BLOG 11/20/13. CHURCH: “ … FOR WE FORGET SO SOON …”

In the grand old gospel hymn: Tell Me the Old, Old Story, there is the wonderful line, which says: “Tell me the story often, For I forget so soon.” That forgetfulness has been endemic with the Christian church since the beginning, and one would think that we might become alert to such a perennial danger and put in place some ongoing defense, but such seems not to be the case. We see it taking place already in the letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor in Revelation 2-3. They were one generation away from their founding in the apostolic period, yet already most were beginning to drift into forgetfulness, or distraction—except for the two under persecution, who seem to have had a clear vision of who they were (reminds one of Samuel Johnson’s comment that the threat of hanging in a fortnight clarifies the mind wonderfully!).

I am always taken with Jacques Ellul’s excellent word to us, that in such a drift into something less than the full, vigorous, transformational, rigorous Christianity set forth in the New Testament the church seems to have become: “the victim of a frightful conspiracy that all the world’s powers and seductive forces have united to transform this revelation, this work of God, into a banal, conformist, and vulnerability Christianity” (for Ellul, the term ‘Christianity’ has been so compromised that he considers it a description of an essentially subverted entity).[1]

Such banality, conformity, and vulnerability are, lamentably and tragically, an altogether apt description of a vast number of venerable the church institutions of my experience. “For we forget so soon!”

Or, maybe Annie Dillard speaks of this same, soon forgetfulness when she asks the question: “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals … the winds seem to be picking up. … Does anyone have the foggiest idea…?”[2] Or, the question of the angel to the seven churches of Asia Minor: “Does anyone have ears to hear?”

And yet in the most banal, forgetful, distracted church communities there are, thankfully, so often those pockets of remembrance: i.e., classes, community groups, home gatherings, informal accountability fellowships, etc. which exist within, but somewhat independent of ,the forgetful church institutions where they have their connections. These tend to exist apart from the formal and ordained church leadership, and express the gifts mentioned in my last Blog. (I wrestle with this in my book Refounding the Church From the Underside.)

Yes, the communities of remembrance, who are formed by the “old, old story of Jesus and His love” are always formed and being formed in unusual and unexpected places. God does not leave Himself without a witness … even in the traditional churches that have, themselves, become mission fields.

But stand by: there is a new generation arising that is marvelously creative and which thinks beyond the parameters of traditional thinking, and may be more Biblically literate. There is arising a generation formed by totally different cultural dynamics, and has the capacity to being into being church communities that are alive, and faithful, and remembering in forms that are contagious with New Creation life, and transformational in their influence—anything but “banal, conformist, and vulnerable.”

At this moment in our history, we are in that cultural whitewater carrying us irresistibly into the unimaginable next form of God’s mission among us. My response: “Whee!”