Community Engagement after Christendom

By Douglas G. Hynd

The post-Christendom era in the English-speaking world has seen a significant reduction in access to political power by the churches, a slow loss of their social and cultural influence, and a shredding of their moral standing from abuse scandals and other public failings. Community Engagement after Christendom directly addresses these challenges, proposing a different approach to the relationship between church and society. 
 
Church agencies today are often entangled in contracting with the state and its private partners to deliver government policy and services. This means they can be increasingly vulnerable to external pressure. So what resources can they and their agencies draw upon to reshape community engagement in a difficult, unsettling context?
 
Community Engagement after Christendom proposes a multifaceted approach. It begins by reading Scripture afresh through questions shaped by the present situation. Douglas Hynd then explores the story of Anabaptist public servant Pilgram Marpeck, identifying how his critique of Christendom can help reshape our understanding today. Finally, he looks at the current experience of church-related agencies and Christian advocacy, suggesting fresh, imaginative ways forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781725257399

Book preview

Community Engagement after Christendom

Douglas G. Hynd

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AFTER CHRISTENDOM

After Christendom Series

Copyright ©

2022

Douglas G. Hynd. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Cascade Books

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paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-5737-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-5738-2

ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-5739-9

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Hynd, Douglas G., author.

Title: Community engagement after Christendom / Douglas G. Hynd.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

2022

| Series: After Christendom | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-7252-5737-5 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-7252-5738-2 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-7252-5739-9 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Church and the world. | Christianity and culture. | Missions—History—

21

st century.

Classification:

BR481 .H37 2022 (

print

) | BR481 (

ebook

)

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright ©

1989

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Prologue: A Perfect Storm

Part I: Reading Scripture Again

Chapter 1: Implicated in the Exercise of Power, While No Longer In Control

Chapter 2: Stories Read Otherwise

Chapter 3: Teaching and Performing a Different Kingdom

Chapter 4: Exile: Community Engagement in a Shifting Location

Part II: Anticipating Community Engagement after Christendom

Chapter 5: Pilgram Marpeck: A Biographical Approach to Community Engagement

Chapter 6: Theologically Anticipating Post-Christendom

Chapter 7: Community Engagement after Marpeck

Part III: Community Engagement on the Way Out of Christendom

Chapter 8: The Risks of Contracting

Chapter 9: Advocacy: Challenging Government while Exiting Christendom

Chapter 10: Practicing Hospitality Toward Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Chapter 11: Presence on the Margins

Epilogue: Lingering with the Beatitudes

Bibliography

After Christendom Series

Christendom was a historical era, a geographical region, a political arrangement, a sacral culture, and an ideology. For many centuries Europeans have lived in a society that was nominally Christian. Church and state have been the pillars of a remarkable civilization that can be traced back to the decision of the Emperor Constantine I early in the fourth century to replace paganism with Christianity as the imperial religion.

Christendom, a brilliant but brutal culture, flourished in the Middle Ages, fragmented in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, but persisted despite the onslaught of modernity. While exporting its values and practices to other parts of the world, however, it has been slowly declining during the past three centuries. In the twenty-first century Christendom is unravelling.

What will emerge from the demise of Christendom is not yet clear, but we can now describe much of Western culture as post-Christendom. Post-Christendom is the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence.

This definition, proposed and unpacked in Post-Christendom, the first book in the After Christendom series, has gained widespread acceptance. Post-Christendom investigated the Christendom legacy and raised numerous issues that are explored in the rest of the series. The authors of this series, who write from within the Anabaptist tradition, see the current challenges facing the church not as the loss of a golden age but as opportunities to recover a more biblical and more Christian way of being God’s people in God’s world.

The series addresses a wide range of issues, including theology, social and political engagement, how we read Scripture, youth work, mission, worship, relationships, and the shape and ethos of the church after Christendom.

Eleven books were published by Paternoster between 2004 and 2016:

Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom

Stuart Murray, Church after Christendom

Jonathan Bartley, Faith and Politics after Christendom

Jo Pimlott and Nigel Pimlott, Youth Work after Christendom

Alan Kreider and Eleanor Kreider, Worship and Mission after Christendom

Lloyd Pietersen, Reading the Bible after Christendom

Andrew Francis, Hospitality and Community after Christendom

Fran Porter, Women and Men after Christendom

Simon Perry, Atheism after Christendom

Brian Haymes and Kyle Gingerich Hiebert, God after Christendom?

Jeremy Thomson, Relationships and Emotions after Christendom

Two of these (Worship and Mission after Christendom and Reading the Bible after Christendom) were also published by Herald Press.

The series is now in the hands of Cascade Books, which is republishing some of the existing titles, including Post-Christendom, and commissioning further titles, including:

Joshua Searle, Theology after Christendom

Andy Hardy and Dan Yarnell, Missional Discipleship after Christendom

John Heathershaw, Security after Christendom

Jeremy Thomson, Interpreting the Old Testament after Christendom

These books are not intended to be the last word on the subjects they address, but an invitation to discussion and further exploration. Additional material, including extracts from published books and information about future volumes, can be found at www.anabaptistnetwork.com/AfterChristendom.

Series Editor, Stuart Murray

DEDICATION

To Love Makes a Way as a nonviolent, prayerful uprising against injustice

The fact that the Bible is still read in our churches makes it at least possible for them to be places where we, who are members of the dominant culture, can find the courage to face our illusions of noble innocence . . . places where the Dream can be unmasked, and the vision reclaimed.

¹

—Ched Myers

[T]he church is called to embody the integration of justice and love (agape) in ever-expanding networks of relationship across national and cultural traditions, caring for those in need whether they are inside or outside the Christian tradition. This understanding of the church maintains a healthy separation from the state, yet goes to the heart of public sociality by giving attention especially to the most vulnerable.

²

—Mark Brett

1

. Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone?, xxi.

2

. Brett, Political Trauma and Healing,

5

.

Preface

My interest in the issues that I explore in this book goes back decades. I was involved in editorial and research work with what was then the Zadok Institute in Canberra on the changing place of Christian churches in Australian society in the 1980 s. I subsequently taught as a sessional lecturer in a variety of courses on church and society at St Mark’s Theological Institute in Canberra. At this stage the breakdown of the previous privileged, though unestablished, relationship between the Christian churches with government was under way, though the full implications were not yet clear. My encounter with Stuart Murray-Williams’s Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World, with its Anabaptist perspective, helped me to grasp the significance of what was happening and raised fresh questions about the future of community engagement by the Christian churches.

I also worked for several decades in the Australian Public Service (APS) on issues related to social and indigenous policy, and public sector accountability. While witnessing the policy shift to contracting in Australia in the late 1990s, I began to wonder about the impact on church welfare agencies in the longer term. Would theological and mission commitments be eroded by neoliberal policy, and its accompanying bureaucratic processes? Would agencies be prevented from advocating for the marginal, and the poor? In 2011 after leaving the public service I undertook interview-driven research shaped by these questions. It was a good time to do so. Many church-related agencies and their sponsoring denominations were beginning to critically reflect on questions of identity, and mission under the pressure of contracting. It was clear that they could no longer rely on their previously privileged relationship to government. That research provided the basis for the case studies in Part III.

So much by way of background. I wrote this book against the background of a rolling series of ecological, health, and economic crises. Barely had Australia recovered from an extended period of bushfires and floods, the one usually follows the other in short order, than we were hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the middle of supporting communities in crisis arising from the fire and floods, churches and church-related agencies were faced with the task of reinventing themselves as communities of worship and service, while working out how to operate under lockdown. In the background was the longer-term challenge of post-Christendom manifested for the churches in declining political power and reduced moral influence, amplified by the fallout from sexual abuse scandals and cover-ups.

How will the churches respond to this multilayered crisis? Will they hunker down, tighten up on theological creeds, patrol ecclesial boundaries more rigorously, reach for large doses of nostalgia, and devote substantial resources to the attempt to recreate Christendom? Or will they respond to the perfect storm in which they find themselves as a kairos moment, an occasion for conversion and transformation, a moment of grace in which they reimagine community engagement as a compassionate presence with those on the margins?

I have written this book to encourage and assist churches, church-related agencies, and community movements for justice to take the path of transformation rather than retrenchment. In pursuing that goal, I have sought to make the theological arguments in the book accessible to those living out their discipleship, not in the academy, but in the tense spaces between church, community, and government.

Acknowledgments

While I may have my name as the sole author on the title page, this has not been a solitary enterprise. Friends, and the networks that they are part of, have been critical in shaping the discussion at varying points.

The idea for this book came out of conversations with my friend Phil Fountain, who suggested that I should look sideways at some of the research I had undertaken on the relationship between church-related agencies and government. Could the material be presented in more interesting and relevant ways than would be the case in an academic publication? That was at the heart of the conversation as I remember it. It proved a fruitful question. I also want to thank Phil for encouragement as the book took shape, and for a friendship that has included vigorous discussions on theological issues over the years. I also want to thank Simon Barrow for encouragement, good advice about the structure and contents of the book, as well as for continuing friendship.

I am greatly indebted to Stuart Murray-Williams for looking at a draft of the proposal for this book, gathering comments from the Anabaptist Network in the UK, and recommending it to Cascade Books for inclusion in the After Christendom series. I want to thank Stuart too for the opportunity to share some of the key themes with a meeting of the Anabaptist Theology Forum in the UK, via Zoom, of course. Thanks too to Jeremy Thomson from the forum, who generously made his manuscript on Interpreting the Old Testament after Christendom available to me.

In an ecumenical spirit, the Australian Catholic University Higher Degree Research Seminar in Canberra gave me the opportunity to present a paper on the context and contents of the book. The members of the forum, from a wide variety of backgrounds both Christian and non-Christian, engaged in an encouraging way with questions about my proposals for reading Scripture again. Thanks go to James Cox and Richard Donnelly for friendship, for reading early drafts of some chapters, and for commenting helpfully on them.

I have been talking about Pilgram Marpeck at every opportunity that came my way over the past two decades. The material on Marpeck in chapters 5 and 6 substantially draws on my paper A life of conscientious dissent, published by Ethos, EA Centre for Christianity and Society, Zadok Papers, S194 Summer 2012.

The case studies in Part III are based in varying degrees on interviews I undertook with managers and board members from church-related agencies in Australia during 2013 and 2014. The interviewees generously gave me permission to publicly attribute to them quotations from the interviews. I thank them for participating reflectively and candidly in interviews that unpacked their agencies’ experience of engaging with government in contracting and advocacy in recent years. The interviews were conducted under clearance from the Australian Catholic University Human Research Ethics Committee (Approval 82N 2013). The case study of Doveton Baptist Church in chapter 11 is a rewritten and expanded version of an article originally published in the Australian Journal of Mission Studies, 13, no.1, June 2019, Church Community Engagement in a Struggle Town, 25–31. I want to thank the editor of the AJMS for his permission to use the substantially revised material in this context.

Heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Jillian, for regularly checking that I was staying focused and actually getting on with writing the book, during a strange year when distractions abounded.

Douglas Hynd

Adjunct Research Fellow

Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University Canberra

Abbreviations

AAANZ Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand

AAT Administrative Appeals Tribunal

ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation

ACT Australian Capital Territory

ACRTF Australian Churches Refugee Task Force

ACOSS Australian Council of Social Service

AD Anno Domini

ALP Australian Labor Party

APESAA Advisory Panel on Employment Services Administration and Accountability

APS Australian Public Service

BCE Before Common Era

BUV Baptist Union of Victoria

CEO Chief Executive Officer

CSC Community Service Centre

CSSA Catholic Social Services Australia

DBBS Doveton Baptist Benevolent Society

DBC Doveton Baptist Church

DETA Doveton Eumemmerring Township Association

DOGS Defence of Government Schools

GFC Global Financial Crisis

IT Information Technology

JRSA Jesuit Refugee Service Australia

JSS Jesuit Social Services

LMAW Love Makes a Way

LNP Liberal National Party

MCP Major Church Providers

NSW New South Wales

PNG Papua New Guinea

SBS Special Broadcasting Service

SHEV Safe Haven Enterprise Visa

SRSS Status Resolution Support Services

TPV Temporary Protection Visa

UCA Uniting Church of Australia

UK United Kingdom

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

US United States

Prologue: A Perfect Storm

The early church’s teaching on charity, David Bentley Hart reminds us, raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest religious obligation.

³

The duties of the bishop in the third century included taking responsibility for the education of orphans, providing aid to poor widows, and purchasing food and firewood for the destitute. Community engagement in the early church resulted in sacrificial commitment by laity as well as clergy. During the plague in North Africa in the third century Christians cared for the ill and buried the dead, frequently at the expense of their own lives, demonstrating an ethos at odds with the prevailing culture. From the other side of Christendom, Terry Eagleton picks up this theological commitment, suggesting that God is present when the hungry are filled with good things and the rich are sent away empty. Salvation does not come through religion with its apparatus of cult, law, and ritual, and compliance with a moral code. It comes rather through feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich.

⁴

Post-Christendom

With the unwinding of Christendom, churches in the United Kingdom (UK) and its settler colonies no longer have access to political power to the extent that they used to.

⁵

They are now only one among many groups involved in advocacy, making a claim to speak on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the community.

⁶

Many Christians, though, are not yet ready to face the reality of this shift. Somehow, they feel the churches’ position of privilege and entitlement was taken away while they weren’t looking. Resentment and angst about the loss of privilege, targeted at those deemed to be responsible for this outcome, are widespread in the churches.

The shift beyond Christendom is not finished yet. That’s an important reality whose consequences need to be faced, both by those who are in grief at this process, and for those who are enthusiastic about getting beyond Christendom. For those grieving, there is more grief still to come. For those enthusiastic at the prospect of reshaping the churches’ community engagement, the enthusiasm needs to be tempered by the reality of what policy analysts call path dependency. We carry our history with us, and don’t get to start with a clean slate. That’s why in addition to the terminology of after Christendom and post-Christendom, I will use phrases such as emerging from Christendom, on the way out of Christendom, and the transition from Christendom. The terminology of transition signals that while we can work toward new forms and patterns of engagement, many of the assumptions and images that we will be working with are themselves a legacy of Christendom. If we don’t recognize that we are carrying that mental baggage with us we risk subtly reinscribing new forms of Christendom, at the same time as we suppose we are exiting from that historical pattern of engagement.

We are not going to escape from the historical legacy of Christendom quickly or easily. As we have found in recent years, there always seems to be something more emerging from that entangled history that needs to be exposed to the light of the gospel. The role that the settler churches in the colonies played in the European invasion and the dispossession of the First Nations peoples in Australia still awaits a substantive reckoning. Christian churches have yet to fully acknowledge the consequences of that invasion, and the extent to which they have benefitted economically and politically from the colonial project over the past two centuries. The inheritance of the churches from the invasion in terms of land and wealth remains, even though the historical Christendom relationship is unwinding. Colonialism is an example of how the historical legacy of Christendom remains to be dealt with even though the structural underpinning of Christendom is being dismantled. I leave this paragraph as a discomforting reminder of a further important agenda awaiting our attention.

⁷

Why secularization is not quite relevant

Much of the recent debate of the Christian churches and their future has been framed in sociological terms under the heading of secularization. What is the relationship of post-Christendom to secularization, de-secularization, and the suggestion that societies are becoming post-Christian? Through much of the twentieth century advocates of secularization suggested that the Christian churches were in a state of decline under the pressures of modernity. They were confident that the churches would become increasingly irrelevant to politics and public policy. Christianity would survive as an individual consumer choice, spirituality to go. The trajectory of secularization as a sociological process turned out to be much more complicated and the outcomes equivocal. The conclusion of many sociologists is that we need to avoid reaching into our intellectual toolbox for one-directional, historically inevitable sociological processes when we come to analyzing the impact of modernity on Christian identity and mission.

There are other ways we can visualize the movement of the sacred and the secular, and how they relate to the social and political changes that are going on. The political theologian William Cavanaugh for example has used the metaphor of the migration of the sacred from the sphere of church across to the realm of the state.

⁸

The historian Eugene McCarraher has identified the continuing presence of the sacred in his narration of the continuing re-emergence of enchantment in the supposedly secular world of business in the US over the past few centuries.

⁹

The work of both Cavanaugh and McCarraher suggests that we should work with the possibility that the sacred may become secular, and the secular transmogrify into the sacred. Similarly, we should imagine institutional and social boundaries as being porous rather than a rigid channel through which the secular rushes down in full flood to sweep the sacred away.

I have also avoided the use of the terminology of post-Christian. I regard the term as problematic as a way of viewing the relationship between the church and contemporary society. This is not least the case because Christianity is still present in the unthought, those taken for granted assumptions we bring to bear in framing our ethical and political debates, shared by both Christians and non-Christians alike. The historian Tom Holland has recently documented how the Christian church and its Scriptures have shaped European culture, and how that influence has remained operative in public debate even if its presence is not always recognized, and this despite the move beyond Christendom. Secularist critiques of Christianity’s public failures, in Holland’s view, are driven by moral assumptions that when examined prove to be deeply rooted in Christianity. [I]n a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain—for good or ill—thoroughly Christian.

¹⁰

The notion that we live in a secularized world that is free of myth and the sacred either misses or misreads a good deal of what is going on.

The deconstruction of Christendom has a long history. Protestant sects in both the UK and the US, from the seventeenth century onward, had sought to undermine Christendom as expressed in the structure of establishment in the UK through their respective struggles for religious freedom. The missionary movement of the nineteenth century, in its periodically tense relationship with the colonial powers, exposed the limitations of Christendom as an exportable model. The questions that began to be raised then about the injustice and dispossession resulting from invasion, are only now receiving some serious attention by the churches in the former colonies. Western Christianity, Jason Goroncy observes, has not heeded the words of the Hebrew prophets to be a sanctuary unescorted by borders or bullets. Nor has it placed much store in the warning carried in the words ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ Instead, it has been made inebriated by quaffing from the same wells of imperialism that created the empires of Egypt, Assyria and the United States.

¹¹

The scope of the book

The past century has seen the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand, Australia, and Canada transitioning, on varied trajectories, away from the Christendom framework. Whether the United States (US) is most helpfully analyzed using the post-Christendom framework is a matter of some controversy. In some regions of the US, particularly the Midwest and the South, the perceived decline of Christian cultural and political hegemony in the nation is generating patterns of angst clearly tied in important ways to issues of racial identity among white evangelicals. White evangelical efforts to sustain their political and cultural power was manifested in the intense support this group gave to Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, though the roots of this development go back to the switch of evangelicals to support for Republicans as far back as Ronald Reagan. Many evangelicals are afraid that a deep-rooted historical settlement is breaking up and have seen Trump as the key to resisting that break-up through control over appointments to the judicial system. White evangelicals were prepared to lock in their support for Trump despite his notorious disregard for ethical norms and patterns of personal morality that had previously been issues of first-order moral concern for them.

How do we interpret these developments in the US? Does the current conflict point to a struggle to ensure the continuing survival of Christendom in the US, or does it confirm that the conflict is about a transition to post-Christendom that is already well underway? I am inclined to agree with Jason Mahn when he argues that Christians in the US are still living in a dominant culture that presumes to be Christian or where Christianity still remains the cultural norm.

¹²

In his view, the culture of the US idealizes and privileges the Christian tradition while simultaneously relativizing it, making it redundant and innocuous. Qualifying and complicating this assessment is the parallel reality that the Black prophetic church has always been in great tension with government in the US.

¹³

A postcolonial world

While I have limited my discussion of community engagement in post-Christendom in this book to the UK and its settler colonies, hopefully future discussion will be able to draw on contributions from Christians in countries such as China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Christian communities in these nations currently face pressing issues about the shape of their community engagement. Facing as they do varying degrees of government hostility, Christendom with its assumptions of a closely connected relationship of the church to the state and of Christian cultural hegemony is not going to provide them with much help either theologically or pastorally. Though the political circumstances in these nations are much more difficult than in the settler colonies that are the focus of my discussion, I hope that my suggestions for reading Scripture and my account of the Anabaptist approach to community engagement may be helpful.

The situation in Oceania, and much of Africa south of the Sahara for that matter, is quite different again. Here Christianity, while transmitted as part of the colonial project, became detached from that heritage during the drive for independence. Christianity is now inextricably intertwined with the achievement of independence, national identity, and a relatively stable political order. Across Oceania Christianity is the ground and starting point of political action. . . . Across the region Christianity and politics have redefined each other in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis.

¹⁴

Sexual abuse, institutional self-preservation, and exiting Christendom

Lament by Christians in response to the emerging reality of post-Christendom in Australia has extended along a spectrum from doom-laden invocations of the imminent arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, to a grouchy, stoic muttering of we’ll all be ruined. Then came the flood of public revelations of child sexual abuse by clergy, and of cover-ups by churches. Much of the churches’ moral standing and authority previously taken for granted despite the post-Christendom shift was suddenly and irrevocably shredded.

¹⁵

The stories of sexual abuse were shocking. What was more shocking, if that were possible, were the accounts of the lack of regard for victims displayed by church leadership, and institutional management when the abuse was reported to them. Compassion by churches for victims of abuse proved to have been in very short supply, with advice from lawyers to church leadership focusing solely on institutional survival and the management of reputational preservation. Paradoxically, attempts to manage reputational damage almost uniformly only increased that damage when news of it became public.

I can remember listening in a state of deep distress to the daily current affairs account of testimony at the Royal Commission hearings. The yawning gap between the practice and teaching of Jesus, and the behavior of church leaders in putting institutional interests ahead of the claims for justice of the victims of abuse, didn’t need to be spelled out to those outside the church. The public were quick to comment publicly and vocally on this contradiction. Churches and their leadership are now facing a loss of trust across the community for reasons that will be long remembered. The pain of betrayal by the churches during this episode has been felt not only by the victims and their families, but also by many of the church’s most deeply committed members.

Against the charge of hypocrisy arising from the wide gap between their teaching and practice, the churches have no defense. It is of no use to have church leaders pointing out that other significant community institutions, whether they be schools, police, child protection departments of state governments, the Scouts, and other organizations were also involved in egregious cover-ups, driven by motives of institutional and reputational self-preservation. That other agencies performed just as badly as the churches does not cut any ice. Churches more than ever before are being judged against the standards announced and lived out by Jesus in the Gospels.

¹⁶

The shaming circumstances under which the social status and inherited moral prestige of the Christian churches was stripped away has supercharged their difficulties in their attempt to re-envision their life and mission after Christendom. The difficulties that the churches are having with this seismic shift is evident in the public commentary of church leaders on just about any issue. Almost without exception, they manifest an undertone of defensiveness and resentment, modulated through an unacknowledged grief at the loss of power and status. If they cannot get beyond this soon, there is a real risk that they will remain stuck in a self-reinforcing spiral, leading to cultural and social isolation. A toxic mixture of nostalgia, anger, and fear driving church engagement with the community is precisely what we don’t need in a context in which the settings for economic, social, and environmental change are all being dialed up to maximum levels. That’s the situation in Australia. Nothing that I have read and heard suggests that the situation of the churches in the other English-speaking nations is radically different.

The Anglican lawyer and theologian William Stringfellow identified the demonic character of the drive for institutional self-preservation by the church with a theological clarity that is hard to evade.

¹⁷

The churches seem to have rarely engaged with the theological dynamics that he identified. On this Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something important to say to us. Writing from a prison cell in Berlin in 1943, having already surrendered his own reputation, both within and outside the church, being labeled an enemy of the state, he observed that the church in Germany under the Nazi regime had not stood up for the victims of oppression and violence.

Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So, the words we have used before must lose their power, be silenced and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking and organizing must be born anew out of that prayer and action.

¹⁸

In response to a church that had given priority to its self-preservation, ahead of concern for the vulnerable, Bonhoeffer called for a time of public silence, accompanied by prayer, and faithful action for justice. In the spirit of Bonhoeffer’s advice, I advance a modest proposal: that for the next decade Christian churches refrain from public advocacy on any policy issue directly related to their own institutional interests. This disciplined and deliberate silence should be accompanied by careful, patient listening to those who are without a voice, to those whom the church has damaged and abused. This listening should inform communal reflection by the churches on what they hear, and what it means for their life and community engagement.

This self-denying ordinance is not meant to apply to the church’s participation in public debate on issues of social policy and community well-being. Far from it. The churches should continue to advocate for those in greatest need, those who do not have a voice, giving priority to the empowerment of those who are on the margins. Even better would be to provide them with the support and resources to enable them to speak for themselves. The church’s contribution to public debate on behalf of others will need to carry an acknowledgment in the tone of our contribution, as well as the content, of our shared complicity in the brokenness of the world that we are seeking to repair.

Choosing terms

Finding a phrase to signal the scope of the book wasn’t easy. After changing my mind several times, I ended up sticking with the term community engagement, largely because it is loose and sprawling in its resonance and reference, and for that reason may be less misleading than any of the alternatives. But what do I mean by community engagement? For Christians community engagement starts with the call to love our neighbor and extends outward from there. Love for neighbor, directed at human and community flourishing, can include political involvement, advocacy, working in the public or civil service, exercising social responsibility through the voluntary sector, and church-related agencies, and even perhaps (?) contracting with government in providing human services and social welfare.

¹⁹

In countries that are undergoing the shift beyond Christendom there are still extensive and diverse forms of community engagement being undertaken by the churches. Beyond activities sponsored by individual congregations and denominations, there is the contribution of organizations with a Christian affiliation but without a connection to a congregation or denomination. There are also groups involved in community service that do not label themselves as having a Christian identity but have significant Christian connections and involvement.

The legal, institutional, and denominational differences even between countries that share a common political and religious heritage make it difficult to find a consistent and shared terminology. I have used the terminology of church-related agencies to