The First Task of the Church

From Jesus Changes Everything, this week’s featured book.

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.
1 Peter 2:11–12

The social thrust of the gospel, and thus the aim of Christian social ethics, is not primarily an attempt to make the world more peaceable and just. Put starkly, the first task of the church when it comes to social ethics is to be the church. Such a claim may well sound self-serving or irrelevant until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such, the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.

The church is where the stories of Israel and Jesus are told, enacted, and heard, and as a Christian people there is literally nothing more important we can do. But the telling of that story requires that we be a par­ticular kind of people, if we and the world are to hear the story truthfully.

This means that the church must never cease from being a community of peace and truth in a world of mendacity and fear. The church does not let the world set her agenda about what constitutes a viable social ethic; the church sets her own agenda. She does this first by having the patience amid the injustice and violence of this world to care for the widow, the poor, and the orphan. Such care, from the world’s perspective, may seem to contribute little to the cause of justice, yet unless we take the time for such care, neither we nor the world can know what God’s justice looks like.

The scandal of the disunity of the church is even more painful when we recognize this social task. For we who have been called to be the foretaste of the peaceable kingdom cannot, it seems, maintain peace among ourselves. As a result, we abandon the world to its own devices. And the divisions in the church are not just those based on doctrine, history, or practices, important though these are. No, the deepest and most painful divi­sions afflicting the church are those based on class, race, and nationality that we have sinfully accepted as written into the nature of things.

Daniel Bonnell, Pondering Angels on the Road to Emmaus, oil on canvas, 2024. Used by permission.

Again, the first social task of the church – the people capable of remembering and telling the story of God we find in Jesus – is to be the church and thus help the world understand itself as the world. The world, to be sure, is God’s world, God’s good creation, which is all the more distorted by sin because it is still bounded by God’s goodness. The church, therefore, is not anti-world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is meant to be as God’s good creation.

The world needs the church, but not to help it run more smoothly or make it a better and safer place for Christians to live. Rather, the world needs the church because without the church the world does not know what it is nor who God is. The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something that is an alternative to what the world offers.

Without such a “contrast model” the world has no way to know and feel the oddness of its dependence on power for survival. Because there exists a com­munity formed by the story of Christ, the world can know what it means to be a society committed to the growth of individual gifts and differences, where the otherness of the other can be welcomed as a gift rather than a threat.

A striking fact about the church is that the story of Jesus provides the basis to break down arbitrary and false barriers between people. This story teaches us to regard the other as a fellow member of God’s kingdom. Such regard is not based on facile doctrines of tolerance or equality, but is forged from our common experience of being trained to be disciples of Jesus. The universality of the church is based on the particularity of Jesus’ story and on the fact that his story trains us to see one another as God’s people. Because we have been so trained, we are able to see and condemn the narrow loyalties that divide us from one another.

Like the early Christians, we must learn that under­standing Jesus’ life is inseparable from learning how to live our own. That means being the kind of people who can bear the burden of Jesus’ story with joy. We, no less than the first Christians, are the continuation of the truth made possible by God’s rule. We continue this truth when we see that the struggle of each to be faithful to the gospel is essential to our own lives. I understand my own story through seeing the different ways in which others are called to be his disciples. If we so help one another, perhaps, like the early Christians when chal­lenged about the viability of their faith, we can say, “But see how we love one another.”

The church provides the space and time necessary for developing skills of interpretation and discrimination sufficient to help us recognize the possibilities and limits of our society. In developing such skills, the church and Christians must be uninvolved in the politics of society and involved in the polity that is the church. The challenge of Christian social ethics in our secular polity is no different than in any time or place – it is always the Christian social task to form a society that is built on truth rather than fear.

So our response to an issue like abortion is something communal, social, and political, but utterly ecclesial – something like baptism. Whenever a person is baptized, the church adopts that person into a new family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-year-old, “Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.” Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be.

More importantly, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church, to honestly examine our own convictions and see whether or not we are living true to those convictions. She is seen by us not as some pressing social problem to be solved in such a way as to relieve our own responsibility for her and the necessity of our sacrificing on her behalf (for our story teaches us to seek such responsibility and sacrifice, not to avoid it through governmental aid). Rather, we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people like us to discover the church as the body of Christ.

The most interesting, creative political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to policymakers, or increased funding for social programs – although we may support such efforts from time to time. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is to be the church. Here we show the world a manner of life that it can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.