As I write, I’m riding a ferry back to Seattle from one of our Presbyterian churches on the Kitsap Peninsula, just west of Seattle. The ferry is being escorted by a security boat, with one of the men standing at the ready, both hands firmly gripping a rifle on a tripod. The morning newspaper, National Public Radio, and the evening news are all talking about the “credible evidence” that indicates Al Qaeda is planning an attack during or before the 2004 presidential election. Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge has just given a speech to a group of business and government leaders in New York City acknowledging, “I know it’s not easy to live with these precautions, these threats.”

The messages and behaviors that mark imminent security threats are becoming commonplace, quotidian. That’s unacceptable for Elder Rick Ufford-Chase, who asserts, “In a post 9-11 world, we have fumbled an unbelievable opportunity to create real security.”

Ufford-Chase is the Moderator of the 216th General Assembly (2004) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I had the opportunity to speak with him in August on the afternoon of Hiroshima Day, which occurred in the middle of the Presbyterian Peace and Justice Conference on the campus of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

For most of us, Hiroshima Day came and went without notice. Not for our Moderator.

“If you ask many people, ‘What is the only country to have actually used a nuclear weapon?’ they cannot tell you it was the United States and they cannot tell you where.”

At forty-one years old, Ufford-Chase is the youngest PC(USA) Moderator anyone can remember. He’s also the first to admit that because he wasn’t around in 1945, he doesn’t really know what it felt like to be an American under the threat of attack from Japan and elsewhere at the time. It was a threat deemed imminent enough to prompt the U.S. to use a force of devastating destruction in the name of security.

“I’m not interested in asking whether or not it was the right thing to do . . . But I am interested in remembering what security at that time really cost. What was the cost of security?” he asks, “and who paid it? We need to recover that memory in the conversation.”

Leaping fifty-nine years to 2004, Ufford-Chase observed that today “people are feeling increasingly insecure. In fact, the whole world is increasingly insecure.”

Now, I note, we’re in tangible territory for the reflective and nimble-minded Moderator who wants to talk about what it means to be a Christian today trying to live the gospel in an insecure world that is swimming in an ebb and flow of imminent security threats.

This Moderator is not one who commiserates, whining about everything that’s wrong with the world. He’s a man of hope who sees the possibility of another way, a way that brings life abundantly.

He finds a reason for hope in the PC(USA), referring to the action taken by the 216th General Assembly this summer in Richmond, VA. “This assembly stood up and said this war in Iraq was not just wrong, but immoral and illegal,” he said. “That was not a group of liberal activist Presbyterians that got together to critique the war. It was a moment of the Holy Spirit. I was never prouder to be a Presbyterian.”

But an action by the assembly to write yet another message to the President and Congress is hardly the place to witness the relevance of the church for an insecure world. “If the church is not going to lead us into a new kind of security, then nobody else is going to do it,” the Moderator says.

If real security is not what we get when our government tells us we’re under threat—when airplanes are inhabited by marshals, and ferries are escorted by gunboats, and all our shoes are inspected for bombs, then what is it?

According to Ufford-Chase, real security is easy to name and almost impossible to attain.

“Real security is when every family everywhere has enough to eat. It’s when every head of household knows that if they work hard, they can provide a real future for their kids—an education and the possibility of a better life. It’s when no one on the other side of the world or across the street can look at my lifestyle and make a logical assumption that my lifestyle is built on the backs of their labor.”

“Real security cannot come at the point of a gun. We need to do the hard work of coming to agreement and supporting one another without pointing a gun at someone and saying, ‘I’m taking what you have.’”

Ufford-Chase’s vision for real security is a far cry from the security the U.S. has been spending $200 billion to generate through the war on terror and emphasis on homeland security. With such disparate visions and even more disparate access to resources, how can the church possibly lead us into real security?

“I don’t believe change happens because a Moderator tells people they should change,” he explains, “or even because the church tells people they should change. We have hard work to do to build a basic understanding across our country and across the church. It’s going to take fifty to 100 years to do that.”

Doing that is not about changing people’s minds through persuasion or logical argument, where people become convinced that this idea is better than the one we’ve got. Ufford-Chase says the real question for us in the church is “who is going to invite Betty and Joe into the world so that they have a direct experience that transforms them. So I will ask them, ‘Hey, will you cross the border with me into northern Mexico and see what life is like for someone who works in a factory making computer parts for IBM for five bucks a day when a gallon of milk costs three? You’re not going to change your mind about something like that until you go and see it for yourself.’”

In the middle of the peacemaking conference, Ufford-Chase has the gall to say, “This is not about peacemaking. This is about living the gospel. Jesus says to love your enemy, turn the other cheek, put away your sword.” Then with an extension of Scriptural imagination, he suggests, “Build houses for your enemy.”

This kind of leadership cannot live by the mere force of a good idea. It takes action. “Presbyterians live their faith in their heads. We need a church that lives its faith in its body. We need people to say, ‘That sermon is not the best sermon ever heard, but that’s the sermon that convinced me to throw away my television and spend the two hours a day that I might have spent in front of the TV being with poor people instead; or giving up a week of my vacation a year and going to the border to rescue migrants in the desert.’”

Shifting from vision to pragmatics, Ufford-Chase continues to develop for me his notion of two-handed action. “You can’t just go do something for somebody else. You’ve also got to give up some of what you’ve got.”

He acknowledges that giving up some of what we’ve got can be difficult and even a bit scary for us. “When people in the U.S. think about giving something up, they think about being alone. That’s a completely foreign notion to people who are living on the margins. They know they depend on their neighbors, their church, and their family. They’re not alone. The last thing in the world they are is alone.”

Ufford-Chase has dedicated over fifteen years to connecting over 10,000 people from the U.S. with people and with living conditions just south of our borders through Borderlinks. “On almost every trip I do,” he says, “kids and adults come back and somebody says, ‘Wow, I never expected them to be so happy.’ Why? Because we imagine that it’s our stuff that makes up our security—makes us happy. They know that what they want is basic security, but they find that in one another.”

“Giving up our stuff could be the most revolutionary act that we could commit, because it would force our church to be the church. It would force us to actually care for one another.”

“You mean Jesus might’ve meant it?” he asked rhetorically. Then Ufford-Chase suggests that instead of imagining our stuff, our lifestyles, our way of life bringing us security, imagine for a moment “if we had spent the last three years building houses to the tune of $200 billion in the Arab world. Think of the difference that would have made. That’s the work of the church, to take that task seriously. And when we do, then we’ll have real security.”

If we were to take that task seriously instead of “The Unforgettable Fire,” the title of an art exhibit featuring photographs of the destruction caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps we could remember this time of threat to our security as “The Unforgettable Grace.”

Now that’s revolutionary.