In Christ

He was truly one of the most remarkable people of the 20th century. Jones abhorred racism and worked tirelessly in the interfaith space. He was a friend of Ghandi and the Nehru family, and a confidant of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As we might expect, Jones was a committed ecumenist.

To quote Wikipedia:

In 1947 in the United States, he launched the Crusade for a Federal Union of Churches. He conducted mass meetings from coast to coast and spoke in almost five hundred cities, towns and churches. He advocated a system through which denominations could unite as they were, each preserving its own distinctive emphasis and heritage, but accepting one another and working together in a kind of federal union patterned after the United States' system of federal union.

I’ve got to know Jones a little – his theology, his thinking, his heart. I don’t agree with everything he said - like all of us he had his own foibles - yet his book In Christ has been a constant companion over the past two decades. Why did Jones write this book? To quote his introduction:

This twenty-third book is the result of a feeling of a need. The need is this:

Some concept that would reduce the whole of life to the utmost simplicity. If you have that, you're "in"; if you don't have it, you're "out." By "in" I mean "in life," and by "out," "out of life." I felt I had found that concept in the phrase "in Christ." If you are "in Christ" you're "in life"; if you are "out of Christ" you're "out of life." If that proposition be true, then it cuts down through all veneer, all seeming, all make-believe, all marginalisms, all halfwayisms — through everything — and brings us to the ultimate essence of things: If you are "in Christ" you are in life; if you are "out of Christ" you're out of life, here and now, and hereafter …

The Ultimate Concept Demands the Ultimate Act

The phrase "in Christ" is the ultimate phrase in the Christian faith, for it locates us in a Person — the Divine Person — and it locates us in Him here and now. It brings us to the ultimate relationship — "in." Obviously, this "in" brings us nearer than "near Christ," "fol¬lowing Christ," "believing in Christ," or even "committed to Christ." You cannot go further or deeper than "in."

To be "in Christ" means to pull up the roots of one's very life from the soil of sin and self and herd and plant them "in Christ." He becomes the source of our life, the source of our thinking, our feeling, our acting, our being.

This obviously involves self-surrender. Not merely the surrender of our sins, our bad habits, our wrong thinking, and our wrong motives, but of the very self behind all these. All of these are symp¬toms; the unsurrendered self is the disease. So the phrase "in Christ" is not only the ultimate concept but it demands the ultimate act - self-surrender.

One would expect that this ultimate concept in Christianity, "in Christ," leading to the ultimate human response, self-surrender, would be deeply embedded in the New Testament. Is it? It is far more deeply embedded in the New Testament than many things upon which we have built whole denominations — the new birth, conver¬sion, baptism of the Holy Spirit, justification by faith, baptism by water, apostolic succession, presbyters, bishops, forms of church government, inner light, absence of forms.

I don’t doubt that the response of some will be “Andrew you’re simply promoting a form of exclusive individualised Christianity rather than recognising the call to participate in the cause of freedom and justice for all.” I recognise the tension.

What I can’t help noticing is that this ‘Missionary to India’ was one of the most effective promoters of the call to freedom and justice for all – and it sprang from a profound spirituality being rooted “in Christ”. There was a deep generosity of spirit within Jones as he reached across all barriers with the love and acceptance that was in him - because he was “in Christ”.

To adapt the words of a well-known series of television adverts – “I want what he had”.