O God, Eternal Father, who hast revealed thyself in Jesus Christ and called us to a life of love to all mankind, give to us wisdom that we who write and we who read these words may look beyond them to thine own pure truth. Concerning thee who shall say the perfect word? Thou who art from everlasting wilt not be captured by the nets of human thinking; but to thee our thoughts bear witness and from thee we ask a blessing. Amen.

We begin with our awareness that God takes the initiative in forming and maintaining the relationship between himself and us. Our meeting with him results in a joyous sense of discovery that he loved us before we loved him.

He touches us on every surface of our lives. Let us say that these surfaces are three: the external, the historical, and the internal. We find God in all of them. No single application, no sequence of designating terms, can adequately interpret his reality, and meaning for human life. He is Creator, ruler, Sustainer, Redeemer, Father–and more.

(1) God “inhabits eternity.” Time and space do not wholly contain him. He is transcendent. Let the whole universe collapse or vanish into nothing, the Creator who brought it into being still remains. Transcending the world, he rules the world as no worldly power could ever rule. Let all earth’s tyrants and oppressors combine against him, and it will still be manifested that “the earth is the Lord’s”; for all the power they can mobilize against him is ultimately derived from him, and finally powerless against him. He is sovereign-–not in the sense that he permits no disorder to break out in his vast domain, but in the sense that no rival power can actually overthrow his rule.

“Disorder” implies a fundamental harmony between Ruler and ruled, which has been disturbed. We believe that God laid the basis for fellowship with and among his human creatures by creating them in his own image, and calling them to become limited co-creators, limited co-rulers with him over the domain of Nature. Whenever men actually realize this their exalted destiny under God, how happy they are! But they show a persistent and tragic tendency to seek their good in the realization of their own self-centered desires, instead of in the will of their Creator. When this occurs, they are bound to be frustrated and humiliated, for they are fighting against their own nature, as well as against their transcendent and sovereign Lord, who cannot be “mocked.” Even the saint who loves God’s laws and seeks to obey them, is conscious of much inner conflict and moral failure; how much deeper is the frustration of those who see no sin in themselves, and assert their wills rebelliously! So long as their rebellion lasts, God appears to them as a Judge, and the ancient law of retributive justice holds good: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

(2) God is not simply our transcendent Creator and just Ruler who rewards us when we obey his laws, and brings judgment upon us when we disobey them. He is also our compassionate Father and Friend who sends a constant rain of daily blessings on the just and unjust alike and offers forgiving love to his thankless evil children long before they are willing to receive it. The pre-Christian philosopher who pictured him in a seventh heaven, far removed from the needs of this world, did not know him. Although he is above history, he has also entered into it to care for and if need be to suffer for each creature he has made. He is Sustainer and Redeemer, as well as Creator and Ruler.

In Jesus Christ God discloses his character as one who will not remain in careless isolation beyond the limits of the universe, but who out of love for all us children sacrifices himself for them. In Jesus’ life and death as in his teaching, God is known not merely as a transcendent God but as a caring Father, whose close companionship may daily be experienced by those who respond to his love with answering trust, but whose compassion also pursues those prodigals who flee from him in distrust, and experience only his judgment–until they come to themselves and realize that it was not from an Enemy but from their best Friend that they fled!

Such Christlike sacrificial love must always have been part of God’s character, and must have been continually pressing for utterance in all God’s dealings with mankind even before Christ and outside of Christ. But when it was disclosed in Christ that the mighty Ruler of the universe was concerned to the last limit of suffering that his children should know him and in him find eternal life, this was sufficient to change men’s entire point of view–sufficient to impart new and more abundant life on a higher plane of existence. In Christ the very center of God’s character, his heart of love, was revealed and began to evoke appropriate response in human hearts. Men began to love their fellow-men sacrificially, redemptively, as God in Christ had loved them.

In the response of the first disciples to the disclosure of God’s love in Christ, the turning-point of history took place. A new and redeemed humanity began, and the foundations of God’s Kingdom were freshly laid. This ne humanity, this new society of the willing servants of God, grows and ramifies to this day, wherever men respond to God’s love and accept his rule to their lives. The Kingdom of God among men begins with those who thus commit their wills to God, in response to his love, and extends from such committed wills out into all the relations of society, tending to remold these relations in conformity with God’s Will. There has always been a Kingdom of God on earth, since the first faltering human response was made to God’s love; but from the time of Christ, in whom the full meaning of God’s love and the full meaning of human commitment to God’s Will were simultaneously revealed, there has always been a community on earth consciously committed to God’s service, and daily praying, “Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The history of this community has become the clue to the interpretation of world history.

(3) There is still another surface of our lives–the inward surface. We should have no principle for the interpretation of history if it were all presented to us to read without any inner coaching as to its points of most significance. Why do we select Jesus rather than Judas as the revealer of God’s will? Because of a monitor within. The Holy Spirit encourages us to decide for Christ as over against that which is not Christ. There is that within us which we know to be the urging of God, interpreted to us by our parents, our church, and the society in which we have been brought up–the foundation on which family, church and society must build–which is ultimate and unescapable. By it we know that the way of Christ is better than the way of Judas: that the former rather than the latter way corresponds to the will of God. By it, when we begin to follow its guidance, we find ourselves inwardly sustained, comforted and abundantly inspired with “love, joy, and peace.” There has always been a Holy Spirit; witness the “voice of gentle stillness” which spoke to Elijah in the wilderness, and the “daemon” which guided Socrates. But at Pentecost, following upon the full dedication of the young Church to the continuation of the work of the Living Lord, there was kindled in the hearts of Christians a new fiery sense of God’s inward Presence and Power, which despite all that has tended to stamp it down, has flared up afresh and burned over new ground in every subsequent generation.

Each one of these contacts which God makes with us is distinct, and yet God cannot be truly understood unless they are considered together. One God makes himself know to us as Father, Son (or Christ), and Holy spirit. He is (1) a transcendent God who (2) enters into history and (3) enters into our hearts. he thus directs and sustains us as only superhuman Wisdom and Power can do; redeems us from sin and misery as only (4) “Love divine that stoop’d to share” can do; empowers us and impels us towards life’s true goal as only Inner Fire and Inner Light can do.

To complete the divine-human relationship, our willing response is necessary. God does not invade the personality, over-riding free will. Love forbids. If he is to reveal himself in his true character, he cannot make an assault upon our belief; our wills and his must meet in freedom. In the divine-human fellowship of the Church, the God revealed in Christ finds a body of willing collaborators set to receive his creative power, his redeeming love, his inspiring holiness, and transmit them to a needy world.

A good test whether the Church’s religious life is genuine or spurious lies in the answer to the question, Does it call for decisions? The God who requires no commitment on our part is likely to be a product of our own philosophizing, needing no commitment since he is already part of ourselves. Only a self-revealing God can call for commitment–but if commitment is not involved, our will, which is the very core of our personality, remains untouched.

God coming to and willingly accepted by us in a three-fold relationship, each impact distinct from though not independent of the others, produces the Church. In turn the Church makes three characteristic responses to the contacts God establishes with us: Faith, fellowship, Freedom. The health of the Church’s inner life depends upon the maintenance of contact with its divine Source; the test of health or sickness is whether or not it makes these three characteristic responses.

(1) Faith is our response to him not so much as he appears in history or in our souls–though if he had not come to us in these latter phases we could not know his true character–but rather as he rules from beyond time and place, the transcendent Father, strong to save, the Giver of everlasting life, who dwells in eternity. In him is all power as well as all goodness. No circumstance or set of circumstances can defeat him–and because of his power and his love no circumstance or circumstances can defeat us. The immortality to which he lifts human souls gives meaning to history. It is only as we are supported by such a One who is beyond and above the world of the senses that we can resist the tides of materialism which flow over the world and ourselves. Faith in God “transcendent, faith which endures as seeing him who is invisible,” is of the essence of the Church.

Faith itself should not be confused with any human expression of faith. No work of human minds, warped as they must be by ignorance and sin, can quite comprehend God. No philosopher can prove him. No preacher can bring him out at the end of a nicely constructed logical syllogism. No morality can quite express him. No ritual can create his “real presence.” All that any statement such as this, all that any instrument of man can offset, in view of God’s sovereignty, is a witness to him, as the compass may point to the pole star, though the star be far from it. But a continuous line of witness, stretching from the first Biblical witnesses down through a long succession of preachers, teachers, martyrs, saints, and simple Christian folk–the ministry of the living Word–is the main means by which a living faith is engendered and transmitted in the Church.

(2) The coming of god into history in Jesus Christ on a saving mission of revelation and redemption produces fellowship. As when a magnet is brought up under a paper of iron filings, a magnetic field is produced in which the filings form a pattern with the magnet at their center and each becomes magnetized itself, so Christ in history provides a pattern of sacrificially shared fellowship and each one who becomes part of it is attracted to do the same. The religion of Israel provides the antecedents for this pattern; Christ founds, not a wholly new fellowship, but a new Israel. There are religions which may survive without any social structure corresponding to the Church–but not Judaism or Christianity. God in Christ is best known by his fellowship-creating effect, loyal response to him producing deep affection and mutual interdependence between all who serve the one Lord–while at the same time he confirms faith and opens the way into the “glorious liberty of the children of God.”

The Congregational Christian Churches have from their inception refused to build their fellowship about any center save the living God who reveals himself in Christ. Forms of church government, creeds, and rituals are used by human beings to express to each other the meaning of that God-centered fellowship. Every good form in the Church must therefore (a) conform to the apperceptions of those who would understand and profit by it. Congregational Christians have never gone to the extreme of denying the place of forms, but they have resolutely resisted the use of any particular one as sacrosanct. They have striven constantly toward the universal which includes all particular forms. The form of their government, their theology, and their liturgical practice is hospitable to all forms by which Christians, whatever their denomination, point toward God. It is this quality which makes them an interdenominational denomination. Their fellowship is not exclusive, but inclusive. The two great sacraments mean, for them, induction into and nourishing communion in the universal fellowship of all who love and serve the Lord Jesus.

They look toward people of faiths other than Christian with a somewhat similar attitude. congregational Christians would say of them that when their lives fundamentally witness to the living God of love who is in Jesus Christ, they are essentially if not formally Christian.

(3) God’s touch upon the individual soul impels one to make choice from among the alternatives offered him by the world and to choose the things of God rather than the things which are not of God. The effect of the Holy Spirit, that is, is to cause one to exercise his freedom in God’s behalf. This has a creative influence in life, since God’s work is always creative, destroying only to rebuild, judging and ruling only to redeem and liberate. The Holy Spirit speaks to the artist, scientist, reformer–to all who devote themselves to making things beautiful, true, or good, or to breaking the shackles that impede creative youth. In this wider sense of the word, the Spirit broods creatively over the whole face of secular society, as in the beginning the Spirit brooded creatively over the primeval chaos; but in a more especial sense, the Spirit of Holiness broods over the Church, producing saints and prophets endowed with various gifts and graces. Here, too, the Spirit’s work is primarily creative and liberative–but it also cements fellowship and quickens faith.

It is at this point that Congregational Christian Churches make another characteristic witness. Their worshipers have never delivered up their freedom to ecclesiastical authorities of any kind, whether individuals, minorities, or majorities; nor have they submitted their conscience to the power of the State. So like other churches that stress the freedom of the Spirit they remain a creative, not an imitative nor a servile community. To exercise freedom in behalf of the creative Spirit of God is, they believe, to escape slavery to tradition, to forms of all sorts, important as forms and traditions are in their own place. The “freedom of the Christian man,” as they understand it, does not mean irreverence for human statutes or divine commands, but the right to judge all external injunctions, in the last resort, by the inward light and leading of God’s free Spirit.

Both in the Church’s worship and in the Church’s work, it faces now toward God and now toward the world.

The source of all worship lies with the transcendent God, the Father of our spirits, who in true worship discovers himself to us (1) through the world of history which surrounds us, and (2) in our hearts.

There are therefore two moments in worship. There is the meditative side, wherein we open our minds, sensitized by the Holy spirit, to the presence of God in history, past and present, with which we are encompassed. Above all, we see God living and suffering and gloriously conquering in Christ, but there are other subsidieary events and persons which point to him: the bible, the hymns, the liturgies, the vast wealth of the literature of power. to “make a meditation” means to open one’s life to God so as to commune with him and be influenced by him through the objects or events of history. This sacramental movement is from God through the world to the soul.

The other part is the reverse movement. Here God (in the Holy Spirit) moves through the soul out to the world. Petitionary prayer is often wrongly conceived as something that takes its beginning with the worshiper, who, it is thought, sends a request to God, who in turn answers it, the work of god being secondary to that of the one who prays. The true conception of prayer takes account of the fact of God’s loving and omniscient character: he is ready, ere the worshiper is ready, to minister to his world. The task of the one who prays is to put his will in line with the Creator’s–then daily to confirm this initial commitment by new decisions, and daily to revise his plans and purposes as more of god’s hidden design is revealed to him.

The Church likewise as in active work of God in history has its own inner life of faith, fellowship, and freedom “hid with Christ in God,” but the kind of god who brings it into existence is a living God, who takes the initiative against the world’s evil. He therefore sets up an outgoing movement of ministry and reformation on the part of the Church. Like Christ, the Church responds to God’s holy will not only by looking up to heaven in grateful dependence, but also by entering into the sorrows and sufferings of the world to mitigate and overcome them. It is therefore properly called the body of Christ. its ministry to the world is three-fold, in correspondence to the three-fold impact which God makes upon it, and the three-fold mission (still unfinished) which Christ and the Apostles bequeathed to it.

(1) The primary function of the Church in relation to the outside world is to extend the faith, everywhere and at all times witnessing to God. it preaches the word. It woos humanity as best it may at home and abroad to respond to God’s transcendent presence. It reaches mankind to pray and to worship.

The Congregational Christian Churches by heritage and purpose are firmly committed to the missionary enterprise.

(2) The Church carries on the work of Christ by creating bonds of fellowship throughout the world. This it does by calling all people–all individuals and individual institutions–to devote themselves, after the manner of Christ, to the common good of mankind.

(a) A primary concern of the Church is the community organized as the State.

When the Church looks at the world community, it finds it broken up into a number of states which regard themselves as sovereign, that is, not answerable to any other human, nor in many cases to any divine, authority. This multiplicity of sovereignties, in spite of the fact that each one of them may provide a ground of fellowship for its own citizens, is obviously a deterrent to world fellowship. The Church is therefore dedicated to the ideal of a world citizenship and world government–not necessarily to a single all-powerful World State, but at least to some unified ordering of international life, allowing liberty without absolute autonomy enforcing justice without tyranny as the laws of God require. Only such a world order, in contrast to the fragments which exist today, can provide peace and progress for humanity in the new era, now beginning.

Within the world community there are a million others, each organized for government and within each of which the Church preaches cooperation for the common good to citizens and groups of citizens. The Church as distinct from the State works only by methods of persuasion and example, but by these methods it labors tirelessly to make each community a fellowship more nearly after the Christian pattern.

(b) If the state is the ultimately large, the family is the ultimately small, community; and this the Church seeks to make the seed-ground of Christian nurture once again in our day, as it traditionally has been. The Church is well aware that unless it succeeds here it will succeed nowhere. If it fails, the best-laid plans of world order will collapse, for lack of devoted Christians and responsible citizens to support them.

Between the State and the family there are many other kinds of companies, brought together by various motives, each one of which the Church would transform into a Christian type of fellowship, and all together into a Christian type of civilization. In a truly Christian world civilization there would be room for many different groupings, with deep, harmonious love and fellowship binding them to one another.

(3) The third function of the Church is to promote freedom-–not the freedom which is license, but the freedom in the Holy Spirit which is creative and good. To this end the Church calls all communities, all companies of people however gathered, but especially governmental and ecclesiastical groups, to employ their energies for the good of the individuals who compose them. The Church holds that the State is bound to permit and encourage each citizen to lead the good life in response to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and to encourage and protect the free exercise of individual conscience even when “reasons of State” make it seem inexpedient. All schools, colleges, and universities are in the doctrine of the Church, designed to develop free men able to follow the guidance of reason, conscience, and the Spirit. Where there are no such schools and colleges, the Church establishes them, in order through knowledge to give to freedom proper instrumentation and direction. Where neighborhoods forget the downtrodden and make them the slaves of an impersonal economy, the Church may set up a neighborhood house or otherwise seek to bring release to the prisoners. Where nations, races, or classes are enslaved or oppressed, the Church has a call to participate in their liberation, and to help create an order of society which will secure their freedom in the future–always by methods consonant with the Church’s nature and calling.

In face of the unchristianity of the world the Church serves the forces of righteousness in at least three general ways.

(1) It provides a constant demonstration of the type of relationship between individual and community which the secular world must adopt to find its true good.

(2) It provides an enclave within which those who cannot be as completely Christian as they are moved to be in an unchristian world may enjoy Christian relations and maintain the constancy of their convictions.

(3) Through teaching and preaching, and through the activity of its members, the Church helps to reshape public opinion and to bring about necessary changes in social institutions.

So the Church becomes a means which God uses in the process of saving his world from evil and bringing his good purpose to fulfilment.

We cannot fully answer the question why God has permitted evil. When we attempt to do so, we come out in a logical contradiction, for on the one hand we know that god is good and therefore can hardly be the author of that which is bad; and yet he is also the Creator and cannot therefore but be in some way responsible for all that is in the world. The intellect “sees double,” as through a prism, darkly, when looking for the origin of evil in God.

In prayer, however, and in Christian ministry, no serious difficulty is encountered in reference to this matter. The question of origin drops into a secondary position, and we know beyond a peradventure (1) that god is wholly good and (2) that evil is to be overcome. If we cannot explain evil, we can at least help to convert it into good, and rescue those who are in its clutches.

Whether evil is to be completely overcome, at some later period in history, we cannot be sure. It seems improbable. All things temporal are incomplete, until God rounds them off. But we “know that his completeness flows around our incompleteness, round our restlessness his rest.” The Eternal God is our final Destination, as he is also our original Source. In him at last, in him surely, is complete deliverance from every ill. Here and hereafter, in time and eternity, to be united with him means life and joy, to be separated from him means torment and disaster.

O God, our Father, Almighty and All-Merciful, forgive, we pray thee, all that is amiss in the words that have been written; and if in them there be truth, we humbly pray that thou wilt engrave it on the heart of every reader. Thanks be to thee for the lighted mind: O Lord, lighten our darkness. Amen.