Now What?

The sky is falling. So what are you going to do about it? There’s no point in making a great fuss if all you’re going to do is stand there and watch it fall. Certainly you should do something, but what? How are you going to help hold the sky up?

Now perhaps there’s something to be said for using social media to decry the falling of the sky, contributing to a general sense within your social circle that something is amiss and someone should do something, though at this point most of us are so stuck in our opinions and self-rightness that no amount of grandstanding online is going to affect us.

So maybe there’s something to be said for just sitting quietly and watching the world burn. It’s not my world. I didn’t cause the problem. I’ve strived to avoid contributing to the problem. 

Maybe this is part of the sense of unrest—we see the problem, but aren’t sure what to do about it. Screaming on Facebook seems futile. Doing nothing seems fatalistic. The problem is too pressing to ignore, but too big to fix.

Perhaps we should have been asking from the beginning—where is God in all this? Where is God when we ask what we should do? What would God have us do?

I’m pierced by this quote from Discipleship in Community:

“The church becomes the instrument of God’s transforming work, through which the kingdom of God breaks into the world for healing, reconciliation, justice, and peace. Missional communities become alternatives to societal brokenness and thereby become both a witness to and a means by which the kingdom of God is present in the world.” (p. 63)

If you want to know what to do, here’s where it starts—participate in a community of faith, showing the world that loving one another, while difficult, is possible. Participate in a community of faith that is unapologetically filled with republicans and democrats, black and white, rich and poor, male and female. Until the church can function as a diverse community itself, the world will never be faced with an alternative to the violent, polarized, bigoted, racist, selfish society it is. 

If you want to know what God’s doing in all this, here it is: he forms us into a community of grace and mercy and love, a community refusing to be ripped apart the way society tells us we must be, because that’s the way society itself is. God is critiquing the world through the existence of the church, if we will but pay enough attention to God working in our own lives. If we will but let God form us into the church.

—John Coffey