for Further Reflection and Discussion
- The author, Presiding Evangelist David Brock, immediately pulls us into his story by painting an intergenerational scene from decades in the future. What role, if any, has religion played across generations in your family?
- Does a long family history in the church make it easier or harder to accept new revelation? Why?
- Brock focuses on change, wondering how it will affect the church and the world. Indeed, Section 164 calls for changes in many areas. Why do we often find this difficult?
- Brock says “our fundamental identity emerges from our union with Christ.” He adds that “distinctions of social class, ethnicity, and gender roles no longer apply.” Think of your own congregation. Does it need to work on eliminating “distinctions”? In what areas of your own life do you struggle with this?
- How would eliminating distinctions alter the way individuals and congregations minister in their communities?
- Brock then talks about the “power and place of sacraments in Community of Christ.” Do you see Section 164 enhancing their use? How?
- Section 164 urges us to change how we deliberate and discern as an international body. What will this shift mean to us as individuals? As congregations?
- Section 164 delves deeply into relationships between individuals, groups, and cultures. How do you see our Enduring Principle, “worth of all persons,” applying under this new revelation?
- What steps can we take when one culture clashes with another over behaviors that each feels strongly about? What Enduring Principles apply to such situations?
- Through discernment in preparation for addressing Section 164, the church began to shift from being a people with a prophet to being a prophetic people. What makes the latter format more challenging to individuals and groups?
—Greg Clark
Herald Team
What Will Your
Great-Grandchild Think?
by David Brock
presiding evangelist
My great-grandchild, or yours, picks up the Doctrine and Covenants in the year 2060 as she prepares for the bicentennial conference of the Reorganization. She thumbs through inspired counsel to the church (an actual book, possibly, but more likely some future rendition of today’s Kindle or iPod). Her eyes fall on a highlighted paragraph of Section 164, one that drew her father in 2030:
Beloved children of the Restoration, your continuing faith adventure with God has been divinely led, eventful, challenging, and sometimes surprising to you. By the grace of God, you are poised to fulfill God’s ultimate vision for the church. [9a]
She reads it, wondering, “What was Dad pondering when he marked the passage?” She wonders if her grandmother was drawn to the same words in 2015. Intrigued by these questions, she reads more carefully: “What will I highlight? What will catch my attention? In what passages will God speak to me?”
How will God touch the lives of our disciple-of-Jesus descendants through the words of counsel in Section 164? Will they still resonate? How will the church change because of the words? More importantly, how will the world change because our community took the words from 2010 forward and embodied them? What will historians point to as key concepts informing a more-faithful response?
There is no way to know, but I have some hopes and guesses about what will last:
Unity in Christ—Our Identity
Consider the biblical foundation that Brother Steve Veazey was called to again and again by the urging of the Holy Spirit. Galatians 3:27–29 (NRSV) will mean more to our mission and identity than ever before:
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Our fundamental identity emerges from our union with Christ. “In baptism,” says Richard B. Hays, “we ‘put on’ Christ; we enter into union with him in such a way that all other markers of status and identity fall away into insignificance” (New Interpreter’s Bible, XI, p. 274).
Distinctions of social class, ethnicity, and gender roles no longer apply, having lost all power to divide and oppress. Our identity is our unity in Christ: “for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The church is to be a new community brought into being by the power of God’s grace. Old social inequalities are being overturned and transformed (NIB, XI, p. 278). If a significant percentage of Community of Christ congregations lives out that identity even part of the time, we will glimpse the reign of God in our midst!
The specific issues we face today probably will be nonissues in 50 years. And, though we pray all divisions will be done away by then, this scripture probably will apply to yet-unforeseen distinctions and divisions that matter to humans but are a source of sadness to God.
The Power and Place of the Sacraments
I hope when our descendents read Section 164 they will honor and celebrate the power and place of sacraments in Community of Christ. Will these words mark a time in the church when the eight sacraments shaped our identity at depths we had not before attained?
As Galatians invites us to be clothed with Christ, may the sacraments be a means to that end. Immersed in Christ may we find ways to “live the meaning of [our] baptism daily.” Eating bread and drinking wine at the sacred banquet, may Community of Christ form “into a true and living expression of the life, sacrifice, resurrection, and continuing presence of Christ.”
May sacramental living emerge from the covenant of marriage that unites two people who uphold the other’s worth and giftedness; who love, respect, trust, and are faithful to each other. May all ordinations, and covenants with God and the people free gifts within the community and protect the vulnerable.
Behaviors and Relationships
The specific moral and ethical issues listed in Section 164 may be long clarified by 2060. They may seem as irrelevant for most as the Apostle Paul’s detailed discussions of male circumcision, female submission, or eating food intended for idols. But the vision of a world defined through God’s eyes never will grow outdated.
The covenant of brother- and sisterhood in Christ is the fabric into which we are woven. It must not be torn. If it is, reconciliation and trust must be offered as grace to mend the tear.
How will future historians and interpreters of scripture assess the call to clarity in this counsel about Enduring Principles and ethical and moral values that define us? Will the call to address specific ethical questions in national and cultural settings strengthen our identity? Or will it cause division and confusion as we apply foundational principles to diverse circumstances?
A prophetic word always risks both failure and the possibility of a deeper dimension of God’s reign among us. I pray my great-grandchild will know her spiritual DNA is the same spiral of Enduring Principles that shapes us today. I pray she also will be able to see faithful disciples of the church (from the deserts of western Kenya to urban Chicago, to crowded Chennai, South India) discerning the Spirit’s will about ethical matters. I hope she joins in discernment processes and principles that mature a worldwide church into a prophetic people.
In the present moment I sense the dramatic shift in how we will discern and deliberate as an international body. It seems wise. It feels like a step toward being more faithful to the God-given values that mark us at our best. What will our great-grandchildren say?
I don’t know. We don’t know. But as I reread Section 164 today I am newly convicted to leave the “shadows of [my] fears, insecurities, and competing loyalties.” I am committed to “move forward in the light of [my] divinely instilled call and vision.” Now, more than ever…
I believe in the sacraments. They draw me into the eternal; into sacred burning-bush-that-is-not-consumed moments. They are a fire in my bones that cannot be put out. Sacraments are transformative death and resurrection moments. I am a disciple in Community of Christ because I was baptized in an outdoor fount dug into the rich soil along the Missouri River, just a few miles from where I write today.
I belong because I have heard the Communion prayers, spelled out in Cyrillic and pronounced in Russian, just before receiving bread and wine in the Sputnik Hotel in Moscow. I believe because I have placed my hands on the head of an ill woman to pray for healing at a busy bus stop in Sonsonate, El Salvador.
Blessing and baptism, confirmation and Communion, ordination and marriage are so central to my identity that I know instinctively they shape my life and this faith community at ever-deeper levels.
I believe in the worth of persons. This principle calls me to embody relationships of love, mutual respect, responsibility, justice, and faithfulness. I have heard the principle preached in Big Bridge, Jamaica, in lilting English that makes me smile with delight.
I’ve seen it in the language of hands moving silently to “shout” and “sing” the tidings of salvation for the hearing impaired, who in turn reveal truths so often not understood by those who have ears to hear.
I believe in the prophetic gift. Through the ages, when covenants were broken, the prophets raised a voice of warning. We must hear and heed the voice of warning in our time. Through the ages the prophetic imagination also painted visions and drew us into the scene: swords transformed into plowshares, streams flowing in the desert, rough places made smooth, families reunited and living beneath their own vine and fig tree, in peace and unafraid.
Such visions turned slaves into a nation and brought exiled people to a promised land to rebuild destroyed walls and sacred temples. Such poetic prophecy turned grief into laughter and mourning into a dance of joy and celebration. It still does!
Often, however, we complain in the days of our desert wandering. But, if the prophet delivers a message that draws from the wisdom of God, time vindicates that word. Generations to follow discover meaning and depth the prophet could not know when he brought the word. It is time that we join these “aching visionaries,” as Nicholas Wolterstorff calls them in Lament for a Son, “mourners…who have caught a glimpse of God’s new day, who ache with all their being for that day’s coming.…”
Will future generations sense the significance of our shift from a people with a prophet to a prophetic people? Will they recognize the shift in Conference deliberations: the invitation to consider words of counsel months before Conference; the deepening spiritual discipline of discernment that invites all to the prophetic task of listening, as did Brother Veazey?
Have we begun listening in the silence, expecting God to answer; listening by first setting aside our preconceived notions, our personal biases about what is right and best; and listening by seeking God in voices with which we differ?
I believe in this prophetic word. This counsel assures that Community of Christ has a mission, an identity, and a vision to fulfill in a changing world, and an expanding church. We are blessed with a prophet—human, as are we—who loves God, loves the church, and is willing to pay the price to humbly bring to the community that which he deeply believes.
His life and witness affirm that this is a word under which he stands and to which he is called just as much as are we.
Section 164 contains seeds for our ongoing transformation and healing. As we respond, we more fully will become the kind of church God wants us to be.