THE RADICAL WITNESS IN A POSTMODERN WORLD

by Barry L. Callen
Earlham School of Religion
October, 2001

A key claim of “postmodernism” is that contexts of interpretation are crucial to the likely content of the final interpretations. Thus, I will share first something of my own context to provide clarity on “where I’m coming from.” I then will move to the emerging “postmodern” world, then to three key Believers Church themes viewed in this new setting, and finally I will conclude with six thoughts about applying old Believers Church ideals in today’s fresh circumstances.

Introduction: A Personal Context

My own spiritual journey has taken an unexpected road. I was reared in a wonderful congregation in Ohio where the pastoral leadership was exceptional. The spiritual nurture was so rich that more than fifty young people from that one small-town church entered full-time Christian ministry during the congregation’s first fifty years. I am one of them and have expressed my gratitude by writing the biography of the woman who was the senior pastor for more than four decades. [1] One theme I heard stressed on occasion in that congregation was the church as God intends it. Sometimes this ideal was highlighted by using the failures from the long history of the Roman Catholic Church as a sad reminder of what can go wrong. This Church of God (Anderson) congregation featured a “radical,” free-church, Wesleyan-informed mentality, but one with little historical perspective beyond reacting to a perceived long pattern of church apostasy.

From my home church I absorbed the love of good pastoral leadership, an appreciation for nurturing young leaders, and a vision of the church as much more than any flawed human institution. After some years of my own ministry, however, my spiritual need led me—of all places—to a Roman Catholic monastery! Beginning in the 1980s, I became an annual Protestant retreatant in a bastion of historic Roman Catholicism. The location was the longtime home of Thomas Merton, probably the most widely read Roman Catholic spiritual writer of all time. The Abbey of Gethsemane has sat quietly in the hills of rural Kentucky since 1848 as a spiritual oasis carrying on a ministry of hospitality, providing without cost spiritual retreats characterized by solitude, silence, and Christian reflection. In one way, making the Abbey a spiritual home was quite a turn from my free-church Protestant upbringing (although over the centuries monasteries have been home to numerous Roman radicals); in another way, it was a growing up into the wider church without denying anything precious from my youth. My pastor and church heritage had called for an elimination of denominational walls and a unity of believers based on relationship to Christ. I was practicing this radical call.

The monastery environment, contrary to common perception, is not intended to disdain the world—as the work of Thomas Merton makes very clear. The point is an intentional holding still, being in touch with oneself and God, cherishing the long tradition of God in the world, actually practicing prayer and God’s presence, relishing the sweet sounds of silence, and finally realizing that true value lies first in being rather than in doing. My book Authentic Spirituality [2] highlights the several streams of Christian spirituality, including the contemplative. Does this make me a Protestant or Catholic? In the spirit of the Believers Church tradition, the answer is: I now am a Christian who belongs to the whole church, protests on occasion, and chooses to be “catholic” in the best sense. I am reaching for the wider stream of Christian riches, benefiting from all and bound by none. This journey of renewal has only begun for me, but at least the corner has been turned! I have been helped further by intense involvement in a recent decade-long dialogue between the Church of God (Anderson) and the Independent Christian Churches, [3] both bodies having much in common with the Believers Church tradition, although typically not thinking of themselves in quite this way.

I have had to shake off the assumption that all church history is black with apostasy and therefore only a foil for teaching the current ideal. The Church of God movement (Anderson) saw itself early as a fresh move of God beginning in the 1880s to restore the true church in the “evening time” of history. For the pioneers of this movement, looking back to the sadness of church history was mostly a means for setting the stage for understanding the significance of the “final reformation” [4] in these last days. This restricted view ended for me in part when I encountered an historian of this movement, Charles E. Brown, who saw the movement as an extension of the “radical” tradition of Christianity [5] and in part when I became deeply involved in the scholarly world of the Wesleyan tradition.

Beginning in the 1980s I dedicated myself to widening the movement’s concept of itself, linking it closely with the Believers Church and Wesleyan traditions. I have continued Brown’s work with my own 1999 book Radical Christianity: The Believers Church Tradition in Christianity’s History and Future. I also, along with my friend Luke Keefer of the
Brethren in Christ denomination, have shared the burden of several current representatives of the Believers Church tradition that are tending to lose their distinctive identity and witness in the overwhelming presence of today’s Calvinistic and establishment evangelicalism. [6] This dominant presence plus a broad cultural/philosophic shift now move my personal context—and the whole Christian community--into a much larger scene.

A Cultural Shift

Christian believers necessarily function within given and often changing cultural contexts. To understand the prevailing social context is essential for effective Christian mission to the general public. Further, to highlight appropriately for believers what should be their primary context, that of the faith itself, is a constant challenge, else the social context comes to prevail even in the church.

What is the current culture of at least most of Europe and North America? It is, of course, complex, debatable, and always changing in particulars. My friend Stanley Grenz says that “we may be in the midst of a transition rivaling the intellectual social changes that marked the birth of modernity out of the decay of the Middle Ages.” [7] The emerging result is more pluralistic, clearly open to “spirituality,” and hungry for authentic “communities” that foster meaning and identity formation beyond arid individualisms—characteristics that later I will argue are fresh opportunities for the Believers Churches in our time. These are “postmodern” perspectives that are heavily—often subtly—impacting Christian theology and mission in our time. They include:

. . .a greater appreciation of nature, linked with a chastened admiration for technology; the recognition of the importance of language. . .in human existence; the acceptance of the challenge that other religious options present to the Judeo-Christian tradition; a sense of the displacement of the white, Western male and the rise of those dispossessed because of gender, race, or class; an apocalyptic sensibility, fueled in part by the awareness that we exist between two holocausts, the Jewish and the nuclear; and. . .a growing appreciation of the thoroughgoing, radical interdependence of life at all levels and in every imaginable way. [8]

This set of current cultural sensitivities is further defined this way:

Throughout this century [20^th], and especially in the last several decades, we have been stepping out of the Newtonian worldview into a worldview which is thoroughly dynamic, relativistic, and relational. Such classical concepts as substance [and] absolute time and space. . .are losing their viability among modern people. Such concepts as process, force, energy, and relationally defined essence are gradually taking their place. [9]

Analyists these days commonly speak of the demise of the “modern” or “Enlightenment” mentality. What has been emerging is “post-modernism,” something decisively “post-Constantinian” and compatible with certain longstanding commitments of the Believers Church. The circumstance has moved beyond the classic categories of Ernst Troeltsch (“church” and “sect”) that assume that the state and society are the main formative forces in a civilization. Newer alternatives to state and society function awkwardly, unevenly, locally, too often unintentionally, but they can and do function. The current philosophic transition sometimes seems like playing tennis without a net.

A Thesis

When I was a student at Earlham School of Religion in the 1960s, Dr. Elton Trueblood told us students that he hated “fog” more than anything else—especially when it was inside the heads of his students! Major cultural transitions create uncertain and foggy times. We must do our best, cautioned by Trueblood, to clear the air for ourselves and others. It is time for careful thinking and disciplined living as God’s people. Clarity of perspective may come in part from recognizing the church as itself a culture that can and must regard and develop itself as a “holy nation” (1 Pet. 2:9).

Postmodernism assumes that truth is participatory in nature and evolves in localized community narratives of perceived reality. The church must again be a convincing narrative in each local place where believers gather to worship, grow, serve, and witness. Today’s culture wars are, on the one hand, a caustic context for Christianity; but, on the other hand, “they return the church to an existence that can become distinctively, exhilaratingly Christian—a social and political existence quite like that of the church in its earliest days.” [10] Perhaps, in the providence of God, “Western culture is nearing a point where the Christian faith can be successfully reintroduced. Maybe the collapse of the present order (the demise of “Constantinianism”) will lead to a new outbreak of revolutionary Christianity.” [11] Stanley Grenz is probably right in judging that evangelicalism today should move from being rationalistically creed-based to being more transformingly spirituality-based. [12] Theology then would be seen properly as a second-order language intended to interpret the experience of faith and support the call to discipleship and mission. [13]

Clark Pinnock now explores the Christian doctrine of God in this new philosophic-cultural environment of postmodernism and consciously does so as a committed “evangelical.” He champions a theology of “God’s openness” as being more biblically faithful and socially relevant than the conventional Augustinian/Calvinistic theology typical of establishment evangelicalism. [14] In like manner, I come to my own thesis. Christianity is seeking to find its way in this strange postmodern time. I join Millard Erickson in welcoming a “soft” postmodernism. [15] That is, opposed to the “hard” variety that relativizes all truth and objectivity into a complete pluralism, I affirm that a middle way must be found that benefits from key postmodern insights without reducing faith to only community-based value preferences not applicable to others or related objectively to any universal truth. I now explore the Believers Church tradition of Christianity in this postmodern environment, assuming that it is a tradition, like the “open” view of God, that is an “open” (inherently “soft”) view of the church and Christian life characterized both by biblical faithfulness and particular relevance to contemporary public sensibilities.

Postmodern Openings and Believers Church Themes

To illustrate the above perspective and thesis, the following focuses first on a concise statement of the core vision of the Believers Church tradition and then on the issues of biblical interpretation, the nature of the church, and the centrality of discipleship. These issues are key to the Believers Church, penetrate each other so that no one is to be understood apart from the others, and hold fresh possibilities for church credibility and mission in the environment of the twenty-first century.

Despite a range of diversity from the sixteenth century to date, there is a discernable pattern of commonality, the Believers Church “vision,” that shapes how the Christian faith is to be viewed and lived out. Typically this vision is counter-cultural in nature. The church of Jesus is seen as a divinely-constituted society of committed believers who belong by choice to the church that determines to function through God’s administration and free from domination by the surrounding social culture. Entrance to the church is by voluntary submission to the privilege of membership, so that the body of believers is free in Christ and free to be Christ-like in the world. Consequently, the emphases on volunteerism, integrity, and separateness mean that the vision focuses more on the church being a social strategy rather than the church having such a strategy.

This vision has a restorationist flavor as it seeks to recover what was most basic to the faith before “the pride of the hierarchs, the arrogance of the professional theologians, and the ambitions of temporal rulers had enhanced its outward show of prestige and weakened its true inward strength.” [16] Now to be restored is a form of church life that is “organic, relational, and open-ended rather than technical, rational, and manipulative.” [17] Church identity is to be established less by creed, confession, liturgical practices, or structural arrangements and much more by shared newness in Jesus Christ and shared commitment to discipleship and mission. This vision has been put well with particular reference to the Church of the Brethren:

We are a people who have confessed our sin, accepted Christ as Lord, and have proposed to live in keeping with the spirit and teaching of the New Testament, have proposed to be faithful members of the body of Christ, and have sealed those commitments in Christian baptism… We are a people who work for integrity between word and deed…. We are a people of unfinished faith…. We are a people committed to living in community…. We are a people committed to service. [18]

Implementation today of this Believers Church vision rests on careful “postmodern” thinking about biblical interpretation, the church, and discipleship.

1. Biblical Interpretation. In my role as Editor of the Wesleyan Theological Journal, I have many opportunities to relate to the seminal thinkers of the Wesleyan/Holiness traditions. One is Howard Snyder of Asbury Theological Seminary whose book The Radical Wesley [19] represents an important link between the Wesleyan and Believers Church traditions. Another is Philip R. Meadows of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary who recently has challenged the adequacy of the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” so widely employed inside and outside the Wesleyan tradition. [20] Being critiqued is not so much the Bible-Reason-Tradition-Experience formula for realizing the proper interpretative contexts in which Christians always work; it is the tendency of many who employ the Quadrilateral to weight its elements in ways still tying the users to tenets of the old “modernism.” Meadows helpfully calls for a better “postliberal” way that features the roles of community and discipleship as essential elements of all Christian biblical interpretation, theological reflection, and public mission. [21] I suggest that this new postliberal way is in many respects much like the “old” Believers Church way.

Nadine Pence Frantz has noted several hermeneutical characteristics of the Believers Church tradition. [22] Especially significant is the key correlation between epistemology and obedience (to really know requires really obeying) and the centrality of the gathered community of believers for adequate biblical interpretation (wisdom lies in the whole, not the pieces). Recognizing with appreciation the rich tradition of Christian believing and creedal formulation as ways of clarifying biblical teaching, the Believers Church nonetheless seeks to keep testing all traditions and creeds, including one’s own, in an ongoing process of new learnings, new Spirit leadings, and constant self-correction. The Spirit who originally inspired the sacred text still illumines its contemporary meanings and applications. Note:

When involved in mission as it always ought to be, the Christian community needs to be able to understand its message in fresh contexts, not in ways that go beyond biblical revelation, but in ways that penetrate the biblical revelation more profoundly. It is not so much new information that we look for as it is a fresh understanding of God’s Word in our new circumstances. The biblical text is quantitatively complete (that is, not requiring additions), but it can always be more deeply pondered and grasped in fuller ways. The Spirit is always able to cause what has been written to be revealed in a new light. [23]

Additionally, I affirm the general theses of Robert Mulholland’s 1985 book Shaped by the Word. [24] Transformed lives are essential to authentic Christianity and key shifts are now required to more readily enable such transformation. Mulholland says that the Bible is more a window onto the new order of being in Jesus Christ than a catalog of religious information, and some changes are needed for the typical believer to gain the new being via biblical reading. The Bible is to be approached in a manner consistent with its primary intent. Such an approach requires a shift of focus toward Christian being instead of the constant preoccupation with Christian information and good works. The crust of the untransformed ego-self is developed and protected by the informational, functional, and doing modes that prevail in today’s culture. Spiritual formation requires a breaking of this crust. God works through the Holy Spirit so that what is done as Christians is an overflow of who one is becoming by God’s grace (Col. 1:9-10). The Bible should be approached in a relational mode (prayerfully and together with the church) since it can only be understood through the same Spirit who first inspired it. This is a destabilizing, anti-institutionalizing hermeneutical stance since the Spirit blows where it will.

2. The Church. According to Robert Bellah and associates, a Western myth is that the autonomous self supposedly exists outside and independent of any tradition or community. Most recent North Americans have thought of life as “to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself.” [25] Society encourages a severing from the past and a choosing of whatever groups the individual freely chooses in order to succeed in this impersonal and competitive world. The related “social contract” political theory sees autonomous individuals freely giving up some personal prerogatives to the larger whole as the best way for all involved to gain personal safety and advantage. The ecclesiological counterpart is a view of the church as a voluntary association of individual believers who do not perceive their individual identities constituted primarily by their presence in the congregation, but assume that they are fixed prior to or apart from their decision to join together. The church is thought to exist to provide convenient and desired spiritual services to its clientele—thus “church-hopping” is common, denominational walls are crumbling, and we are being left with only an ad hoc and nearly optional ecclesiology that is very tempting to “free-church” people.

Despite this trend, it now is becoming clearer that the story of a person’s life is embedded in the stories, attitudes, and perspectives of the communities in which the person originated and now participates. Further, it appears relatively clear that the knowing process “is a cognitive framework mediated to the individual by the community…. The believing community transmits from generation to generation and region to region the redemptive story, which it recounts in word and deed. In so doing it mediates to us as believers the framework for the formation of our personal identity, values, and worldview.” [26] The whole of biblical revelation and Christian life, in fact, can be stated in terms of God’s intent to form and live through a distinctive people. [27] There is, then, and must be championed according to the Believers Church, a mediating position between establishment Christianity and the social-contract or optional and ad hoc view of the church.

The mediating position affirms that the church is “gathered” rather than “given,” emphasizing the dynamic and voluntary over the highly standardized and inflexibly legitimized. But the church nonetheless is essential, not optional; it is to be disciplined, not individualized to the point of subjectivistic chaos. The classic Quaker stance, for example, objects to salvation being dependent on the framework of religious institutions and clergy functions, preferring instead a religious volunteerism to a church supported by public taxation. Even so, the church is seen as a fellowship of people gathered by Christ and made alive by his Spirit in order to carry God’s good news to the world. [28] The weight of the “in order” requires more than the optional association of believers. Believers Churches prefer to view the church “as a pilgrim community journeying together with the very present guidance of God’s Spirit…. ” [29] There is openness and dynamic, but not an individualistic alternative.

In this gathered and journeying paradigm, the church is God-ordained and should be marked by righteousness and disciplined obedience to Christ. Karl Barth was understandably horrified that the church he knew lacked the theological resources and/or will to stand against Hitler. Thinking and acting much more counter-culturally, Barth insisted that the church should be the church on its own terms and not on those of the world. Therefore, “the challenge is not the intellectual one but the political one—the creation of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.” [30] Once the integrity of the church is reclaimed, believers can be empowered for the adventure of ministry together. What is needed is “a theological rationale for ministry which is so cosmic, so eschatological and therefore counter-cultural, that they [especially pastors] are enabled to keep at Christian ministry in a world determined to live as if God were dead. Anything less misreads both the scandal of the gospel and the corruption of our culture.” [31]

3. Discipleship. Elton Trueblood’s view in 1967 is probably even more true now. “Committed Christians,” he observed, “are a minority at the present time” and “part of the power of the early Christian movement arose from the clear recognition that [being Christian] was by no means popular or generally accepted.” His intended emphasis, of course, is on the word “committed,” believers being committed in a way that is radically Christ-centered and service-minded. To be radical in these senses means that “the church must exist in the world, but, paradoxically, it must exist at the same time apart from the world.” [32] Reading the Bible rightly and being the church rightly finally focuses on the subject of discipleship.

The true church exists in today’s Western world as “resident aliens” in a society of unbelief. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon make a classic Believers Church point:

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price. [33]

The biblical concern is whether or not we professed believers will really be faithful to the gospel and directed by the way things now are in light of the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus.

In summary, reading the Bible rightly leads to being the church with its own Spirit-integrity, which in turn leads to the following central realization about Christian discipleship: “The church is called to be the Body of Christ expressing now within its own life the characteristics of the coming reign of God—peace, love, joy, freedom, equality, and unity.” [34] As a medium for the message of God’s good news in Christ, the church must exhibit the power of the message in the midst of the world. The church exists to participate in present resurrection realities and thus embody and reflect through its life a living hope that is available to all.

Current Applications of Old Ideals

I earlier described elements of “postmodernism” and suggested that its hunger for authentic “spirituality” and meaningful “community” present a fresh opening for the Believers Church witness today. Several insightful perspectives in the significant 1999 book Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World by Robert Webber have set me to fresh thinking about the Believers Church or “radical” church tradition. If something important is dying today, it is crucial to realize that something else is being born. While the new may not be the preference of Christians, I agree with Webber that today's postmodern world is "a rich cultural context for the recovery of a classical view of the church." [35] The church is not a fossilized medieval institution (the critique of Roman Catholicism) or an "invisible" abstraction in the midst of a mass of disconnected denominations (the circumstance of Protestantism). The church is to be a living extension of Christ that connects believers in all times and places on the basis of the ancient apostolic witness to the person, work, and enduring significance of Jesus Christ. The church is the Pentecost community of Christ's Spirit. Given this understanding of the church, and despite all the contemporary problems, this is a good time to be Christian believers!

The fresh hope not withstanding, the problems for Believers Churches are all too real. Many such bodies can sympathize with and to some degree reflect the experience of the Brethren in Christ [36] and the Churches of Christ, the latter now so well recounted by Richard Hughes. The Churches of Christ, a large free-church body of believers in North America, was built on “twin pillars.” The first was a rationalistic and restorationist approach to the apostolic church. The second, on the other end of the timeline, was the apocalyptic Kingdom of God. But by the end of the 1960s, reports Hughes, this construct was struggling for credibility, even among many of its traditional advocates. Increasingly it “behaved like a denomination that had made its peace with the larger culture even though they continued to employ the sectarian, countercultural language of primitive Christianity to define their basic identity…. [The members] could not decide if they constituted a sect or a denomination—though they resisted both labels. In the midst of their indecision and confusion, the restoration vision grew blurred.” [37] Is such a past still usable? Does time inevitably erode the renewing impulse? Allow me to offer six observations in the direction of a positive answer.

1. Seeing the Vision. The Believers Church tradition has sought to recapture a vision of what it believes to be the New Testament way of being the church, the church that God intends in contrast to being the compromised religious community that this world is pleased to tolerate and even support. The church is not to be merely an extension of the world’s acceptable altruism, but a divinely-constituted society with its members committed to and shaped by God’s reign. It is to be “an outpost of the kingdom of God calling individuals to leave the existing society, at least symbolically, in order to join God’s society.” [38] Seeing this vision is an important first step, but only the first step toward the difficult journey of practical application.

My own immediate church heritage has embraced this vision, especially in the context of holiness revivalism and out of a concern for Christian unity and effective church mission. Announced this movement’s primary pioneer, Daniel Warner, in his personal journal entry for March 7, 1878: “On the 31^st of last January the Lord showed me that holiness could never prosper upon sectarian soil encumbered by human creeds and party names, and he gave me a new commission to join holiness and all truth together and build up the apostolic church of the living God. Praise his name! I will obey him.” [39] Given this vision and high idealism, the resulting Church of God movement (Anderson) has struggled over the generations with how best to live them out in and for the divided and holiness-lacking Christian community. The dilemma in large part has been a persistent inside-outside question.

2. Renewing Inside-Out. It has been observed that, had the eighteenth-century Wesleyan revival in the British Isles occurred two centuries earlier in the context of the Protestant Reformation, it likely would soon have been forced to become a separate Believers Church body. [40] But in the later Anglican setting, John Wesley resisted such separation (although eventually it did come, especially in America). Nineteenth-century Wesleyan revivalism in North America (the Holiness Movement) tended to follow the earlier lead of Wesley, hoping to bring spiritual renewal from within the established church bodies, by then also including the Anglican-separated world of Methodism. Success was limited at best, leading to various “come-out” strategies.

3. Renewing Outside-In. John Wesley’s “radical” vision came to feature serious Christian seekers banding together in counter-cultural covenant communities, “class meetings,” that were not anti-church, but pro-renewal efforts designed to nurture the growth in grace of all members and speak prophetically to the established churches and the world. [41] Such banding together, growing, prophetic speaking, and Christ-directed living are at the heart of the Believers Church. It is the conviction that Christ’s gathered people, when illumined by the Spirit and obedient to Scripture’s meaning and mission, will be a “peculiar people,” [42] reading the Bible with a “minority hermeneutic,” [43] and by their very existence challenging the dominant culture of church and world. Often faithfulness to such a vision forces the envisioners to the outside of the intolerant establishment.

The Church of God movement (Anderson), for example, overreacted to the clear abuses in organized Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Pioneer leaders cried out against virtually all organization in the church’s life. This movement, now searching for its soul in a new time, surely was right in starting with the person and present work of God’s Spirit, but it was not entirely right in its anti-organizational focus. Gilbert Stafford now speaks helpfully of two essential dimensions of church life, the dynamic (charismatic) and the stabilizing (continuity with the whole church in the whole of its history). [44] Both are essential for church health and mission. Admittedly, form is as fragile as it is necessary for the life and work of the Spirit in this world. Often this paradox is difficult to live with. Believers Churches frequently have been, by choice and/or necessarily, “outside” minority voices.

4.  The Central Task of Ministry Today. Renewing church life, especially from the outside in, requires a clear and healthy sense of being “resident aliens” in the world. [45] Walter Brueggemann says that above all, in today’s postmodern context, the task of Christian ministry is “to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” [46] Believers must be helped to become, not another product of the general culture, but a child of the tradition of Christian faith, shaped by its memory, language, attitudes, and goals. Pastors and educational institutions of the churches carry significant responsibilities in this regard.

5. On Being a Dialogical Church of the Spirit. As Believers Churches remember their traditions and newly commit to being shaped by Christian faith and not contemporary culture (church or world), the “how” questions are inevitable. How do believers who were divinely gathered at another time avoid themselves being more of the given churches of this time (a move from prophetic “sect” to settled “denomination”)? Where is the proper balance between the “charismatic” and “institutional” dimensions of church life?

One response that is in concert with the “radical” stream of Christianity involves the picture of a dynamic fellowship of believers functioning through active and ongoing conversation. Pointing to a “convictional non-creedalism” that champions obedience without coercion, diversity without division, C. Arnold Snyder now calls for a “recovery of the Anabaptist conversations.” [47] This is what Merle Strege calls the “dialogical church” in which traditionalism, the dead faith of the living, yields to a healthy tradition, the living faith of the dead conversing constructively with the insights and challenges of today’s church. [48] William Brackney helpfully envisions for the church a “postmodernist pattern” that features “a greater application of Free Church polity, especially democratic decision making,” based on a voluntarist theology that “must inevitably lead to a reconstruction of the doctrines of the Holy Spirit. . .that gives continual new life and calls forth unexpected new directions in leadership and mission.” He focuses on lay empowerment for mission and leadership. [49]

6. Resisting Diverse Distortions. Put in vigorous terms, the Mennonite Norman Kraus describes Anabaptism as a “radical, Jesus-centered martyr movement” that aims at fundamental change in the individual and social order. [50] By contrast, the dominant “evangelicalism” today is much less critical of much of prevailing culture and too easily supportive of unbiblical individualism, social passivity, the civil government, the military, and the economic elite. These accommodations are to be resisted. On the other hand, as Ronald Sider insists, also to be resisted is the tendency in the Believers Church tradition to substitute pacifism, ethnic identity, and social justice concerns for a living relationship with Christ and even for key doctrines of historic Christianity. [51] Such a distortion is surely intolerable. The path that leads home is narrow indeed.

Best of the Ancient Calling

The ancient Believers Church calling is to be the authentic people of God in the very midst of this present world. It now is to bear a “radical” witness within a “postmodern” context. This calling’s foundation is the present reign and work of God and it is intended to yield “the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). The Spirit-community (the church) is to be an alternative to the communities and ways of the world. The challenge “does not lie primarily in the right religious words or the right structures of ministry. The proof is in the actual being and doing of the Christian life.” [52] The calling is demanding and clear. God’s time is now! Answers are not automatic. Let the Anabaptist conversations resume in earnest!