ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
May 16, 2025
Guest Writer: Michelle Beech, Shepherd/Founder of Ekklesia (ekklesialove.com)
To be called to serve in the world, yet not be of the world, is to participate in God’s movement of hope and transformation. God calls to us with the bold proclamation in Isaiah 43:19: “Behold, I am doing a new thing!”
Like James Cone, who rooted Black theology in the cries of the oppressed, I sense that God’s new thing emerges at the margins—where exploration and challenge meet. Cone reminds us that hope is not abstract; it is incarnational, grounded in faith, and carried on the backs of those who dare to trust God’s grace. Another great theological thinker is Paul Tillich who would view this call to the margins an existential encounter of concern.
Tillich’s position is that God is the ground of being and that all else is to limit God. This is hopeful for the emerging church movement and all faithful responses to God’s call. Following God “who will be who God will be,” especially at the margins, challenges the church (the people of God) in new ways and to include new people.
Moving in God’s new ministries without certainty can be discomforting, but exposure to a variety of thinkers and God’s revelation in us, are gifts of freedom to explore as we answer God’s call into the wilderness. To serve this “new thing” God is doing is to step into a world being remade—not by power or certainty, but by the Spirit blowing wherever it may.
