After Jesus’ ascension, the Holy Spirit carries Jesus’ presence to humanity (John 14:16–18) and forms a community which bears witness to the reign of God: the church. The church lives out the reign of God as an alternative to and an indictment of the world around it. As soon as Jesus began proclaiming God’s reign, he called followers around him to learn from him how to continue the work of proclamation. These followers, after his ascension, became the church, gathered by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to the reign of God. As Lesslie Newbigin so succinctly puts it, “The church lives in the midst of history as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the reign of God.”¹

               Mortimer Arias talks about the work of the Holy Spirit in reminding the church of the “subversive memory of Jesus,” a concept similar to Brueggemann’s alternative community. Arias discusses two ways in which God helps the church remember Jesus: the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit. Scripture, itself a work of the Spirit, retells the story of Jesus, identifying the critique and newness in the reign of God, but as Brueggemann warns, a static remembrance of an alternative community can be used to introduce its own totalistic counter-movement.² For Arias, the work of the Holy Spirit is to keep Jesus at the center of the church. He writes, “The Holy Spirit is the other ‘subverter’ promised by Jesus, whose ministry is specifically to awaken us, to help us to remember, not to forget the message that has been entrusted to us in Jesus Christ.”³ The Holy Spirit points to Jesus Christ as the proclaimer and presence of the reign of God, reminding the church that it lives the reign of God as a community which offers criticism and hope of the present age, a community built on the eschatological promises of God.

               Bringing about a remembrance of Jesus and Jesus’ proclamation is not the only work of the Spirit—the Holy Spirit is also the primary agent in gathering the church. This differs from the more common understanding of the church in American society as an organization one chooses to join. This understanding is heavily influenced by the philosophy of John Locke, who writes, “A church…is a free and voluntary society… No man by nature is bound unto any particular church or sect, but everyone joins himself voluntarily to that society in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is truly acceptable to God.”⁴ One’s religion is separate from anything outside of themselves and God (representative of Locke’s secular₂ imaginary), and it is only up to them which religion to choose to belong.

               This way of looking at religion as a voluntary association is also at home in Taylor’s secular₃, even though Locke is writing in an earlier era. Rather than opting into a church through which one will regularly experience transcendence, as in secular₂, in secular₃ encountering transcendence at all is optional. Responding to these changes, Edwin van Driel offers another perspective, centering the work of building the church on God’s action rather than human action. The church, expressed in local congregations, is a community God gathers together. He writes:

For many North Americans the church is a voluntary organization that we join or leave at will. Congregations are communities held together by shared convictions, practices, and programs… We see churches as players in a religious marketplace…
I invite you to think of your church…the church of which you are a part or which you serve, as being as such a community gathered together by the ascended Christ.⁵

van Driel builds his argument on Ephesians 1, especially verse 10 and the statement of God’s plan “to gather up all things in him [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth.” For van Driel, the church is more than just a response to the work of God in the world through Jesus Christ—it is gathered and constituted by the work of God as a new, concrete community which exists in the world.⁶

               While van Driel assigns the work of gathering the church primarily to Jesus Christ, I see this as an action of the Holy Spirit, one that is discussed by Michael Welker. Welker describes the Holy Spirit as the working of God’s power in the world:

God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is not only a power by which God once upon a time intervened in past worlds and made Godself knowable. God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is also the power and the force by which God intervenes in constantly new ways in the present world and makes Godself knowable to people living in the present and in the future.⁷

To present his argument, Welker applies the metaphor of a “force-field” to the work of the Spirit, connecting with the theory of electromagnetics, something I studied extensively for my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering.⁸ While a thorough discussion of electromagnetics is outside the scope of this paper, there are several important characteristics of electromagnetic fields that have relevance in light of Welker’s treatment of the Holy Spirit. When two or more fields interact with one another, they cause interference; the fields are affected by one another. Depending on the specific properties of these fields, they may interfere constructively: the two fields add together to create a larger effect than each individually. Alternatively, they may interfere destructively: the two fields subtract from one another creating a smaller mutual effect. While interference in practice is much more complex, these complex interactions generally fall into these two categories of interference: constructive or destructive; addition or subtraction. These interacting fields may constructively interfere at some points and destructively interfere in others.⁹

               As the Holy Spirit works in the world, a part of the Spirit’s gathering work is bringing people into constructive interference with herself. As Welker phrases it, the Spirit, among other activities, “transforms and renews people and orders, and opens people to God’s creative action.”¹⁰ The Spirit brings the presence of Christ to humans and in doing so grows them to be more like Christ. As the Spirit works, it moves people from destructive interference—acting in ways that are against the reign of God—into constructive interference. The Spirit brings them into an encounter with the transcendent God as they experience this interference. The encounter leads people to become proclaimers of the reign of God and witnesses to Jesus Christ and his work. Welker states, “People who receive the Spirit are enabled to bear witness; it is the Spirit who, through those human beings whose services have been enlisted, bears witness to Christ.”¹¹ Welker is quite clear, though, that this work of the Spirit is not only an individual activity—the Spirit works in community. In Welker’s view, “[The] fullness of salvation…is mediated in and through the community of testimony of people who have been ‘washed…sanctified…justified’ by the name of Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God.”¹² The Spirit gathers those who constructively interfere with her into a church; the same community who bears witness to the future reign of God in the present.

               This shift in thinking, from the church as a voluntary association to a community gathered by the Holy Spirit brings that communal aspect of the church to the forefront. Returning to the work of Edwin van Driel, “to be saved, is for the gathering work of Christ to reach you. It is to be knitted into the new humanity, the new household of God.”¹³ From this understanding of the church as a gathered people, there are several consequences, which I will discuss at various points in the remainder of this chapter. If strangers are gathered to a local congregation as part of God’s activity, their welcome by the congregation is now a response to a work of the Holy Spirit. As such, hospitality becomes an essential part of the ministry of the church. Secondly, this view empowers the church to shift its focus from ensuring one’s salvation to being a new community. The Holy Spirit brings people to the community and develops their faith; the church lives into its own call to bear witness to the reign of God. Those who were gathered as strangers are discipled by the church as the church lives out who it has been previously discipled to be. Finally, the gathering of the church is to bear witness. As van Driel writes in another work, “We are sent exactly in being gathered. In being gathered, we are being saved; we are knitted into the new community established by Christ… In this community, Christ makes already visible what the future looks like.”¹⁴ By remembering the gathering work of the Holy Spirit in forming the church, the church is free to be who it is: an alternative community who proclaims of the good news of the reign of God by its very existence.

Notes

1. Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, Revised Edition (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 110. ↩︎
2. Brueggemann offers the example of the shift from the alternative community of Moses to Solomon’s totalism in chapter 2, “Royal Consciousness: Countering the Counterculture,” in The Prophetic Imagination, by Walter Brueggemann, 40th Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 21–37. ↩︎
3. Arias, Announcing the Reign of God, 67. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
4. John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 85. ↩︎
5. van Driel, “Rethinking Church in a Post-Christian Age,” 48–49. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
6. van Driel, 53. ↩︎
7. Michael Welker, God the Spirit, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2013), 4. ↩︎
8. Welker’s discussion involving the action of the Spirit as a force-field may be found in Chapter 5, “The Pouring Out of the Spirit: Its Action of Liberation and of Overcoming the World,” in God the Spirit, by Michael Welker (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2013), 228–78. ↩︎
9. One relatively easy to perceive example of this phenomenon is the interaction of sound waves between two loudspeakers. When two loudspeakers are placed at a distance from one another and the same music is played through both, as one walks at a distance from one speaker to the other, the bass frequencies of the music will sound louder or quieter depending on one’s position and the distance from each speaker. The moments when the bass frequencies sound louder are points of constructive interference; the moments when the bass frequencies are quieter are points of destructive interference. ↩︎
10. Welker, God the Spirit, 221. ↩︎
11. Welker, 224. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
12. Welker, 237–38. ↩︎
13. van Driel, “Rethinking Church in a Post-Christian Age,” 58. Emphasis in original. My own discussion of the church as a new household is in the next part of this chapter. ↩︎
14. Edwin Chr. van Driel, “To Be Gathered Is to Be Sent,” in Essays on the New Worshiping Communities Movement, ed. Mark D. Hinds (Louisville, KY: Witherspoon Press, 2018), 50. ↩︎