Chapter four of Mark R. Gornik’s To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City exemplifies both its greatest weakness and, more importantly, its enduring value. Gornik offers a “reading” of Nehemiah (pp. 127ff), which applies it to the modern task of urban revitalization. Here, as elsewhere, Gornik too blithely interprets Scriptures about the church as speaking to “the city” (pp. 103ff). Nonetheless, he persuasively demonstrates that the Spirit’s work in the church is holistic; that is, as he transforms hearts, he transforms lives. Accordingly, the church must be not only an occasional gathering of worshipers, but a community of faith which transforms the community in which her members live. When the church determines to live as a biblical community, the city is revitalized (pp. 74ff). Gornik’s heartening ecclesial emphasis suggests a better subtitle: “The biblical church in the inner city.”
Operating from a biblical definition of injustice as harm inflicted on society’s most vulnerable members (p. 51), he argues that poverty is not a consequence of personal choice, but of broader social conditions (pp. 35ff, 222-23). As a result, Gornik may give too much weight to social causation; he demonstrates an odd reluctance to describe the sins of poor persons as such (pp. 97-98, 223). The remedy to injustice, counter intuitively, is the gospel of justification by grace alone. While generally conceived in terms of individual salvation, it has social implications because converts enter into the church community and are set free from all the powers of this world, spiritual and societal, which oppress them (pp. 55, 61-63). Community renewal ought to flow from the church’s proclamation of God’s free grace in Christ (p. 231).
This leads Gornik to point out an obvious scriptural truth usually overlooked in the American church: Christ identifies with the poor (p. 28) and so his church ought to identify with and be composed of the oppressed and excluded (pp. 66, 73). Following the (surprising?) example of Nehemiah (Neh 1:6), Gornik and his friend Allan Tibbels determined to individually repent for corporate sins of oppression by relocating to the Sandtown neighborhood of Baltimore (pp. 167ff). This action eventually led to the founding of New Song Community Church, whose corporate life forms the experiential spine of this work of theological sociology.
This book is not a handbook for doing urban ministry. Rather, it is an attempt to describe how the local parish can be the church in the inner city and thereby renew it. In this regard, To Live in Peace applies not only to urban Christians. By offering a vibrant picture of what can happen when the people of God determine not only to worship together but to live together, it challenges all its readers to believe and act on the Spirit’s power to transform all aspects of human life and society, to give up commuting to the most ideologically pure pulpit, and to commit to serve and love the brethren in the local congregation so it may become a true community of faith.
