Those words provide the title for the opening chapter of Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church*by Maria Harris.

The following is from this opening chapter, and provides a valuable springboard for the coming series of posts.

Harris begins her superb volume with these words:

No image has so captured our Christian imaginations in recent years as has the image of ourselves as a people.  Although various models of the church, such as herald, servant, institution, and congregation, continue to influence us, the dominating self-understanding is increasingly the church as a people.  Perhaps this one emerges as most compelling because it takes our humanness seriously.  Being a people, a community of persons, means that all of us are flesh and blood, heirs to both the heights and the depths of everything that goes into being human.  It takes the incarnation seriously and suggests that we have allowed into our spirits the truth that the Word has become flesh (John 1).  And because we have accepted that, we have also allowed into our spirits the truth that the Word continues to become flesh, today, in us.

The Word continually becoming flesh, in us, completes the image.  For not only are we coming to understand ourselves more and more as a people; we now realize that we are a people with a pastoral vocation.  The truth of our baptism and confirmation is confronting us regularly, and we are beginning to see that being incorporated into this people carries responsibilities with it.  No longer is it enough to be passive members, receiving a world told us by someone else, filing that word away to be taken out for a reading now and then.  No longer is it enough to leave the work of the church to pastors and ordained leaders, as if the total responsibility was theirs.  Instead, we are realizing that the word of God is addressing us, saying something to us, making demands on us, and asking us to live that word in our lives.  We are a people called by the gospel, called to make a difference in our world.

We are called to care for ourselves, for one another, for the earth which is our home.  We are called to take seriously our relation to God and to all God’s creatures, both within and beyond the church.  We are called to end our isolation from others by living each day of our lives rooted in love, rooted in the Christ.  And we are called to believe that in doing so, we fulfill our destiny as a people of God.

The mission of the people who are the church is to go into the world and to be in the world as Jesus was, as the revelation of God.  The mission of the people who are the church is to reveal God as present to the world, as a God who cares for the world and is in an ongoing relation to the world.  The mission is to reveal a God who works through active and practical ministry in the world – a world so loved that, in the words of John 3:16, the only-begotten Son of this God was given as a gift to the world. (23-25)

*Maria Harris.  Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1989.