Who Carries the Cross?
On cheap grace, costly discipleship, and shared assumptions about the Church
A few weeks ago I sat in my capacity as a delegate to the Governing Body of the Church in Wales, listening to a debate I have, in various forms, been listening to throughout my 30-year ministry. The question was whether to make permanent the trial rites for the blessing of same-sex partnerships that had been introduced provisionally and now required either ratification or withdrawal. There was no middle way. A vote was taken. The rites will be made permanent.
I’m not going to rehearse the arguments. You know them already. They’ve been made, on both sides, for decades, and they haven’t changed much in that time. What passes for debate in these settings often becomes a ritual exchange: lived experience set against scriptural citation, both offered with conviction, neither convincing to the other side. Each side believes itself faithful. Each believes the other is causing harm. The speeches have grown practised in the speaking.
What I found myself noticing wasn’t so much what was said, but what everyone was taking for granted. Again and again, from one speaker and then another, there came the same language, as if drawn from a common well: the Church should be welcoming; it should be a place of safety; membership should be as undemanding as possible. Those in favour of the rites spoke of a long history of exclusion, of people made to feel they had no place, and pointed to the new rites as a sign of welcome embrace. Those against spoke also of welcome, but of a welcome bounded by what they take to be the plain teaching of Scripture. There was an equal measure of sincerity on both sides.
Underneath all of it, there was an assumption so widely shared that no one felt the need to state it: that the Church’s ought to be nice. That’s effectively what we mean by “welcoming”, isn’t it? The Church should be the kind of place where people feel good about themselves, where belonging is warm and frictionless, where the community suits itself to the lives of its members. Not unkind, not exclusive, not demanding — just reliably, consistently nice. It’s an attractive vision. It’s also, I’ve come to think, a fairly significant departure from anything the New Testament describes.
Up to that point, I hadn’t examined this assumption very closely myself. It took sitting there, listening to speech after speech returning to the same unspoken foundation, for me to recognise it. So, what I want to write about isn’t the debate itself—I’ve no light to shed there. It’s that assumption about the Church. The debate simply made it visible.
Perhaps our problem isn’t only that we’ve made belonging to the Church too costly for some people. Perhaps it’s equally that we’ve allowed it to become too easy for everybody else.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer named this cheap grace — the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without discipline, communion without confession. Grace as a settled background condition rather than a summons. Grace, as he put it, that we bestow upon ourselves. Costly grace, by contrast, is the call that asked fishermen to leave their nets and follow, or a rich man to sell everything and give it to the poor. It’s the call that causes us to find that the one thing we lack is precisely the one thing we can’t bring ourselves to relinquish. A call that costs a life and, in the losing of it, restores it. There’s nothing cosy about it. It isn’t gentle, though it’s given in love. It calls people away from what they’ve always been into what they don’t yet know how to be. And it’s worth noticing that the rich man walked away grieving — not because the call was unfair, but because it was costly, and he had a great deal to hold onto.
The Church has always known this, though it hasn’t always lived as if it did. In much of the Church now, “come as you are” has become the whole of the message. It’s a necessary beginning, of course; but it’s not the end. To be called by God is to be changed. But we’ve grown wary of saying so, or perhaps we’ve simply forgotten how to be changed ourselves.
This is where I want to tread carefully, because it’s also where I have to be honest about my own position. Bonhoeffer writes that when Christ calls a person, he bids him come and die. Not come and observe. Not come and refine a nuanced position. Come and die. I sat in that chamber with no one challenging my own accommodations. My own appetite for comfort, my own unquestioned certainties, my own settled arrangements with a way of living that doesn’t, if I’m honest, demand very much of me. My own Christianity is a very comfortable one.
It’s easy to invoke costly discipleship and mean, in practice, costly discipleship for other people. I’ve done this. I’ve felt the force of the gospel’s demands most clearly in domains where the costs would fall on someone else, and held them rather more loosely where they would fall on me — on my time, my security, my comfortable settlement with a way of life that the New Testament regards, at best, with suspicion. It’s easier still to deploy costly discipleship selectively: firmly in one domain, much more softly when the costs would fall on those of us with money, or influence, or the luxury of a settled and uncontested life. The call of the gospel arrives, as far as I can tell, with a fairly comprehensive claim on us all.
There are those who burden particular people with the full weight of costly discipleship while leaving the rest of us largely undisturbed — our wealth, our comfort, our settled arrangements quietly exempt. That’s a form of favouritism dressed up as fidelity. It has something of the quality James warns against in his epistle: bidding one person sit at our feet while offering another the better seat, and imagining that no partiality is involved.
But the gospel is equally uncomfortable in the other direction. There’s a temptation to treat the discomfort of the call itself as the problem, and to keep loosening the terms of belonging until almost nothing is asked of anyone. I recognise this temptation too — the instinct to resolve tension by removing it, to make the Church a place where everyone can settle rather than a place where everyone is, in some sense, unsettled. This impulse sits uneasily with a gospel that speaks, with some consistency, about dying to oneself — which is, if we’re honest, a fairly demanding entry requirement.
I notice, too, that I’m drawn to communities and forms of Church that are congenial to me — that don’t ask too much, that affirm what I already think or just prefer, that allow me to feel I’m being formed while leaving the more inconvenient parts of my life largely unchallenged. A Church in which no one is ever required to relinquish anything isn’t a more welcoming Church. It’s simply a shallower one. And the people it fails aren’t only those it turns away; they include those it admits too easily with no expectation of repentance, of lives that will be changed.
The demands of discipleship aren’t an excuse for severity, and I want to be clear about that. They’re not a licence for exclusion dressed up as fidelity, nor for mistaking discomfort for holiness. The call comes from love. The New Testament is clear on that, and equally clear that it leads, however circuitously, towards something recognisable as joy. The question isn’t how to make the Church harder to belong to. It’s whether we might belong to it more honestly — and take up our crosses more equally.
What would a Church look like that understood costly discipleship as the common condition of membership — a genuine claim applied, without exception, to the ways we hold our money, our power, our certainties, our desires, our daily accommodations to a way of life that sits uneasily, at best, with the gospel? It would, I think, make everyone equally uncomfortable — not cruelly, but honestly, because any genuine invitation to change requires something real to be relinquished before something real can be received. Such a Church would almost certainly be smaller. It wouldn’t be very nice. But it also might grab hold of our affections more tightly. We tend to belong more deeply to communities that cost us something.
Those who believe LGBTQ Christians must shoulder a distinctive cost for their fidelity have to ask why comparable costly demands aren’t pressed in other domains of Christian life. And those who support the rites might sit with a harder possibility: that even where they don’t discern such a cost, it isn’t beyond God to ask it. The gospel has a habit of asking more than we think we can offer, or should have to. Abraham discovered this. So did Job, and Paul, and every Christian martyr. But the same gospel contains Jesus' sharpest rebukes — reserved not for those who fell short, but for those who loaded others with burdens they themselves didn’t carry. Neither position exempts anyone. That, perhaps, is the point.
Which brings me back to the debate I sat through a few weeks ago. Both sides, I’ve come to think, have been operating with a shared assumption neither has examined: that ordinary membership of the Church ought, broadly speaking, to be free of serious demands on our lives. The argument has been about whether any exceptions to that baseline need to be made or removed — not about whether the baseline itself is right. It’s an assumption I recognise in myself. And it may be the one most worth examining.
Because if it’s wrong — and the gospel gives us good reason to think it is — then the real question isn’t really the one we’ve been debating. It isn’t only about who may receive the Church’s blessing, or on what terms. It’s about whether we’ve allowed belonging to mean something the gospel never promised: discipleship without cost, grace without the cross, community without a claim over us. We’ve been arguing, with great energy and real pain, about what kind of cross some might have to carry. What we’ve been slower to ask is whether any of us are carrying it — and what it would look like if we were.
Very challenged by this.
Brilliant again, thanks Mark.