Thanks, Larry:

And thank-you, com7fy8! Not only do you give us a positive message and agenda, but you offer a vision of the world in which God’s providence is active everywhere. This makes it possible for us to live as God’s people in the world. This recognition that God’s work with leaders and people groups shows that salvation is concerned with far more than the ‘individual.’

God works with whole communities of people. Matthew’s version of the great commission comes as a command to go to and to baptize nations of people. The word, ‘nations’ is ‘ethnos,’ or what we would call ‘people groups.’ That actually continues the OT tradition in which the prophets proclaimed judgment and salvation for cities and nations.

It is because we have forgotten what God is doing in the world, and the nature of God’s work among us, that we become easy prey for any and all ideologies offering alternative (read heretical) ways to envision the nature of the world, and therefore the believer’s place in the world. Very often, this attack comes as patriotic idolatry. And we fall for it!

Every time!

Especially in America, the church is divided. Churches are separated, and have forgotten their identity and vocation as a holy nation. As a result, the witness of the church is inept, compromised and profoundly confused. It has no sense of what it means to be a society under God, or a community of reconciliation. It is unready to confront the powers.

We must recover that sense of the community of God in order to show the world what it means to live in the City of Salvation rather than in the city of death. To that end, your recognition of God’s work among peoples in community with one another, and with their leaders, is truly refreshing. So let us covenant to strengthen our common life in Christ.

Public Blasphemy