NOTES for 2Th 3:1
What is the connection between prayer and witness? The first thing that comes to mind: without prayer, without constant communion with God, no witness is possible. Is possible only dry theology, the theoretical reasoning about God, about Christ, the Kingdom. One cannot say that such reasoning will be absolutely erroneous, they may be formally not only correct, but even irreproachable, however they will not become witnesses. And when it comes to the life of church, the prayer for those who witness at the moment is something completely natural and obvious. But it is only one aspect of the case. The other one is connected to the fact that it is possible to really witness about the Kingdom only from the very Kingdom.
As long as the witness will not begin to live his life, all his witness will be in a great measure the witness of someone else experience, than his own. But in fact, especially the Church is nothing other than this Kingdom entering our world. The main and, in fact the only task of the Church is to witness about the kingdom, and the main means of such witness - the demonstration of the Kingdom in our world being transformed, but not yet transformed, the demonstration of its breath, its love, its power. And any witness of every member of the Church becomes, in fact, a part of the church-wide testimonies. It is not of course in this present case about formal membership to a church structure and either about formal penalties.
It is rather exactly about what the apostle writes in his epistle: about the unity of the Kingdom, which manifests itself in the common spiritual space of the Church, which, certainly, never coincides with the social space of the church structures. And since the spiritual space of the Church is united, the distances for the spiritual life of the Church cease having a decisive meaning: the prayer of one community of church can become the spiritual support of another, which the members have to witness a lot because of circumstances.
It is in particular here that manifests itself, as seen, the spiritual specificity of the Church, as, according to the expression of very Paul "the body of Christ": no matter which size it reaches, its essential spiritual unity does not disappear, making possible the flow of the spiritual energy from one of its parts to another one. The process, which becomes itself a living witness of the reality of the Kingdom: because according to the laws of the non transformed world such thing is impossible. But what is impossible in “this world” becomes possible in the Kingdom.