Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Beloved Community is not held within our church walls. As soon as you begin to think like that, you have moved into the exact opposite of beloved community, because in creating that definition of community, you have necessarily created otherness. There is the community inside our walls, the people who think like us, act like us, look like us. And there are the people who are not part of that community, the “others.” This is not Beloved Community. Royce distinguished between small “communities of grace” that were loyal to the greater cause of the universal Beloved Community and those who were insular, often “predatory,” in their loyalty to their own. 

Universalism is naturally woven into Beloved Community. Universalism is universal salvation; salvation for everyone, unconditional…

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

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