This from Ray McGovern, via inward/outward, on the resignation of so many to say “what can we do?”. McGovern expresses and exasperation with what has become seemingly a habit of those who call themselves “Progressive”.
Ray McGovern | The Courage to Face the Consequences
The Courage to Face the Consequences
By Ray McGovern

I had the privilege of sharing speaking duties with her on several panels arranged by progressives in California. It was painful. Faiza would pour out her heart, only to be met with expressions of sympathy – and impotence. After three successive days of this, she found a way to express her outrage without wearing out her welcome. We were in Santa Cruz, speaking to a standing-room-only audience. After Faiza’s account of the horrors being experienced by her people elicited the all-too-familiar, hand-wringing moans of “what can we do,” she lost it.

Faiza could see it. We are, for the most part, blissfully (perhaps studiously?) unaware of our own power – the power we still enjoy as Americans, even as the claws of fascism creep steadily closer.

Good stuff on feelings of powerlessness; I would add to this (and McGovern knows this well, since he comes from an ecclesial tradition (Church of the Saviour) that is strongly ecclesial; radical in its emphasis on the “set apart” character of the church; and its existence as an alternative that witnesses to an alternate reality; that of of the Kingdom of God as procalimed by Jesus. But they are a church (or now, in insititutional terms, a “church tradition”, now that what was once one church body (from 1947-76) called “The Church of the Saviour” is now a community of churches that identify themselves as “in the Church of the Saviour tradition”. They exist alongside traditions such as “Reformed” “Roman Catholic” “Lutheran” etc., but they remain small in number because of the assumpti ons they make about the nature of the church, and membership in the church. This emphasis upon the radical nature not only of the gospel they preach, but also the kind of community to which they strive, is what makes them for me a model of what it means to consider the church as a people set apart.

McGovern wrote this article for a Progressive website, TruthOut,  and spoke of the “power we still enjoy as Americans”.  After what I said about the ecclesial tradition from which he comes (“Church of the Saviour”) ,  I get a little uneasy about the phrase “power as Americans”.  This is not the power from which  McGovern draws,  and we are forthwith presented with the issue of how to speak as a people called apart to witness to the world as to the source of our hope.  It is hard to be a critic of McGovern here because I know of The Servant Leadership School which McGovern co-directed for several years (a ministry of the Church of the Saviour which provides a “Seminary of the People” ).  So I know the inaccuracy and unjust judgment that could be rendered by those who might find probelmatic his language here.  It’s one thing to “get the language straight”,  and another to actually participate in a church that aims to help each other resist the addictions to culture,  and to be involved in missions to that end,  all the while holding to several spiritual disciplines,  even at the point of money,  that have cuased many outsiders to describe such expectations as being those of a “monastic community” rather than a church per se.  Such an assesment seems to me to call into question the very character to which the church is called,  which is to be a light and a witness to the kingdom.

Such are matters that prevent me from making such surface judgments on “Progressives”  (or those who “sound like” those called Progressives).  If the actual LIFE of a community of Christians is about discerning what God is doing and at which place God is calling us out to be a light,  then the issue of wherher or not it is appropriate theologically to appeal to “power we enjoy as Americans” seems to me to be a distant second to actual faitfulness to that call.  It’ snot even that people “In the tradition of the Church of the Saviour” are not themselves apt to speak unapologetically in the language of Christian confession. They do.  Someone observed to me,  after reading an interview with Gordon Cosby about COS,  that they “sound pretty conservative”,  no doubt noticing how freely they speak in confessional language,  and assess the world in terms of the strugle between good and evil,  and speak of God’s activity in the world via the kingdom Jesus preached and the fact that Jesus died rather than challenge the world in the world’s terms.  But such an assesment –that this constitutes “being conservative” is a false ID.  It is a COMPETING, confrontive alternative to all of the  world’s categories.