This is a lightly edited manuscript of a talk I gave last week at Trinity Classical Academy in Omaha, NE.
Last Sunday night I opened up a chat app I sometimes use to stay in touch with friends and saw reports of a man armed with an AK-47 reportedly roaming about on campus at a prominent evangelical college in western Pennsylvania. A friend of mine who teaches there was included in the chat and several of us had asked him what was going on. Eventually we got the reply: Apparently there were a series of fraudulent calls placed to SWAT teams in the western Pennsylvania area that day.
We live in a moment where it has become easy to fear the worst when reports of that sort come to us. After all, earlier this year saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk on a college campus. Then we might also consider the school shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis in which several children were murdered. If one goes back a couple years, there is the Covenant School shooting in Nashville–an attack in which a friend of mine lost his daughter and another friend spent the day fearfully attempting to contact her son who was in school when the shooter attacked. We live in a moment that has become quite violent, even nihilistic, and while the inputs producing this violence are varied, that does not make the moment any less alarming.
It can be challenging in such a time to think that forms of life we might pursue during more peaceable times should be rejected or discarded in less peaceable times. Chaos and fear take hold and cause us to reevaluate many of our core commitments and wonder if perhaps we should take a more aggressive stance or perhaps withdraw further from the world. Several years ago I was interviewing a writer friend about a recent book of his–one which, I thought, had largely dispensed with certain Christian callings toward love of neighbor in the name of keeping oneself safe. At one point in the interview I asked him where the Christian call to love neighbor and practice hospitality fits in a moment of severe anxiety and even violence. My friend–and I still regard him as a friend, to be clear–was silent for about 10 or 15 seconds. Finally he said “Well. Heavy silence.” I think many Christians can relate to the uncertainty my friend felt when faced with that question.
C. S. Lewis faced not dissimilar questions in his 1939 sermon “Learning in War-time” which he gave as Britain was beginning its war with Nazi Germany. During such a time, Lewis wondered, how do we even justify the life of a place like Oxford? Does it not seem decadent or indulgent in such a moment? Lewis thought not for this reason: Times of chaos do not actually change the call God gives his people; indeed the first readers of the New Testament encountered the call to love their enemies at a time when their enemies would soon be trying to kill them. Hard times do not change what we are called to. They merely help us see the stakes of our lives more accurately and truly; they awaken us from ease and remind us of the urgency of living in a society of eternal beings, all of whom will one day stand before God and, in that moment, find that they either love him or hate him. This is how Lewis put it:
For that reason I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective, The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life". Life has never been normal.
But it is not only Lewis whose wisdom I find instructive. I am also reminded of the counsel I once heard given by an Anabaptist pastor from a Christian community that had first been chased out of Germany by the Nazis in the 1930s and then later were also banished from England due to their refusal to serve in the military. The community of believers this pastor served had suffered deeply. It would be easy, I think, for such a community to respond to that suffering by turning inward and seeking to protect themselves from a world that had so routinely harmed them. But that wasn’t their response. On the contrary, this pastor said a phrase that I’ve not been able to forget in all the years since I’ve heard it: The stronger the center, the more daring the outreach can be.
What is striking about our brother’s observation is that it suggests that we should not pit a strong communal life against a community marked by generosity and outreach. This, of course, is often how these things are discussed in our churches: It is easy for outreach-minded churches to water down elements of their Christian life together in the name of relevance or seeker sensitivity. Likewise, it is easy for more internally oriented churches to so emphasize the importance of their common life that they end up not having room for anyone new to enter in, let alone for them to reach out into the world.
I think our Anabaptist brother, however, offers us a better way–and, fortuitously, a way that very naturally agrees with the endeavor of Christian education and, even, the model of education used here at TCA. For what is the trivium, but an acknowledgement that both of these things matter a great deal? A friend of mine who works as a headmaster at a classical Christian school in Texas put it this way:
You can't learn the basics–grammar–if you're constantly bombarded with falsehoods. Therefore for that time we orient more toward building a strong center. But you can't express the truth–rhetoric–if you have no interlocutors that need to hear it, therefore for that time we orient more toward daring outreach.
So the task before us is not to pit a strong internal center against the call to reach out in love to the world. The task, rather, is to find the relationship between the two, how rather than being at odds with one another these two concerns actually reenforce and strengthen each other. The relationship is less one of conflict and more one of wisdom and prudence–it almost has an inhale/exhale quality to it as we try to find the balance between shoring up the center and giving ourselves sacrificially to the world outside the community.
In what remains of our time, I want to try and do two things:
First, define what it means to have a strong center.
Second, define what daring outreach in our moment might look like.
To begin, let’s talk about having a strong center. I want to suggest there are three qualities that go into a community having a strong center:
First, the community is clear about the common objects of love that they share together. This, in itself, is important: Often we think of larger communities as being bound together by a signed contract or perhaps by some agreed upon procedures that define how they relate to each other. You sign a contract with an employer. You submit to certain procedural rules politically or perhaps in your neighborhood, for example. In other cases, we can imagine groups that are unified by what they oppose–many activist groups would fit here, but so too would some philanthropic type organizations. But true communities are gathered together not around contracts or procedures or oppositions, but around some common good they wish to pursue together, some shared love that is preserved and enjoyed through their common life.
What those objects of love are will differ from community to community, of course. The common objects that unite a school are not the same as those that link a church or a family. And these objects can sometimes be quite small or ordinary. To say a community must be united around common loves is not to say they must share an exhaustive list of agreements about religion or politics or the good life. The love that unites, say, a dance company is a love of creating beauty through movement. It is a love, in other words, that can tolerate a great deal of difference amongst its members, provided they share that common object.
Even so, without clarity on what the community loves, it is difficult for the community to be strong because it is love that will anchor us during adversity and justify whatever sacrifice or endurance that our life together asks of us. So one part of creating a strong center is being able to answer the question “What common objects of love unify us as a people and direct our life together, in whatever form that takes?”
Second, these common objects shape us toward quiet confidence, not anxiety, fear, or aggression.
When I was a high schooler trying to sort out my own beliefs and ideas about the world, I read a lot of things–many of which did not meet with the approval of the strict church I grew up in. It led to many frustrating and tedious conversations because church members were anxious and even angry about what I was reading. This, of course, only emboldened me and made me wonder if they were hiding something. Finally, I began to get angry myself during these conversations. When rebuked yet again for my reading I looked at the person and said, “OK, look: I want you to open this book I have and find the page in it where Christianity will stop being true. Can I read up to there, at least?” The point I was trying to make, albeit in a mouthy and disrespectful way, was that if Jesus really came back to life after being killed, there was nothing in the book that would change that. The author could say what he or she wanted. What mattered was what was true. And if Christianity was true, this book wouldn’t change that. And if Christianity wasn’t true and this book would prove it… well, don’t we want to live in the truth?
When our communal life is defined by anxiety and fear, it signals weakness. It signals a lack of faith in the loves that unite us. Over time, it relativizes those loves: It suggests that what holds our community together is not the goodness of the thing we love, but rather the fact of our choosing that thing for ourselves. In other words, what holds us together is not something worthy of love that we pursue together but basically a collective sense of taste and preference. Over time, what this does is it flattens the distinctions that ought to exist between types of communities.
I am a Nebraska football fan and a member of Center Church in Lincoln. But while I very much desire my neighbors to be Christian, I am not terribly bothered if they are not Husker football fans. Indeed, I rather expect that non-Husker fans have had far more enjoyable fall Saturdays in recent years than I have, on the whole. But ultimately whether you enjoy college football or what team you support is a triviality; it does not touch matters of ultimate meaning, belonging, or transcendence. Yet when we seek to defend transcendent loves from a posture of anxiety or aggression, we flatten the distinction between those things.
As a contrast, consider the story my friend Joy Clarkson has told about her own period of doubt. She was in her later teen years and wasn’t sure what she believed. She asked her mom if she would still love her, even if she wasn’t a Christian. Joy’s mom replied, “Of course I will, Joy. But I think you will be happier with Jesus.”
There’s an enormous pedagogical difference between the anxious person monitoring a youth group kid’s reading and the calm, confident reply of Joy’s mother, isn’t there? When we are fearful and anxious, it is quite easy for every interaction we have to ultimately be about our fear and anxiety rather than whatever thing we might actually be trying to discuss. But when we have a quiet confidence in the goodness of the thing that binds our community together, then we can actually have conversations about that thing, rather than conversations freighted with subtexts caused by our jittery fearfulness. A strong center is a calm, non-anxious center, because it recognizes that the only way we can preserve these loves that unite us is if we are willing to talk calmly about their goodness and extol them to others.
Third, they willingly sacrifice to preserve and advance those goods they share. And please don’t let your mind here wander first to money or volunteering. Certainly, those can be sacrifices we make for the sake of a community united around a good we care about deeply. But there is a more basic point to make here: My friend Kirsten Sanders wrote of it quite beautifully in a recent essay about marriage in which she considered the way we close ourselves off to certain options when we take marriage vows. To many, this seems like a constraint on our liberty, a kind of needless repudiation of options or possibilities we might otherwise enjoy. But this has it all wrong, as Kirsten explains so well:
The irony of Christian marriage may be that in the face of the pressure toward endless choice, it is this constraint that really makes adults, because it is with this constraint where we find the grace of limits. By limiting our freedom to choose, we are bound to just one thing. To choose one thing, or in this case one person and one life, you risk having only that one thing. In this constraint we resist the optimization and ordinalization of our worlds. When we bind ourselves to just one thing, we refuse to imagine ourselves as the sum of all of our choices. We might then become persons who have received grace, not made but given.
To have at the end of your life one single story, a promise that was kept, would gesture to all the things you did not choose. It might leave their shadow in its wake. But it might reveal as well the One who in fire and blood made himself known as Covenant-keeper, as a promise-making God. In forsaking all others, you’d be choosing this one thing, marriage as the shadow of the oath made in smoke and fire.
When I talk about sacrificially living as a community, I am not principally thinking of a specific act of sacrifice we might make, but something closer to what Kirsten is describing: The choice to actualize this one good thing to the exclusion of other things, even other good things, is itself a pledge, and in making that pledge you open yourself and the world to things that can only be had through the forsaking of other things, through the sacrifice of other opportunities or experiences. To live sacrificially in this way is to live freely, provided we understand freedom rightly, for freedom is not simply the multiplication of possibilities, but the actualizing of one possibility and living faithfully within the bounds of that choice.
Now let’s talk about daring outreach.
Before we even start, I want to note that even here what we are talking about has less to do with what we do and more to do with who we are. It is common in some church circles to connect the idea of “outreach” to specific programs or events, but I think when we do this we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Even as we consider our relationship to the world outside our church or school or other small community, it remains the case that the sort of people we are matters more than the specific actions we do.
There is another reason I think we shouldn’t start with specific events or programs here: Often these sorts of outreach presuppose that our neighbors desire to be part of a community and if only we show them ours they will happily get involved. But I do not think this is always true anymore.
We live in a world that makes it very easy to be alone–one can live cheaply on one’s own, after all, and thanks to a variety of mobile apps and streaming video, it is quite easy to live on one’s own without necessarily feeling loneliness in the way that many might have in the past. In practical terms, you might say that when we reach out to our neighbors the “competition” as it were is not between the communities they currently have and the ones we might invite them into, but rather between the pleasures of tech facilitated consumption and entertainment in solitude and the demands and inconveniences of community. And this is a new sort of problem that I don’t think existed at all 50 years ago and wasn’t even that severe or pronounced ten or 15 years ago. But it is, I think, where we are today.
So in thinking about being present in the various spheres God has placed us, be that a business or a civic life or a neighborhood, the challenges hit from a different angle than they have in the past.
What, then, does daring outreach look like in this context? I want to suggest that it first means we are people of candor, people who neither feel the need to hide or conceal ourselves from our neighbors, nor people who feel the need to domineer and control as a way of managing our own insecurity and anxiety.
What does candor look like in practice? I think Wendell Berry describes it well in this passage from Jayber Crow where he describes the way a man named Mat Feltner looked at a person he had just met:
There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him.
Daring outreach requires that we be the sort of people who are willing for others to look right into us. Why does this matter? Partially, I think, because such a characteristic is always a good thing. But also because we live in a time of deep mistrust and cynicism, which when combined with the ease of solitary life means that many people wouldn’t dare move into any sort of community unless need compelled them. To participate in the life of the world in this moment means, I think, being the sort of person who others see as being trustworthy, honest, and possessing integrity.
My pastor has told the story of a previous church he was part of that illustrates this point. Once about 15 years ago he was serving in a church whose senior pastor had to be removed from his role due to a serious moral failing. On the following Sunday, Adam stood up and told the congregation as frankly as he could without violating the privacy of the other involved parties, about what had happened. He explained what the process would look like for dealing with the sin of the senior pastor, what they were planning to do going forward as a church, and what forms of help or support they could offer to congregants as they took in and processed this very sad news. And here’s the striking thing: That day a man was attending the church for the first time. And do you know what that man did after the service? He told Adam he wanted to become a member. Adam was taken aback by this, but as they talked the man said to him, “If you don’t try to hide something like that from the church, but talk about it as transparently and honestly as you just did, I feel like I can trust you.” In the coming months, that church actually grew rather than shrunk.
One of the defining characteristics of our moment is that we live in a time of radically low trust across all major social institutions. The sociological data we have tells a grim story: In 2023 Gallup polled Americans on which institutions inspired “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. Here is what they found: Only 8% of Americans reported that congress inspired such confidence. Big business? 14%. The criminal justice system? 17%. The presidency? 26%. Public schools, banks, and large tech firms also came in at 26%. The church or organized religion? 32%. The medical system? 34%. The police? 43%. In fact, only two entities inspired confidence in a plurality of Americans: the military at 60% and small businesses at 65%.
Given these obstacles to cultivating neighborly life and inviting others into our churches or school, it is essential that our thinking about outreach begins with trust, transparency, and candor. It is very easy for our neighbors to not go to church. It is very easy for them to not get involved in a neighborhood project. It is easy to not send their kids to a school like TCA.
If we desire that people would join us in these various endeavors, we need to demonstrate that we are people of integrity and trust, that in joining with us they will find a sense of belonging and joy and membership that can’t be matched by the pleasures of solitary consumption.
Built on the foundation of such candor we come to the next characteristic of daring outreach: Hospitality.
One of the characteristics of our moment is that we don’t really live in shared spaces very much. Indeed, via devices like smartphones it is exceedingly easy for us to create our own bespoke sense of reality, even to create our own “facts.” This makes it virtually impossible for us to encounter one another as ourselves rather than to feud with digital proxies for our neighbors. And in such an environment, the easiest thing for us to do is simply mimic others who adopt these patterns of life. We create our own safe spaces, our own alternative facts, our own digitally mediated cults.
Ultimately, what we are facing is the dissolution of shared contexts and in the absence of shared contexts we tend, over time, to also lose or dissolve our sense of shared humanity because we learn to relate to our neighbors in the ways that digital networks teach us to. What we lose is that flicker of recognition that comes to Frodo at different times in The Lord of the Rings. Without having met him, Frodo says he wishes Bilbo had killed Gollum when he had the chance. Gandalf firmly rebukes him in response and later when Frodo meets Gollum he finds that he feels the same pity for him that Gandalf did.
The dissolution of embodied contexts, simply put, is the dissolution of our capacity for pity, for we do not pity disembodied idea machines spreading misinformation, but we can very much pity human beings when we encounter them in the flesh, however wrong we might think they are about important matters.
I want to suggest that hospitality is a key way of addressing this problem. In practicing hospitality, we remake the embodied contexts in which we encounter our neighbors as themselves, as human creatures who are the image of God.
What shape hospitality might take will differ from person to person and community to community based on their phase of life, their distinct capacities, and their calling. My wife and I are both beneficiaries of the work of L’Abri, which is a fairly radical expression of Christian hospitality in which families open their homes to students who stay with them for weeks or even months at a time. And it may be that some of you are called to that, if not now then perhaps in the future.
But for those of us who are not able to open our homes in that way–and this includes my family now while our kids are still fairly young–there are still things we can do: We can invite neighbors over for a meal. We can also simply seek to be present in our neighborhoods, striking up conversations as we can with the people God has already called to the same places we live in. (My mom and wife are both better at this than I am, to be honest.)
One of the reasons that growth in virtue is so important, growth toward being a certain type of person, is that as we grow toward God we begin to carry about with us a certain sort of atmosphere of welcome. And that hospitable spirit is something we can take with us wherever we go, it creates a space in which we can receive people hospitably, even if only for a few minutes as we go about our day.
Finally, we must be people committed to conversation. Conversation is a kind of ongoing meeting between persons, a chance for us to see and hear our neighbors and to be seen and heard by them. It is not a thing that is scripted, nor is it something in which one party is seeking to own or defeat the other. Conversation requires patience and attention, a willingness to be taken out of yourself and into the presence of another, speaking with someone rather than talking at them.
A story that might illustrate the point: A friend of mine recently spoke with a woman who had been at a fundraising event for a major political advocacy organization. While there she had what is better described as an “encounter” than a “conversation” with a young man who was very agitated about some of this woman’s work, which he had somehow been aware of prior to their meeting. Within a minute or two of meeting, the man no longer appeared to even be speaking to her. She said that it almost felt as if she could have reached out and tapped on a window that had fallen between them–the man was entirely unconcerned with her; their encounter almost seemed like more an occasion for him to perform his rightness, courageously rebuking this person he had just met and who he did not know at all.
I do not think most of us will be tempted toward behavior quite so extreme or inhumane. And yet I think we can recognize lesser forms of this same tendency in ourselves–a tendency to instrumentalize our neighbors, to relate to them not as human persons, but as some means to an end.
The Bible is full of these sorts of human encounters: One might think of the woman caught in adultery and hauled before Jesus, or the meeting between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, or between Paul and his jailer in Phillippi. But perhaps my favorite story along these lines actually comes from the Confessions of St Augustine–a book that is arguably the first autobiography written in which the great 5th century saint and doctor of the church tells the story of his early life and conversion to the Christian faith.
It has always been the ordinariness of Augustine’s conversion that stands out to me. He is a remarkable man, probably the greatest man the church has seen, and yet consider how he describes the pivotal moment that leads to his conversion. To set the scene a bit, Augustine has found himself in a church in Milan for the weekly worship gathering. He is in a very dark season–he deceived his mother and left her in northern Africa, to sail to Italy in search of stable work as a teacher. On the journey to Italy he became gravely ill on the ship that carried him there. Then in Rome he took a number of students, but they left him without paying him for his work. So as he came to Milan he was in a fairly fragile condition both in terms of health and money and he was still feeling deeply guilty about deceiving his mother. And now listen to the way he describes what happened next:
(Ambrose) received me like a father, and looked with a benevolent and episcopal kindliness on my change of abode. And I began to love him, not at first, indeed, as a teacher of the truth — which I entirely despaired of in Your Church, — but as a man friendly to myself.
I want to belabor the point here a little because I think it is remarkable: St Augustine, a man who more than anyone else outside of the apostles or Christ himself has influenced the direction, character, and content of Christian theology, a man who to this day is recognized as one of the church’s greatest theologians, was drawn to Christ through the fatherly kindness of one Christian man. And if you looked at him when he met Ambrose he would not have struck you as a likely convert: He himself says that he “entirely despaired” of finding truth in the church. How many of our neighbors today might say the same? What changed this for Augustine was not an argument or a book, though both of those did play a role in his conversion. What was instrumental at the key point in his conversion was simply the attention of Ambrose, his welcome and his ongoing speech both from the pulpit and in person with Augustine.
Where, then, does this leave us? I imagine some would hear all this and find my suggestions entirely inadequate to the nature of the challenge before us. Indeed, from experience I know that many do find such proposals inadequate. In closing, though, I am reminded of two things: First, to quote a personal hero of mine, those of us who seek to do the Lord’s work must recognize that we must do that work in his way. Our Lord is not a consequentialist; he does not think the ends justify the means. Indeed, one of the most frequent conflicts that arise between Christ and his disciples concerns the disciples’ sense that Jesus doesn’t really understand the problems they are facing because if he did he would act differently. But Christ works through his own means.
Second, I am reminded of the story of Elisha and his servant. One morning Elisha’s servant went outside and was alarmed to see a huge army at the gates of their city, waiting to attack and capture them. This is how 2 Kings 6 describes what happened next:
15 When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. “Oh no, my lord! What shall we do?” the servant asked.
16 “Don’t be afraid,” the prophet answered. “Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”
Who is it that is with us today? The one who is with us is the one who has himself been falsely accused, treated unjustly, and, indeed, killed. Yet in response to this he prayed for those who assailed him. And when he returned from death he did not tell his disciples to withdraw from the world, but to go into it. And he did not send them into the world with swords and strategies of war. He sent them–he sent us–rather with the Word of God and the waters of baptism and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. He sent his followers into the world not with weapons and war, but with food and a table.