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If you sample Charles Colson's work—read a Christianity Today column one day, listen to a BreakPoint radio commentary another day, attend a Wilberforce Forum worldview conference on another—you could get the impression that his many passions take their turns: he decries postmodernism on Tuesdays, evangelizes prison inmates on Wednesdays, fosters doctrinal discussion with Roman Catholics on Thursdays, denounces judicial activism on Fridays, warns against cloning on Saturdays, and goes to church on Sundays. Fortunately, Being the Body (written with longtime Colson associate Ellen Vaughn) now connects the dots for us.

Being the Body is ostensibly about the church. But it is really a synthesis that ties together Colson's varied strands of interest and advocacy. And the church—the divinely ordained social manifestation of Christ's presence between the Cross and the Second Coming—is at the center of his vision.

The church is the community of the redeemed. As redeemed people, we are given two mandates: the first is to make disciples of all nations, which is something more than what evangelicals conventionally refer to as evangelism. It includes telling people the good news of Jesus' sacrifice and calling them to commit themselves to him. But that is only a first step in disciple making. To be a disciple is to follow a teacher. If Jesus is our teacher, there is much to learn about him and from him, and we learn to live life his way by sustained practice.

Unfortunately, says Colson, many evangelical churches are more given to "recruitment" than to "repentance." Recruitment-oriented churches, he argues, focus more on filling pews than on changing lives. Repentance-oriented churches, on the other hand, are about helping people catch a new moral vision and aiding them in their practice of the presence of the kingdom.

Because the world tries to squeeze the church into its own mold, Colson stresses the importance of thinking analytically about the pervasive assumptions and habit patterns that shape the way we live as hypermoderns in the information age. Colson and Vaughn achieve the necessary critical distance by looking at the church under pressure: believers in prison and under totalitarian regimes. Here Ellen Vaughn's storytelling abilities shine as she recounts scenes from penitentiaries, gulags, concentration camps, and even a Marxist elementary school. Under pressure, the church strips itself of the incidental and focuses on the essential: nurturing itself from Scripture and sacrament, it follows the lead of the Savior, and it practices being a foretaste of God's kingdom.

Colson and Vaughn have titled this volume Being the Body to signal the continuity with their 1992 volume, The Body. But they also use the title to stress our need to put being ahead of doing. The authors are clear that unless we get straight what it means to be the Body of Christ, we will forever be led astray by our modern North American orientation toward technique and method.

Yet Colson's approach is not quietistic. He stresses the call to holy living and social and cultural action that characterized the 18th-century evangelical renewal and its heirs.

This is where Colson sees a second mandate to the church. When we are redeemed, God gives us anew the command he gave to our first parents to "fill the earth and subdue it." When we are in Christ, "There is a new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17, NRSV, REB). And with a new creation and a new society come new responsibilities to shape them for God's glory.

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June 2003, Vol. 47, No. 6