2/25/15. DISCIPLES IN THE ABSTRACT?

BLOG 2/25/15. DISCIPLES IN THE ABSTRACT?

I frequently reflect on the oxymoron exhibited with all of those church-ified folk who took their baptism vow to “be Christ’s faithful disciple” (or something close), … and yet who seem totally indifferent to their neighbors and associates who, behind those, maybe, charming or sophisticated personalities are living in their own nightmare of fear, of meaninglessness, or maybe hopelessness. I wonder what such church folk think as the ostensible followers of Jesus Christ—Jesus who was passionately focused on his calling to seek and to save those folk who were living in their existential lostness.

I cannot force my way into the lives of my neighbors, most of would not even be able to articulate, much less confess, the existential reality of their “lost in the cosmos” sub consciousness. A few decades back there was a grunge-rock group known as Nirvana. Its leader was a druggie, and something of a ‘Pied Piper’ by the name of Kurt Cobain. Cobain was the nemesis of all of the well-scrubbed and proper reporters on cultural realities. Ultimately, Kurt Cobain took his own life, but in his autobiographical account published after his death, … and at the very end of that account he was describing his emotional state, and he made a poignant one-line confession that haunts me to this day: “But what I really need is God!” I doubt if Cobain could have articulated exactly what he meant by that, but there is that universal and haunting need for meaning and acceptance and hope that is only found in God. Who was Cobain around who incarnated a life that found its center and creative source in God?

Or, wasn’t it T. S. Eliot who wrote that: “The wilderness is not off in some far-off desert clime, but the wilderness is sitting next to you on the tube-train”? Yet, if one is only a disciple of Jesus in the abstract, and essentially disconnected even from the guy sitting next to you in the church pew, … then one is missing the whole point of Jesus and of his mission. And yet, when one reads the accounts by Luke of that early church in Jerusalem, which was essentially an outlaw group, one reads that the word of Jesus went everywhere, and day by day men and women were being saved, and the number of disciples multiplied, so that even priests and leaders of the hostile Jewish community were coming to faith. How do you account for that?

You account for that by the fact that no one was a disciple in the abstract. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer would write two millennia later: “When Jesus calls a person he bids them come and die.” When one accepts the requirement of following Jesus: that all of us, every one of us, is to be part of the church’s contagious presence in the realities of daily life, so that our faith is such a winsome and convincing demonstration of authentic New Creation life, that others will be made curious, and perhaps ask what makes you tick—even if it costs us our life! One could wish that Kurt Cobain could have been in contact with someone who cared about him for Jesus’ sake.

I once asked a friend, who was the leader of a mission effort in the thick of the rebellious youth culture, and which mission was seeing remarkable fruitfulness, how he explained such an remarkable awakening in so many fractured young folk? His response was that he was convinced that where the darkness is the greatest, that is where God rejoices to work the most powerfully.

God does in fact call us to gather together as his people, but the purpose is in order that we continually re-evangelize, encourage and equip each other for our weekly mission. We are probably more truly the church when we are scattered during the realities of the week than when we are gathered on a Sunday morning (or whenever). It is God’s calling to every single believer, however gifted, or timid, however modest one’s circumstances, to be a child of the Light, and to pray for the most unlikely of our neighbors and working associates and classmates—always aware that God has put us in their company, not as a hidden and passive religious persons, but as the incarnation of Christ’s mission to seek and to save the lost—that wilderness sitting next to us.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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