When does the place to feel at home become a cocoon?
In her perceptive report on trends in American society, Faith Popcorn calls the first trend cocooning (like the caterpillar creating a safe haven before it emerges as a butterfly). It is "full-scale retreat into the last controllable environment"--your own space, your own home. Instead of going to the movies to sit among strangers one rents a video to watch at home with a few close friends. And it's often an armored cocoon with home security systems and neighborhood watches.
Churches cocoon, also. They, too, can aspire to be places of retreat from a society undergoing rapid social changes where the faithful can feel at home. While believing that they are friendly, they can exercise subtle dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. A stranger may be welcomed for worship, but not into membership or especially as a new leader.
Nations cocoon, also. A central California farmer may weep over his crop rotting in the fields for lack of harvests. Mexican migrants are no longer welcome, while welfare recipients eschew farm labor.
An alternative vision of global interdependence was presented by the late Theodore Hesburgh as "spaceship earth." Nations and peoples are as interdependent today as the Russian and American astronauts on the Mir space station.
Witness and reconciliation on spaceship earth belong together. It is the Lord's Great Commission for the twenty-first century. It is our calling as a Pentecost church. No longer need we cocoon behind locked doors for fear of the stranger as Jesus' disciples did (John 20:19). In the power of the Spirit, we like the first apostles can speak and act with boldness. Our witness and God's reconciliation will bring us into new relationships with those outside the church-- both those estranged from faith traditions and peoples of other faiths. Finally, the reconciliation that will be sought will be not only among the sinned against of God's human family, but also the sinned against species of God's marvelous creation.
--Norman E. Thomas, Heisal professor of evangelization and church renewal,
United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio