COMMENTARY: The Church on the Margins

c. 2003 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.) NORTH CONWAY, N.H. _ “What do you think a `church on the margins’ would look like?” asks a pastor after my second talk at a clergy/spouse retreat in the White […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

NORTH CONWAY, N.H. _ “What do you think a `church on the margins’ would look like?” asks a pastor after my second talk at a clergy/spouse retreat in the White Mountains.


Clergy are rarely consulted on public policy nowadays, except as window dressing for opinion-shapers. Election-year “prayer breakfasts” are photo ops for politicians, not occasions for probing the mind of God. Calls for “faith-based” social services seemed more a pandering for votes than a sign of genuine faith-driven compassion.

Conservative evangelicals are in fashion nowadays, thanks to burgeoning membership lists available for vote-scouring, but they will find their spotlight brief. They already overreach, as religious leaders usually do in the political realm. Their mega-pastors, like Roman prelates and Presbyterian preachers before them, will discover they are tools for the powerful, and the tool must conform to the hand that wields it, or it will be discarded.

Older towns assumed that churches and synagogues would occupy important real estate, as a moral beacon. But newer communities are centered on commerce, not steeples. Church festivals no longer shape public life. Some cities no longer stop traffic for funeral processions. Except possibly in the South, church volunteering adds little to one’s resume.

Rather than view life “on the margins” as a sign of decline, we should know that the margins are where we should have been all along. For that is where Jesus served, and two millennia of efforts to occupy center stage, to be kingmakers and princes, yielded more warfare than peace, more arrogance than tolerance.

As conservative evangelicals are demonstrating now in their brief turn on stage, Christians tend to turn mean and ugly when we are given the reins. Our tendency toward absolutes and certainty renders us unfit for worldly power. We, too, will say anything in pursuit of wealth.

So, asks a pastor, what would a “church on the margins” look like?

It would be noisy and chaotic. It would be servant, not master. It would embrace all kinds and offer bread to any uplifted hand. It would love the unlovable and learn from the weak. It would listen to cries of pain and share God’s outrage when one person imposes suffering on another. It would be “radical,” as Jesus was radical, namely, getting to the root of things and not being swayed by the superficial.

A church on the margins would be poor in coin but rich in compassion. It would see oppression at every level, including the tendency of worldly power to oppress even those who think themselves masters. It would dare to question and to disturb, knowing that good news always stands in contrast to bad news.


A church on the margins would look beyond its own prejudices and categories, its own doctrines and certainties, and would try to hear God’s fresh word for a confusing dawn. It would reexamine everything _ and I mean everything _ in its hunger to see the face of Jesus. For our one foundation is nothing we or our ancestors ever built.

A church on the margins would be a circle of friends _ a disorderly circle, and an odd assortment of friends. It would be grounded in listening, not oratory; in discovery, not catechism; in catching the tunes of human hearts, not arguing over appropriate music. It would set aside all privilege, even the traditional prerogatives awarded to clergy.

All voices would be valued, even those whom the world has dismissed as irrelevant, untutored, sinful and worthless. All questions would be honored, all yearnings taken seriously. Not only would the wolf lie down with the lamb, but the lawyer would listen to the bricklayer, the scholar would learn from the homeless, the hyper-moral would tend to the fallen and accept care in return, and the world’s carefully cultivated tastes and barriers would crumble to dust.

Then, and only then, would we be doing what Jesus did. Then would we know what happens when servants of God dare to shine light on the margins. Then would the darkness fight back, not co-opting us for photo-op prayers, but tasting its own uncleanness and resenting our honesty.

Then would we be in trouble _ but what glorious trouble to be in!

DEA END EHRICH

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