The Face of Christ

I just love this man and his thoughts!

“To become a Christian,” I agree, as a statement does have a bit of an air about it, don’t you think? I like his language of the “lucky break” and the “slow, obscure process” of discovering the face of Christ behind the Mystery.

The Face of Christ

by Frederick Buechner

I ENTERED UNION Theological Seminary in the fall of 1954. If anyone had told me as little as a year or so earlier that I was going to do such a thing, I would have been no less surprised than if I had been told I was going to enter the Indianapolis 500. The preceding year I had become in some sense a Christian, though the chances are I would have hesitated to put it like that, and I find something in that way of expressing it which even now makes me feel uncomfortable. "To become a Christian" sounds like an achievement, like becoming a millionaire. I thought of it rather, and think of it still, more as a lucky break, a step in the right direction. Though I was brought up in a family where church played virtually no role at all, through a series of events from childhood on I was moved, for the most part without any inkling of it, closer and closer to a feeling for that Mystery out of which the church arose in the first place until, finally, the Mystery itself came to have a face for me, and the face it came to have for me was the face of Christ. It was a slow, obscure process . . . and the result of it was that I ended up being so moved by what I felt that I found it inadequate simply to keep it inside myself like a secret but had to do something about it.

(Originally published in Now and Then.)

About the author: Liana Stone writes from beneath a sometimes literal pile of the most delicious tiny humans you ever saw. She and her effervescent husband, Jason, currently call Oregon home, having moved back from Zanzibar in 2020, where they served with All Nations. Liana had the privilege of not only attending the first Capetonian Church Planting Experience (CPx) in 2008, but attending a second CPx in Cape Town with Jason in 2012 (Double graduate here, people). Both Liana and Jason have a deep love for the All Nations family and are grateful for the way their time working within All Nations has shaped and impacted their life.

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