The Mission of Wholeness
W. Carl Ketcherside
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Perhaps our brethren who have grown up in the restoration movement have had a mistaken view of mission which has operated to keep them from effective encounter with the world. In an attempt to avoid being of the world, they have sometimes actually not been in it. On at least two occasions in the past, colonies of the disciples have withdrawn to remote mountain areas to live a sort of communal life in simplicity, free from contact with worldly enticements. Both of these projects failed because of a gentle revolution of their children, or grandchildren, who deserted the colonies to return to society.
In the twentieth century the attempt to preserve a monastic type of existence has relied upon the more subtle restraints and pressures of factional loyalty. This has been rather successful in the past. In some communities there have been as many as ten different kinds of "Churches of Christ." The members of one group have no acquaintance with those of any other. There is no sense of family relationship across the lines. Each one regards all of the others as either "sectarian" or "extremist." A sectarian is one who endorses what the group opposes; an extremist is one who opposes what the group endorses.
Group activities are attended only by those affiliated with congregations allied with the sponsoring faction. For example, a song rally will bring together only "the loyal brethren," a term used to describe those, in each instance, who adhere to the partisan tests of fellowship. If there are ten divergent groups in a city there will be ten different kinds of "loyal brethren," none of whom will have anything to do with any of the others. The young people of one segment are discouraged from dating those in another. When love triumphs over party pressures and two young people from different factions marry, one or both (depending upon where they attend) will be given up as "lost to the cause."
In this kind of rigid sectarian framework, it is obvious that there will be no cultivation of acquaintanceship outside the "Church of Christ," for there is no recognition of fellowship even within its own parties. It has completely abandoned its original historic purpose as "a project to unite the Christians in all of the sects." There are now no Christians in the sects. There are only sectarians in the sects, and "brothers in error" in the other parties. The Christians are those who agree with us, for we have no error and our interpretations are infallible. It does not bother us that there are two dozens of our factions which are infallible and also inveterately different from each other.
Within our monastery walls we are insulated from the world--even the religious world, the theological world. We mill about talking to one another. We listen only to "faithful brethren." We bask in
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There is only one thing that presents a problem. God has a way of breaking through barriers and breaking down walls. He even broke through the flesh barrier in the incarnation, and battered down the fearsome racial wall between Jew and Greek. He does this when a "fulness of the times" arrives. There are a great many factors which contribute to the filling until a fulness is achieved. There are a lot of indications that "the Church of Christ" and the rest of the religious world, may be approaching such an era.
No simple explanation can be offered as to why we are going to be forced out of our shells and driven into the world where we ought to have been all of the time. God calls in multitudinous ways, and when He calls us out and we will not go, He sometimes pushes us out. He can even use evils to accomplish His purpose. War is an evil (although not necessarily a sin), but it has gathered young men from factional nests and flung them out into the world where their very homesickness for the manifested Christ has driven them into contact with those of other parties. Often they have discovered a depth of spiritual devotion which they never experienced in those with whom they have always associated. The term "loyal" takes on new meaning when one becomes aware that "the disloyal" are much closer to the cross than he has been. With such an awareness he can never again be satisfied with the old provincial alignments.
The major reason why we are bursting our factional bonds is because the factions are in a wholly different world than the one in which they were spawned. The members are breathing a different atmosphere. Our pressurized cabins are collapsing. The fresh winds are creeping through the crevices and seeping through the cracks. Our young people are becoming educated. They are being trained to think and to question. They are doing both, and the result is revolution, in the best sense of that term. The partisan answers no longer fit the pertinent questions. As always, the defenders of the status quo resent the questions. The partisan spirit thrives best when all of the dissenters swallow and none of them speak. The "faithful" should always gulp, but they should never gasp or gag!
But it will do us good for the future if we listen to the voices of some who are being designated "the new breed" of saints, and learn what things in our unwritten creeds and unwholesome attitudes they can no longer condone. We have been with some of them on university campuses, in fraternity "bull sessions," and in dialogues of depth. We cannot speak for them. No single person can do that. We can suggest a few things which we have learned and we do so with some reluctance, for we have no particular urge to join the critics.
1. There is a revolt against the tendency to make God a kind of partisan ruler who is always on "our side" in every theological engagement. This is, in essence, a reversion to the age of tribal deities, and makes God too small. When we whittle God down to our sectarian size we end up actually worshipping ourselves. The voice of the party becomes the voice of God. There is ever a tendency to think of God as a "Church of Christ God," a "Christian Church God," or a "Baptist Church God." In such thinking God is made to like what we like, and also to hate those whom we hate. To "worship God" is to perform, our distinctive ritual and to search His revelation to find confirmation for it.
2. There is an uneasiness over the tendency to compartmentalize men and to fragment personality. Worship is reserved for certain times and performed in cer-
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The perceptive saints believe that every thought, intent, and act of the man in Christ, rendered in reverence for this divine-human relationship is worship. They know that the expression "the worship" is not found in the sacred scriptures. They are recapturing the meaning of salvation which is to make whole, and they know that it relates to the unshattered personality, and has to do with the physical, mental, moral and spiritual aspects of human nature. A group which regularly gathers to employ mass psychology in only one of these aspects, and which equates divine election with remaining in good graces with the group, can never truly represent the Christ to modern man. Jesus was worshipping as surely when He ate with publicans and sinners, relieved the embarrassment of a host by supplying wine, and fed a bedraggled mob, as when he read from Isaiah in the local synagogue. Jesus did not turn "worship" on and off like a faucet.
3. There is a growing resentment over the tendency to reduce men, who are made in the image of God, to partisan statistics, whose value to "The Establishment" lies principally in the "nose count" for the attendance figure in the weekly bulletin. In such situations men become pawns for clerical power plays and are digits in the climb to the "successful ministry." The important thing is not that men count, but that they be counted. The growth of the "kingdom of heaven" is determined by the number of persons inside of religious structures at a specific hour on a given day, so that it is not so much a matter of what is within us, but of what we are within. Under these circumstances the kingdom does come with observation!
At the risk of being misunderstood, we must point out that there is a seething revolt against what is often referred to as "phony charity." This is the kind of calculating concern which weighs human need and distress against partisan gain. The real consideration is not the desperate plight of the individual, but whether, if we help him materially, in his dark hour, we can motivate him to become a member of the clan. The philosophy is that we can only go "all out" for a family if there is a real chance of getting them "all in." Real compassion, which always relieves need for mercy's sake, and never counts either the cost or gain, is dubbed "the social gospel" and dismissed as an invention of Satan operating through "liberals."
Not too long ago we attended a great lectureship on the campus of a Christian college. A panel session on the theme, "Modern Day Liberalism," drew a capacity crowd to a spacious auditorium. One of the speakers was assigned the theme, "The Social Gospel." It was evident from the outset that he had no conception of it within the scope of current theology. He began by defining what it is not, and pointed out that it was not installing a kitchen in the basement, or putting a drinking fountain in the foyer, of the congregational meetinghouse. After this profound observation he proceeded to tell of what the social gospel consisted, and left the astute listener convinced that Jesus practiced what the speaker deplored.
In the question period he was asked about the infiltration of the inner city ghetto to clothe the naked, feed the starving, furnish medicine for the sick, and minister to the depressed. His answer demonstrated that the church could engage in such a work only as a direct means of lining the unfortunate up with "the Lord's church." Thus, feeding the
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Such a crass approach to human demoralization and disintegration under the guise of "giving the church the glory" is creating a reaction in the minds of many against the institutional church, which always covertly asks, "What do we get out of it?" The subtle art of talking out of both sides of the mouth about such questions as racial integration, birth control, and other problems (or, of not talking at all), tends to drive away the sensitive thinkers who conclude that once again the publicans and sinners may go into the real kingdom ahead of the scribes and Pharisees, who are "rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing."
Our brethren, I think, conclude that when they oppose the "social gospel," the world will automatically conclude that they have the gospel of Christ in its purity. Unfortunately, however, the world does not make this semantic switch or deduction. With them the alternative to the social gospel is an "anti-social gospel." But the gospel of our blessed Lord is not anti-social. The Great Physician is no less a healer, a psychologist, and a moral counsellor, than a spiritual rescuer. When He ransomed man He delivered the whole man.
As His body upon earth, we must be concerned with every aspect of life. Certainly Jesus was concerned with those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, but He was also concerned about those with empty bellies and flagging energies who would "faint by the way." We find ourselves always embroiled in the argument about "priority ratings." "But which is more important," we ask, "the body or the spirit?" We always assume there can be no dispute.
Jesus had a way of avoiding traps set by lawyers. When confronted with the alternative of keeping the sabbath inviolate (spiritual), or of healing an unfortunate cripple (physical). He did not say that either the spiritual or physical had the preferred rating, but man did! And whatever the man needed most at the time was what should be supplied.
A man who has been stabbed with a switchblade knife, and who lies bleeding on the street, does not need to be handed a tract on "Why I Left the Nazarene Church." He needs to be rushed to a hospital. And if you go on passing out tracts, while a "lowly Nazarene" picks him up and takes him to the hospital, disregarding the gore that stains the upholstery of his new Ford, you might have been better off if you hadn't left!
The point of all that we're saying is simply that man cannot be drawn and quartered by those who are in the Way. A "social gospel" which deals only with environmental factors and ignores the fact that man is a sinner in need of amazing grace, is as inadequate as a gospel which seeks to relieve man's total need by getting him into a religious meetinghouse three times per week. We are being challenged in our day to realize that laws and forms and structures, are secondary in importance to man. Man was not made for these, but vice versa. God still wants mercy and not sacrifice. Sacrifice in its totality can never become mercy, but mercy can give validity to sac-
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We can continue to close our ears to the voices of revolution and sit out the whirlwind in our ecclesiastical storm-cellars, but when we do emerge we may find a world so strange that we dare not go into it and cannot fulfill our mission. Or, we can with a courage born of faith in Him, penetrate our world now and seek assurance of His presence and promise, "Lo, I am with you always." For me there is no real alternative to the latter!