Stephen McAlpine writes:

Australia Is Coming Apart: The Church Can Point a Way Forward.

This past Sunday at church I watched as an elderly man – a long time member – walked into church and went to the front row. I won’t name him, but it would be fair to say that life has not been easy for him. He’s had his fair share of struggles. He’s generally not someone who is going to be in the photographs on the front page of your church’s website. Okay, switch out the word “generally” in that last sentence and that’s probably more accurate.

Afterwards over coffee we all had the usual chatting and talking and encouraging, and he too was in that mix. Eventually everyone packs up and we all leave (Jill and I always seem to be there until they turn out the lights – one of us is a chatterbox, but who can tell which one!)

But as this bloke said hello to a few people, raised a hand in greeting, and as a couple of people responded before he sat down just before having to stand up again as we began to sing, it struck me once again what a magnificent thing the church is.  Where else?

Where else is there such a levelling of people. Or indeed such a raising up? I have not seen it anywhere else.  It does not exist anywhere else. Indeed our rector over coffee a day or so later was observing that in the other communities to which he belongs – those outside the people of faith – there is much talk about togetherness and community. Many ideas about fairness and equality. But talk and ideas are not the same as tangible proof.

Where else? It simply does not exist. Not in the long term.  And I’ve seen this over and over again. I recall one complex character, loveable, smart, loud and pretty broken, and who could use up a lot of your time (and did when life got bad). A parishioner said to me

I am going to treat him in such a way that in the New Creation I won’t look back in shame or embarrassment at how I acted towards him.

Naturally we baulk at that because we think that we are more noble than that. We think that we are more innately good than that. We think that others might behave poorly towards such a person, but not I. Not magnanimous I!

Piffle. You are not magnanimous. You just are not.

Humans are tribal, self-selecting in their relationships, mistrustful of anyone not like them enough, and determined to be the birds who stick together with those whose feathers they recognise as their own.

It is only the gospel of Jesus, nay, Jesus himself who both compels and empowers us to be any different.  When James writes to Christ followers – mostly Jewish converts – he leans into our inability in our own flesh to be welcoming to the stranger. And by stranger I don’t mean someone we don’t know, I mean someone we don’t want to know. Someone who might be a risk to our time and attention and energy.

You see, people who are like us, share our values, our social status, our educational standards etc, they are not strangers to us, even if they come into church new. Yes of course we don’t know them, but we’re pretty quick to change that. We lean into them.

Other types? Not so much. We lean away.

That’s why James has to say this:

My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in,and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?

We recognise that in ourselves don’t we? But notice that James’ first call is not to lean into the humility of Jesus as a reason to show no partiality, but rather the glory. And the fact that he has to state this so clearly in the very first generation of the church, demonstrates that it is counter intuitive.

James then goes on to say that the strangeness of God – certainly strangeness in terms of the gods of the Roman Empire of their day – is that he chooses the very things that the culture despises. And that the culture assumes that the gods would despise:

Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?

In this one verse James flips the script and shows that God is the role reverser.  And that has always been the case when salvation is on the table.  It was the case for Hannah prior to the birth of Samuel when she prays:

The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
    he brings low and he exalts.
He raises up the poor from the dust;
    he lifts the needy from the ash heap
to make them sit with princes
    and inherit a seat of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord‘s,
    and on them he has set the world.

Words that are echoed in the Magnificat centuries later by Mary.  And note that last verse, it is because God is in control that such reversals occur. This is not saying that God cares for the weak because he is weak, but precisely because he is strong. He rescues the poor because he is rich. The one who has no need lifts up the needy.

You can imagine receiving James’ letter. You can imagine being a small, insignificant group of people, on the fringes of the culture, both as Jewish people and as Jewish people who have decided that Jesus is Messiah. Yet you cannot imagine that that role reversal, that script flipping, would become the very power that swept away the Roman idea of power (or at least put a hand up to stay it over the centuries).

Four months ago I wrote a blog post called Australia Is Coming Apart. In it I said this:

if Australia – and indeed the West – is to avoid the devastation of coming apart, we will need some priests of history, as Associate Professor at Australian Catholic University, Sarah Irving Stonebraker, puts it. If anyone has a remit to hand on the baton of the truth, to rightly divide the word of truth, and to speak truth to a fractured and fractious world in which competing visions of reality are tearing us apart, then the church certainly has that remit.

I was promptly poo-pooed by another Christian leader online about the idea that we are coming apart as a nation, who said it’s still great place to live. Sure, by certain indices in certain places it is. Ironically, the offline conversation that ensued led to a social media unfriending. We came apart.

Even more ironically the next day Charlie Kirk was murdered, which exposed huge faultiness in belief and values not just across Australians, but within the church.. And not three months later the Bondi massacre. The division, unrest and indeed the hatred is only going to increase.

There was a short show of unity before it all came crumbling down again. We are not going to “Kumbaya ourselves out of this one, don’t kid yourself that we are.

And we’ve all got something to say. We are all cultural and geo-political experts suddenly. We all have a view of Venezuela even though we don’t know any Venezuelans and couldn’t point it out on a map, and have no clue why their oil is different to the oil that the Saudis have. Yet we all have something to say.

I don’t want us all to turn inwards. There is work to be done socially and politically. I don’t want evangelicals to retreat to quietism, much less only focus on church.

I don’t think we’ve been given a mandate to do that. I think we’ve been given a mandate to both preach the gospel AND to shape the world for good in the public square through our gifts, talents and experiences even in the culture’s fallen state. I also think my own tribe in Australia the past thirty years hasn’t been at the forefront of that public task and is playing catch up.

Yet at the same time, I return to that scene I saw on Sunday morning at church and I think “Wow! Where else?” Yet at the same time I lament as I experience – and listen to – a disturbing number of relational schisms, outright ungodly behaviour and frantic attempts to cover it us, among our self-declared theological finest.

If the events of the past three to four months have disturbed us, then you can imagine how disturbing they are to those without hope and without God in the world. The cultural, political and social spasms of the past couple of years is exactly why we are seeing the Quiet Revival. It’s exactly why we are seeing “full fat faith” among previously secular young people.

How should we prepare for such eventualities? Tidy up our church grounds? Get our “Ms” in place? Ensure we have our staff teams and vision sorted? Sure, why not. But perhaps a cursory read of the Book of James might be a place to start. And then to ask ourselves, how are we going to flip the increasing crazy and disturbing cultural, political and social script we are witnessing today?

How are we bringing people together at the very time that society is pushing them apart.