What Makes the Church a Community of Light

The season of Epiphany celebrates the realization that through the incarnation and revelation of God in Christ, God's light has entered the world.  The Church is called to be the community that evidences and reflects God's light.

The Church's own internal polity; the way it structures itself, goes about its practices, and in particular, the way it deals with conflict, is the primary mechanism through which it reflects God's light to the world.  That is, the Church's theological perspectives, however important, are less important than the way that the Church effects these perspectives.  What makes the Church a place that reflects God's light into the darkness of human culture is thereby not necessarily its right perspectives, but the way that it lives out these perspectives and how it treats both those within the community and outside of it

Human culture sees itself as a place of light.  But it is grounded in the notion of identifying the light, distinguishing it from the darkness, and then driving out the darkness.  This is evident in the way that conflict is addressed.  Those with differing perspectives war with each other, and those with the perspective that emerges as right then drives out those who hold the differing perspective, identifying it as darkness.

The Church is called to practice a completely different methodology, and in doing so, to reveal human culture's methodology itself as darkness.  The very act of driving out the darkness, no matter how much those who drive it out are in the light, is itself a manifestation of darkness.  The community of light, rather than driving out those whose perspectives are deemed erroneous, is called to maintain the bonds of covenant with those deemed erroneous, so that they can be brought into the light.  By mirroring human culture's methodology, irregardless of the correctness of its perspectives, Christian communities are simply mirroring the world's darkness.