Congregational Leadership

Writing History From The "Now" Perspective

I recently spent a few days in New York City, the most populated city in the United States. What makes their population figures even more staggering is their small land mass. The City of New York is the most densely populated city in these United States with nearly nine million city dwellers. By contrast, Jacksonville, Florida is the largest city of square miles in the lower forty-eight states, but only ranks thirteenth in population with 1.3 million inhabitants. By the way, if these New York numbers make you feel your personal space is shrinking, maybe you should relocate to Sitka, Alaska where this polar town occupies 2,874 miles but a population below ten thousand!

New York has a lot of history. The Statue of Liberty, The Empire State Building, a subway system with a one hundred year history, and the New York Yankees offers a start. But we can find new history there too, that is being written: the ever-changing Times Square, Wall Street, and Ground Zero. Who can’t remember where they were when they first heard or saw that the Twin Towers had been hit by a plane?” This mix of the historical, the past and the “new” past—the places that are newly etched forever in our minds—has my attention these days.

Ours is a seeing culture, of course. We tend to discount things unseen. Learning to live comfortably in the reality of the unseen is a mark of mature faith and is characteristic of persons who often demonstrate great stability in all things. I often find myself praying, “Thank you Father for what You have done. And thank You for the things You are doing that I can see and for the things You are doing that I cannot see.” John Wesley was known to charge those early Methodists to “be sure that things eternal (unseen) are just as real as things temporary (seen).”

The subjects of past history, of current history, and of “sighting the unseen” have this reality in common: that God is at work in them all. God’s invasion of history in the Incarnate Christ is a demonstration of His valuing of history and of His determination to enter into our predicament. And He is no less involved in our present, current history. His Spirit lives within us and is at work in our lives—seen or unseen. God is always at work.

Given that premise—that God is always at work—what are the places where the work of God is seen? Can we say that the work of God is the work of the church? To what degree is the work of the church—universal and local—actually a continuation of “the acts of God in history.” There is no shortage of nay-sayers regarding the local church in North America and a subsequent criticism over the impotence of evangelicalism when compared to the growth of the Church in Third World areas.

A strong ecclesiology understands that God is at work through His Body, the church. All local congregations would do well to see how and where they could serve their community. Such expressions of the social gospel often lead to evangelistic opportunities. The Christ of God, “who came not to be served, but to serve” compels us to “make history” in our world by incarnational acts of love and service to our neighbor and to our community. William McCumber, former editor of the Herald of Holiness (now Holiness Today) once remarked, “When Sampson slept in the lap of Delilah he was shorn of his power to act for God. The church that sleeps in the lap of the world will become a contributor of its evil when it could have become a distributor of its conscience.”

Christ’s body—the church—must not act “headless” but rather act in cooperation and collaboration with Christ, the head of the church.