TODAY IN MISSION YEARBOOK
Mission Yearbook: A house united
The Rev. Dr. Allen Hilton, the founder and leader of House United, explains during a recent edition of “Leading Theologically” that the organization took shape about 15 years ago “when I started to see the people I like in the left wing of the church and the right wing of the church didn’t like each other.”
“The problem was they didn’t know each other. They were speaking from a distance and stereotyping one another,” Hilton told the Rev. Bill Davis, the host of “Leading Theologically.” Listen to their 44-minute conversation here.
In 2012, Hilton facilitated the first Courageous Conversation about a marriage amendment that had been proposed in Minnesota. “We had 425 people come out and talk to one another who disagreed,” Hilton said. “That set the hook for me on a calling to try to get left and right, different cultures and races, talking to each other rather than assuming things about one another from a distance.”
Transformation can occur through experiences, he said, such as building a house together or serving alongside one another at a soup kitchen — “things they would have done anyway as Christian folk,” Hilton said, “but they do together so they know one another a bit. They start to like one another, and they can’t believe it because they know what each other thinks.”
As workshop participants get to know one another, “they listen better to what the people think and why they think it,” Hilton said. Hilton likes to hear from people “who have brought together difference for a living — military folks, sports coaches, businesspeople who know they can make better widgets if they get more diversity in play.”
In his 2018 book “A House United: How the Church Can Save the World,” Hilton makes this argument, as Davis points out: “We 21st century Christians come by our divisiveness honestly. … The earliest churches battled one another over everything from how to distribute the offering plate money to which of their prophets spoke truth and which falsehood, to whether Moses’ law provided access to God or threw up a blockade on the pathway to God.”
“That is some of the history we have inherited as the church and followers of Christ today,” Davis said. “Here is my wondering: What can we learn from the early church about how to be reconciled to one another and to God?”
Hilton responded that within about a half-century of Jesus’ public ministry, Matthew “illustrated the necessity in Jesus’ mind of going toward one another when we harm one another.” In Matthew 5, Jesus speaks of the urgency of leaving our gifts at the altar to make things right with our siblings in the faith whom we’ve wronged. “The center of reconciliation in Jesus’ economy is kind of clear from those two passages and a whole lot of others,” Hilton said.
“The thing is, original unity is a myth. A lot of people think the early church was perfect and then things fell. The early church wasn’t perfect,” Hilton noted.
Davis returned to Hilton’s book: “It’s time to challenge our culture’s unproven and unconsidered assumption that flocking with birds of our own feather produces flourishing lives, individually and nationally. It’s time for us to ask, ‘What would it look like, how would we read our news, how would we choose our neighborhoods and our churches and our friends, how would we even treat one another in a church and nation that could properly be called a house united?’”
Inclusion should be much more than “We’re so good, we’ll allow you in,” he said. A friend taught him this lesson: Inclusion happens because “we need you. Who’s missing among us? We can’t be as much of a shalom community, we can’t be as much the body of Christ, if you’re not a part of us. You have something we don’t have.”
“I think Jesus tried to combat arrogance wherever it happened, and we’ve got so much arrogance right now,” Hilton said. “It has to start with, ‘We don’t have all the answers, and mine may be wrong.’”
Leading Theologically is a mission and ministry of the Presbyterian Foundation and the Theological Education Fund. Find out more here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Tina Rhudy, Director for Building Services, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)
Kerry Rice, Deputy Stated Clerk, Interim Unified Agency
Let us pray:
Creator God, we give thanks for opportunities to embrace humankind. May this be a place where the community finds your unconditional love. Let light shine with your grace. Amen.