Our Call to Discipleship: The Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement

Our part in the Jesus movement is our Call to Discipleship: to follow Jesus. Discipleship means learning to lead the lives as God’s people. Growing in discipleship involves prayer, study, worship and service.

Jesus laid out the fundamentals for any who would follow him when he said, “The first [commandment] of all is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:29-31).

The Beloved Community is the body within which we promote the fruits of the spirit and grow to recognize our kinship as people who love God and love the image of God that we find in our neighbors, in ourselves, and in creation. It provides a positive, theologically and biblically based ideal toward which we can grow in love, rather than framing our justice and reconciliation efforts as fundamentally “against” (e.g., anti-racism, anti-oppression).

Charles Skinner describes the vision this way: “Beloved Community is not an organization of individuals; it is a new adventure of consecrated men and women seeking a new world … who forget themselves in their passion to find the common life where the good of all is the quest of each.” Quoting Karl Barth, Charles Marsh writes of the Beloved Community, “[T]he Christian regards the peaceable reign of God as the hidden meaning of all movements for liberation and reconciliation that ‘brings us together for these days as strangers and yet as friends.’”

In other words, Beloved Community is the practical image of the world we pray for when we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We dream of communities where all people may experience dignity and abundant life, and see themselves and others as beloved children of God. We pray for communities that labor so that the flourishing of every person (and all creation) is seen as the hope of each. Conceived this way, Beloved Community provides a deeply faithful paradigm for transformation, formation, organizing, advocacy, and witness.

Our call to discipleship as the people of St. Peter’s Church, is to work on becoming the Beloved Community for Monroe, a place where God’s love welcomes all, where strangers become friendsW

"When I act as charity bids, I have this feeling that it is Jesus who is acting in me; the closer my union with Jesus, the greater my love for all without distinction." ~ St. Thérèse of Lisieux