Speed and the Gospel

For three weeks in August, my family and I explored the French countryside by train and by bike. 

After several days in Paris, we left the big city for St. Malo’s walled coastal streets in Northwestern Brittany. Arriving by train, we continued by bus through suburban roads towards the old city’s fortified walls. The remainder of our journey into town was made on foot. Weaving our way through the crowds on narrow cobbled streets, it quickly became clear that the old city was not particularly hospitable to cars. 

There were those who tried to penetrate the walls, of course. 

As we explored the city and its streets, more than a few Range Rovers nosed through the crowds. From time to time the pedestrians did let cars through, but no one was in any hurry to do so. 

St. Malo’s streets were designed in, and for another time. A time of pirates. A time without cars. With the exception of some as-yet-imagined James Bond car chase, these twelfth century streets will never experience twenty-first century speeds. Instead, these streets continue to move at the speed of relationship; of meandering feet and wandering conversation; of open-air markets and cafes that spill into the streets.

This stark contrast brought up for me vital questions about the gospel’s speed and mode of transport. 

For a brief moment in North American history, from roughly the 1920s through today, the church has sought to spread its message at the speed of so-called progress. Mimicking the dominant assumptions of our economic, political, and social systems, we have assumed that success is to be measured by perpetual growth, what economists might term dynamic stabilization. And yet this approach (an approach that demands we do more, more effectively, with fewer resources) only leads to burnout. 

But what if we approached our current struggles in a different way? What if we started to play by a different rule book?

What if we stopped trying to bring our cars into St. Malo, and started to walk the gospel road at the speed of meandering feet and wandering conversation? 

I know, I know, it all sounds a little old fashioned. And maybe it is. 

But here’s something I know. The good news, if it is more than magical thinking, can only be meaningfully embodied in context. The gospel is not a program, a curriculum, or a marketing strategy (even as we might use these tools in service of Jesus’ promise of liberation for all of Creation). 

To understand context requires time. To understand context requires relationship. In relationship we discover what others are seeking. In relationship we discover what we ourselves are seeking, too. In relationship we begin to discover what good news might look like and sound like for these people (for a particular person, perhaps even for ourselves) in this particular time and place. 

What I’m saying is that our sharing of Jesus’ liberating gospel isn’t always fast paced. We can’t always depend on the fastest, smoothest, shiniest thing to do the job for us. I love this, and I hate it at the same time.

I love it, because it reminds me that we are channels of God’s love in the world. I hate it, because it means I can’t just leave the work to somebody else. This is our work, together, and it starts with a question. This question, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s accent, sounds like this, “who is Jesus Christ for us today?” 

When Bonhoeffer asks this question, he is essentially asking “who are the crucified people of the world?” and “who are we, as a Christian community, being called to serve?” and also “how will we stand against the forces of violence and injustice that have led our society to dehumanize them?” 

Bonhoeffer began his career pursuing fast-paced academic success. His early theological work is abstract, distant, precise. And yet his life and ministry lead him to teach Sunday School at a Black Church in Harlem; to serve as youth pastor amongst disenfranchised youth in Berlin’s poorest neighbourhood; to hear stories of the global church that decenter his own privileged experience. 

And so, when Bonhoeffer seeks to answer his own troubling questions, he does so having been transformed by the God he encounters in minority and oppressed communities.

Through unlikely friendships, God reveals a world far more complex than Bonhoeffer had imagined (let alone experienced). Through relationship, his vision of who the Good News was for broadened immensely. 

That is to say, when Bonhoeffer is forced to slow down, to dwell in relationship with others, to get off the treadmill, he steps out of the safety and distance afforded by the Range Rover onto teeming cobbled streets.

It’s here–in the muck and filth of everyday life–that he is able to say that he has encountered God. These encounters, and the transformation that follows, are what allow him to say that finally, at last, he has become a Christian. 

Bonhoeffer's transformation feels like a St. Francis level epiphany.

When God calls Francis to rebuild the church, he first assumes the call is to repair brick and mortar.

When God calls Bonhoeffer to rebuild the church, he first assumes the call is to pick up his pen and write better, headier, more robust theology. Both Francis and Bonhoeffer are wrong.

While I am in no way comparing myself to these saints of the church, I love that I share an important quality with them. All too often, I get it wrong, too.

All often I forget that the gospel's power is not in acts of power, but in vulnerable, embodied, mutually transformative encounter.   

The call to participate with God in the renewal of all things may involve bricks and mortar. It may involve the construction of a theology for this time. First and foremost, God's call is to look, listen, and then respond to the God who comes to us in the form of the stranger; the God who comes to us in the form of the neighbour.

“But who is my neighbour?” a teacher once asked Jesus.

Without spoiling the ending of that particular dramatic episode in the life of our Saviour, may I humbly suggest that you start with the neighbour next door.

Be intentional. Cultivate relationship. Share in each others’ joys. Share in each others’ sorrows. Pray ceaselessly. Respond mercifully. Give graciously. Practice resurrection with wild abandon. When God comes near, bear witness to what you have seen. Bear witness to what you've heard. Bear witness to what you've experienced.

And as you do, may you discover your liberation bound up in theirs; theirs with yours; and the church’s liberation bound up with the liberation of Creation, indeed the whole cosmos, these glorious worlds and innumberable stars that God so loves.