Re-Enlivening Ministries
Friday, June 19, 2026
Juneteenth
Father Richard turns to the apostle Paul’s advice to the first churches to envision church renewal today:
Prior to the imperial edicts in the fourth-century that pushed Christians to the top and the center of the Roman Empire, the church was still countercultural and non-imperial—a social movement for the reign of God. In a two-hundred-year period, Christians went from being complete outsiders to directing the inside! Christianity increasingly accepted, and even defended, the dominant social order, especially concerning war, money, and authority. [1]
While Christian churches today do much good, they are still largely aligned, especially in the West, with cultural and political power. To recover the early church’s emphasis on faith as a loving and communal way of life, we clearly need to support good and compassionate pastoral and healing practices. We must begin to validate Paul’s original teaching on “many gifts and many ministries” (1 Corinthians 12:4–11) that together “make a unity in the work of service” (Ephesians 4:12–13). We need Christian people who are trained in, validated for, and encouraged to make home and hospital visits; do hospice work and jail ministry; support immigrants and refugees; help with soup kitchens; counsel couples before, during, and after marriage; teach classes in parenting; offer ministries of emotional, sexual, and relational healing; help with financial counseling; build low-cost housing; take care of the elderly; run thrift centers—all of which put Christian people in immediate touch with other people. Remember, healing was most of the work Jesus appeared to do. It is almost too obvious. Either we see Christ in everyone, or we hardly see Christ in anyone. Either we are Christ to everyone, or we cannot be Christ to anyone.
My vision of any future church needs to be much flatter and much more inclusive. It is much less “churchy,” surely less patriarchal, and more concerned with fulfilling its mission statement than with endlessly reciting its heavenly vision and philosophy statement—the Nicene Creed—every Sunday. Simply put, any notion of a future church must be a fully practical church that is concerned about getting the job of love done—and done better and better. Centuries of emphasis on art and architecture, songs, liturgy, and prescribed roles have their place, but their overemphasis has made us a very top-heavy, decorative church that is largely, and constantly, concerned with its own in-house salvation.
Most people today, in fact, understand church to mean a building, rather than “where two or three gather in my name,” where the Divine Presence is promised just as certainly as it is promised in the bread, in the Bible, in the Sacraments, or in any anointed leadership: “There I am in your midst” (Matthew 18:20).
Authentic leadership, I think, implies people who can spot, affirm, train, support, finance, and validate gifts and leadership wherever they see them in actual practice (think multipliers instead of monarchs). Then we are not all striving toward the top but striving toward supporting the supreme work of love flowing into the world. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press, 2014), 48–50.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Powering Down: The Future of Institutions,” ONEING 7, no. 2, The Future of Christianity (2019): 46–47. Available in print or PDF download.
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| John Chaffee – Five On Friday |
1.
“Trauma blocks loving connection;
Loving connection heals trauma.”
– Unknown
I’m just gonna leave this one here without further commentary, it’s that good.
2.
“Humanity needs not the death of God but the birth of a new understanding of divine reality.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French Jesuit Priest
Or, as Thomas Keating says, “We need a theology that matches our current cosmology.”
We know that the universe is still expanding, growing, and birthing new stars and universes. We know the Earth is not the center of the universe, but that we circle around a star that is also not the center of the universe. We also have to reckon with the fact that we do not live in a 3-tiered universe, with “hell” literally below us and “heaven” literally above us. (Rather, the Kingdom of Heaven is already near and among us.)
We also know that God is not some Divine Tyrant like a Pharaoh or Genghis Khan. Jesus reveals that Yahweh is nothing like Zeus. Infinite Love looks nothing like a cosmic Santa Claus keeping a list and checking it twice.
It is possible that in 6,000 years, people will look back at Christianity now and think that we were still in “kindergarten Christianity.” We still believe in the Sword more than the Cross, and we often still believe that God utilizes fear more than love… How pagan to believe such things!
But I believe something is changing.
We are now in a Post-Secular society, one in which the fullness of secular life was attempted and found to also be lacking… which means a return to faith and religion.
As I say that, though, I do not mean a return to how faith and religion were done in the past, but hopefully a more robust, integrative, mature, healthy, and holy one. We now have more access to the whole of the Christian tradition than ever before, thanks to the internet, so hopefully the chaff will be separated from the wheat, the cream will rise to the top, and we will see a resurgence of people rediscovering the best of the Christian tradition.
3.
“Those who would know much, and love little, will ever remain at but the beginning of a godly life.”
– Mechtild of Magdeburg, 13th-Century German Nun
As a recovering Enneagram 5, this one is directed at me, who, for years, made the mistake of caring more about knowledge and information than about learning to love and be loved. Or, I guess you could say I wanted to be loved for what I knew rather than for who I am (because that felt terrifying).
Granted, I have been through some things that led me to put up some serious walls, but fortunately, the older I get, the more those walls continue to crumble like Jericho’s.
Notice, though, that Mechtild does not say such a person is not godly. She only says that such a person will “ever remain but at the beginning.”
4.
“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
I grew up in beach culture, in which there was a culture of recreational drug use.
Although I never fell into it, I knew of its presence.
And even then, I knew that some people were not really using it “recreationally” but as an escape or attempt to numb some deeper pain. Obviously, this numbing can work for a short while, but the deeper pain will always be there until it is exhumed.
It was much later on in life that I heard a very important term: Adverse Childhood Experiences (or, ACEs).
The ACE study, done between 1995 and 1997, helped put into the collective consciousness that childhood trauma can lead to many issues later on in life. The study named 10 “Adverse Childhood Experiences.”
- Physical Abuse
- Sexual Abuse
- Emotional Abuse
- Physical Neglect
- Emotional Neglect
- Household Substance Abuse
- Household Mental Illness
- Parental Separation or Divorce
- Domestic Violence
- Incarcerated Family Member
It’s quite a sad list, isn’t it?
And get this… While driving to work, I was listening to a podcast about Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, which does fantastic work rehabilitating gang members, and it said that some homies have 9/10 or even 10/10 of those experiences! Lord, have mercy.
Back to the Wendell Berry quote… We have lost each other. We need each other in order to heal.
Huh. I guess that goes back to the first quote above, which I did not intend.
Love is the solution, isn’t it? It is always the solution.
5.
“If you do not learn to deny yourself, you can make no progress in perfection.”
– St. John of the Cross, 16th-Century Spanish Mystic
Before I say anything, allow me to note that for St. John of the Cross, “perfection” is nearly synonymous with “union with God.”
We will never make any progress on the journey of being united with God if we do not learn to deny ourselves.
By this, I do not mean that it is a matter of denying cake, cocaine, materialism, etc. (Although denying those things would be healthy for us in probably both the short and the long run.)
To deny ourselves is to choose someone else’s good over our own. It is a matter of denying all the ways our ego gets in the way of healthy and holy relationships. This applies not only to our relationship with God but also to the people around us. The ego wants to get ITS way, which means there is little room for others.
To deny ourselves might mean creating space for others in our lives, which brings me back to “perfection as union.” To deny ourselves does not mean abandoning ourselves. To deny ourselves might mean refusing to allow ourselves to find all our fulfillment within ourselves and reaching out for loving union.
After all, love is the perfection of the law.
