Justice, Grief, and Christ’s Pathways to Wholeness

The current meta crisis—hastening authoritarianism, regional wars, the cost of living crisis, climate collapse, and the Sixth Extinction—confronts Christ followers with trenchant injustice throughout the world. Our context is a moment of prophetic invitation. How can Christians, especially generationally privileged disciples, live out Christ’s radical invitation to act justly, love mercifully, and live into authentic wholeness among the marginalized and oppressed, rather than subscribing to faith in Christ from a position of power? In South Africa, for example our story is one of longed-for reparation, to restore what has been stolen and repair what has been broken by apartheid. In our opportunity to heal our wounded history, there is a role for winsome stories, of successes and failures among Christians, who are finding ways into deeper faith—stories of engagement with injustice, trauma, and grief, and discovering with Christ pathways into authentic wholeness. Here, five South African writers integrate autobiography, theology, philosophy, and spirituality, in the hope that our stories may resource faith communities worldwide, and especially the young, who are radically integrating their lives to the pattern of Jesus’s justice, grief, and wholeness, to bear peace in a disintegrating world.