I’ve been writing lately about what I see as the problem with the liberal/mainline/progressive church. You can read the entire series here. This post will wrap up this series and transition us into a new series to begin next week.

 

I’ve offered a lot of ideas over the past several weeks about what the church should look like. More and more I am coming to understand the role of the church to not be about personal (or even communal) piety but about being base communities that strengthen their people for resistance.

 

On the blog Koinonia Revolution, the author describes Christian Anarchism as a form of liberation theology for the oppressor class (pointing out that many Christian anarchists are white and come from privilege). I think there is some truth to his statement (even as all Christian anarchists don’t fit the white, cis, straight, male designation).

 

Understood in this way, church becomes less about form and more about function. Writing from a North American context, how are we strengthening and equipping one another to resist the dominant ideology of the nation? How are we imbuing one another with a prophetic imagination? How are we actively resisting violence, consumption, and greed?

 

But this is more than just an activist collective; this is rooted in a study of Scripture, a deep contemplation, singing, and sacrament. It’s this fusion of deep faith and radical action that makes it work and make things make sense.

 

So what does this look like in a practical way? How is it that our communities can become base communities? Over the next couple of weeks I want to begin to explore sacraments as sites of resistance. How do the rituals that we do as a community become signs of our resistance to the Empire?

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