BLOG 4/9/14.  A CRITICAL PRESUPPOSITION FOR OUR ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE FOR THE CHURCH

Picking up on my previous Blogs about an alternative narrative with reference to the church for the emerging generation I need to make a point, … it may seem almost too obvious, or simplistic, and yet it is not. Churches, historically, have tended to forget who they are and why they have been called after a generation or so. This tendency first emerges in Revelation 2-3 with the churches in Asia Minor. It is still so. A church community forgets how it is to be the alternative community that incarnates God’s New Creation in Christ. I want to focus here on how and why the individual participants of the Christian church, i.e., New Creation community, are the critical factor—how and why they must all be intentionally formed by the Word of Christ, and the mission to which Christ calls them.

Maybe, on this opening of the baseball season, I can retrieve the humorous question of Casey Stengel when he had been called to manage the newly minted New York Mets, and when they were having a disastrous season. To those in the dugout: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” I think of that exasperated question of Stengel so often in my engagement with numerous congregational leadership retreats.

Let me give you one such example (of many). Some several years ago, a younger pastor friend of mine was frustrated that his very prominent congregation in a small Southern city was essentially becalmed, not going anywhere, and content with life as it was. He asked if I could come lead a Sunday afternoon leadership retreat for his Elders. So I did, and we gathered at a lovely rustic-elegant retreat lodge with leaded glass windows overlooking the mountains. These elders were a cordial, successful group of mostly professional folk for whom the church was an essential part of their social fabric. Nice bunch. Friendly, and seemingly open to the event. I was introduced and proceeded to give some basic Biblical background for the purpose of the church and its leadership. All seemed accepting.

Midway into the afternoon we broke for coffee. Again, laughter, and camaraderie among them. But when we gathered again, I have a troublesome habit of asking questions, and since they all had nametags on, I could address them by name. So without warning I asked one to tell us how he came to receive Christ. He stumbled around and gave a not-too-convincing account of how he always felt God near in time of need, etc. I asked another why Christ called us to be the church? To another: how does the church relate to God’s good news in Christ? To another: how does your role as an elder make you responsible for the faith-walk of the members of the church?

You catch my drift here. Well, if I could grade their answers, they would all be somewhere between barely passing and failure. That gave me my clues for my concluding presentation. Then it was all concluded by the pastor, with a celebration of the Eucharist. After they had all departed, I turned to my young pastor friend and told him that I thought his problem was systemic unbelief among even his leadership. To put it in Stengalese: they didn’t know how to play baseball, i.e., they were obviously not formed by the Word of Christ into the radical newness of the gospel.

So it all returned to normal. It had been a pleasant event. Nothing changed. This was all they had ever known. The church continued as a socially congenial, but essentially a “stagnant pool of religious Christianity.”

That being said: in my/our quest for an alternative narrative for the church in a newly emerging culture, it must begin with the engagement of those persons, those believers, who have forsaken the “wide gate and the easy way that leads to destruction,” and have deliberately entered into “narrow gate and the hard way that leads to life …” (Matthew 7:13-24 ESV). We’re looking for persons contagious and irrepressible with Christ’s “gospel of peace.”