COMMENTARY: Something new is coming to pass

(RNS) Before I could send out an essay about a favorite street in Manhattan, I needed photographs. On a Sunday morning when I should have been in church, I went out with my camera into a glorious fall day. Sidewalks were jammed with walkers ambling in family clusters and couples. I passed a caravan of […]

(RNS) Before I could send out an essay about a favorite street in Manhattan, I needed photographs.

On a Sunday morning when I should have been in church, I went out with my camera into a glorious fall day. Sidewalks were jammed with walkers ambling in family clusters and couples. I passed a caravan of handicapped persons being escorted to Central Park by cheerful helpers.

At 100th Street and Broadway, I came across a Halloween street carnival, complete with face painting, games, homemade food, parents sitting with children, and neighbors chatting over apple cobbler.


The scene was quite disconnected from All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day. But it seemed deeply in touch with faith values like family, friendship, trust, affection and kindness.

Not far away, behind closed doors, were expressions of Christianity’s deep divisions: a Greek Orthodox outpost of Christianity’s ancient East-West schism and an Episcopal remnant of the 19th-century Oxford Movement, now oddly in the news again thanks to Pope Benedict XVI’s overture to disgruntled Anglicans to come home to Rome.

Nearby also is a large synagogue that grew out of tension between German Jews and Polish Jews and concern for social class.

By contrast, I sat later with a group at church who are planning a recovery ministry to help addicts seeking sanity to surrender their lives to God and to encourage each other toward humility, honesty and a “spiritual awakening.”

Don’t make it too “churchy,” warned a recovering alcoholic, because people seeking recovery will flee any further experience of being judged by Christians.

Perhaps you will understand my confusion. I believe in God. My way to God is through Jesus Christ. I am devoting my life to helping faith communities get healthy and do the work that God needs done. When a faith community gets it right, incomparable “glory fills the sky.” And many do get it right. Healthy faith communities are critical to the fabric of our nation.


But, on balance, I find myself wondering where we fit in God’s determination to “make all things new.” as it says in Revelation. I can’t imagine that God’s “new heaven and new earth” will be found in our incessant bickering, our Babel-like towers of Scriptures, doctrines and stones, our righteous remnants clinging to things “passing away,” or the “nastiness and hate on both sides” that one reader says killed a men’s Bible study group at his church.

I look at a street carnival filled with joy and love, people helping the less fortunate, and the humbled wanting only to help, and I wonder if many people haven’t already found God’s new world, and we church folk represent the noise they had to escape.

I think the Christian movement has come to a watershed that our history and shortcomings have handed us. Something old is passing away and something new is coming to pass. I’m not talking liturgical trend, shifting denominational balance or a torch passing from Europe to Africa, or from mainline to evangelical. It’s something more profound.

We have wanted to save the world. But we got in our own way, and the world went on without us. God still wants to “make all things new,” but it probably won’t start with us, for we have been too proud.

New life starts in pain, not in good intentions. Now seems to be our time of pain. And therefore, our time of hope.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)


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