Barbara Brown Taylor on Differences in the Church

What’s your camp? Conservative? Progressive? Liberal? White? Black? Oppressed? Woke? Republican? Democrat? Who’s your enemy? The “Left”? The “Right”? If you knew your neighbor was voting for the other guy, would you want to have dinner with her? With all this floating around, I return to the wisdom of Barbara Brown Taylor, quoted below.

She arrived here after a march for racial justice which was confronted by "counter-protesters," namely, white supremacists. The thing she wrestled with was their passionate self identification as believers. Like so many of us in these days, she had to wrestle with the struggle between theology, ethics, politics, and more....

"Most of us have a romantic notion of community that gets in our way, because the real purpose of community is not to retreat someplace with other like-minded people, but to give ourselves up to the working of the Holy Spirit by learning how to live with people we may not like at all. What better way to open ourselves up to the God beyond our knowing than to begin with the neighbor beyond our knowing? What finer way to learn about the reconciling power of Christ than to test it in a body of infinite variety?"