What can the church become?

On this day which commemorates the life and witness of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I find that much of what Dr. King preached and wrote resonates in the world today. In worship yesterday we heard several excerpts from Dr. King alongside scripture. One of the excerpts was from a sermon given in 1954, The Transformed Non Conformist.

“Transformed Non-Conformist”
Montgomery, Alabama
November 1954

“We need to recapture something that the early Christians had. They went out aglow with a radical gospel. They were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word. They never allowed their actions to be shaped by the mundane patterns of this world. They were willing to sacrifice fame or fortune or life itself for a cause they knew was right. They were quantitatively small but qualitatively big. In those days Christianity was powerful. It stopped barbaric evils like infanticide and brought an end to the bloody gladiatorial shows. Its views on war were clearly known because of the refusal of every Christian to take up arms. At that time the church was still a numerical minority. But then it began to grow in numbers until it finally captured the Roman Empire. Gradually it became so entrenched in wealth and worldly prestige that it began to dilute the strong demands of the gospel and to conform to the status quo of the world. Ever
since that time the church has been like a weak and ineffectual trumpet making uncertain sounds, rather than a strong trumpet sounding a clarion call for truth and righteousness. If the church of Jesus Christ is to regain its power, and its message its authentic ring, it must go out with a new determination not to conform to this world.”


I wonder what it would look like for the church to be able to more clearly sound?

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