The Work of Faith

by Wesley Rowell, Associate Rector

“I don’t know about you, but there were a few questions where I wanted to say, ‘OK, God, but … how hard do I have to, exactly, persevere in resisting evil? Because it seems like evil might have the upper hand these days, and we’re tired. Do I have to serve, seek and serve Christ in all persons – all of them?’ – Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe

There are moments when the difference between the Kingdom of God and the powers and principalities of this world can no longer be blurred, softened, or explained away, not because anyone declares it, but because the texture of daily life itself changes. Authority tightens. Force becomes familiar. Words like order, security, and necessity are deployed to anesthetize the conscience, making the unthinkable feel inevitable. To speak the name of Jesus is to speak the names of all persons who have been murdered by state-sanctioned violence as precious and holy, every name a prayer we must carry with us. It is to proclaim that the Kingdom of God does not require the erasure of bodies to sustain itself.

Scripture leaves little room for confusion here: the Reign of God does not rely on fear, does not require coercion, and does not treat human bodies as expendable tools in service of control. When violence is recast as protection, Christians are not being offered a neutral reality to accept, but a decision to make.

I write this as a Black, queer, Christian man living and ministering in a city where armed presence has settled into the background of ordinary life, where neighbors quietly disappear from public view, and vigilance has become a shared posture. I also write as a pastor whose body has never been neutral in public space, called to serve people across fear, disagreement, and deep moral fracture. The Gospel does not permit us to confuse stability with righteousness or authority with truth. It insists that we tell the truth about power precisely because God’s Kingdom does not need domination to sustain itself. Faithfulness in such moments is not about choosing sides so much as refusing false stories about how the world must work.

This is where the Church’s discernment is tested, not in its ability to issue statements, but in its willingness to recognize when the logic of the principalities has begun to masquerade as common sense. The witness of Jesus is not a call to romanticize suffering or baptize death as sacrifice. It is a refusal to let fear dictate our allegiance. Christ stands before the powers of the world unarmed, uncoerced, and unafraid, exposing their limits by simply not becoming like them. To follow him now is not to seek danger, but to remain anchored to a Kingdom that tells the truth about violence, honors the dignity of every single body, and refuses to call injustice inevitable.

This moment also asks us to remember our shared history honestly. The Civil Rights movement is often invoked as inspiration, but is too easily reduced to a story of noble suffering that quietly asks new bodies to bear old costs. That history deserves more reverence than this. The faith that sustained that movement was not a theology of death or a love of danger, but a fierce commitment to life, dignity, and truth in the face of systems that denied them. Those who marched, organized, prayed, and resisted did so not because they sought harm, but because they refused to consent to lies about whose lives mattered. To remember that legacy faithfully is not to reenact it theatrically, but to allow it to sharpen our moral clarity in the present.

So the question before us is not whether we feel afraid, angry, or exhausted. Those responses are human and understandable. The deeper question is whether we are willing to see clearly, to discern when the language of safety has drifted into the logic of domination, when silence becomes complicity rather than prudence, and where our true allegiance lies. The Kingdom of God does not announce itself with force or demand submission through fear. It reveals itself quietly but unmistakably wherever truth is told, dignity is defended, and love refuses to surrender its moral imagination. In such a time as this, that clarity is not optional. It is the work of faith. The Christian call demands we raise our voices, but to do so from the Love that evil cannot blemish.

Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm, girded with truth, clothed in righteousness, and ready with the gospel of peace. – Ephesians 6: 10-15