10/26/14. BLOG: TRUE COLONIES BEGIN WITH DEMOLISHING ‘THE MYTH’

Pursuing my attempt in these blogs to find some way to provide a substitute or other terminology for that the word: church, I have chosen to speak rather of colonies of God’s new humanity, i.e., a whole fresh and reconciled demonstration of God’s design to create all things new in Christ, and that includes the recreation of human community. Now, this may sound odd to my readers, but one of the first things we need to do (then repeat it periodically) is to demolish the very idea that such colonies are composed of well-scrubbed saints who meet together to perform some sort of spiritual rites.

So let me, then, preface this ‘demolition’ with the explanation that: I speak of colonies as basically being a fairly small number of individuals—maybe a dozen—who spend time together because they have responded to Jesus’ invitation to find a whole new life by their relationship with himself. Then, there are those (call them what you will: assemblies, staging areas, public gatherings) that I conceive of as mother colonies, which would be made up of several or a number of these basic colonies collaborating for mutual purposes not possible by the small basic colonies. Have I got you confused enough now?

So, while these basic colonies are made up of those who have responded to Jesus’ invitation, it also made up of all kinds of guys who come to him in all kinds of expressions of brokenness, i.e., really messed up, confused, compromised, posturing folk … some sophisticated and polished by appearances, some rough-hewn and uncouth, but all come out of need. Earl Palmer, a colorful Biblical teacher, explained that the Christian doctrine of total depravity is the great ‘democratizing principle’ of the Christian faith in that it puts all of us in the category of those needing the forgiving grace of God in our broken lives.

Problem is: so many of us come with the illusion that everybody else has it together, when the reality is that none of us really has it all together. But with that illusion, our tendency is to hide behinds some kind of a religious persona so that other folk will not reject us. So one of the first disciplines of creating true colonies of God’s new humanity is that of creating a climate in which we can come out of hiding … can demolish the myth, or illusion, of a colony of well-scrubbed saints (sort of like an A.A. member confessing to the others: “I am a drunk.”).

This takes time. It takes a small number of folk who have names and faces and stories, and who are intentional in walking with each other in their lives of faith. At some point, when we have established a healthy relationship with each other (and in dependence upon God’s Spirit) we can begin telling our stories, coming out of hiding, confessing our struggles and our brokenness with each other. We find out, layer-by-layer, that the Episcopal prayer of confession is really accurate when it states that “we have done things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we ought to have done, … there is no health in us, … we are most miserable offenders.”

Such ability to be thus vulnerable to one another is not at all a dismal exercise, but a very freeing one—when we can come out of hiding and state who we are, we then become a liberating voice to others who are still captive to their efforts to be accepted by being something they are not. In my own experience, an episode of this took place when my wife invited several couples whom we knew fairly well though common participation in the same church, over for brunch. And quite spontaneously one of the quieter persons, for some reason, began to tell us how she found Christ and was delivered out of a destructive past. That triggered another, confessing his own pilgrimage, so that before the morning was over we all knew each other at a deeper level, and were set free to minister to one another in a more fruitful and realistic way. But it all begins with demolishing the myth that we’ve all got it together and are not dependent upon the grace of Christ. For colonies of God’s new humanity to be genuine, we’ve got to come out of hiding. We’ve got to demolish the myth of being what we are not.