The Spiritual Roots of Outward Mission:

Reflecting with Barry Callen and Radical Christianity / October 1, 2001

Stephanie A. Ford, Earlham School of Religion

About the importance of radical discipleship, Barry Callen writes, “The Christian faith is not simply about knowing the truth in Christ; it also is about being transformed by that truth.” [1] And how does this transformation, this radical shift of one’s being, take place? I think we descendants of the radical reformers are good at beginning the journey of transformation. One gift I claim from my Baptist upbringing is the altar call. And while I never physically walked to the front of a church—symbolically, I knew that it represented my free and open decision to follow Jesus Christ. At the age of 13, I testified to my personal decision in baptism—an experience of youthful, but sincere consecration to be a disciple of Christ.

It is this call to radical discipleship that Professor Callen identifies as key to our heritage in the Believers Church. And while we in the various branches of that radical stream may quibble over terms such as “conversion” or “convincement,” we would nevertheless agree that Christ calls us to a transformation of heart, will, mind, and body. Voluntary pilgrims are we, dedicated to a relationship with the living Christ, rather than persuaded by creed or church structure. In the Gospel of John, Jesus call us “friends,” Quakers reminds us—yet, this is not always a comfortable friendship. It is a friendship, says Dr. Callen quoting Rodney Clapp, that is “[c]ruciform and subversive…attentive rather than manipulative, relational rather than rational, open-ended rather than calculating.” [2]

Strong words indeed, especially as we try to make our way as friends of Jesus in the troubling aftermath of September 11. Indeed, in these past weeks, we may have been tempted to manipulate the leading of the Spirit to condone retaliation out of our deep sense of fear and profound grief for those who were lost. We may also have been tempted to rush dogmatically toward our Anabaptist and Quaker testimonies of pacifism, without pausing to listen anew. Yes, we grapple with a tough friendship: Jesus, very much the radical, did not resist his own crucifixion. What does it mean to remain at the margins with Jesus at the Cross?

I am not here to try to answer these hard questions; they are the questions I am struggling daily with. However, it is clear that our outward mission as Radical Believers is on the line. Where do we find the spiritual roots to support our outward mission to our deeply troubled world?

This question relates directly to the definition of spirituality I have adopted, that being a “lived faith,” a lived relationship with God. Naturally, then, my study of spirituality leads me to the study of biography. I want to know how individuals have lived out their relationship to God, from the first century all the way into our postmodern era. Like Professor Callen, I am particularly drawn to listen to the radicals, not only to those of our own faith heritage, but also to any who have stood at the margins of church and culture with Christ. So today, I will be looking at the spirituality of three radical Christians—my hope is that by listening to them we might receive spiritual grounding for our own, very difficult outward mission today.

One of my students described her numbness of recent weeks in a paper. She wrote, “I have cried, missed my family, felt deep fear and still I live in an aura of disbelief.” She described herself staring out her window, hearing the sounds of crickets and yellow jackets, lawn mowers and car radios, but feeling dulled to the everyday music of life. The possibility for joy in relationship to God felt even farther away. Such grief is natural, I would say, even needful. But out first witness of faith, Francis of Assisi testifies, the present spiritual reality also summons us to recover a sense of holy joy.

The popular images of St. Francis, like the statues that adorn our gardens, portray a gentle, peaceful soul. But in fact, the Francis of history was hardly meek and mild. Before his conversion, he was the exuberant playboy of Assisi. Then in a dramatic gesture, the youthful Francis signed up to be a knight. But he didn’t last long on the battlefield; he was taken prisoner and returned home a changed person. His comfortable world looked different; he now saw the sharp inequities of rich and poor; and to his father’s dismay, he began reaching out to the most feared of the city, the lepers. The Church, with its wealth and status, now seemed alien to him. Stopping to pray at a broken-down chapel outside of town, Francis heard a voice calling him out into mission. It was a mission that would entail a life of poverty, itinerant preaching, and the beginnings of a simple religious community like the one shared by Jesus and His disciples. Francis lived and preached to the church from the margins. Nevertheless, though nearly blind by the time of his early death, Francis never lost a deep-founded commitment to joy.

Theologian Dorothee Soelle writes that the Italian’s ardor for joy was hardly nave. He knew hunger and cold firsthand, was beaten and ridiculed—and yet he still held fast to the ecstasy of God’s love that fills creation. Francis declared, “It is the devil’s greatest triumph when he can deprive us of the joy of the Spirit. He carries fine dust with him in little boxes and scatters it through the cracks in our conscience in order to dim the soul’s pure impulses.” [3] Of course, Francis believed in tears, in true mourning—but he ardently resisted the dullness of ongoing melancholy. At his death, he enjoined his companions to sing songs of praise to ease his pain.

This call to remain joyful today may sound like a small thing, a simplistic response to the voices of gloom and doom around us. Perhaps it sounds escapist to you. But I think it is a voice we need to hear. I find it easier to retreat into a kind of apathy, melancholy, and dullness when I look into the face of our complex, warring world. What does it mean to tend the joy of our Redeemer’s vision? To say from the margins with Francis, that Christ is indeed our source of hope and healing, that peace on earth is not some tired dream. Can we again rejoice with the Psalmist and proclaim that “God’s steadfast love endures forever, and Yahweh’s faithfulness to all generations”? [4] Francis’ prophetic voice from the margins is one that bids us forward into the eternal presence of God, a God of creative and endless possibility—who can redeem and recreate in ways we cannot conceive. No, this is hardly a nave joy that Francis calls us to remember.

The second witness whose wisdom I am seeking today is actually one from our own “radical” reformation tradition: Lucretia Coffin Mott, the nineteenth-century Quaker preacher from Philadelphia. The spiritual energy of this one life amazes me; for eighty-seven years, she worked for the abolition of slavery, for equal rights for women, for better conditions for the working poor, for the peace movement, for the separation of church and state…and well, that was just the beginning of the list. She was also keenly interested in ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. The primary source of her spiritual nourishment? The Hebrew prophets and the Sermon on the Mount. Unprogrammed Friends have often been criticized for their lack of attention to authoritative voice of Scripture, but this Hicksite Friend fed on the words of Jesus. Yet, Mott also listened intently to her world, a world of heated division on the issue of slavery. Many Friends of her day were content to let their actions speak their conviction, but Micah and Matthew nourished Mott’s confidence that slavery could no longer be excused, not only among her small sect, but in her nation. She proclaimed to Friends that they must to continue to speak Jesus words on the Sermon on the Mount to the present age, saying,

Ye have heard it was said by them of old, thou shalt treat thy slaves kindly, thou shalt prepare them for freedom at a future day; but I say unto you hold no slaves at all, proclaim liberty now throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof. [5]

There is no question that Lucretia Mott was invested in political and social change in the world, an issue debated among those of us in the Believers Church: For how do we keep our communities spirituality unified and strong if we scatter out into dialogue with that world? Certainly, there are different ways to shore up a tradition. Frankly, I have watched the Southern Baptist Convention do a lousy job of “shoring up” the Baptist tradition, as it has wandered into the alien territory of creedal statements and the denial of women’s call to pastoral ministry. Mott cautioned the Friends of her day against such easy retreat into sectarianism, saying,

Remember that the church of Christ is not our little petty society, nor any other sectarian organization. The church is composed of living members and these living members are sent forth even as Jesus was sent forth, with the glorious gospel of peace to proclaim in the earth. [6]

Is spiritual health to be gained by defining our identity against the world or by reaching out in love to the other? As well as listening to Scripture and to each other, Mott calls us to listen attentively to the world of our own day.

Now, listening is hard work. I usually pat myself on the back when it comes to listening; after all, it is a critical ingredient in my call to spiritual direction. But I have been slow to really listen to the other of our western world, who I think today are Muslims. The recent terrorism does not speak from the heart of Islam, I know, but I cannot thoughtfully explain why. It is true that I have studied World Religions, but really, I have only listened to the surface of Islam, learned enough to repeat the five pillars. True listening, as Quaker spiritual writer Patricia Loring says, requires much more humility. To really listen, she says, we face “our resistances to the reality of the other person…and how we require others to conform to our [ideologies] and ways of expression.” [7] She’s right. I have a hard time hearing a Muslim woman fully veiled describe her covering as a sign of honor before God, something she conscecrates to God in the way that I dedicated my baptism. To hear her, I must abandon my stereotypes, and hear her loving devotion to Allah. What does it mean to listen to the voice of Jesus in our day? If He were walking among us, would He not be inviting Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus to eat at His table?

The last witness I will bring to our search for spiritual roots for our outward mission is not a daughter of the Free Church. In fact, she might be seen as a champion for what the radical reformers felt most ill at ease with: creeds, priestly hierarchies, and a high liturgical view of the Eucharist. Furthermore, the Anglican spiritual writer, Evelyn Underhill, who lived from 1875-1941 in London, would not have been described as a person at the margins. She was educated, well-to-do—a woman with the luxury of donating her time to writing, retreat leadership, and spiritual direction. Evelyn Underhill was admired by Anglican church leaders, not a typically “subversive” friend for Jesus in established state church of England. But this would change. For as Underhill prayed and meditated during the 1930s on the meaning of the Cross, more and more she found herself at odds with the Church of England’s alliance with national interests. Indeed, she became a convinced pacifist. For Underhill, to follow Jesus in nonresistance and love to the Cross meant that war, even against the terrorizing menace of Hitler, was no longer an option for a Christian. Now—this position did not make her a popular figure in the Anglican Church! Of the 15, 000 who claimed pacifism in England at the beginning of World War II, almost all belonged to the Brethren, Mennonite, and Quaker communities. Underhill was now squarely at the margins of her church and country. She had on the issue of Church and State, in spirit, crossed over and joined the Believers Church.

For Underhill, Jesus’ journey to the Cross was an act of yielding to a higher way, the way of transcendent Charity. Now—Underhill freely admitted that pacifism was not the fastest way to get effective “results” in a this-worldly way. It meant facing the “apparent defeat of the Cross,” a defeat to which the Johannine Christ surrendered in hope, saying to his followers “‘be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.’” [8] The pacifist, Underhill believed, by identifying with Christ in the power of surrender, could act with spiritual confidence. Underhill came to believe that the Church had to disidentify with the military state, with any reaction of violence. It was a lonely, unpopular voice Underhill had found, a voice that put her at odds with her own faith community and nation. We can hear her lonely obedience to her faithful reading of the Gospel message in these words, written in 1940 as war raged in Europe:

The pacifist is one who has crossed over to God’s side and stands by the Cross. Thence, with the eyes of prayer, he sees all life in supernatural regard; and knows that, though our present social order may crash in the furies of a total war and the darkness of Calvary may close down on the historic scene, the one thing that matters is the faithfulness of the creature to its own fragmentary apprehensions of the law of charity and its ultimate return to the tranquility or order, which is a perfect correspondence with the steadfast Will of God. [9]

Now am I as convinced as Evelyn Underhill was about the Anabaptist and Quaker peace testimonies? Frankly, no. Remember that I am a Baptist, but not an Anabaptist.

In my heart of hearts, though, I believe I am on my way to becoming a pacifist. Unfortunately, I carry a lingering sense that some kind of this-worldly expedient response to terrorism is needed. Yet, like listening to a new believer proclaiming the truth of his or her salvation experience, I am struck upon hearing Underhill’s radical discipleship, one she committed herself to even as her small nation trembled. She was committed to the Cross over her own safety.

So what is the nourishment we find in the radical conviction of these three witnesses, one officially in the Believers Church, and two who brought the radical nature of Christian discipleship to their established Church traditions? The simple one, Francis’ call to joy, we know as we live in the wake of possible war, is not as easy as it sounds. But I believe it is a radical call to remind each other of the joyful hope of the gospel message. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Lucretia Mott reminds us to be listeners to the gospel and also to the world we live in today, to ask what would Jesus do if he walked in Galilee today? Might He meeting with Muslim mothers who have watched their beloved sons chose the martyrdom of suicide bombings? Are we able to listen attentively, hospitably to the wounds we have inflicted on our enemies? And finally, Underhill reminds us that following the call of radical discipleship takes into dangerous proximity of the Cross and Jesus’ surrender to a higher way of Love. Indeed, I find myself looking for a way to grow my roots deeper into the soil of the gospel so that I might be able to rejoice in, listen for, and wait for God’s triumph of peace.