Photo credit: Carla J Roth
IN LETTING GO of Ekklesia’s think-tank, regular commentary and news service activities after heading towards a quarter of a century, we are not quite saying ‘that’s it’.
Our publishing continues, several online newsletters are being planned (including my own Illuminations), past work is accessibly archived, and the network of friends, allies, curious onlookers and helpful critics we have built up over the years – some 14,000 people on our social media channels (including X/Twitter) – will continue, as we have said, for the time being.
It is interesting how that qualifier in the announcement we made about our future was interpreted in some media spaces. “For the time being” was put in inverted commas, as if to stress uncertainty about these activities. That was not the intention. We were simply saying that we cannot specify the long-, medium- or (in some respects) the short-term at present. But, nevertheless, we move forward in fresh ways; with relationships treasured, ripples of change moving outwards, and possibilities wide open.
That, in fact, is the texture of life. If where we are and what we are letting go of carries the whiff of impermanence or uncertainty, that is because this is how life is. All things shall pass. We shall all die. Nothing lasts for ever. Yet we still have hope, invest in hope, proceed in hope. But to what horizon? When Ekklesia began in 2002, the horizon was what you might call “a different Christianity” to the one of Empire, domination, exclusion and enemy-making. A key moment was the publication of our founder Jonathan Bartley’s thought-provoking book, Faith and Politics after Christendom: the Church as a movement for anarchy (Paternoster, 2006).
Ekklesia’s commitments meant exposing and opposing the dark side of historic Christendom and the religion of power, but also the agitations and threats of what is now labelled Christian Nationalism (rooted in US exceptionalism and white supremacy) which have subsequently raged through MAGA and the symptomatic proto-fascism of a Donald Trump.
Positively, it meant focusing ourselves unceasingly on elevating the voices of nonconformists, dissenters, Quakers, Anabaptists, radical Catholics, peace churches, levellers, liberation theologies and all those (people of faith, and people of good faith but no ‘religion’) who are animated by the conviction that “another world is possible”. That war, injustice, inhumanity, exclusion, genocide, predatory capitalism and environmental destruction are not permanent features of our lives, but temporary disfigurements and aberrations – no matter how deeply rooted, persistent and irreversible they may sometimes seem to be.
How so? What is the solidarity, the possibility, the horizon that relativises such things, that suggests that peace, justice, community, flourishing and sustainability can prevail against all the odds (including those spelt out in all the recent science-based reports on global heating)? We will all have different answers to that. To what keeps us going. But for those of us who continue, against all common sense, to seek the path of costly transformation that led an obscure Palestinian Jew to crucifixion, and to a promise of life beyond the death meted out by Empire, the answer is perhaps most succinctly summarised in the title given to the web resource page of our long-time friend and associate, Dr Harry Hagopian, an International lawyer, commentator and ecumenist.
Epektasis is “largely about politics”, he writes. “But it is also about human rights, democracy, good governance, peace, justice and reconciliation at a time of ongoing turbulence across the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf regions.” Crucially, he explains, it is profoundly rooted in an “overarching Christian ethos of striving to ‘stretch forward’ (epekteinomenos in Greek, from St Paul in Philippians 3:13)” towards a new world coming, something which indeed expands the boundaries of what is and what shall be.
That word epektasis is actually the conviction about the unceasing journey towards eternal fulfilment, communion and bliss in the Divine which was developed by St Gregory of Nyssa (335-394/395 CE). It is one of the most original aspects of the great Cappadocian’s way of thinking. It is a message of hope for unlimited personal, interpersonal and social transformation and possibility which, at its best, the Christian message embodies, proclaims and acts out in all things – including politics and economics.
It does so not because it seeks to privilege itself, nor because it wishes to marginalise or cast out those who are different (quite the reverse), but because it has been grasped by a vision of life in all its fullness, with all and for all… and because it therefore cannot let go of hope, no matter how tough and threatening the circumstances. Perhaps a better way of putting that is not “cannot let go” (let’s face it, we lose our grip all the time), but “will not be let go”, because others will always be there, and because the final Other is love and communion, not hate and separation.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” As a matter of fact, there is very little in human history, current events or honest inspection of the human condition which would finally suggest this. From the perspective of mortality it is fracture, decay and death which have the last word. But, of course, that was not the perspective from which Dr King conceived those words. Nor were the undeniable limitations of this life the ultimate horizon for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu or any of the other figures who have inspired us in the path of Jesus of Nazareth. No, their commitment was not holding on, but being held; not life threatened by death, but life in defiance of death; not carrying on in our own strength, but living beyond our means into the invitational infinity of love we name God. This is the true ecumenism.
Not everyone who has valued, engaged with, looked in upon or contributed to Ekklesia over the years has shared that particular perspective, belief or hope. Many have struggled with and rejected Christianity and religion, institutional or otherwise. Some would name the things we have talked about differently, or find the theological language we have sometimes needed to resort to and expand upon a struggle. But the key thing that has bound us together is the double conviction that “the system is broken” and that “another world is possible”.
So we (whoever ‘we’ have been over the past 22 years) will continue to identify alternatives, propose transformations, form coalitions, tell difficult truths, organise resistance, amplify prophets, press for change, value all people, hug one another deeply, negotiate awkward realities, recognise the abyss, pray fervently (which means to welcome what-shall-be in the domain of love), and remain undeterred. The space for all that is still an ekklesia, a public square in which all things are made new, a vision and body of humanity that Dr King called “the beloved community”.
In those terms, the ones that really matter, the search for (and building of) ekklesia continues. Not as a denomination, a church, a religion, a faction, a class, an ideology or a think-tank, but as a continually rediscovered zone of flourishing, hope, repair, rebuilding and imagination. A liberated and liberating space for all. That, we have always believed, is the place where a disruptive stranger from Nazareth would and will be truly welcome. Nearer the gutter than a Cathedral, as Dorothy Day once put it. This is the place where God is to be found in the world, and where solidarity begins anew, daily.
So our message to all we have travelled with over these more-than-two-decades is “fare well” as you continue your journeys (of which we have been privileged to be part), and au revoir – literally, “until we see each other again”. This is not a final word. No word ever is. It is just a word in transition. And it remains, as always, a poem; an invitation to see things differently and practice hope-in-action.
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© Simon Barrow was director of Ekklesia from 2016 to 2024, co-director from 2005 to 2016, and an associate from 2003 to 2005. He is a writer, educator and activist. His columns can be found here.