Beyond Non-Complicity
Most people, if it can be at all avoided, do not want to cooperate with wrongdoing. But notions of complicity are too often being weaponized to shame and bully others.
This world is messed up. This is evidenced in small part by the constant drumbeat of mass shootings in America. Our civil strife is ever more apparent. We use and abuse each other. We condemn one another. Wars continue to pop up. Nations fear each other and arm themselves enough to blow up the whole globe. The have-nots sink further and further into an economic hole. Racism seems to never be healed. My news feed, full of human depravity, is poisonous. The information conveyed on social media platforms fills our minds, displacing the practices associated with Jesus’ true revelation that love of neighbor and even one’s enemies are key habits for human flourishing.
Despair about bad religion in the Church is never far away. The desire to flee the Church is in the hearts of millions. Many leavers are drawing a line that ensures they are not complicit with the sins and errors of the Church. I am empathetic. But we need to consider complicity for a moment, how it works or does not work as an aspect of spirituality in the way of Jesus.
If I leave my small group and go to another, I am still a part of a local church. If I leave my church and go somewhere else, I am still a part of a network or denomination. If I leave my denomination, I am still Protestant. If I switch to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, I am still a part of the universal Church.
If I leave the entire Church, I am still part of the broken, sinful human community.
I get that most people, if it can be at all avoided, do not want to cooperate with wrongdoing. That seems natural and normal to me. But notions of complicity are too often being weaponized to shame and bully others. Non-complicity as the overarching decision-making pattern of one’s life often fails to acknowledge complexity, nuance, context and timing. Non-complicity, especially when it is motivated by virtue signaling, is too often mean and judgmental. It settles for the articulation of a negative without putting forward positive alternatives.
Using complicity as a rationale for fleeing the Church, while under some circumstances is a good first step, does not go far enough. It is not whole-grain virtue. Genuine virtue is an inner readiness, a preparedness, a bent of the heart and soul to do that which is good and righteous. Acting on such virtue may call for leaving, but it may also insist on staying at great cost to oneself for the sake of others.
Jesus is the example of non-complicity plus positive action.
Jesus did not simply refuse to be complicit with the militarism of the Zealots, he went further by showing himself to be a healer of wounded bodies. He did not merely separate from the religious errors of the Pharisees and Sadducees, he encouragingly taught and modeled good religion. He didn’t merely refuse to flee the world and live in the caves of the Qumran, he touched lepers, conversed with a woman at a well, ate with sinners at dinner parties, and in a social setting, let a woman touch his feet. He didn’t simply nag about the political and religious compromises of the Herodians, he persistently demonstrated single-hearted loyalty to his Father.
Non-complicity with sin, wrong or error is good—of course.
But it is only partial followership of Jesus. Something positive, something more powerful than non-complicity animated the words and works of Jesus. It was cooperation with his Father in the inbreaking the kingdom of God. This powerfully positive orientation both gave rise to the aims of Jesus and made non-complicity with sin and error natural and normal.
It is instructive to stop and wonder: How did Jesus manage to be himself in the world in which he emerged, amid so much misguided, disheartening religion and brutal, dehumanizing civic sin? How did he manage to live expectantly before an audience of One?
Being present to brokenness in non-complicit ways is a matter of perspective.
Dallas Willard’s powerful and evocative insights give an imagination for why and how Jesus comported himself in the world and among his confused, sometimes bickering first followers:
Jesus knew a God-bathed, God-permeated world.
Dallas contends that ours is a world—
…that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it.
And…
until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet seized us.
The reality of God’s presence companions us as we sort out how to be redemptively engaged with brokenness.