Radical Kinship
Church as a New Family
Jesus followers experience reconciliation in “thick” communities that overcome division via radical kinship “in Christ”
Radical Kinship
Neo-familial kinship in thick communities of Jesus followers is a foretaste of the coming reign of God, in which all humanity will be reconciled. The ekklesia of God described in the New Testament demonstrated Holy Spirit empowerment by participation in the divine life—the presence of Christ—which is itself a Trinitarian community of love.
When the Apostle Paul implored Philemon to welcome the runaway slave, Onesimus, as a beloved brother in the Lord (“as though he was me”), Paul demonstrated a radical new expectation within the ancient world. In the emerging family of Jesus followers, former divisions would be obsolete. “In this new humanity,” Paul explained to Philemon’s church in Colossae, “there is no question of ‘Greek or Jew,’ or ‘circumcised and uncircumcised,’ of ‘barbarian, Scythian,’ or ‘slave and free.’” Instead, “The king is everything and in everything.” (Col 3:11)
Paul demonstrated for Philemon the revolutionary implications of the new commandment that Jesus gave his disciples shortly before his crucifixion. “Love one another! Just as I have loved you, so you must love one another. This is how everybody will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for each other.” (John 13:35) Henceforth, self-giving love expressed by, and through, the Ekklesia of Jesus followers would be the mystical expression of God’s loving presence in, and to, the world.
Live the Word resources and trainings are designed to help Jesus followers find reconciliation in neo-familial thick communities of radical kinship “in Christ.”
“Radical kinship is the only thing that mattered to Jesus. . . . If kinship was our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice, we would be celebrating it.” Father Gregory Boyle, Jesuit Founder of Homeboy Industries.
According to the Way-of-Jesus, ordinary people bind themselves together in extraordinary ways via distinctive, open, and welcoming communities. These churches, assemblies and congregations (Ekklesiae) testify to the transformative power of the Way of Jesus as expressed on earth in the community of believers—described in Scripture as the beloved bride of Christ. In the partnership of diverse people, all in equal need of God’s healing mercy, the mystical presence of God is manifest for the ages.
Live the Word resources and trainings will point to historical examples and contemporary expressions of radical friendship between former enemies living in Biblically-inspired communities. In these, we “taste and see” how to transcend racial hatreds and separations. For example, in the history of Quakers and Moravians includes instances of inter-racial reconciliation even in times when slavery was rampant. The inter-racial Koinonia Farm community co-founded by Baptist preacher and Bible translator, Clarence Jordan, in 1942 in Americus, Georgia exemplified Christian radical kinship in America’s still segregated culture.
The Bible teaches that this radical walking “in the way of Jesus” makes real, vibrant and powerful the reconciling effect of the spiritual presence of Jesus. This is what Jesus and Paul refer to as “His Body” together “in Christ.” It is the realization of the visions of both the Garden of Eden and the Temple of Jerusalem: God dwelling with his people as an energizing power within their collective unity through the power of the “indwelling” of God’s Holy Spirit. This also is the biblical concept of the “Kingdom of Heaven/God”—the “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” taught by Jesus.
Of course, Jesus warned his disciples that, beginning with Judas and Peter who would betray and disown him respectively, the Ekklesia of God would often fall short of its purpose on earth. Yet, he encouraged his followers to persevere in being transformed by and in the power of God’s spirit into deep communion and fellowship (Greek: Koinonia), hence being a ministry of reconciliation. “I am praying that they all may be one—just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they too may be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me.” (John 17:20)
Live the Word resources and trainings build communities of healing and reconciliation.
What Experts Say about Radical Kinship
Part of the reason for demonstrating abundance is because of the people who often gather at dinner church. Fosner found that as they experimented with dinner church, poor and marginalized people were drawn to this sort of setting. It meets their sociological needs more adequately than what happens on a Sunday gathering. Reflecting on the parable of the great feast (Luke 14:15-24), Fosner writes, “The point of this parable is so simple most miss it: if your church is empty, drop down on the socioeconomic ladder and invite the poor and the broken until your ministry house is full” (33). For Fosner, the dinner church movement stands in solidarity with the poor, just as Jesus did. Within a few blocks of most churches in America is a struggling neighborhood, “whose residents would never consider going into a church building on Sunday morning, but they would welcome a dinner church in their neighborhood” (41). From this gathering and standing in solidarity with all peoples, “dinner churches change entire neighborhoods” (44).
Banks is emphatic that the equality of all believers in Christ is at the heart of Paul’s vision for community. Drawing on familiar texts like Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither slave nor free … for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) and I Corinthians 12:13 (they are recipients of one spirit), Banks concludes: “Those in the community who possess higher social status do not have any privileged position with God (1 Cor. 1:26-29), for Christ’s life and death has superseded such human evaluations (1:30). Members of the community should reject the way the world judges social status (1:26; 2:1ff)” (96-97).
He goes on to note that: “Paul’s remarks do not imply that differences between these groups disappear as a result of what has now happened [in Christ]. … [Even] within the new community forged by Christ, some legitimate racial, social, and gender differences continue to exist. Such diversity avoids a complete uniformity between people and adds variety and richness to human relationships” (98). Banks elaborates: “The owners of homes naturally had much to offer the community, given the cramped quarters in which many people lived and the subordinate position of many slaves. Others were among those who gave substantial financial help to those in need. Social differences were not treated as if they did not exist, nor were they subjected to an indiscriminate leveling process. They were used to benefit others” (100, emphasis added).
From a summary of Paul’s Idea of Community: Spirit and Culture in the Early House Churches
At Saint Lydia’s church in New York, she finds a church aimed at reversing the individualized trend of Western society, helping her congregants regain the sense that as humans we are inherently communal beings. This is not easy because sitting down with others who are hungry, tired and lonely, one never knows the wounds that are going to be shared. Eating together requires a level of vulnerability that simply sitting in a pew listening to a sermon does not.
When she visits Southside Abbey in Chattanooga, she finds a church wrestling with the ever-pertinent question, “Who is my neighbor?” As the church found out, this question is easier asked than actually lived out in a way that genuinely reflects the community. As Vanderslice attests to, “Southside Abbey is a place where neighbors come together to learn from one another, to see one another, to acknowledge their shared home in the house of God” (73).
From a summary of We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God by Kendall Vanderslice
Eberhard Arnold believed in a radical kinship that would ultimately subsume all humanity. “All life created by God exists in a communal order,” he writes, “and works toward community” (3). Later in the book, he expands on this idea: “In the same way as each individual living body consists of millions of independent cells, humankind will become one organism. This organism already exists today in the invisible church” (21). It is the Holy Spirit, Arnold argues, that is calling us and guiding us into the divine life of radical kinship. “The future unity of humankind, when God alone will rule, is ensured by the Holy Spirit,” he writes, “The only things we can already perceive of this great future of love and unity, is the Spirit” (27).
From a summary of Why We Live in Community by Eberhard Arnold
“The fundamental answer to the ‘Why church’ question,” Fitch writes, “is: Presence is the way God works” (38). God desires to be present with us, and not just with us as individuals, but with us in the social network that is the church. Our worship, therefore, is centered around God’s presence with us, and our desire to be attentive to that presence. This sort of worship is something in which all members of the church participate, not only in times of gathering but also as we disperse throughout the week. As we are attentive to God’s presence with us, God guides us, and through our relationships, God transforms the world. “Presence,” Fitch writes, “works through social relationships between people and God, people and people, and people and systems. God disrupts, heals, and renews people and systems not through coercion over people, but by his very presence among and with people. And for God to work this way, God requires a people to be present to and to make space for presence in the world. God requires the church” (42-43). This work of being present to God-with-us in the Holy Spirit and of making space for God’s presence in the world is our primary act of worship in which all members of the church, in their local congregations, participate.
From a summary of What is the Church and Why Does it Exist? by David Fitch
“Nothing did more to make the Christian communities distinctive than their sheer heterogeneity,” writes Kreider, “Not only were women and men together; so also were children and old people” (102). Pagan writers of the era were quick to criticize Christians for their radical inclusion of people on the margins of society. Kreider also notes that the early churches were distinctive in their inclusion of and caring for the poor – a work that was often led by the women of the churches. The bonds of this radical kinship were forged by the frequency and intensity of their gatherings (at least weekly, and often much more frequently than that). The church father Justin, for instance, wrote of his congregation in Rome in the second century, “We are constantly together.”
From a summary of The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire by Alan Kreider
Humphrey’s vision is a powerful one that invites us to be a public witness of God’s love and grace in the world. Thus, he writes near the end of his introduction: “We are called to be God’s experiment in how people stay together in a divided world. Now more than ever— whether churches are in city, town, or country—we need churches that will dismantle that walls of hostility that keep us apart, uncoiling people from shame and hiding, allowing God’s very good news to unfurl us all into our full humanity as image bearers” (7).
Humphrey offers the example of Hope House— an intentional Christian community connected with their congregation— to give readers imagination for what radical kinship might look like. He reflects on the experience of this community: “Interestingly, the most formative dimensions of our being together were not just in routine prayer times, meals, or any other form of gathering. Rather, it was in the negotiation of space and living habits, traversing the “in betweens” of community life, where I sensed growth happened the most” (128). Trying to negotiate a life together across multiple cultural backgrounds, Humphrey recall, required both vulnerability and courage.
From a summary of Seeing Jesus in East Harlem: What Happens When Churches Show Up and Stay Put by José Humphreys
Hendrik Berkhof emphasized that one of the most powerful indicators of Christ’s work in unmasking and disarming the Powers was the way in which Jews and Gentiles (and many other divided segments of humanity) lived and worshiped together as one body. “The very existence of the church, in which Gentiles and Jews, who heretofore walked according to the stoicheia of the world, live together in Christ’s fellowship, is itself a proclamation, a sign, a token to the Powers that their unbroken dominion has come to an end” (51). Our first responsibility in addressing the many divisions and injustices of our day, Berkhof notes, is to live in the church in a manner such that, “justice and mercy prevail in our common life and social differences have lost their power to divide” (51).
From a summary of Christ and the Powers by Hendrik Berkhof
McKnight and Barringer emphasize that one essential effect of God’s reconciling work in Jesus is that Christ’s followers are formed into a family of sisters and brothers where all siblings have equal status. “True sibling equality,” they write, “has huge implications for ending power- based and fear-inducing cultures. Equality under God the Father and Christ [the] Son wipes out any hierarchy of superiority and rank” (118). It is the Holy Spirit, who transforms us “from enemies and strangers into friends and family” (118). The authors offer the apostle Paul as one whose work was marked by the radically transforming power of the Spirit. “Nothing is clearer in the missionary work of the apostle Paul,” they write, “than his determination to not only get people saved, but to get saved people to learn how to get along with one another. Particularly those who had not traveled in the same circles. His mission, it can be said, was to expand the close-knit nation of Israel into a multiethnic people” (119).
From a summary of A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer
Radical kinship is, according to Nugent, an essential hallmark of the local church fellowship. “We still live in a world in which people regularly experience discrimination at work, school, and home,” he writes. “We still live in a world where race, gender, age, pedigree, and net worth confer privilege and deny access. People still yearn to be part of a community that appreciates them for who they are, welcomes them into a life of flourishing that revolves around something bigger than themselves, and includes others who are not like them” (142). Noting that Jesus’s disciples included both tax collectors and Zealots (two political groups as deeply polarized as any in the United States today), Nugent writes: “in the kingdom, friendship isn’t rooted in shared hobbies, taste in movies, sense of humor, or even good chemistry; it is rooted in a common commitment to God’s reign. Since that reign is all-encompassing, those who are obsessed with it find themselves caring about the same things, living by the same principles, and valuing the same goods” (159).
From a summary of Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church by John Nugent
Finger observes, “At one level, the story of the beginning of the church in Jerusalem is the story of disparate people being melded into one family, one kin group” (132). And this disparate group even included enemies, those accused of indirectly crucifying Jesus. This new-familial kin group is what made the message of Jesus so attractive to others. It was also a necessity for survival. “The reconstitution of the fictive kin group meant physical as well as spiritual survival, since without it the lack of relationship and connections doomed first-century Mediterraneans to destitution and starvation” (277).
For most Westerners, identity is shaped by individuality, with little attention paid to the group they are attached to, but this was not the case in the first century. Finger writes, “In this culture, persons were not known as individuals (as in Western society today) but were embedded in a kin group, from which they derived their identity” (128). The family was the number one kin group, the center of meaning from which people understood who they were and where they belonged. But Jesus upended this, establishing a new kind of neo-familial kin group—the community of Jesus-followers—that superseded loyalty to the blood family.
From a summary of Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts by Reta Halteman Finger
Greg Boyle, a white, well-educated Jesuit priest, and the gang members – most of whom are Latino/Latina or black – would seem to have little in common. And yet, as the stories of Barking to the Choir remind us at every turn, deep bonds of humanity unite them. The work of Homeboy Industries, Boyle writes, “aspires to put a human face on the gang member. If this doesn’t happen then kinship is impeded. It is also meant to soften our conventional take on who this gang member is and ushers in an abiding belief that we belong to one another. It is anchored in the truth that all demonizing is untruth” (8).
The sort of radical kinship that Boyle depicts in this book is rooted in truth, most specifically the truth that we are loved immeasurably by our Creator. Boyle reminds us that Jesus spoke of those “who belong to the truth” (119). As we come to know the love and truth of our belonging to God, we find healing and grow in our capacity to extend this love and belonging to others. The radical kinship that we share with others is not rooted in any sort of human commonality (nationality, language, race, gender, age, etc.), but rather in the basic truth that as humans, we all are created in the image of God and are loved by and belong to God. Boyle writes: “Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin. Homeboy’s message is not ‘You can measure up someday.’ Rather, it is ‘Who you are is enough.’ And when you have enough, you have plenty” (84).
Boyle encourages us to relish the freedom found in radical kinship, especially the freedom from judging others. “We must try and learn,” he writes, “to drop the burden of our own judgments, reconciling that what the mind wants to separate, the heart should bring together. Dropping this enormous inner burden of judgment allows us to make of ourselves what God ultimately wants the world to be: people who stand in awe.” He continues: “Kinship asks us to move from blame to understanding. Our practice of awe empties a room, and suddenly there is space for expansive compassion” (57).
From a summary of Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship by Gregory Boyle
Although table fellowship was central to Miles’s experience of the Gospel, her practice of the table was inextricably bound with the practice of radical kinship. Driven by our common hunger as humans, and our common creation in the image of God, all humans were invited to and welcomed at Christ’s table. A crucial theme of Take This Bread is the powerful way in which God continually brings diverse people together around the table. “[The Eucharist] reconciled, if only for a minute, all of God’s creation,” she writes: “revealing that without exception, we were members of one body, God’s body, in endless diversity. The feast showed us how to re-member what had been dis-membered by human attempts to separate and divide, judge and cast out, select or punish. At that Table, sharing food, we were brought into the ongoing work of making creation whole” (76-77). This inclusion into the reconciling work of Christ was not just a privilege of the well-educated church professional, but rather was open to all who desired to follow Christ. “’Real’ Christians,” Miles writes: “weren’t the ones who happened to control the levers of ecclesiastical power, those who belonged to the biggest churches or oldest traditions. They could be total outsiders and still perform rites that evoked the Gospel messages of healing, new life, shared food, shared grief, shared peace. They included anyone who, like those first unqualified disciples, got a taste of Jesus and followed him” (241).
From a summary of Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion by Sara Miles
Part of what was so subversive about the Christian meals of the first century, as Streett depicts them, was the profoundly egalitarian nature of how they were practiced. The early Christians followed the example of Jesus, Streett maintains, who reclined at the table with those culturally perceived as saints (e.g., Pharisees) and those culturally perceived as sinners (e.g., Levi, the tax collector and his friends). In the early Christian meals, women and slaves were given a seat at the table (or more specifically, they reclined at the table) in ways that they were unable to do at traditional Roman banquets. A visitor to one of these meals “would encounter an alternative way of life, where all people regardless of the status assigned to them by Rome, participated fully as equals in the meal. Around the meal table believers forged a new social identity as being ‘in Christ.’ As such, they were now being fashioned into a new body politic, which represented the kingdom of God” (202). Streett acknowledges the struggles that first century ekklesia faced in practicing this radically egalitarian kinship, but insists that the nature of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed was undoubtedly egalitarian, and despite their struggles to do so, the early Christians did bear witness in often imperfect ways to the radical kinship that God desires.
From a summary of An Analysis of the Lord’s Supper under Roman Domination during the First Century by R. Alan Streett
Both Tyson and Villodas encourage churches to reconsider what it means to flourish. They acknowledge that flourishing is a spiritual matter but contend it always extends beyond the spiritual. Villodas states his perspective bluntly: “I am convinced God is interested in the flourishing—the shalom—of a concrete place” (79). This is no abstract statement for Villodas. Neither is it an unattainable one. Villodas and the people who attend his church do not ask how they can improve the city, which would be overwhelming, considering it is New York City. Rather, they emphasize the communities, the boroughs, that compose the city. They regularly ask, “What can I do to make Elmhurst [a New York City neighborhood] more beautiful?” (80). Tyson offers further illustration of Villodas’s perspective: “To move toward rootedness in our discipleship … we have reclaimed the idea of the ‘parish.’ We define a parish as a geographic area of spiritual responsibility. We are not called to just care for church members, but whole communities— modeling the sacrificial love of Jesus in a particular context. This means that what happens in my parish is my responsibility.” In one of the most diverse, multi-ethnic neighborhoods in the United States, members of Villodas’s church are learning to love their neighbors, and to experience the sort of solidarity and kinship that emerges as we follow in the way of Jesus.
Villodas describes how his church cultivates this radical kinship with their neighbors: “Many in our church community have started to take this call seriously. They have stepped into problem areas in the community, acting as chaplains and police liaisons. They’ve forged relationships with local business owners, joined the PTA, launched community associations, opened arts programs, and led initiatives to restore public parks. And they have done all this in Jesus’s name, with humility and love, as servants of the community. As a result, we have seen the beginning of a shift. We have seen cynics’ hearts soften, atheists begin to doubt their doubt, and lonely people find a home in a community where they experience healing and acceptance. And one life at a time, Jesus is becoming a topic of conversation in the places where we live” (62).
From a summary of Sacred Roots: Why the Church Still Matters by Jon Tyson, Rich Villodas
Following in the tradition of the early Christians, Pohl sees an intimate connection between table fellowship and radical kinship: sharing meals across the lines of class and ethnicity is one of the most important ways that radical kinship is cultivated in the church. “By God's grace and power, and because of the sacrificial welcome they had experienced in Christ,” Pohl notes, “[the early Christians] learned to sit down at a table and share their homes and lives with people they had previously viewed as dirty or less than human. They sorted out this new way of living and valuing in the context of offering one another hospitality” (162).
From a summary of Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us by Christine Pohl
In seeking to tear down the wall between clergy and laity, Yoder’s argument in The Fullness of Christ, promotes a radical kinship in ministry. He takes the apostle Paul’s words seriously: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Corinthians 12: 21). Like all the parts of the human body, every member of the local church community has a vital role to play in life and witness of that congregation. Yoder notes that this radical kinship is rooted in Jesus’s example of servanthood. Jesus did not come to rule, but to serve. Yoder writes: “[It is] Jesus’ role as serving not only God but his disciples, whom he now calls ‘friends’ and ‘brothers,’ which Jesus gives the disciples as model for their own roles, when they are still thinking about ‘which of them would be the greatest’ (according to Luke and John) in a eucharistic setting. … The notion that God himself has renounced rule for servanthood and calls us to do the same (Philippians 2:5-11) is paradoxically a powerful thought. It explodes the categories with which we think about social processes. That is why one of Satan’s most ordinary tricks is to let us continue to use the language of serving as a euphemism for ruling” (67). Yoder reminds us that radical kinship is not just about tearing down walls between those that are deeply divided in the world (Jew and Gentile, male and female, etc.), but also about how we relate to one another in a Christ-like manner. In Christ, there can be no hierarchy, where one person rules over another.
Although it can, at times, be a challenging read, John Howard Yoder’s The Fullness of Christ, is a crucial book for helping us reimagine what it might mean to live the Word. Living and embodying the Word (i.e., Jesus) is a calling for all members of the church – not just ordained clergy – and all have been gifted by God to participate in this work together.
From a summary of The Fullness of Christ: Paul’s Vision of Universal Ministry by John Howard Yoder
Some aspects of the practice of radical kinship have been identified in the three practices above, including the non-hierarchical status of the church community and diverse members sharing food as family members in table fellowship. Simson also highlights the ways that meeting in a home (versus a church building) opens the doors for kinship with those of other faiths and those who might be alienated from Christianity by the ways that traditional Christianity has aligned itself with the power systems of the state. For many Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, entering a church building itself is a spiritual, cultural, social, and philosophical problem. As relational family-style house churches develop – similar in style to the extended family culture from which these three religions have come – a more welcoming and less taboo environment is created, helping people raised in other faiths to learn about Jesus Christ in an appropriate fashion” (121).
Because of its capacity to cultivate these key practices, the house church as Simson describes it, is a compelling model for what church might look like. Simson’s focus on house churches as a radical alternative to the traditional churches he critiques might impose a barrier for some in those traditional church settings. However, there are many fruitful ideas in this book that are worth exploring in our churches, whether traditional, house church, or otherwise.
From a summary of The House Church Book: Rediscover the Dynamic, Organic, Relational, Viral Community Jesus Started by Wolfgang Simson
The most relevant facet of Jordan’s life and work is the multitude of ways in which he sought to bring Christians together in radical kinship across racial boundaries. Of course, his community in the Jim Crow South did not take so kindly to Koinonia’s efforts toward interracial fellowship, and Jordan suffered real and threatened violence against himself and their community. In the essay “Metamorphasis,” Jordan roots his work toward radical kinship in the witness of Jesus himself, who called both Matthew the publican and Simon the Zealot to follow him in fellowship with one another (In today’s society, that would be like calling a Donald Trump follower and the most ardent of Leftists to follow Jesus together.) The fact that Jesus not only called both of these political rivals, but that they followed him in fellowship with each other, writes Jordan, “was absolute proof that the reign of God had changed these people from the little old caterpillars of hate and prejudice and greed and had made them into the butterflies of his new order” (75-76).
From a summary of The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion by Clarence Jordan
Isolation, as Werntz describes it above, is the antithesis of a community of radical kinship. Churches, he notes, are too often “a mirror of social isolation, not an alternative to it” (21). Radical kinship is inhibited by the prevalent individualism in churches, but also by the crowd mentality that forms in churches with strong, visionary leaders. Following Bonhoeffer, Werntz notes that “the opposite of isolation is not ‘people gathering together’; the opposite of isolation is ‘community in and through Christ” (32). The reality that we are not merely brought together, but brought together in Christ “as an interdependent whole” (32), offers a depiction of the sort of radical kinship that God intends for humanity. Or, in other words, we are not simply living together in community, but rather our call is to live the Word together. Furthermore, our being gathered in Christ, Werntz notes, is above all, a bodily gathering, in which the diversity of our bodies (male and female, ethnic differences and skin colors, abled bodies and disabled bodies, etc.) are all joined together in Christ’s body. The church, Werntz writes, “is a body where the world ‘in Adam’ – with all of its creaturely contours, bonds, and fractures – is taken up and transfigured into the body of Christ” (37).
From a summary of Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together by Myles Werntz
Isolation, as Werntz describes it above, is the antithesis of a community of radical kinship. Churches, he notes, are too often “a mirror of social isolation, not an alternative to it” (21). Radical kinship is inhibited by the prevalent individualism in churches, but also by the crowd mentality that forms in churches with strong, visionary leaders. Following Bonhoeffer, Werntz notes that “the opposite of isolation is not ‘people gathering together’; the opposite of isolation is ‘community in and through Christ” (32). The reality that we are not merely brought together, but brought together in Christ “as an interdependent whole” (32), offers a depiction of the sort of radical kinship that God intends for humanity. Or, in other words, we are not simply living together in community, but rather our call is to live the Word together. Furthermore, our being gathered in Christ, Werntz notes, is above all, a bodily gathering, in which the diversity of our bodies (male and female, ethnic differences and skin colors, abled bodies and disabled bodies, etc.) are all joined together in Christ’s body. The church, Werntz writes, “is a body where the world ‘in Adam’ – with all of its creaturely contours, bonds, and fractures – is taken up and transfigured into the body of Christ” (37).
From a summary of A Friendly Guide to John’s Gospel by Mary Coloe