Beyond the polity of death -May 14, 2005

Three signs marked my arrival as a participant in the historic thirteenth WCC Conference on World Mission and Evangelism in Athens, Greece (9-16 May 2005). In content and form they were very different, but together they show the scale of the global challenge Christians face in commending the Gospel of reconciliation to a divided world.

The first sign was an advertising poster on the road between Athens and Attiki. “We welcome a new myth to Greece”, it declared. “Yours.” It would be hard to find a more potent summary of the post-modern condition. There is a genuine hospitality to the plural environment. But it is one which is tempted to replace commitment with curiosity, to see our founding narratives as exchangeable goods, and to think of the story that shapes us as ours to dispose of as we choose.

In coming to Greece, the land of antiquity, we have been reminded that things are rather more complicated than this. Even what is new comes from the ancient storehouse of faith, Jesus reminds us in St Matthew. And when we look at the brokenness of the world around us we know that there is so much more at stake in the Gospel than “a nice story”.

This becomes disturbingly clear in the second sign, one that greeted us all at the opening ceremony on the quay here at Agios Andreas (part of the 2004 Olympic Village). A high Cross, crafted in olivewood out of the love and pain of our sisters and brothers in Jerusalem, arrived by boat to express God’s gift for the healing of the nations.

Viewed another way, it would be hard to think of a more unwelcome present. People ask God for peace and healing. What they get in return is an instrument of torture upon which the Body of Christ is broken. No wonder evangelism is such a difficult task!

Why would anyone take up the Cross if they had another choice? The Gospel of pain-bearing is irrecoverable to the world of public relations. It can be received only as a gift beyond our means.

What this means in the alternative polity of God has been shown to us through a third sign. We are meeting in what is now an army resort. Every day military helicopters fly high above our conferring and our worshipping. In these products of human ingenuity we see the cost of the security the world offers us at the edge of relationship. Protection against each other through the ultimate sanction of killing.

It is this logic of division and violence that God confronts, absorbs and transforms in the Cross of Christ. So we can rejoice in our diversity – but without the disturbance of the Spirit, the confrontation with the security of death Christ joins us to, and the promise of restoration through the Creator, what we are most easily reconciled to are the inevitabilities of history rather than the subversive hope of the Gospel.

The road towards the risen life Christ offers is therefore marked by a costly refusal of the conditions of sin, alienation and injustice. And it begins not with a political project or a managerial strategy, but with ordinary people baptized into communities of sharing, celebration and resistance.

What many of us will take away from this World Council of Churches gathering, therefore, is not some grand new paradigm of Christian mission. Rather, it is a rainbow company of people with whom we have prayed, listened, read, broken bread, and shared the coming of Pentecost and Easter through our different traditions.

For even more than the words we have spoken and the dreams we have glimpsed, it is our common life in a temporary home (water failures and all) that has told us about who Jesus is and how the kingdom comes. But is this the Gospel we really want and are we willing to proclaim and live it?

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.