This may come across like community 101, but as I ponder various charters and creeds, challenges to character and conduct must have a context among the people; then accountability rightfully leads to responsibility, which hopefully results in right action, where proofs of righteousness are witnessed in the words and actions of all parties involved — justice being first and foremost restorative and reconciling — leading to clear, direct and simple declarations about God, people, and redemption.

Sometimes we take risks and hits, partly because loved, welcomed, educated, and skilled people invited into the core of our prayer and work have not been accountable, having walked away from responsibility for their words and actions, exposed at the character level when the pressure was on corporately — freely disqualifying themselves, not by their own rules of engagement, but by the deeper kingdom thresholds they have not yet been allowed to cross.

On the wrong side of such thresholds some say, “Basing everything on relationship for me means that you can’t expect anything at all from me, while I decide what you being in relationship with me means for me.” Relationship becomes a smooth word placed mid-sentence, people nodding agreement en route, willingly overlooking context and destination.

A slam poet might preach, “Anarchy minus justice is a purgatory pulverizing the heartbeat out of intimacy. Anarchy plus justice? Just ask the Great Revolutionary to reveal the holes and scars of his neo uno decorum; which leads to fumbling if it ain’t humbling.”