Sunday
From the perspective of occupying Roman powers, the Christian sect was radical because it encouraged alternative behaviors that were both attractive to those at the bottom and threatening to the worldview of empire.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
During Paul’s lifetime, the Christian church was not yet an institution or a centrally organized set of common practices and beliefs. It was a living organism that communicated the gospel primarily through relationships.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
These scattered Christians were not numerous. They were not wealthy or powerful, and they were in constant danger of being killed. Yet they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was uncontainable.
—Huston Smith
Wednesday
Love is what Jesus preached—and what he embodied. In the early church devout Christians tried to embody God’s love and to experience God in such a way that love reshaped their lives.
—Diana Butler Bass
Thursday
Christianity has been most vital when it has been energized by movements of self-organizing—or perhaps we should say “Spirit-organizing”—cells. These cells have grown, multiplied, and borne fruit—fruit in just and vibrant institutions, fruit in thriving, peaceful, joyful communities.
—Brian McLaren
Friday
My vision of any future church needs to be much flatter and much more inclusive. It is much less “churchy,” surely less patriarchal, and more concerned with fulfilling its mission statement than with endlessly reciting its heavenly vision and philosophy statement.
—Richard Rohr
Week Twenty-Four Practice
An Opportunity for Beloved Community
Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers highlights the church’s call to meet the human longing for community.
There is something elemental and compelling about communities of people who help one another to grow into all that they were created to be. Where each person is as committed to the other’s flourishing and to the flourishing of the whole. Where the members are willing to sacrifice their own comfort and even lives for the sake of the other and for the dream they share.
You don’t have to be religious to seek beloved community. I believe we humans are created with a homing device that begins to hum and light up when we see individuals and communities driven not by ego but by self-giving love.
But if you are religious, and certainly if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, then beloved community should be one of the basic tenets of faith. That’s what Jesus told the young seeker who asked him the greatest commandment. Jesus told him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22: 37–39). Jesus welcomed people into a countercultural, self-giving community of love with God at the center.
True, the ideal gets watered down…. [But] hold out for the robust and uncompromising vision of God’s kingdom of love. For us, it’s a dream. For God, it’s reality.
Even if we have failed a thousand times before, don’t let this hour pass without calling on Jesus and the prophets one more time. Notice how God’s reign is already breaking in and how the Spirit empowers us to join up with that movement. Especially now, even as the powers of empire and established order are busy reassembling the cracked pieces of our national and church life with the same self-centric powers and goals at their core, we should be striving and praying that God will reshape us in the image of God’s beloved community. If not now, when?
Reference:
Stephanie Spellers, The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community (Church Publishing, 2021), 25–26.
Image credit and inspiration: Brice Xerty, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like these tree rings, the early church’s imperfect but living community grows circles of love, joy, and fellowship through time.
