HOPE FOR RENEWAL (Under the Banner of Christ, Part 1)
This post is part of a series talking about my new book, "Under the Banner of Christ with Benedict: Ancient Lessons in Christian Leadership for Times Like These"
(PART 1) HOPE FOR RENEWAL
The scandals that have rocked the Church over the last 30 years, the crises of faith and faithfulness, the failures of leadership across all segments of the Christian people both ecclesiastical and lay, point us to the urgent necessity of renewal – renewal in the way we think about Christian leadership, the way we live as Christians, and the way we form our communities (and the ways they form us). The crises within the Church and the challenges facing the Church from modern society did not arise out of nowhere nor by chance, but are part of the failure on our part as Christians to remain close to the Gospel of Christ in all things and shape our lives and institutions on the life-giving mysteries of our relationship to God in genuine Christian community.
There is nonetheless cause for hope! This is not the first time in history that the Church has been rocked by scandal and the Christian community alienated by the corruption and abuse of leadership. It is not the first time we have been faced by animosity from the world and from those who would eradicate the love of God from the earth. We Christians have been through this kind of thing a number of times before. In many of the reforms that overcame such challenges in the past, and the renewals that followed them, the wisdom of one human person in particular figures prominently: Benedict of Nursia, and the way of Christian life he established in the world. Our own times bear certain significant similarities to Benedict’s own times, living as he did during the social and political upheavals (and the attendant problems in political and ecclesiastical leadership) following the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
In his pivotal 1981 work, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says,
"What [Christians at the decline of the Roman Empire] set themselves to achieve... was *the construction of new forms of community* within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.
And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament." (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue).
Find the new book here.