REFLECTIONS: "On Power and Christianity"

I remember a beloved professor saying that the real issue coursing through every vein, every text of the Christian gospel is power.  And at 24, 25, I wasn't quite ready to grapple with that.  Wasn't experienced enough to appreciate what he was asking.  I didn't understand that every conversation about justice is also a conversation about power.  And how we imagine and embrace it, resist it and distort it, how we share it and count its cost.

After serving in churches for thirty-some years, I have questions of my own, and more often than not I return to that series of conversations at Union Seminary in the 80s.  Conversations about power.  About power and the gospel.  About power and spirit.  About power and community.

After a month of intense discernment, our congregation met today to discuss the Apartheid-Free Movement, and whether our participation would be faithful, warranted and consistent with our mission as a beloved community.  We didn't get around to naming 'power'--not specifically--but the issue was hidden in plain view.  Is the church, one asked, an activist community, interested in partisan politics?  Shouldn't we aspire to a 'big tent' vision, asked another, where so-called conservatives and so-called liberals can happily coexist and worship?  Was it right to adopt such a controversial approach?  These are perfectly reasonable questions, of course.  And they remind me that we are--or some of us are, at least--uncomfortable with the idea that Christians should organize to create social change in the world, that churches should participate in powerful movements leveraging relationships and institutional spirit for the common good.  

In the case in point, the decades-long occupation, enforced by sophisticated military technologies and funded in large part by US support, we resist the urgent plea of Palestinian and Israeli partners--the plea for solidarity, organized support and political action.  We can talk about apartheid, for example, and even name apartheid for the sin that it is (General Synod, 2021); but the idea that we'd join a movement of movements, a movement of communities building power together for social and political change: this goes too far.  In a split vote, we voted to "oppose" apartheid, but not to join the Apartheid-Free Movement with its call to action and partnership.

Again, it's about power.  At least it feels that way to me.  Do we believe that the One who calls us is interested in consequential partnerships, consequential action, nonviolent and civil disobedience (if need be) in order to create justice (to DO justice) and make peace (to MAKE peace)?  Or are we wedded to the notion that the very best churches can do is keep the doors open, talk about big issues, and read good books--but resist power of any sort, in any guise, for any reason?  When doing justice means offending a friend, or hurting their feelings, must we back off, back down and step aside?  In the matter at hand, many friends have insisted on just this: that any kind of organized work, "empowering" work, to dismantle Israel's apartheid project is offensive, hurtful and (very possibly) antisemitic.  So we just don't.  We don't engage.  We back off.  We acquiesce to our own powerlessness.

But, of course, to "resist" power in this sense is simply to accomodate the entrenched systems of privilege and power already in place, already steadying the status quo.  And this is precisely why the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy continues unaddressed, over years and years, decade to decade.  We have had opportunities to act (as we once did in South Africa), and we have deferred.  We have had clear strategies presented around principled, nonviolent, credible campaigns of powerful resistance--and we have refused.

It's my belief--I guess, it goes without saying, but I will--that the gospel community trains its people in the ways of love, nonviolence and generous relational power.  To "oppose" apartheid but refuse to confront it through love and action is to give in to its logic and madness.  

The call to discipleship is not--at least, in my reading--a call to passivism and inaction, an invitation to mere observation and faithful despair.  It is, instead, a way of life, emboldened by the Resurection itself and the One who resurrects, and a way of being powerful together.  Not patriarchal powerful.  Not authoritarian powerful.  Not guns-in-every pickup powerful.  But power of the cross powerful.  Power of the pentecost powerful.

So I wonder, friends, where we go now?  What kinds of power are available to us?  And whether or not we have the appetite (and the courage) to go where that gospel may lead us.

DGJ  1/28/24