Is it too much to expect the "world" beyond the church to be community? The church, according to many Christian thinkers, can be a foretaste of the eschatological community—the community that will be created by God through Christ at the end of time. There is some truth in this, to be sure. As long as the world is made up of sinners, there will be sinful divisions among us. Said Luther, "The world and the masses are, and always will be, unchristian, although they are all baptized and are nominally Christian." If he could write that of sixteenth century Europe, where most of the people were indeed Christian, how much more that must be true in the present world in which barely a third of the people are even nominally Christian! Is there really any basis for inclusiveness and community in such a splintered, secular, sinful world?
Two things can be said. First, sin and divisiveness are there in the church as well as in the world beyond the church. Therefore, as we find the grace to overcome divisions within the church and to become a genuinely caring community, we are also helping God prove that it can happen everywhere. Second, the action of God is not limited to the churches. God is God everywhere. God is already at work in every heart. That is what is referred to as "prevenient grace," the grace that prepares us for Jesus Christ. St. Augustine had an interesting way of putting this. According to him, God creates in us a deep dissatisfaction with life until we can find ourselves in God. As his great prayer puts it, "Thou hast made for Thyself, and our hearts our restless until they find their rest in Thee." Or as he puts it elsewhere, "you have placed salt on our tongues that we might thirst after you."
Translated into the question of inclusiveness, we can say that God has already placed within every human heart a deep dissatisfaction with the separated life. We are not happy—we cannot be happy—when we are alienated from our sisters and our brothers.
Can there be such a thing as real community in the wider society of which we are but a small part? So long as sin exists, we shall have to be content with the partial realization of community. Even in the family and the church, we experience only in relative and limited form what God intends. Moreover, we cannot make it happen. God has to do that. Nevertheless, we can be confident that community is God's intention for us. God has created us with a powerful drive toward overcoming our alienation from one another. The gift of inclusiveness, a specific part of the United Methodist legacy, can become a force in the hands of God for the drawing together of humankind. At our best, we have learned that most of the diversities of background and experience, of youth and age, of specific gifts and inclinations are an enrichment to us all. Can we not contribute this gift to the rest of the world?
