The Church and the Right to Be Heard

What is a “Christian missionary”? A Christian missionary is a person who feels called by God to communicate to others by lip and by life, on some frontier of the world, the good news of the Gospel of Christ. He becomes a “missionary” when he is set apart by the Church, or by an association of fellow Christians, to dedicate his every talent to the task of so presenting Christ to other people that they shall accept him as Saviour and Lord and become members of the Christian Community.…

Not only, however, must the Christian Church be represented in the world by missionaries whom it sends out and supports; it must itself be missionary. In consonance with its nature, in loyalty to its Head, the Church must be so inspired by its worship of God, and so illumined by its insight into God and the world, that it shall be, in every epoch and in every place, the vehicle of God’s redeeming love in Jesus Christ. Neither the true worship of God by a true Community of God, nor a true understanding of God by the whole Christian Community, can become a substitute for the missionary service of God. Called by God to participate in his redemptive activity, the Church must, in lowliness and reverence, and in dependence upon the Holy Spirit, dedicate herself to the fulfillment of her redemptive function.…

It is surely not an unwarranted presupposition that, if the Church is to be “in very deed the Church,” if it is to match the secular faith of Communism, if it is to be truly relevant to the deepest needs of men in this revolutionary time, Christians should be eager to communicate their faith and should win the right to be heard regarding it. This right is won when non-Christians, or merely nominal Christians, are eager to know what Christians have to say because they have learned to respect them for what they are. Nothing, on the other hand, is more tragic for the Church or for Christians than when “outsiders,” concerned but disillusioned people, are heard to remark or imply, “I cannot hear what you say; what you are sounds too loudly in my ear.”—Excerpted by permission from Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal, by John A. Mackay, president emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary, (Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 166–68, 179.