Beyond tolerance to compassion: that is the Church's greatest strength

books:


	• The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today Charles Marsh Basic Books, 2006 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
	for more information click here

Beyond tolerance to compassion: that is the Church's greatest strength

We talk tolerance, as well we should, but in the church we believe in compassion - in suffering alongside the hurting - something much bigger than tolerance. We talk acceptance of those who are different, but in the Bible's record of the early church, we see not acceptance, but people becoming family with one another. Becoming a beloved community is far more difficult - and therefore more miraculous - than mere equality under law.

On a more hopeful note, beloved community never died, even as the Civil Rights movement lost steam, fragmented and lost many its leaders to murder. The story of Christians pressing onward and upward toward justice in the here and now, starting with Martin Luther King, and continuing today is the subject of Beloved Community, Charles Marsh's new book. It ought to be required reading for all Christian activists: there is a distinct pattern to success and failure in the Christian pursuit of beloved community, and Marsh dissects it all.

All this is far more important than coalition politics, because beloved community is a subset of the church - a community created by God and sent into the world. Christian activism is thus a different critter altogether than many other social reform movements, liberal or conservative, with whom the Christians in question may agree or disagree. Ultimately, this is God's story. God's overarching mission in the world is to create a kingdom for himself, and populated with people who have been rescued from their own sin, and reshaped into a distinct community. The Greek word for church - ekklesia - literally means "called out" from the rest of society. Beloved community is just a fancy way of saying "Church as it out to be."

From the collapse of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Community, through Francis Schaeffer's L'Abri fellowships, to several of today's spiritual and community leaders, Marsh's book is a message of hope for Christians: Beloved Community is alive!

for more information click here

Speaking to his supporters at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that their common goal was not simply the end of segregation as an institution. Rather, "the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community." King's words reflect the strong religious convictions that motivated the civil rights movement in the South in its early days. Standing courageously on the Judeo-Christian foundations of their moral commitments, civil rights leaders sought to transform the social and political realities of twentieth-century America. In The Beloved Community, Charles Marsh shows that the same spiritual vision that animated the civil rights movement remains a vital source of moral energy today. The Beloved Community lays out an exuberant new vision for progressive Christianity and reclaims the centrality of faith in the quest for social justice and authentic community.

for more information click here