Sandhya Rani Jha is a minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination and 
director of the Oakland Peace Center.
If you don’t know the story she refers to about the French village, Le Chambon, I encourage you to read the book by Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (Harper Row, 1979). It’s an amazing story of true kingdom citizenship lived out in a time of great danger.
The following excerpt is taken from the Christian Century article, “Do politics belong in church?”. You can read the entire article here.
“My mind has been on the French village of Le Chambon recently. During World
War II, the village of maybe 5,000 people saved possibly as many as 5,000 people from the Nazis and the Vichy regime. As President Barack Obama noted on Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2009, ‘Not a single Jew who came [to the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon] was turned away, or turned in. But it was not until decades later that the villagers spoke of what they had done—and even then, only reluctantly. “How could you call us ‘good’?” they said. “We were doing what had to be done.”
“In my current itinerating ministry, I have visited a lot of churches that are proud of their commitment to being nonpolitical because it makes them more inclusive. But a nonpolitical church’s politics supports the way things are. That
doesn’t make it an inclusive church. It makes it a church that is unwelcoming to people who want a different world. To riff off of a popular meme from the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, people of color are saying to the mainline church, ‘The American empire is literally killing us,’ and the mainline church is saying, ‘Yes, but . . . ‘
“The reason Le Chambon keeps showing up in my imagination is this: every Sunday for over a decade before France fell to the Nazis, the pastors of the village preached a message that reinforced their community’s identity and what that identity meant in practice. The message was:
- We are Huguenots who survived persecution by the Catholic majority. That means we show up for people being persecuted.
- We are Christians. This means engaging in nonviolent resistance to empires doing harm and protecting the people who are being harmed.
“In a sermon delivered the day after France surrendered to the Nazis, village
pastor André Trocmé said to his congregation, ‘The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the spirit.’
OK then. Secondly, if you are not teaching in ways that help your flock understand the the practical significance of Jesus’ radical, upside-down kingdom ethics for engaging the politics of this world, then aren’t you failing in your pastoral responsibilities?
