To Live in Peace

I've just started reading Mark Gornik's book, "To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City." Gornik's book, written out of the experience of planting a church and helping a community become more cohesive in inner-city Baltimore, is an incredible, integrative work. It's an essential read for the church planter in an inner-city setting. Dealing with social, political, economic, and theological aspects of life in the inner-city, Gornik's book is multi-dimensional, and sopping with insights into new ways of being church in the midst of our ever-evolving communities. As someone thinking of church planting - or even just digging in and living out my Christian faith - here in Toronto, in an inner-city community, this book has been incredibly challenging. As a church planter, our thoughts should not just be captivated by saying the right words. Surely we are not only to relate the gospel in words, but also with the wholeness of our action. When we reduce the gospel merely to verbal speech, we reduce the potency and overall transformative power of the gospel over our thoughts our words and even our actions. To preach the gospel, we must all accept our call to authentically incarnate the gospel as Jesus did - not only in our words, but also in our full self-giving for the life of other, and the life of the world. It's easy enough to write off our duties to give everything, like the rich young ruler, to the poor, claiming not to be "rich," but rather "middle class," but these technicalities are not the spirit of Christ's all-encompassing, all-renewing gospel. To live in peace, in the inner city or anywhere else, is to be the peace, to (stealing from Gandhi) be the change now. Sounds heavy. I thought Christ's burden was supposed to be light...