A Book Review on Living Into Community by Christine Pohl (Eerdmans, 2012)
Christine Pohl is an experienced Christian Social Ethicist. She is the Associate Provost and Professor of Church and Society/Christian Ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary. She owned a Christian bookstore for six years and worked in advocacy and refugee resettlement. She currently serves as an occasional advisor for homeless shelters and refugee programs, and has helped plant four churches.[1] She has received grant to study the practices of pastoral excellence within community, which is part of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project. In Living Into Community, Pohl invites general readers to cultivate four practices that are essentials to communities, proposes how they counteract possible complications and deformations, and advocates how each practice can cultivate in congregations and families.
Pohl believes that people are “longing for community” that is vibrant, caring, faithful, and sturdy, although messiness and disappointments are an inevitable part of human relationships. I like the way that Pohl describes the redemptive purpose of Christian community at which “the biblical images (of God’s household) suggest closer and more significant relationships and a life together that draws people in”.[2] She is correct in pointing out good communities require more than shared history and tasks. Grace, fidelity, and truth need to occur so that people can feel safe to take the risks that are necessary for growth and transformation.
To counteract with the culture that values self-actualization, individual success, consumption, and personal freedom, Pohl advocates a framework that focuses on practices that will lead us to moral and theological commitments. For her, “Practices are at the heart of human communities… are the ordinary, taken-for-granted dynamics of good relationship… (and they are) at the heart of God’s character and activity”.[3] With twenty years of intentional studies, Pohl notices the followings are the good communities practices: hospitality, making and keeping promises, truthfulness, gratitude, Sabbath-keeping, testimony, discernment, forgiveness, worship, and healing. She considers them as responses to grace that Christians have experienced in Christ. However, I would disagree with her in the following statement, “In general, practices are most powerful when they are not noticed, when they are simply an expression of who we are and what we do, a way of being in the world and relating to one another that seems ‘natural.’”[4] I do not see how these practices are most powerful if they are “hidden”. It is too idealistic to make these practices “natural” in the world that we are living now. By contrast, Jesus called his disciples to be different as the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matt 5:13-16). The Christian community should be like “a city set on a hill” which “cannot be hidden”, so people may see the good “practices” and give glory to God. The importance of gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality is more than morals and duties, sustaining and strengthening community, preventing and solving conflicts. They are the marks of Christian community just as Robert Webber expresses, “The church is the primary presence of God’s activity in the world… to be the church we create an alternative community to the society of the world. This new community, the embodied experience of God’s kingdom, will draw people into itself and nurture them in the faith.”[5]
Pohl understands gratitude as the primary response Christians can have if our lives are redeemed by costly grace. She quotes from Karl Barth, “If the essence of God is grace, then the essence of human beings as God’s people is our gratitude and thanks.”[6] Gratitude is important because it gives life to communities while ingratitude “sucks out everything good, until life itself shrivels and discouragement and discontent take over”[7] and it is dangerous to communities. Grace evokes gratitude as stream flowing from God’s love to the love of one another. Grace is practiced out of love especially “when it didn’t seem fair, or reasonable.”[8] When I read the sections Gratitude and Justice, and Every Gift Has Strings, I can relate them to the complications of the corrupted Chinese bureaucrats. The ways that officials embezzle public funds and people use gifts to bribe has strangled society and relationship. Culture is hard to change when people think they are entitled, self-made, not indebted, too busy to say thanks, or being envy. Nevertheless, when ingratitudes are many grace super-abounded. The gospel’s counterpart to covetousness is when individuals and communities begin living the practice of gratitude as each day a small resurrection.
I like the case that Pohl uses to relate promise-keeping and community. When Jason considers filing for bankruptcy, his pastor helps him to recognize that the decision would affect the government, future loan applicants, people who are making sacrifices to pay back, and his own integrity and future. By keeping his promise and the truth-telling of the community, he moved toward deeper maturity and responsibility to honor an obligation. It is a true example of fidelity in a practicing community. I think marriage vow is related to the “covenant fidelity” concept embedded in the 7th commandment against adultery because it bounds two people with legal and willing commitments. Promise-keeping in marriage guards against betrayal in the form of affair and abandonment in the form of divorce. It takes a community: friends, family, and the church body to witness and watch whether they practice what they vowed. It is a gospel-alternative of violating covenanted relationship because promise-keeping testifies God’s faithfulness, grace and power, and fidelity promotes justice and freedom in the world.
Pohl sees truth-telling as a way of truthful living that is larger than whether a person should ever lit or “bear false witness”. She recalls the early church history that deception, lying, and half-truths have endangered communities and undermined others efforts. These deformations break communities apart, and distort our relationship with God and each other. Truthfulness is a character of God and is repeatedly taught and required from followers in Old and New Testament. Truth-telling is the gospel-alternative to “false witness” because it frees us from our natural hear that is “deceitful above all things” (Jer. 17:9). I particularly agree with her in this, “People who love truth build others up with it rather than using it to tear them down; much of our truth-telling should involve affirming what is right and good… “Speaking the truth in love’ is at the heart of growing up in every way into Christ (Eph. 4:1-15).[9] As a future pastor, I am being reminded that truthful living encompasses forbearance, forgiveness, mutuality and patience, because as the corollary Kierkegaard observes, “when you do not do what you promise, it is a long way back to the truth”.[10] Truth-telling is the basis for pastors who live what is preached.
In the final section, Pohl emphasizes hospitality as the heart of biblical Christianity. I see hospitality as a way of evangelism because we are extending the love of God to strangers and inviting them to the kingdom of God. I learn that hospitality is making room for strangers to redeem our hostile, busy, and pragmatic culture. It is a beautiful picture when communities are sharing our gifts, reconnecting home and church, and living into all the other practices as “loving those whom God has set beside us today”.[11] This is also a gospel alternative of “you shall not murder”, but “love you your enemy”.
