The Question

"But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." -1 Peter 2:9

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison in the 1940s, asked a question that has haunted me: "…in what way are we the Ekklesia, 'those who are called forth', not conceiving of ourselves religiously as specially favoured, but as wholly belonging to the world?"

It's a question worth sitting with. Not rushing past. Not answering too quickly with the comfortable assurances we've been trained to give.

In what way are we, as we are behaving today, the royal priesthood? In what way are we belonging to the world? In what way are we embedded among those Christ came to save, sharing their life, present in their struggles?

I fear the honest answer, for much of the American evangelical church, is that we are not. We have conceived of ourselves as specially favored. We have built territories of our own. And in doing so, we have abandoned the very calling Peter describes.

Called Forth — To What?

Ekklēsia (ἐκκλησία) is the Greek word typically translated "church" in the New Testament, but its meaning runs deeper than our modern concept of church. Bonhoeffer gets his meaning "those who are called forth" directly from the compound of the Greek word:

  • ἐκ (ek) — "out of" or "from"
  • καλέω (kaleō) — "to call"

So ekklēsia literally means "the called-out ones" or "those who are called forth" — an assembly of people summoned out from the general population for a specific purpose.

Here's what's striking: in classical Greek, ekklēsia wasn't a religious term at all. It was political. It referred to the citizen assembly called forth from their homes to conduct civic business in the public square. Citizens summoned out of private life into public responsibility. Out of their individual concerns and into the shared work of the community.

This matters more than we might initially think. When the New Testament writers chose this word to describe the gathering of believers, they weren't reaching for religious vocabulary. They were reaching for a word that meant showing up, being present, taking responsibility for the common life.

The church isn't a group of spiritually elite people retreating from the world into religious privilege. It's people called forth into the world for a purpose. Called out of private piety and into public presence.

A Priesthood Without Territory

The notion of believers being a royal priesthood, belonging to the world, is reinforced when one considers the role of the priests of Israel. This connection isn't incidental — Peter is drawing on deep Old Testament themes when he applies priestly language to all believers.

The Levitical priests did not have a territorial inheritance in the land. This was not an oversight or a punishment. It was definitional to their identity. The repeated formula throughout the Torah is explicit: "the Lord is their inheritance" (Deut 10:9, 18:2, Num 18:20). While every other tribe received a portion of land to call their own, the Levites were scattered throughout Israel, dwelling among the other tribes rather than in their own separate territory.

There's a paradox built into their identity: they were set apart for holy service, yet embedded among the people. They weren't a separate caste living in religious isolation. They depended on the tithes of the people and lived in cities distributed throughout the tribal allotments. Present among, sharing the ordinary rhythms of life, not sequestered in a religious compound waiting for people to come to them.

The priest who lived in a city of Judah or Naphtali or Ephraim wasn't there as a visitor or a missionary passing through. He lived there. His children played with the children of farmers and craftsmen. He knew the struggles of that particular place, the dynamics of that particular community. His holiness was expressed through presence, not distance.

This is the model Peter invokes when he calls us a royal priesthood. Not a territory of our own, but a presence among. Not a separate inheritance, but the Lord himself as our portion — which frees us to be distributed among all the peoples of the earth.

The Territory We've Built

Sadly, the tendency in much of the evangelical church has been toward establishing a territory of our own, be it in mind or physically, isolating ourselves from the very people we were called to serve and minister to.

I have this idea that has frankly informed my theology and Christian walk throughout my brief passage here on earth. We are bound by the circumstance and reality of the world around us and as such God expects us to engage with it and respond to it in totality, not shying away from any part of it, no matter how counter it may be to our philosophy of a well lived life.

This may seem like a tautology. One may respond, of course we are bound by our circumstances and reality, so how could we respond in any other way?

But for many believers, there is a life of separation that ignores reality, ignores the circumstances of this world and instead creates an alternative reality. One that is filled with nothing but Godly things, and Godly music, and Godly teaching, and Godly thoughts. Anything counter to that is not allowed to enter this pseudo-reality.

We have Christian radio stations so we never have to hear secular music. Christian bookstores so we never have to browse alongside unbelievers. Christian schools so our children never have to navigate pluralism. Christian social networks so we never have to encounter dissenting views. Christian gyms, Christian business directories, Christian yellow pages. An entire parallel economy and culture designed to ensure we never have to leave the compound.

In this way, many believers ignore and shut out the world God created, the one he designed each of us to live and be effective in, and therefore shut out the fulfillment of God's will here on earth.

We have carved out a territory. We have claimed an inheritance that was never meant to be ours. We have done the very thing the Levites were forbidden to do — and we have called it holiness.

An Ontological Claim

I want to be clear about what I'm saying here. This is not about "engagement" or "being relevant" with the world. Those framings still treat the world as something external to us that we strategically interact with. They assume the territory is our home base and we venture out on occasional expeditions.

This is an ontological claim about what it means to be human before God: that our creatureliness, our embeddedness in time and place and circumstance, isn't an obstacle to faithfulness, but the very medium of it.

We are creatures. Finite. Located. Bound by the particularities of our birth, our culture, our moment in history. This is not a defect to be overcome. It is the condition God chose for us. He made us embodied, placed, situated. And he called it good.

The hermetically sealed pseudo-reality of "Godly things" is actually a kind of gnosticism. It treats the material, historical, circumstantial world as something to be escaped or transcended rather than inhabited. It mistakes holiness for separation from rather than consecration within.

The gnostics of the early church believed the material world was corrupt, created by a lesser god, and that salvation meant escaping it through secret spiritual knowledge. The church fathers fought this heresy vigorously. And yet here we are, centuries later, constructing elaborate systems to escape the world God made — and calling it faithfulness.

The Levitical priests were holy. They were also distributed among the people, sharing their life, present in their cities. Holiness and presence were not in tension. They were the same calling. The priest did not become less holy by living among the tribe of Dan. His holiness was expressed precisely in that presence.

The Incarnation as Pattern

If we need any further confirmation that God intends us to be fully present in the world as it actually is, we need look no further than the Incarnation itself.

God did not send a message from outside the system. He did not establish a beachhead of pure holiness from which to conduct operations. He entered. Fully. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Greek word there — eskēnōsen — means he pitched his tent, he tabernacled, he moved into the neighborhood.

Jesus was born in a borrowed stable, raised in a backwater town with a bad reputation, worked as a manual laborer, attended weddings and funerals, ate with tax collectors and sinners, touched lepers and corpses, wept at the tomb of a friend. He did not hold himself at a sanitary distance from the messiness of human existence. He waded into it.

And this is our model. This is what it looks like for the holy to dwell among the people. Not pristine separation, but incarnate presence.

Brotherhood

There is a certain restlessness among some believers, even a nascent awakening to the idea that this life of separation and isolation is ineffective and antithetical to any serious efforts toward fulfillment of the great commission — and more importantly, a rejection of God's will. Something feels off. The compound is safe, but it is also suffocating. The approved playlist is clean, but it is also lifeless.

I would imagine these individuals can relate to another statement from Bonhoeffer: "I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently draws me more to the religionless than to the religious, by which I mean not with any intention of evangelizing them, but rather, I might almost say, in 'brotherhood'."

I think what Bonhoeffer is saying here is that he recognized his brothers are those who live in this world, bound by the same circumstances, facing the same challenges he does. And that he could not, or struggled to, relate to those living in a reality that is not the one God planted us in. There is something honest about the person who faces the world as it is, without the cushion of religious fantasy. Something that resonates with our own creaturely experience. Something that feels like shared humanity.

Some may take issue with his claim to "not intentionally evangelize them," asking how he could be a follower of Christ and not intend to fulfill the great commission. I cannot speak to Bonhoeffer's context, but for today I believe this is absolutely the right move.

In the past several decades our engagement with the world has been distilled down to a transactional sharing of the gospel. We discretely share the good news with a stranger or acquaintance and assume that by this act we have engaged with the world, been "in the world." We check the box, return to the compound, and congratulate ourselves on our faithfulness.

This transactional mindset turns people into a category to be converted, raw material for religious production, rather than people to be known, loved, and recognized as shareholders in a common existence within God's creation. They become targets rather than neighbors. Projects rather than brothers.

The priest who lives among the tribes isn't there primarily to perform religious functions at them. He shares their life. He knows their names, their struggles, their joys. He is present not as a religious professional conducting outreach, but as a neighbor. And from that shared life, everything else flows. The religious functions have meaning precisely because they emerge from genuine relationship, not as substitutes for it.

What This Looks Like

So what does this actually look like in practice?

I don't have a program to offer. I'm suspicious of programs. We have enough programs. What we lack is presence. But I can tell you what it has meant for me.

It has started with not eschewing anything simply because it is deemed ungodly by the subculture. Music, entertainment, people. Living life with them, doing what normal people do together. Being available in contexts where I might be needed, where presence might matter — contexts I would never encounter if I had pre-filtered my life to only include the approved and sanitized.

It means being at the neighborhood barbecue, not just the church potluck. It means knowing what music and movies and books the people around me actually care about, not so I can critique them, but so I can understand the people I'm called to love. It means being present in spaces that aren't designed for Christians, because those are the spaces where most people live their lives.

Obviously there are limits. But those limits are not based on whether something is culturally coded as "Christian" or "secular." The question shifts from "is this on the approved list" to "does this honor the dignity of God's creation and the people I'm with."

Pornography, for instance, isn't off limits because it's "worldly." It's off limits because it degrades image-bearers. That's a completely different moral logic than the one operating in the sealed-off pseudo-reality. One is working from a list handed down by the subculture. The other is working from a principle rooted in the character of God and the dignity of his creation.

This distinction matters immensely. The list-based approach requires constant boundary maintenance — an exhausting vigilance about what's in and what's out, what's safe and what's contaminated. The principle-based approach asks a different question entirely: Is this consistent with love? Does this honor the image of God in myself and others? This is freedom. Not freedom to do anything, but freedom from the endless policing of cultural categories.

The territorial Christian has removed themselves from contexts where they might be needed. They've pre-filtered their life so thoroughly that they never encounter the situations where faithfulness gets tested and exercised. You can't bind up wounds if you're never where people are bleeding. You can't be salt and light in a world you've carefully avoided.

And here's the thing — this avoidance isn't just ineffective for mission. It's a failure of love. The neighbor we're commanded to love is the actual neighbor, not the theoretical one. The people we're called to serve are the people God has placed in our path, not the ones who show up at our church building. If we've arranged our lives to never cross paths with anyone outside our tribe, we have structurally prevented ourselves from obeying the second greatest commandment.

The Risk

I won't pretend this is safe. The compound exists because the world is genuinely dangerous. There are things out there that can harm us, ideas that can mislead us, temptations that can destroy us. The instinct toward protection isn't entirely wrong.

But the call was never to safety. The call was to faithfulness. And faithfulness often looks like risk. Jesus sent his disciples out as sheep among wolves. He didn't establish a sheep preserve where no wolves were allowed. He sent them out.

The Levite living among the tribe of Benjamin faced the same temptations as his neighbors. He wasn't protected by geographic isolation. His holiness had to be maintained in the midst of ordinary life, not apart from it. This is harder. It requires more of us. But it is the actual calling.

There is also the risk of being misunderstood by fellow believers. If you're not maintaining the boundaries, if you're not performing the expected separations, you will be suspect. You will be accused of compromise, of worldliness, of going soft. This is painful. But it is not new. Jesus himself was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. If we're following his pattern, we should expect similar accusations.

Called Forth

We are the ekklēsia. Called forth. But called forth to what?

Not to a territory of our own. Not to a sealed reality of approved things. Not to a posture of transactional evangelism that sees our neighbors as targets rather than brothers. Not to a gnostic escape from the material world God made and called good.

We are called forth into the world. The actual world. The one God made, the one he placed us in, the one his Son entered fully — including the parts that were messy and broken and counter to any reasonable philosophy of a well-lived life.

The royal priesthood has no inheritance of land. The Lord is our inheritance. And our place is among the people, embedded, present, sharing the life we were given. Not as visitors conducting outreach. Not as missionaries on temporary assignment. But as neighbors. As brothers. As fellow creatures navigating the same reality, facing the same struggles, bound by the same circumstances.

That is what it means to belong to the world. That is what it means to be called forth.

And it is, I believe, the only way we will ever fulfill the calling Peter describes — to proclaim the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Not from a distance. Not from behind walls. But from within. Present. Embedded. Belonging.