“Bound up with the World”

Appendix III

“Bound up with the World”

By Patricia McGarth

Traveling Secretary, ASCM

Underlying all the work of the Nasrapur meetings of the WSCF General Committee, was the conviction that Christians, singly and in communities, are called to live in the world, to make their witness in the very midst of the beauty and terror, the boredom and the mystery of the day to day life of men and women. This immediately posed the dilemma-how is a Christian or a group of Christians to maintain his relationship with Everyman and yet not be conformed to the standards of Everyman? Or, to be rather more realistic, how is a Christian or a group of Christians to escape his present imprisonment within those standards and yet not cut himself from those to whom he must witness. Paul recognized the dilemma at the outset of his Christian life; long after, he told Agrippa that Christ, on the Damascus road, had said, "I have appeared unto thee... delivering thee from the peoples and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee." And Jesus, in the last hours before his arrest, prayed for his disciples. "I pray not that thou should take them, out of the world, but that thou should keep them from the evil". He recognized so clearly the double temptation that would always beset his followers. We have been inclined to turn a blind eye, to become a comfortable enclave within society, and there to let jealousy, greed, laziness, thoughtlessness, selfish ambition destroy us, even as they destroy the "world" from which we have tried to Withdraw. So Visser't Hooft spoke to us of the fact that our churches are today shot through with worldliness and called on us, as church Embers, to accept the grace of God which alone is sufficient if we re to wm free from this worldliness and to accept our responsibility under God to speak a word of hope and of judgment and of love within the world in which we have been placed.

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From The Australian Intercollegian, June, 1953

Delegates coming out of very different situations all helped to make clear to us that involvement in the world is not an option for the Christian. It is a fact; and he may choose to act responsibly or irresponsibly in the face of that fact. This is true whether he lives on the razor-edge that is life in Eastern Europe, in the midst of the conflicting forces that threaten to tear India apart, in the welter of superstition, ignorance and oppression that is so much of Latin America or in the world of hate and fear through which Africans struggle to attain human dignity. It is equally true for those of us from Europe and North America and Australia where the technological revolution has left us without roots, without standards, without hope. What is true of the world at large is also true of the student world. The student is subject to social and political pressures, to all the strains of living and as well to the strains peculiar to his calling as a student. Wherever we are, we have to accept the fact that we are involved in this world, and to speak a word from within it.

"Church" and "World"

Although each of the Commissions faced the question of the relationship between the Christian community and the world at large, this was particularly the concern of the Commission, which produced the report on "The Christian Mission and our Citizenship in the World". Its useful attempt to define the "Church" and "World" opens up the whole enormous field of "mission" and I quote it as a basis for further thinking: "The church is that part of humanity which is in the act of recognizing the Lordship of Christ and which is integrated into the Body of which He is the Head. This part of humanity, through its contact with the living world and its share in the sacramental life of the Body, is daily renewed so as to live by the spirit, in love as the world ought to live.

"The World is humanity as persons in their relations to one another, both within and outside the congregation of the faithful-Persons loving and hating one another, at work and play, in marriage, in social institutions and in political structures, thus belong to the world. These relations and structures and the human life in thel11 receive their true significance from the Christ to whom the Church witnesses as Lord of all things. Membership in the Church enable the Christian to live "worldly" in a positively Christian sense (that is, "new worldly") and to share God's love in which He reconciled the word unto himself."

This helped us to get beyond the geographic approach to "mission" and to put content into the idea of its being the witness of the a/hole Church to the whole world. At Tambaram, Peter Kreysigg had started us along this line when he examined with us the world we are to evangelize, and distinguished within it four "mandates" which together bring the whole of human life under the sovereignty of God - the four mandates being the Church, Power or the State, Marriage and the Family, and Work. God's purpose is not that any one of those mandates should absorb the others, but that within each of them men should discover right relationships and right patterns of conduct. Now man, wherever he is, faces the problem of finding a satisfying pattern in each of these areas of his life, and the problem of integrating these patterns into wholeness.

Temptation and Task

The Church as institution has to resist the temptation to provide a ready-made "wholeness" centered in it - it succumbs to this temptation when it allows a multiplicity of meeting and activities to draw its members away from those other groups with whom they must establish creative relationships; or when it presumes to provide ready-made patterns for living within those groups. At the same time, the Church has to resist the ceaseless encroachment of the "world", to refuse the invitation to provide the moral flavor for the thoroughly secular pudding. It cannot be content with a pattern of external observance superimposed on a world turned away from Christ's lordship over all that is. The way of that witness is the way of suffering-love and concern for men in the whole of their lives. Without that, the witness is unintelligible, for it is only so that men, singly and in groups, begin to understand the redemption won for them by Christ on the Cross. The way in which this concern is expressed varies with time and place; but for the people of the Indian village as of the English mill town, for those of the farming community as for those of the University College, the love of God has to be given tangible expression. That only happens when Christians allow all that they have of imagination, sensitivity, intellectual toughness d physical energy to be channels through which God's love reaches men. It is not so much a matter of blueprints as of a spontaneous reaction to human need; nor is it so much a matter of creating new structures, as of revealing and strengthening the good is in existing structures.

“The devil is always the angel fallen”, said M.M. Thomas in an

address during the General Committee. Again, "The Church has allowed legitimate human aspirations to become the servants of Hell". Too often, the Church, and we who are its members, are content to decry the devil whom we see, instead of seeking to discover the original good now become proud. Fear of the unforeseeable, and desire to retain the familiar, hold us back from what ought to be an adventuring with Christ in the twin realms of thought and action. It is not wrong of men to desire a reasonable share of material goods and neither of responsibility nor is to use the political machine in order to attain those ends neither it wrong for men to wish to push scientific exploration to its utmost. If Christians behave as though these things are wrong or are so faithless as to believe these things a threat to God's sovereignty, then the men and women involved in these areas of thought and action turn away from God - believing that they have seen Him mirrored in these Christians ~ and become prey to impersonal and depersonalizing ideas and ideals. There is an urgent need for the church in our day to confess its timidity and lack of faith, and to speak again to the world of democracy saved from utopianism, of science saved from scientific humanism, of the social revolution saved from Stalinism. These are the points at which people are creating or accepting patterns and relationships; it is at these points that the Church has its opportunity of recalling men to creative relations with one another under God. In place of the pride that destroys, there is a need for contrition, which opens the way to new life. We cannot make a community - it is a gift to men who come together in penitence before the Cross-, and receive there the forgiveness of God. It is the Church's part forever to be calling men and women into this situation, bringing them face to face with Jesus Christ and, in its own life, helping them to understand that He goes with them through all that makes up their days and years.

A fundamental Personal Encounter

For the fact of the matter is that Christianity is not first a matter of creeds and codes, but of a spontaneous relationship with a person. Wherever the Church is oppressed, we see this in sharp relief. Where that are no longer precedents and familiar patterns, men and women do live in daily obedience, forced back to the bedrock of faith affirming nothing but the presence of Christ living and active in the situation. Where the real issues are less dramatic, they are nonetheless real, and the fact of this personal initiative and response is the

basis of the church's message. It is the message for the students in a University, as it is the message for any other group of people in any other setting. The Commission, which worked on “Our Pastoral Needs as Students”, stated it in contemporary language: "A major pastoral need is focused around the word 'integration'. The first thing that has to be recognized is that integration is not an end to be striven after, but a consequence. The centre of integration cannot be of oneself. Moreover, it is to be integration of a person and not of a human machine, the centre must be personal. The only integrating factor, which does not lead to impersonalism or slavery, is the person who loves completely. It is our experience that there is only one such person, Jesus Christ. In his love, he accepts people as they are even when they cannot accept themselves. Before him, there is no need for pretense as to either who one is or where one is. Inability to accept oneself and one's own situation is the major factor that leads to disintegration. Conversely, the knowledge that one is accepted as of value, in spite of the facts, is a liberating and dynamic force. Here is an entry into life, which is a finding of oneself through losing oneself in Christ. In finding oneself one also finds one's real situation. Therefore, the Christian is one who is free to throw off all masks, and is at home in any situation, and with any person.

"Not only is a new person born, but also relationships. The loneliness that is the product of self-made barriers is broken by a life that is now open to others, who are seen to be acceptable to Christ. It is also broken by the fact that the Christian is no longer alone, for he is bound in the community of the Christian Church together with all those who have received life from Christ”.

This fundamental personal encounter illumines for each Christian the reality of his being in but not of the world. He recognizes and accepts his involvement in the total human situation, but he is no longer imprisoned in it; he knows that the prison door is open, that in Christ is freedom from the tyranny of circumstance, and he longs to share with others his knowledge of this fact. If he is to do that, he has to be prepared to share real friendships, to recognize and appreciate the wholeness of personality. So at Nasrapur we talked a great deal about the need for "maximum human hunter" if we are truly to bear witness in the Universities or anywhere else. Many of us had seen a dramatic example of such encounter when we visited the village of Old Tambaram, and realized that there the teaching and preaching, the provision of food and

of medical aid and of useful employment together constitutes a work of evangelism. Deeds and words are mutually illuminating, as the message of the love of God is given content at points of real human need. There needs to be wholeness, likewise, in the witness of Christians in the University world; and this is only possible if there is a real willingness to enter into friendships with the people behind the facades. Student Relief committees, for instance, become more than the machinery for raising funds, as understanding grows between the people wearing the political or religious labels of cooperating Societies; further, there is recognition of the need to break through the anonymity of relations with those who receive material aid, so that the unknown T.B. student becomes the Honors Chemistry man whose personal and academic life has been dislocated by this illness, and who finds adjustment to his changed circumstances terribly hard. Again, in his Faculty Society, or the Overseas Club or the Dramatic Society, the Christian student works to make this a good society, academically speaking, without falling into the error of regarding it as being merely the sum of its activities; he more than any other member, should be aware of and responsive to the people in that society learning to understand them and so, perhaps, finding the point at which, for one or more of them, Christianity makes sense.

The Christian student resident in a university college does not pretend than he can stand aside from the personal and social tensions common to adolescents and young adults; he admits that these are his problems too, but he is not overwhelmed by them for he knows, as he grapples with them, that "there is one who hears, knows, understands, judges and forgives". As a member of one or the other of the political clubs, a Christian is concerned for the betterment of social structures but is not deluded into any belief that such human structures will be perfect, nor does he accept the party line as absolute authority. It is as we begin to recognize the power of redemption in such common human experience that we begin to understand the necessity of our remaining "in the world" and the reality of our being kept "from the evil".

It would appear that much of this witness is the witness o individuals. But that is not so. Rather it is the witness of a community "scattered", which knows the visible unity of common worship and study and fellowship. That this is a unity experienced in diversity is true; but that such unity is given, is to be recognized by each

Student Christian Movement and demonstrated within the life of the secular University. This was brought home to us sharply during the General Committee meetings. We belong to different cultures, to different denominational traditions, we spoke from different theological viewpoints, and we called for different political action. Commission reports were hammered out as opposing views clashed and were modified. It all happened with more or less grace, but it was never easy. There were times when it seemed that the tension was too great and that something must snap. But that did not happen, nor will it happen while we remember that we are held together in a common encounter with God and man. Ut omnes unum sint: That they all may be one. The Federation motto has taken on new reality. The oneness is not experienced if we sidestep the very real human issues that divide us; it grows as we frankly face those issues, as we struggle intellectually and imaginatively to understand one another, as we enter into a fellowship of prayer and intercession and recognize our responsibilities one to another, as we know ourselves engaged in the common enterprise of witness in the student world.

Of all this we were reminded as Robert Mackie led us in worship at the close of our meetings. In all of its more than fifty years of life, the Federation has known only one task - Witness. It was for this that it came into being and ever since it has been in the fellowship of the Federation that men and women have carried out the task, despite all those calamities that would have seemed to make such fellowship impossible. In the coming three years, the work we did at Nasrapur has to be carried further; in every Student Christian Movement, and in terms of the world context, there must go on the struggle to make the message of the mission contemporary. There is nothing to suggest that the task is easy, nor that the state of the world will make it easier. But it is exactly there, in the world, that ^e mission is to be preached; Christ continually pours out His life for the world, and as Christians witness to this, in the life of their '-Christian community and in the life of their secular communities, men and women do meet Christ and recognize Him as their Lord and their God.