Reconciliation as the Mission of God (an excerpt) 1.

This is an excerpt from Lausanne Occasional Paper 51:  Reconciliation as the Mission of God which was published in connection with the 2004 Forum on World Evangelization.

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [the Son], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20) 

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: The old has gone, the new has come!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:17-20a) 

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20a) 

“But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  (Matthew 5:44-45)

“For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:27-28)

The Vision of Reconciliation

The mission of God in our fallen, broken world is reconciliation.  Sacred Scripture witnesses that God’s mission of reconciliation is holistic, including relationships with God, self, others, and creation.  This mission has never changed from the Fall to the new creation in Christ, to its fulfilment in the coming of Jesus in the eschaton.  God’s reconciling mission involves the very in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, as realized through Jesus’ incarnation, His life and ministry and preaching, and through His death and resurrection.

God’s initiative of reconciliation through Christ transforms believers into God’s new creation.  With all of creation, we await our final and perfect transformation in the end of time.  At that time, when Jesus returns, God’s mission will be complete.  People of every nation, tribe, and language, gathered as one, will worship the Lamb, the tree of life and its leaves shall be for the healing of the nations, and the new heavens and earth shall make the reign of God a reality with all things reconciled to God (Romans 8:18-39, Revelation 7:9-17; 21-22:5).

Reconciliation is God’s initiative, restoring a broken world to God’s intentions by reconciling “to himself all things” through Christ (Colossians 1:19) including the relationship between people and God, between people and with God’s created earth.  Christians participate with God’s mission by being transformed into ambassadors of reconciliation.

In response to all this, the believer is called to participate in God’s mission of reconciliation.  This includes obeying Jesus’ command to humbly make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18-20), teaching them to follow the example of Jesus who suffered for a suffering world.  The church is called to be a living sign of the one body of Christ, an agent of hope and holistic reconciliation in our broken and fragmented world.  

A serious impediment to God’s mission of reconciliation in our time is not only the reality of destructive divisions and conflicts around the world, but quite often the church being caught up in these conflicts — places where the blood of ethnicity, tribe, racialism, sexism, caste, social class, or nationalism seems to flow stronger than the waters of baptism and our confession of Christ.   

While the church’s suffering faith is evident in many conflicts, the guilt of Christians in intensifying the world’s brokenness is seriously damaging our witness to the gospel.  The church’s captivity is both direct and indirect, whether actively furthering destruction and division, remaining silent or neutral in the face of it, or promoting a defective gospel.  This is true of recent and current contexts including legalized apartheid (South Africa), “ethnic cleansing” (the Balkans), genocide (Rwanda), histories of racism and ethnocentrism (USA), terror and killing of civilian populations and bitter, unresolved social divisions (ranging from “sectarianism” in Northern Ireland, to Dalit “untouchables” and caste in India, to the plight of Aboriginal peoples in Australia, to the Korean peninsula, to Palestinians and Israelis).  Christians are often bitterly divided on both sides.  

This troubled situation calls for prayer, discernment, and repentance, and a critical reexamination of the very meaning of mission, evangelism, discipleship and even church in relation to God’s reconciling mission.  This is particularly urgent given cases where vast areas of revivals and church planting have become vast killing fields (such as Rwanda 1994), with Christians slaughtering neighbours and even other Christians.

Yet even in the worst conflicts, signs of the quest for reconciliation can be detected in the church.  Christians have shaped many of the world’s most hopeful breakthroughs for reconciliation.  In becoming agents of biblically holistic reconciliation, we must learn to name and confess the sins of the past and present and encourage others to do the same, be willing to forgive, and live in new ways of repentance and costly peacemaking.  Above all, Christians must be people of hope; hope in God’s victory in Christ and that, over time, reconciliation can break in, because this is God’s mission.

The Context of Reconciliation

The Social and Historical Context of Conflict

God created humanity in God’s image, for natural union and wholeness of life with God, one another, and God’s material creation.  The Fall shattered this union, resulting in the estrangement seen in Cain’s murder of Abel.  While destructive conflict is rooted in this rupture, it cannot be explained solely in terms of wicked human hearts.  Powerful historical and social forces, unjust systems, and “spiritual forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:12) are also part of the world’s brokenness.  The transmission of the gospel and the ministry of the church do not run in a pure, separate historical stream, but are carried on inside of and tainted by the world’s poisoned, muddy histories.  All the agents of brokenness must be discerned and confronted—personal, social, and spiritual.

In our shrinking and increasingly pluralistic and globalized world, manifestations of social division are intensifying.  Destructive conflicts crying out for reconciliation include both open conflict and “quieter” conditions of persistent injustice, division, and separation.  Four interrelated dimensions of historical social conflicts must be engaged: the past and its trauma; how that past is named and remembered; how the present is described and engaged; and how the future is imagined.    

In terms of the past and its trauma, destructive social conflicts and realities do not drop like meteors from the sky.  Behind each trauma are infective histories, particular social, economic, spiritual, institutional and political factors and powers, and the reality that the oppressed of yesterday often become the new oppressors, repeating cycles of destruction.[2]  Reconciliation is not forgetting the past.  Yet naming and remembering the past well is difficult.  Sharing a history in every social division are offenders and offended, passive bystanders and active peacemakers, with lines between them rarely agreed upon and alienated groups and the Christians within them holding tightly to conflicting versions of truth.  In response to God’s love and justice, however, Christians are called to fearlessly seek and name the truth of what has happened, guided by repentance and forgiveness.  This must involve seeking shared truth across divided lines.  Deformed ways of remembering the past include denial, social amnesia, a spirit of unforgiveness and uncritical affirmation of one’s own group and its history.   

In the present where we live, haunted memories, the unresolved past, and continuing trauma have a cumulative effect.  These forces can so pervade a culture, a people, that they are passed on from generation to generation — perpetuating distrust, fear, bitterness, exclusion, retribution, and the politics and economics which often exploits these realities.  Persistent unjust balances of societal power are also a consequence of the unresolved past and present.  In the face of all this, divided groups easily resign themselves to separate and alienated communities, jostling for power.  If militarism enters as an option of providing some with personal security while neglecting human security for all, conflicts rise to devastating levels.   

Against these forces of the past and present, alienated groups cannot even imagine a future of friendship, solidarity or common life.  Instead, they accept and live with permanent categories of another group as aliens, strangers or enemies: “black” and “white;” Hutu and Tutsi; clean and “untouchable;” South and North Korean; and “terrorist” and “terrorized.”  Fragmentation becomes normal, acceptable and even inevitable.   

The Church & Mission Context

When Christians are passive bystanders and refuse to become constructive agents of reconciliation amidst such divisions and destructive conflicts, we are guilty of withholding love to a neighbour, the love of God is not manifested in our lives, and we give life to a defective gospel.

Numerous ideologies of escape steer Christians away from reconciliation and must be named and rejected by the church.  These include:  

• Dualistic theologies which are silent about social problems, name enemies as solely non-human evil spirits, preach the sufficiency of individual salvation without social transformation, or the sufficiency of social involvement without personal conversion in Christ;
• Ethnocentrism, racialism, sexism or nationalism that promote the fallacy of any ethnic, cultural, gender or national group’s self-sufficiency, and promote loyalty to and the self-interest of one’s group as an end in itself. Ultimate loyalty is intended for Jesus alone, who calls us to love our neighbour as well as our enemies, and not only “our own”;
• A false belief in God’s creation of essentially different people groups, justifying permanent boundaries between them. This includes the Hamitic ideology, that teaches that God has cursed the descendents of Ham, Noah’s son, creating separate orders of peoples—some inferior and some superior.  This is a heresy.  Rooted in this ideology was racial segregation in the USA, apartheid in South Africa and genocide in Rwanda, which many Christians supported, along with believing in their underlying ideology;
• A spirit of individualism seen in Christian disunity, competitiveness, or deplorable schisms and splits which infect many denominations, churches, Christian institutions and ministries. This disunity and egoism blinds our ability to discern the world’s need for reconciliation and seriously harms the church’s ministry;
• Adopting numbers of conversions or church plants as a primary measure of Christianity’s growth, allowing churches or ministries to grow with superficial discipleship, homogeneously, or in ways that perpetuate histories and systems of separation and alienation. This tacit approval of permanent boundaries and segregated lives limited to ”people like us” falsely blesses the chasm between alienated groups and disables our ability to be self-critical;[3]
• An underlying message of cheap grace that encourages shallow resolutions, a superficial discipleship powerless to engage social pain, and reconciliation without repentance. A biblical theology of the cross and suffering is needed to renew the church’s thinking and life.

Against these ideologies of escape, the church must formulate theological alternatives that encourage authentic reconciliation.

Regarding other situations, when sweeping revivals and rapid church growth occur, Christians must restrain from triumphalism.  In too many cases, Christians have been implicated in destructive conflict which has overtaken vast areas of revival and church planting.  The church has failed to be self-critical or discerning enough, or to adequately answer “How did this happen, and where did Christians fail?”

In addition, Christians cannot be neutral in a time of social crisis.  Too often we are silent about destructive conditions occurring around us, or in our world.  Any dichotomy between the evangelistic and the prophetic is false.  Along with leading believers into personal holiness, the church is charged to have a prophetic social presence.  The church must learn to speak the truth to powers.  This calls us to “discern the will of God” concerning societal powers and governing authorities that have immense influence over the lives of Christians, over our nonChristian neighbours and over destructive conflicts and societal realities.   

The capacity to be a prophetic church is being seriously eroded by three stances.  A religious pluralist stance promotes social transformation without personal conversion, losing the uniqueness and lordship of Christ.  A quietist stance ignores social evil, is silent when people suffer persecution, and preaches the sufficiency of individual salvation without social transformation, losing public social witness.  An assimilationist stance misuses the Bible to support the status quo of social or political exclusion, or weds Christian interests with particular governing authorities, losing all prophetic distance. 

In addition, the church often shares in the sin of comfortable neutrality, the complacency of those who find themselves on the side of social privilege and fail to work vigorously to transform the status quo.  This is at least true of those who tend to preside over the levers of theological power and influence.  Thus the theology of the church is often in support of the status quo, or asks very few critical questions, losing all prophetic voice and domesticating the gospel.

Yet God’s forgiveness in Christ makes possible the church’s faithful confrontation of past and present trauma and injustices.  As communities of Christians learn to model confession, forgiveness and costly peacemaking in lives marked by joy, we proclaim a new future and offer a vision of hope to a broken world.