I guess I have two main topics to bring following on from David’s contribution of last month. They relate to the nature of the nation state and our relation to it as the body of Christ. I offer them as usual for prayer, reflection and practical response and to encourage further revelation and discussion through the Daywatch blog www.daywatch.eu Please try hard to blog if you can because we want to get an online community up and running, but if not you can of course email us on admin@passion.org.uk

1. As many of you know my current main job is researching the relationship between church and empire, a task that I have been brought to by prayer and revival and that the Holy Spirit has indicated is necessary to the mindset change needed for an overcoming church positioned in the world. The main conclusions emerging from the historical side of my work are

a) Jesus came as a deliberate antidote to the Roman Empire which was at that very time attempting to colonise heaven itself in order to rule the earth with the appearance of divine approval. Through the Caesar cult the Roman emperors called themselves Son of God and Saviour and the Pax Romana was regarded as the divine peace. So when Jesus came in direct contrast to the Roman emperor, calling himself by the same names used by the imperial cult and declaring the kingdom of God, it was obvious that he and his church were of a completely different kind of power and nature to Rome.

b) The disciples never fully got the hang of this although Paul’s insistence on pushing first back to Jerusalem and then on to Rome indicates that he saw the gospel of the kingdom as opposed to and moving against the strongholds of empire. But in the end the lure of peace through empire proved too much for the church and demonstrated just how successful empire’s invasion of heaven had been. For by the early fourth century it was simply assumed that God was sovereign like worldly emperors and that his kingdom was an empire like theirs, in fact the Roman Empire just needed a Christian emperor and to adopt the church as its legitimator and it was the kingdom of God after all!

c) This idea was so convincing that even when Rome fell, the church carried on looking for earthly rulers with which they could partner in imposing peace through sovereignty. The church and the competing political powers spent centuries fighting one another and among themselves over who would bring the peace. The reformation was frankly as much about this as about important issues of doctrine such as justification by faith. In the consequent Thirty Years War during the first half of the seventeenth century some nine million people were slaughtered throughout Europe in the argument over who would best bring the peace of God’s kingdom through earthly empire.

d) As a result the surviving church in northern Europe, particularly in Britain and the Netherlands, resolved to find political partners with whom they could create a new agency that could take responsibility for the political peace that Rome had embodied centuries before. Out of this endeavour the nation state was born. Its very birth in the second part of the seventeenth century was established by war, justified by propaganda and facilitated by money so it is hardly surprising that the history of the modern European states is the story of these three interconnected powers and their impact on ordinary people. These three foundational strongholds are now taking on a life of their own in terms of a new global empire based on war, money and the media.

Two things follow from all this, firstly, the church is largely responsible for the mixture of blessing and oppressing that has marked the centuries of European history and become its heritage throughout the world. There is no way we can distance ourselves and blame the world (secularisation), the flesh (personal sin) or the devil alone for it all. Rather it is the result of the church’s misunderstanding of the gospel and its wrong alliance with empire. Secondly, the nation state and the global empire that is following on its heels today is the offspring of the church even although the world, the flesh and the devil are all over it. This is why we cannot give up on it but must embrace its territory and take responsibility for its peace.

2. Our calling as agents of the kingdom is opposed to the whole concept of hierarchical rule. This could hardly be more clear from the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, his identification with the poor and his clear instructions to his disciples “the kings of the nations lord it over them; and those who have authority over them are called 'Benefactors.' but it is not this way with you” (Lk 22:25-26). Several implications follow from this.

a) We were never supposed to set up a system but rather to journey into the world in relationship with the Lord, both individually and corporately laying our lives down, sometimes by what might seem like compromise and other times in strategic sacrifice.

b) We are called to be a dynamic relational community on a journey. We need to find those fellow disciples and sons and daughters of peace and build together relationally in ways that strengthen our life in the world, in it but not of it. We need to avoid those allegiances that take us out of the world while still binding us to the shapes and domination systems that we are called out of.

c) By partnership with the life of the trinity in prayer and loving service we walk on into an institutional church that often still misunderstands the gospel and aligns with the encroaching global empire in its teaching and practice. We pilgrim on through the political, legal, educational and business structures of the global empire of money, war and media and the caring professions and charities that have been set up to mitigate the worse aspects of their rule but are still shaped by it. We carry the kingdom of God knowing that here we have as yet no continuing city, but that the nations of the earth will ultimately find their peace in the kingdom whose seed we are scattering all along the road we travel.

I am aware that my words for all this are getting increasingly metaphorical. More concrete outworkings are yet to come. But before they do, more and more of us will need to press into intimacy with God at the same time as we press on into our imperial centres of Jerusalem and Rome, wherever we find them, even if we are threatened, misunderstood or lose our heads there, knowing without a doubt that Jesus’ resurrection is the evidence that this way of life works and that this kingdom can never ultimately be destroyed.