Why do we use the term “Zion”?

By John Hamer, Director of Outreach and Innovative Ministries

In the 21st century, the word Zion has become contested because of the nationalistic political movement born in the 1890s. Our use of the term “Zion” in Community of Christ predates that usage by many decades. For us, Zion represents the peaceable and radically equitable community described in the opening chapters of the Book of Acts.

Acts of the Apostles represents the earliest written attempt to tell the story of Christianity’s growth as a movement after the events of the first Easter.  The book was written at the end of the first century, when the movement had already expanded with well-established congregations in cities and towns across the Roman Empire and beyond its frontiers.  This was a time of transition as the first generation of disciples who had known Jesus in the flesh had passed away and the apostolic age, where mendicant prophets, traveling in pairs, speaking in the Spirit, boldly announced the good news of a new covenant and sacred community open to everyone.

Now, as congregations had become more established, the roles of traveling apostles and prophets were giving way to local officials: deacons, elders, and bishops.  Words spoken by the Spirit were giving way to the reading of written text, the emerging canon of Christian scripture. The author of Acts is creating their narrative from this vantage and perspective: knowing what the movement has become and imagining how it might have gotten started. The author’s belief and testimony is that Christianity’s impetus and spread was fueled by the Spirit of God.  That the movement was led by committed disciples who were in turn empowered and led by the Spirit.  And so the text begins with the great baptism of the Holy Spirit experienced by the disciples at Pentecost.  

The author of Acts envisions what the first Christian community ought to have been like. We read that in coming together to build sacred community, to embody Christ, the disciples were of “one heart and mind,” and fully committed themselves to living as the spiritual Kingdom of Heaven on earth in stark contrast to the physical kingdom that they experienced in the material world:  the Empire of the Romans. In this way, they sought to create a perfect, peaceable, equitable, inclusive, and just community: a utopia. Some of them applied the name “Zion” to this community — which refers to the idea of a perfected, heavenly Jerusalem at the heart of a new, Edenic world. 

For us, Zion is the term for a peaceable and just community that abolishes poverty by empowering all, a community that does not privilege any one racial or ethnic group at the expense of others, but is radically inclusive, and welcoming of all. It is with definition in mind that members in Ontario named one of our church campgrounds “Ziontario.” It is with this definition in mind that members of the church in Toronto named our social housing charity “Sionito” — when it became a little piece of Zion for Spanish speaking refugees who moved to Canada in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is my hope that we can experience a glimpse of this kind of Zion, God’s radically inclusive, peaceable, equitable community as we continue to move Onward Together. May we open ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit as we seek to embody Christ in our mission across Canada.

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