What is the connection between prayer and witness? The first thing that comes to mind is this: without prayer, without constant communion with God, no...
What is the connection between prayer and witness? The first thing that comes to mind is this: without prayer, without constant communion with God, no witness is possible. There can only be dry theology, theoretical reasoning about God, about Christ, about the Kingdom. One cannot say that such reasoning will necessarily be mistaken; it may be formally not only correct, but even flawless, and yet it will not become witness. And when the matter concerns church life, prayer for those who are witnessing at a given moment is something entirely natural and self-evident.
But this is only one side of the matter. The other is connected with the fact that one can truly witness to the Kingdom only from within the Kingdom itself. Until the witness begins to live by its life, all his witness will still be more a witness to someone else's experience than to his own.
But the Church is precisely nothing other than the Kingdom entering our world. The chief and, in essence, only task of the Church is witness to the Kingdom, and the chief way of such witness is the manifestation of the Kingdom in our transforming but not yet transformed world, the manifestation of its breath, its love, its power. And every witness of each member of the Church becomes, in essence, part of this whole-Church witness. In this case, of course, the matter is not formal belonging to one or another church structure and not formal sanctions. The matter is precisely what the apostle writes about in his letter: the unity of the Kingdom, which manifests itself in the single spiritual space of the Church, which, of course, almost never coincides with the social space of church structures. And since the spiritual space of the Church is one, distances cease to have decisive significance for the Church's spiritual life: the prayer of one church community can become spiritual support for another community whose members, because of circumstances, have to witness especially much.
It is precisely here, as is evident, that the spiritual specificity of the Church appears as, in the words of the same Paul, the "body of Christ": whatever size she may reach, her essential, spiritual unity does not disappear, making possible the flow of spiritual energy from one part of her to another. This process itself becomes a living witness to the reality of the Kingdom, for by the laws of the untransformed world such a thing is impossible. But what is impossible in "this world" becomes possible in the Kingdom.
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3:1 May run - Go on swiftly, without any interruption. And be glorified - Acknowledged as divine, and bring forth much fruit.