Mark Gornik - To Live In Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City

Sayo Ajiboye
DMin Overture 1
May 2007
To Live In Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City
By Mark R. Gornik
261 pages

Stories of life and faith are often many leveled. Mark Gornik’s book To Live in Peace tells the story of Inner City Baltimore and a town named Sandtown. It is a story of hope and the power of faith to transform space, it is secondarily a narrative about God’s glorious power in saving his creation and giving the world a new life from the travails of sin. Sandtown’s stories bring hope to those who longingly hope for God’s transformational power in the midst of conflicts and troubles on our earth.

Gornik’s thesis was simple; it asks a question: “how do we understand the calling of the church in the places like the inner cities of our world? Gornik is unequivocally committed to an understanding that it is as the church “practice peacemaking” at the core of its mission that hope and life will come to these blighted places (126).

Gornik’s treatment of the topic was powerful, he took a high ground and displayed a highly advanced understanding of the issues and the concept at play in urban renewal. He based his understanding on a firm commitment to theological solutions but was able to make the word become flesh as he weaves Sandstown’s stories into a critical thesis of argument, which thread sociology, theology, music poetry and personal ruminations.

Reading such chapters as “Excluded Neighborhoods” and “Out of the Ruins,” Gornik was able to present the extremes of complexity and the seemingly intractable reality of the situation in the inner city. Gornik’s The Inner city, like Dr Martin Luther King’s is not devoid of tension, it is however desirous of real justice. Gornik’s Justice is defined by biblical concept of “shalom.” Biblical shalom is not afraid of diversity, it does not sidestep complexity; it rejoices in the many troubles as well as the many gifts of Jehovah’s people.

Gornik’s statement that “peacemaking…must follow in the steps and the way of the crucified Christ as it confronts and deals with its own power…. ‘Cross bearing’ is the way of social change” (123) confronts my own systems of power in Africa. In my own life and context, ministry and relationships tends to be very hierarchical and patently power driven. Gornik while subscribing to the fact of power challenges the concept of “meek capitulation” of the dis empowered.

Historical co-option of Christianity by colonial and post colonial agents of oppression and the tendency of the African church to affirm the pacifist Christ without affirming the activist Warrior king all brings into a balance the tension that the average Nigerian/African Christian face when confronted with the question of direct engagement with oppressive power. The church in Africa must engage with our past tendency to out-white the white and deal with internalized tendency to succumb to inaction in the face of oppression.

Gornik’s differentiation between “self difference” and “weak difference” (after Miroslav Volf writing on 1Peter)) plunges the church into engagement with a radical witness of the shalom. God’s people must follow Mirolav in fearless engagement with a violent oppressive world. The Jeremiah narrative, which defines 1 Peter, must receive our attention. Power must be held to an accountable standards, the just must be willing to enter an empty well to bring “shalom;” we must model “difference” we must not acquiesces to “weakness.”