BLOG 9/17/14. COLONIES OF NEW HUMANITY REQUIRE ‘NEW HUMANS’
The reason I am adopting the term: colonies of God’s New Humanity here in order to speak of Christ’s church for the very basic reason that far too many of the institutions of ‘religious Christianity’ (Bonhoeffer’s description) tend thoughtlessly to designate ‘Christians’ as those who are identified as members of their particular congregations. This has resulted in multitudes of ‘church members’ who have never made any intelligent and moral decision to embrace the person of Jesus Christ in all that he came to be and to do and to teach, i.e., they have never had any transformational encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ.
Yet the New Testament consistently identifies those who are Christ’s disciples as those who have embraced Jesus in all that he came to be and to do–all he commanded–and who have welcomed him into their lives, so that Paul can say: “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (II Corinthians 5:17). This indicates that when one comes to Christ, that a radical change of status before God, of purpose, and of motivations takes place, i.e., new creation—or, for our purposes here, one becomes a ‘new human’ and participant in a ‘new humanity.’
Who Christ is, we become. What Christ was incarnated to be, we share with him. He died to reconcile us to God, and we, likewise, die to a former way of life. The late Dick Halverson always concluded his benediction by saying something like: “Where you go, Christ goes. Where you are, Christ is. What you say, Christ says.” Yes, precisely. Paul, again, articulated this reality when he described himself as being in anguish “until Christ is formed in you.” He never, never spoke of passive ‘church membership” but he was unequivocal in saying: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
Jesus used the metaphor of himself being the True Vine and we being the branches, who as we abide in the Vine, become recipients of the Vine’s life, and so become those who bear the fruit of such abiding, such identification. This is not something that happens casually, or unconsciously, or without consequences. It is for this purpose that I want to insist that God’s design is to create colonies of such new humanity/new creation persons to unmistakably demonstrate the communal expression of God’s new humanity.
That is also why, one of the four gifts the ascended Lord gave to the church for their equipping (Ephesians 4) is that of a teaching-shepherd—someone(s) to form Christ’s followers into conformity to his life and teachings—to teach and model and coach those who become participants in Christ’s mission, and the contagious witnesses to the incredible new humanity he came to create. It only follows: that if Christ is dwelling in you and me and we in him, then we will have a burning desire to be and to do what he had a burning desire to be and do. This is not tame church membership.
It also means that the basic colonies of God’s new humanity must be small enough so that every person participating has a name and a face and a story—and is formed into the image of Christ–no anonymous sightseers, no one lost in the crowd of anonymous religious folk. Colonies of God’s New Humanity are composed of new humans, new because Christ is in them and they are in Christ. Got it?
