This title really puzzles people. “Of course I live in the Church. Where else would I live?”
We have always lived in two modes of being church. There is the institutional mode that provides religious services. This would be the people that ‘get their baby done’ and ‘have their funerals in a religious space.’ The church provides the rites of passage for life and gives moral guidance to the society at large (that does not mean that anyone follows its moral teachings).
Then there are the people who live in a church of transformation. Our Christian faith is not doing the right things, but becoming the right person. All the teaching and the sacraments of the church are directed to a life of transformation. We are meant to become the living extension of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is to take flesh in our flesh.
Now, everyone stands somewhere along this spectrum.
We are being called to become a church of transformation. Our preaching and teaching must guide us to a true change of life. In other words, the gospel of love and justice that Jesus gave us must change us into the love and justice of God.
We are not afraid to tackle the rough issues in our own lives and the life of the society in which we live. We may say we believe that every human being is made in the image of God. But it is in the living that we are responding to the Holy Spirit who is moving us to see our fellow workers, who speak a different language, have a different color and have cultural differences from the majority as a living image of God. In every country of the world, Christians are struggling with treating their fellow workers as God values them. It is in our actions that our beliefs prove to be authentic.
We are struggling to become aware of the effects of our industrialization on the planet. We are taking seriously our responsibility to hand on to future generations of humans a planet where all forms of life can thrive. We are recognizing how our society has become detached from the effects of CO2 on the atmosphere. As believers we are struggling with inter-generational justice: that is, handing on a liveable planet to all the generations that will come after us.
In our prayer and our liturgies ,we are not burdening God with our demands but rather entering into the compassion, justice and heart of God. We seek to know what is on the heart of God so that we can walk with our God who moves us to a strong sense of justice, especially toward the poor and excluded. We take very seriously that no one is ever a ‘disposable human being’ to be forgotten and cast aside in the human reality.
In a church of transformation it is the people who are hungering for change in their lives. They have been given the Holy Spirit and now they want to Holy Spirit to do it work in us.
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