04.02.09
Anabaptist future II.. Conversion
In the first post I considered how the church in modernity abstracted itself from “place,” abandoning its effectiveness by disconnecting from physical neighborhoods. I considered our call to relearn place through the lens of the Benedictine vows, noting that one of the founders of Anabaptism, Michael Sattler, began his journey as a Benedictine monk. Today we look at the second of the vows: conversion.
What does it mean to repent? The word in the Scripture is metanoia, and it signifies a turning in both mind and heart. Conversion starts on the inside and works its way out.
The word signifies a process more than an event. It means to keep on turning, to be renewed in our minds, to allow the light of God to expose new layers of our lives requiring a new surrender day by day.
When our own inner lives are exposed to the light we learn about the false self. That enables us to see it in others. When we live this way we can invite others along on the same journey. There is no “us†and “them†as if we have achieved something. We identify with the broken because we are broken.
It is to Christ we are converted but not to Christ alone. “The church is the dating service – sometimes she thinks she is the date.†Richard Rohr hits the nail on the head but at the same time, conversion includes a communal element: when we repent of our sin and selfish ways we join a people on a journey toward wholeness, toward shalom. In Hebrew repentance is signified by the word shuv.
Shuv has a storied history – it pictures Israel returning from Babylon to be God’s holy people in the land of Promise. God gave to Israel the law – a code for living together as a political entity. So conversion begins with our personal orientation to God, but it doesn’t stop there. It expresses a new polis in an alternate community under an alternate Lord. It embraces all of life, and in particular life in community.
What does this mean for life together with marginalized and homeless people?
It means that no one of us has arrived. We journey together to a land we have not seen. It means that together we learn new ways of being, ways that exclude no one. We build a new home together – a third culture and a third space that shows an alternate way of living in peace and friendship. As Stanley Evans wrote, (1962)
“There is only one way in which the church in the back streets can proclaim the Gospel effectively, and that is by action. The great mass of people have a very shrewd idea of what Christianity professes; but they have an equally shrewd idea that the practice of the Church in no way corresponds to these professions.â€
