In the chapter on “recapturing” the “first love” zeal in The God of Intimacy and Action, I am inclined to disagree with Tony Campolo again. When he talks about having the “urges” and uncontrollable desire to “tell the gospel story”, and includes an account of how a former drug addict calls it a “high without the drugs”, the “gospel story” is in danger of becoming confused with individual ecstasy and individualism.
For me, 99.9% of the “witness” is all US and not “me”. The only “me” comes in where our personal transformation is told as an experience of the “new life” in community. Not a “new life” for my personality, but a changed way of living. The “witness” is the “city on a hill”; the alternate polis. It’s not “excited individuals” but “vibrant life” of the community. Tony’s friend asking him “Why didn’t you tell me, Tony?” brings out this problem. To make it a matter of “similar ecstasies” tends to emphasize the “inner individual” over the experience of an “ecstasy experience of community”. Our witness is US and not ME. We can only with great difficulty “witness” without a “come and see “invitation”. Tony’s friend would have undoubtedly “seen” something of the life Tony was failing to articulate in his conversation if he had been urged to “come and see” The Church of the Saviour names their events for visitor/pilgrims “Come and See”, where they attempt to explain (and , necessarily, “show”) what they’re about.
My sense about “invitations” is that any “successful” invitation is an invite into a living breathing community, and stopping anywhere short of this is an almost sure failure; a mere “emotional outburst”.
I’m becoming much less “Baptist” and much more “Catholic” in this regard, and have much more affinity with the “outside the church there is no salvation” than what came from my baptist roots. But somehow, Gordon Cosby (founding pastor of The Church of the Saviour) came out a Baptist heritage with such a strong sense of ecclesia. For him, it was also the experience of a body devoting itself to the calling of God to reflect an alternative reality (actually, the only reality, but alternative to that of the world) that moves the source of “salvation” from “persuasion to make a decision” to “commitment to a body of Christ”.
(I get the feeling that had I not been under some time pressure to make a selection at Borders — I had a 40% off coupon — I would have selected something else after reading more closely in the first couple of chapters. These chapters alone would have persuade me to look for another title –which I now realize I could have used to get my own hardback copy of “A People’s History of the United States”— since there isn’t anything new that I know of from Hauerwas or David Fitch or the like. Maybe if there’s another 30% or 40% deal within a month, I can return this and get something else)
