” and see what might transpire. That usually leads me to long reactions of disappointment that make me wonder whehter there is omething wrong with me, or if I am to expect this lack of interest in a notion of a community of the committed.