Authentic Engagement: The Role of the Church in Social Transformation

By Dieumeme Noëlliste

Though called to partner in God’s holy work of transformation, the church has often responded with resignation rather than hope in the face of a broken, hurting, and violent world.

In Authentic Engagement, Dieumeme and Mirlenda Noëlliste remind us that the church was never meant to content itself with faith in the hereafter. However, to fulfill its God-given role in society, it must know what and whose it is, and situate itself accordingly. The authors explore questions of ecclesiology and
establish the theological foundations for social engagement as they examine what it means to be a people defined by relationship with the triune God. Arguing that the church has a mandate to see the world transformed, they suggest a model of engagement that would empower believers to act as agents of
transformation in all realms of society, while remaining deeply rooted in their calling as ambassadors of a heavenly kingdom.

This book brings hope and conviction in equal measures as it reawakens the church to a consciousness of its identity, its calling, and its powerful potential to bring change in the here and now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Langham Global Library
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839738012

Book preview

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Authentic Engagement is clear and straightforward, but it is not an easy read. It is truthfully and painfully prophetic, but it is hopeful. It is not an easy read because Noëlliste unflinchingly identifies, describes, and grapples with ways in which the church too often fails to be the church and fails to be the church in the world. Yet it is hopeful because Noëlliste’s vision of and prescriptions for the church are grounded in the reality of the Triune God and are unswervingly shaped by the redemption available to the world in Jesus Christ. When his clear-eyed analysis stings, it is the wound of a friend, and when he issues constructive calls to action, they are informed by his own authentic engagement in the life of the global church. Throughout, this is a book of biblically grounded theology – theology about the church, for the church, and for the world.

W. David Buschart, PhD

Professor of Theology and Historical Studies,

Denver Seminary, Colorado, USA

This volume is a clarion call for the church to be all that it was meant to be in and for the world. Biblically thoughtful and theologically thorough, with interaction from an array of global voices, Authentic Engagement argues that the Christian faith has social import: being a constructive agent of social change is necessary for the church’s witness and indispensable to its mission. It has been so from the beginning. This book returns us to this fundamental truth.

M. Daniel Carroll R. (Rodas), PhD

Scripture Press Ministries Professor of Biblical Studies and Pedagogy,

Wheaton College and Graduate School, Illinois, USA

Professor Dieumeme Noëlliste’s fiercely intelligent, deeply committed, dynamic personality guided the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology from its inception, and his ever-expanding influence on global theological education spread from there. Now, four decades into a notable ministry of preaching, teaching, and cross-cultural leadership, he offers us a bountiful harvest – his biblical and theological reflections on the church’s call to social transformation. While his own life story might be held up as an inspiring example of radical transformation, Dr. Noëlliste deliberately grounds his arguments in Scripture, reason, and the historic teachings of the church. What we see in this book is not Dr. Noëlliste, the Haitian prodigy, but the rich fruits of a carefully disciplined mind that is subservient both to the word of God and to the will of his heavenly Father. Thus, a humble submission to God’s word and will undergirds this prophetic call to Christian social transformation. His partnership in this project with his gifted niece, Dr. Mirlenda Noëlliste, signals the way their message spans genders and generations. Read this and renew your prayers for God’s will to be done here on earth, as it is in heaven – faithfully, lovingly, justly, and joyfully!

Timothy Paul Erdel, PhD

Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy,

Bethel University, Indiana, USA

Dieumeme Noëlliste and Mirlenda Noëlliste have done it again, this time in English! This is a well-researched and carefully argued volume that demonstrates in a theologically rich fashion how the Christian church can authentically engage with the wider world to bring positive transformation to all. I particularly value how the two authors bring the voices of a wide range of important theologians around the world into the conversation about the church’s role in the world. This is an important and valuable resource for scholars in ecclesiology and theological ethics. It will also work well as a textbook in theological ethics at graduate and undergraduate levels.

Rev. Knut M Heim, PhD

Professor of Old Testament,

Denver Seminary, Colorado, USA

The church endures scathing criticism from both insiders and outsiders. As the church’s ranks decline, many view it as irrelevant. But rather than merely lament the past, and especially the current state of the church’s ineffectiveness in the world, Dr. Noëlliste and his niece show how the church can recapture its Christ-ordained mission. In this robustly resourced, historically nuanced, and theologically informed treatise, they put forward this challenging proposal – the church can advance the cause of social transformation by being authentically engaged with the present social order. Both italicized words are crucial for their project: the church must truly be the church as God’s alternative society (no compromise of its nature and character); and the church must fully engage the world in all its messiness with a holistic and transformational message characterized by its pursuit of righteousness and justice. Here is no unrealistic fantasy, but rather a truly hopeful appeal in a world mired in hopelessness and despair.

William W. Klein, PhD

Professor Emeritus of New Testament Interpretation,

Denver Seminary, Colorado, USA

Social ills are, arguably, the chief ethical and apologetics issues of our time. But American evangelicalism, on the whole, has aligned with political tribes to determine our approach to these problems. Instead of setting culture, we have chosen sides in societal schisms. In Authentic Engagement, Dr. Dieumeme Noëlliste challenges the church to address social matters on the king’s terms. We do not have the privilege of indifference or idleness, but kingdom ethics should determine our participation. God has equipped us with an eternal message that is temporally relevant. It allows us to have hope in tumultuous times. I commend this book to anyone who desires to embody Christ’s kingdom-minded message and mission.

Brandon Washington

Pastor of Preaching,

Embassy Christian Bible Church,Colorado, USA

Authentic Engagement

The Role of the Church in Social Transformation

Dieumeme Noëlliste

with Mirlenda Noëlliste

© 2023 Dieumeme Noëlliste and Mirlenda Noëlliste

Published 2023 by Langham Global Library

An imprint of Langham Publishing

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Contents

Cover

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The Transforming Vocation of the People of God

Transformation: A Keynote of Scripture

Transformation: A Future Hope with Present Implications

Transforming Influence: God’s Mandate to His People

The Purpose of This Book

Part One Models of Transforming Engagement

2 Major Views on the Church’s Role in the World

Mapping out the Options

Nonengagement

Restrictive Engagement

Indirect Engagement

Unbridled or Thoroughgoing Engagement

3 Authentic Engagement

Meaning

Foundations

Criteria

Part Two Ecclesial Consciousness for Transforming Engagement

4 Society of the Triune God

Identity and Engagement

Trinitarian Ecclesiology in History

The Church as the People of God the Father

The Church as the Community of God the Son

Instituted and Empowered by God the Spirit

Holistic Trinitarian Connection

Trinitarian Theology and Authentic Engagement

5 Ambassador of Heaven

Differentiating Activities from Role

The Church as God’s Representative

Biblical and Theological Grounding

Praxiological Implications

Part Three Acts of Transforming Engagement

6 Exemplar of a New Order

Ecclesial Life as a Reflection of the Life of the Triune God

Ecclesial Life as the Space for Showcasing the New Order

Displaying the Life of the Triune God before the World

7 Herald of Transforming News

The Mandate to Proclaim

The Message to Be Proclaimed

The Manner of Heralding the Gospel of the Kingdom of God

8 Catalyst of Human Well-Being

Well-Being Is God’s Desire for Humanity

Hindrances to the Experience of Well-Being

Catalytic Ecclesial Actions for the Promotion of Well-Being

Part Four The Stance of Transforming Engagement

9 Hope-Filled Realism

Wrongheaded Directions

Hope-Filled Realism: A Better Option

10 Expectancy

The Necessity of Hope

The Surprising Irruption of Hope

Hope as Expectation of the Good

The God of Hope

The Emitter of Hope

11 Prayer

Empowerment to Stay the Course

Leadership to Fulfill God’s Purpose

Discernment to Act Wisely

Bibliography

About Langham Partnership

Endnotes

Index

Foreword

More than seventy years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr articulated an enduring taxonomy of ways of relating Christ to culture. He identified five main approaches, which included Christ against culture, The Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ as the transformer of culture.[1] More recently, Don Carson has evaluated these options in light of biblical theology, observing how Niebuhr’s options and preferences might have looked different had he himself come out of a very different culture, particularly in the Majority World.[2] What, then, of precisely such a Majority World voice? What would someone who grew up in and ministered for about half of his adult life in the Caribbean, but who also studied in and taught during the other half of that life in the United States, have to say on these topics? What would anyone, updating the cultural mandate of the church, and not just Christ or the individual Christian, have to say? What would such a writer in the third decade of the twenty-first century need to modify, if anything, from either Niebuhr or Carson? What if their perspectives began with neither of these books nor other secondary literature, but with a combination of the study of Scripture, rigorous theology and lived experience? Theologian Dieumeme Noëlliste provides answers to all these and related questions in this succinct yet profound work on the church’s authentic engagement with the culture and society around it. From different but complementary angles, he agrees with Niebuhr and others who argue that transformation is the ultimate goal.

Noëlliste was born and grew up in Haiti, the most impoverished of all the nations in the Western hemisphere. He later served as the president of Jamaica Theological Seminary, and as dean and then president of the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology, both located in Kingston, Jamaica, for many years. For some time now, he has been a professor of systematic theology and ethics at Denver Seminary in Littleton, Colorado, holding the Vernon C. Grounds Chair of Pastoral Ministry and Social Ethics. He also directed the Vernon C. Grounds Center for Public Ethics during a significant majority of that time. Noëlliste received his bachelor’s degree in theology from William Tyndale College in Farmington Hills, Michigan, his Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and his PhD in theological studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, specializing in modern and contemporary Christian thought. In fact, I first heard about Dr. Noëlliste from our former professor there, Dr. Don Carson, who was lauding his ministry. Just a few years ago Noëlliste received the alumnus of the year award, bestowed on him by TEDS.

Dr. Noëlliste has written numerous scholarly and practical articles, along with editing, co-authoring or authoring several other books, in both English and French, and he is fluent in those languages, as also in Creole and Spanish. He has traveled throughout the world, regularly organizing and/or speaking at theological conferences as well as helping with the accreditation and reaccreditation of Bible colleges and seminaries, especially in the Majority World, and helping them to build up their facilities and resources. For a period of time, he served as director and chairman of the International Council for Evangelical Theological Education, the major accrediting body for evangelical theological schools in the Majority World. He belongs to the Latin American Theological Fraternity, the International Council for the Promotion of Christian Higher Education and the Oxford Round Table, an organization that sponsors interdisciplinary conferences with diverse attendees, usually on matters of public policy.

In a world of unprecedented political polarization within individual countries with the resurgence of far-right and far-left organizations in both political and socio-economic contexts, and in a world of greater international warfare and threats of war than we have seen in three-quarters of a century, the Christian church needs to present a credible and compelling witness to the truth as well as the practical livability of its faith. With virtual anarchy in Haiti, the one nation in Latin America that has received the greatest amount of Christian missionary efforts since the arrival of the Europeans(!), we have to do better. We need to avoid the extremes and work at moving toward a center that is deeply rooted in Scripture and its mandates, which recognizes politics as the art of compromise, which can support the lesser of two or more evils when choices in political and ethical decisions do not present clear-cut cases between right and wrong, good and bad. We need to recapture Jesus’s vision for the arrival of the kingdom of God, with the church as a countercultural witness to the possibilities for the flourishing of human life both in this world and in the next. We need to recognize the already-but-not-yet arrival of that kingdom with Jesus’s first coming, which will one day make way for its full arrival at his second coming. We dare not underestimate the depths of evil and opposition to God’s kingdom that currently remain and will always remain prior to the end of the age, but we also dare not underestimate the possibilities of transforming our planet, with the help of God’s Spirit, into new, more moral environments, complete with all that is required for human persons to flourish. We have to allow God to determine the limits of what he will allow on the one hand, and inspire on the other, rather than over-optimistically or over-pessimistically act as if we could make those decisions for him.

Alternating between the theoretical and practical levels, and drawing widely on key biblical passages and theological texts, Dr. Noëlliste challenges our minds and touches our hearts. Just when we think he has given us about all we can manage notionally in one sitting, we discover he is also giving us about all we can handle emotionally. Yet this is not because this book is either unrelentingly optimistic or pessimistic. Noëlliste is profoundly realistic. Even when he challenges our thinking as to the good that could happen, he then gives us glimpses from his lived experience when it has actually happened for a time in Christian circles. What we have here is actually a manifesto for ecclesiastical possibilities in our time as the church seeks authentic engagement with the world in hopes of its transformation for the better, in whatever ways God chooses to bring it about. Read it for encouragement, motivation and inspiration. It deserve nothing less.

Craig L. Blomberg

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of New Testament,

Denver Seminary, Colorado, USA

October 2022

Preface

Ancient philosophers spent a great deal of time talking about the nature of reality. Is realty made of water, air, or fire or something else? Their discussion often turned around the notion of movement. Is reality static or is it dynamic? In other words, do things remain the same, or do they keep changing?

For a philosopher like Parmenides, the static view seemed the correct description of the world, while his fellow philosopher, Heraclitus defended adamantly the contrary position. Reality, he believed, is always in flux. It never remains the same.

Very good arguments can be offered on behalf of both men. But humanly speaking, Heraclitus appears to have the edge. We seem to live in a sea of change. Some even say that, if there is one constant, it is change itself. This is an overstatement, of course, since the only One who can claim absolute immutability is God (Mal 3:10; Jas 1:17). But you get the point. Every now and then, I look at my pictures of thirty, twenty, and even ten years ago, and can barely recognize my own self.

Yet in giving the nod to Heraclitus, we must caution against a concept of change that seems to construe it as aimless and purposeless. To what end is the river changing so constantly to the point that we can never set foot in the same mass of water? Is the motion an end in itself? Are the wheels just turning, but never moving?

Such a view of change doesn’t seem attractive to us. The change that gets us excited is the one that eggs us along toward a destination – a better place than the one we now occupy. It is teleological in nature. We believe that it is this sort of change that Christian faith endorses and champions. It is a dynamic movement that pushes the created order, including ourselves, towards what it and us need to be. It is a change that presses forward towards a goal that is better. It is a change that’s not content with a reality that insists on being confirmed as the ideal, although it is in fact the very opposite of it!

Scripture tells us that God, the immutable One, is the power that propels reality towards that much desired destination. He is the One who will ultimately make all things new (Rev 21:1ff). Yet, although he is the Ultimate Mover, in his sovereignty, he uses lesser agents in the process of prodding reality in the direction of his ideal for human life, and among such instruments are his people – the church.

If this is true, this recognition raises (or should raise) several questions in our minds. What position must his people adopt in order to play a meaningful part in that divine project? How must we view ourselves in order to muster the confidence to contribute effectively to the execution of the grandiose plan? What concrete actions can we pose to foster the forward movement of that project without causing harm to our identity as his people, and to the cause itself? What posture should we adopt when our effort doesn’t seem to yield the outcomes we desire? These are the issues that we will endeavor to explore in the pages of this book. If our meagre attempt prompts you, our readers, to join us in the examination of these questions, we will consider our effort worthwhile.

Dieumeme Noëlliste

Littleton, Colorado, USA

Advent 2021

Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for some time. The first musings occurred in an address I delivered at the 2005 Congress on the Evangelization of the Caribbean (CONECAR), in the Bahamas. The talk was entitled The Caribbean Church: A Successful Agent of Change and it stirred up a great deal of interest among the participants. Then, as is well known, in 2010, a massive earthquake devasted the country of Haiti. That catastrophic event pushed a segment of the Haitian church to launch a movement called La Mobilisation de l’Eglise autour de son Rôle Prophétique (The Mobilization of the Church for Its Prophetic Witness). As part of the movement, I had the opportunity to deliver talks and present seminars on the church and its role in the social domain. Some five years later, I revisited the topic for a series of lectures I delivered to the students and faculty of the Séminaire de Théologie Evangélique de Port-au-Prince. In addition to all this, for several years my responsibilities as a member of the Faculty of Denver Seminary included providing leadership to the Vernon Grounds Institute of Public Ethics. The Institute was a think tank that reflected on the church’s role in addressing some of the thorniest issues confronting American society. During its ten years of operation, it tackled health care, immigration, creation care, child poverty, racism, capital punishment, and economic justice.

In all these settings, I received much that helped inform my thinking on the issues addressed in this book. The contributions came in the form of feedback, pushback, insights, and sharing of differing perspectives, from a wide cross section of persons: students, church leaders, Christian activists, and fellow academics. To all of them, I owe a debt of gratitude. The names are way too numerous to mention, but I must give a shout-out to a select few. Among them are M. Danny Caroll Rodas, Erin Heim, Michelle Warren, Brandon Washington, the late Felix Gilbert, and Dr. Gary Vander Ark who served with me on the steering committee of the Vernon Grounds Institute. Besides these, I must mention my friends Edouard Lassegue and Rony Joseph, fellow Haitians with whom I frequently lament the situation of our country.

All this means that the ideas that have made their way into the pages of this book have been running, in one way or another, in my mind for years. Putting them down on paper required concentrated time. I am deeply grateful to the board of trustees of Denver Seminary who afforded me the time to do that by granting a sabbatical during the spring of 2021, during which the lion’s share of the manuscript was produced, amid the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2019, I teamed up with my niece Mirlenda to produce a volume in French on Afro-Caribbean religions, entitled Les Religions afro-caribéennes à la lumière de la foi chrétienne. The experience was a delight. I am grateful that Mirlenda accepted the invitation to be a contributor to this book.

This is our second book with Langham. Once again, the people at this innovative publishing ministry have shown grace and patience toward us. When COVID-19 interfered with our writing plan and prevented us from meeting the original deadline, our editor Mark Arnold was kind enough to grant us an extension. For this we are grateful.

In the process of writing, I find nothing more invigorating than the encouragement of family. I am grateful to my wife Gloria and daughters Leila and Nicole for their moral support while