Repair

A church that relearns how to repair would still have sins in need of exposure, wounds in need of debridement, errors in need of deconstruction. But for every thesis we nail to the door, we might fix a broken hinge or putty an old crack. We might be known less for our mutual antagonism and more as repairers of broken walls. With time and faithfulness, maybe we can pass on to future generations a hard-won tendency toward repair.

Thus ends a essay on repair by Bonnie Kristian at Christianity Today.

While I’ve yet to write the official post launching what I hope to be the ongoing project of this blog it will be something adjacent to the idea of repair she writes about but with a different sense of the devastation the church has/is going through. The concept of repair reminds me of something like Tim Keller’s How to Reach the West again (which to be honest to me sounds like How to Make America great again.) These seem more like nostalgia, a longing for better days, than a willingness to grapple with the actual reality that stands before. The title for blog/project comes from Jonathan Lear’s classic work Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, which follows the story of how Plenty Coups and the Crow people navigated the end of a world. While I have read and listened to the book several times it has not become clear to me what type of world Lear that would be facing but the book has the overarching theme that world Lear and we inhabit is going to face its own cultural devastation. We can each pick our own prophets for what this cultural devastation might look like but whoever we pick it is not clear what to do next. Repair, the way Kristian writes about, could be the path for the church in this coming collapse but to me it looks more like putting a bandage of a flesh wound and cannot see how the things we might repair lead us to crisis in the first place.