Enchanted Community

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.

BLOG 1022/14. GOD’S NEW HUMANITY COLONIES IN THE POLITICAL ARENA

In a couple of weeks we have a national election in this country. One comic quipped that there were three things they didn’t talk about in her church: sex, politics, and religion. The more is the pity since we should be talking about all three profoundly, theologically and Biblically if we are to be faithful in our calling to be God’s new creation people. With the news media full of campaign reports, political charges and counter-charges, we certainly need to know how to respond to the political context in which we live. After all, the church was launched in a political context in which Caesar was god, and to profess that Jesus was Lord was an act of sedition punishable, often, by death. To be a follower of Christ was to be part of a counter-culture, which was totally controversial, and subversive to all of the political, economic, social, and cultural principalities and powers that sought for themselves the role of being god. The followers of Christ were always challenging the idols of the day. Why?

It begins with the command of Jesus, which stands at the threshold of our entrance into God’s kingdom/new creation: repentance. We are not called into some never-never-land of comfortable spirituality or religion—we are called from darkness to light, from the dominion of Satan/darkness and into the dominion of God’s dear Son—from one ultimate loyalty to another. The consequences of repentance are total and with political implications: we renounce all other lords and loyalties, and obey the teachings of Jesus Christ as our authority, our guiding line.

The church during those early centuries was dynamic, and transformational, and growing at an unbelievable rate against all kinds of resistance, persecution, both from local authorities and from the empire. It bewildered even officials of the empire. My readers would do well to Google: the Letter to Diognetus, in which the reporter to his Roman superior states of Christians: “They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”

The church was faithful to this calling until about the beginning of the 4^th century, and with the Emperor Constantine’s ostensible conversion to Christ at the Milvian Bridge. He then made the Christian religion the ‘official’ religion of the empire, and so co-opted the church to his own political ends. And this subversive co-opting has prevailed over the millennium and a half since, what with the ‘divine right of kings’, of “God save the queen,” of “God bless America,” … all in various cloaks of patriotism. And in our day few churches stop and reflect on what God’s purpose for our presence in the civil magistrate might be, or how we might filter the political claims and counter-claims of this toxic political climate through the radical teachings of Jesus, i.e., the common good of humankind, economic justice, the welfare of the helpless.

We are to be, on one hand, the salt and light, the leaven of love and justice, in whatever place we live. We are definitely not to be part of the culture of discontent, but we are by, virtue of our repentance and our obedience to Christ’s teachings, to be an incorrigibly subversive folk. Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged racial injustice, and when told that what he was proposing was against the law, responded: “I appeal to a higher law.” Later (after his Nobel Peace award) he challenged the military policies of this nation in Vietnam and was pronounced unpatriotic. The counter-cultural voices of the faith have often come from the radical edge of the church in such persons as William Stringfellow and the Berrigan brothers in their troubled decade. Now it’s our turn.

So here we are facing an election in a culture of discontent. We have always been subversive. Go for it! G. K. Chesterton told us: “Jesus promised his disciples three things: that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, … and in constant trouble.” Welcome to true discipleship demonstrating God’s new humanity in Christ.

BLOG 10/19/14. COLONIES OF GOD’S NEW HUMANITY BEGINS WITH …

Describing the basic building block of the God’s recreation of the human community begins with two or more persons who are believers in Jesus, and whose intention is to obey him (who are his disciples), and to intentionally join Christ in his mission of reconciling the world to himself. An individual, or private, Christian person is incomplete—maybe an oxymoron. There is a built-in “one another” factor in the DNA of those who follow Christ. It is not a private spiritual experience. So those, who heed Christ’s call, will also seek out others who have similarly heeded Christ’s call to faith and obedience.

The formation of colonies of God’s new humanity is a demonstration of God’s intention to recreate the true relationships that demonstrate before the watching world God’s reconciling love. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.” Now, … here is my point: Such relationships do not ‘just happen’. It takes intentionality and time, and it takes my engagement with very real others, and it involves love for neighbors and neighborhoods.

Right here, however, we have to identify our ‘neighborhoods’. So that a critical piece of the creation of new humanity communities is: identifying our neighborhoods and neighbors. What or where is the neighborhood in which I engage others? In the earlier, small village, or “All in the Family” neighborhoods, they were where the people whom we knew by name, and who lived close to us, and for whom we had some sense of mutual identity. This becomes more rare in the digital age, when we may not have any connection with those who live around us. It may be more the people in my school class, or my work environment, or the people in my running-club, or even folk with whom I share libations at the local pub. There is no simple formula for this, but I, and my colony of God’s new humanity, do not engage in the mission of God in the abstract. In the mission of God I am called to be an agent of God’s love with real people, often tragically confused and spiritually hungry, and people with whom I rub shoulders.

Maybe is sounds like an oversimplification, but God’s new humanity folk need to cultivate the gift of significant conversation, of being able to be aware of the folk around me, of inviting neighbors over for a glass of wine, or a cup of coffee, and engaging them in conversation that gets beyond the weather, or politics, or sports—and calls forth each other’s story. It sees one’s home or apartment as a place of hospitality. But in this mission I still need the support and prayers of others who share Christ’s calling and mission with me. I need the colony.

When I was young, my colony was my biological family, and our dinner table was a place of sharing and accountability, and my father was one who sensitized us to our mission to those we met at school, because he and my mother were also sensitive to this mission in their workplace. When I went to college I found my colony among fellow students who were disciples, and with whom there was mutual nurture and encouragement in our mission within that academic neighborhood. So with each later passage of my life.

It is terribly sad, even tragic, when one can be participant in large and prosperous church institutions and never know the “one another” love with real people in real colonies of mutual love and support and prayer and mission. Churches where such impersonal religious society is the norm are probably a major mission field themselves (though they may have colorful ‘missions conferences’, etc.). This is all oversimplification, I know, but the New Testament makes plain that the believers were together in colonies sharing the apostolic teachings, around relationships of intimacy and mutuality, around the breaking of bread, (i.e., probably common meals plus the Eucharist), and in prayer for one another as they realistically engaged the neighborhood. It begins right there.

BLOG 10/15/14. COLONIES OF GOD’S NEW HUMANITY: NERDS? OBSESSED?

Peter Thiel, who is a co-founder if PayPal and a teacher at Stanford, has written a fascinating book about some of the dynamics necessary for ‘start-up’ companies. I think I’d like to plagiarize a small piece of this as I seek in these blogs to propose an alternative narrative for the church under the rubric of the church as: colonies of God’s new humanity. Thiel speaks of the small group of young I.T. wizards who invented PayPal. They were all, he says, the same kind of nerd, and they were all obsessed with the creating of the same form of digital currency. Nerds who were obsessed with a vision—I like that. It sounds strangely like something that Jesus and the apostles had in mind when they were preaching the “all things new” kingdom of God, and the communities thereof. How can one be casual or passive or forgetful of the radically new creation that Jesus inaugurated by his life, death, and resurrection—and into which he calls us to be participants through our faith in him?

If I read the letters to the seven churches in Asia Minor (Revelation 2-3) correctly, when such churches become forgetful, or distracted, or diluted by accommodating of alien influences, they are in danger of ceasing to be churches, i.e., to have their lamps removed from the lampstand. Or, in Thiel’s terms: when churches cease to be the nerds who are obsessed with who Jesus is and what he has come to be and do … then to that extent they cease to be any kind of transformational communities of light and life in this dark world.

So, you may ask, how do we maintain that nerdy and obsessed authenticity as God’s new humanity people? What are the disciplines? Good question. I think it no accident that the apostle Paul climaxes his awesome letter to the Ephesians with his sobering exhortation that unless the believers consistently “put on the whole armor of God” that spiritual disaster is near certain. It is a call for being obsessed with what it is that they have been called to be as new humanity folk.

I think the figure of the whole armor (which would have been so familiar to those always in the presence of Roman soldiers) gives us a really practical and simple algorithm for our quest into this kind of authenticity. Here is my understanding: First, fasten on the belt of truth, which is not specifically defined but was that apron or belt necessary to protect the loins, hold the weapons, and the first to be put on. I take that to mean that we initially lay hold afresh of Jesus who is the Truth, and the sine qua non priority of any authenticity of new humanity. Second: we bind on the breastplate of righteousness, which I interpret as the doing of the truth, the living out of the behavior required of God’s new creation people, i.e., the orthopraxis, the good works, or the lifestyle that can be seen by all. We are after all called to be instruments of righteousness (Romans 6:13). Third: on our feet we put the shoes of “the readiness of the gospel of peace,” which means that new humanity folk are incorrigibly obsessed and wholesomely contagious with Jesus Christ, and always ready to be instruments of thrilling reality of God’s love in Christ.

Fourth: knowing the reality of the potentially devastating assaults of the ‘god of this world’ in the form of doubts, of discouragements, and ‘down times’ we bind on the shield of our faith in our faithful Savior who has promised never to leave us nor forsake us. This Greek word has to do with a whole body shield. Next, Fifth: we put on the helmet of salvation, i.e., the kingdom, or new creation, thinking, or the knowledge of Christ and the mind of Christ. In other words we are to think Christianly, or be new creation nerds. Sixth: we take up always the sword of the Spirit, which is our capacity to eagerly communicate/speak/preach the message of Christ. And, finally, Seventh: we pray always as our way of communicating with God, and appropriating his wisdom and power in our lives. This armor can be put on by the simple reminding of ourselves each day of the pieces and appropriating them by faith, while walking, driving, or engaging in our daily routines. But they do need to be “put on” if we are to be authentic and obsessed nerds of God’s new humanity.

BLOG 10/12/14. COLONISTS: ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND ARCHITECTS

In my last blog I was reminding myself, and my readers, that even while I am seeking to provoke an alternative narrative about the church and its form, its mission, its message for the emerging post-Christian culture … that we are also indebted to those faithful folk of former generations who sought to be faithful in many diverse, and often very hazardous contexts. For the most part I wandered us around among episodes and personalities of centuries past, upon whose shoulders we stand today. It is a vast and thrilling and challenging study.

Several years ago I had an ongoing conversation with a very insistent and gifted group of younger adults who were all about one-third my age, who were pressing me on how they could be authentic and effective as followers of Christ in the context of so many confusing elements both in those traditional institutional churches (which have often lost their way) and amidst the cynicism and agnosticism of so much of their 24/7 lives. I loved what they came up with (and wrote of it in The Church and the Relentless Darkness): they decided that they were both archaeologists, retrieving the treasures and contributions of the church’s past, but also architects of its incarnation in a totally new and uncharted future.

There is a whole lot of wisdom here. It is shortsighted on our part to neglect the lessons of our history. Every different cultural setting has imposed upon the church its own ethos and requirements. It is a fascinating and informative history. There is so much that we need to have learned, and I highly commend to my readers the scholarly but eminently readable study by South African David Bosch: Transforming Mission, in which he traces the church history and mission from apostolic times to its post-modern present. Anyone who desires to give wholesome leadership to the church of today and tomorrow will hugely benefit by the insights and wisdom recorded in Bosch’s volume.

But again, as we look forward into our role as architects, to be giving self-understanding of the colonies of God’s new humanity (or the communities of the Kingdom of God) in the ‘whitewater’ of our own present incarnation, we also need to realize that in the last century there has been a two-fold seismic shift from the familiar understanding of the church dominated by the west, and by the Christendom patterns (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Independent) of the west. The center of gravity has shifted to the emerging and vigorous church of the two-thirds world of the south and east. This shift has been from Christendom patterns of ecclesiastical institutions, to a more spontaneous and culturally sensitive and diverse set of forms in Asia, Africa, India, and Latin America. Bosch will help in your understanding of this.

The other seismic shift has been, for us, philosophical and cultural as we have moved into a culture that is basically illiterate of Christendom, if not hostile to the residue of so much of the Christian faith, and the caricatures thereof, that is replete in the atmosphere. To help our architects here, the classic introduction would be Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. (I am also very biased in favor of Jacques Ellul: The Subversion of Christianity.)

Some of our Latin American friends have described the church as: the missionary arm of the Holy Trinity. I like that. That is why I have chosen to use the description of God’s people-in-Christ as: Colonies of God’s New Humanity … because that indicates that we are to be not only a visible demonstration of the love and grace of God in our relationships, … but also those who can be wholesomely and contagiously in conversation with those “spiritually confused God-seekers” with whom we rub elbows everyday in school, in the neighborhood, the lab or office, or in the local pub or coffee shop. Yes: we are archaeologists of the rich heritage of the church’s past, but also stewards and architects of its future. Our only reliable guide will be the teachings of Christ and the apostles in Holy Scripture, so we need to nerd-out on those teachings.

BLOG 10/8/14. OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO THE PASSING ‘CHRISTENDOM’ ERA

I promised at the conclusion of my last blog to remind you, that in the midst of my critiques,…  of our indebtedness to the Christendom era which existed from about the 4^th-5^th centuries until fairly recently. As we move into the post-Christian ­era with its built-in aversion to so much of the Christian faith, and the ‘anti-bodies’ it has built up to resist it, … those of us who are looking for those effective and creative paradigms of how we live out the communal dimensions of God’s New Creation in such unknown territory … must never forget that we do, actually stand on the shoulders of centuries of other believers in Christ from many traditions, who like us have sought to be faithful (“aliens and exiles”) in the cultural setting into which they were born into.

The emerging generational culture, which is being so formed by the social media/Face Book culture, seems not to have much of a proclivity for history, or where we came from. Yet even Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the wizards of Silicon Valley know they are debtors to the legacy of Ohm, Faraday, Franklin, Edison and so many others. We do take so much for granted.

In 1975 I found myself a participant, with a small group of evangelical Protestants, as the invited guests of members of the Vatican staff, and the Roman Catholic Curia in Rome. It was an unusual meeting because neither we, nor our Vatican hosts had ever had any significant conversations with each other. We were there under very unique circumstances to discuss the topics of evangelism, and also the ministry of the laity in the workplace, in the aftermath of Vatican II. Here I was, a card-carrying Reformed Protestant with all of my anti-Catholic baggage being the recipient of their hospitality. In addition to our mostly fruitful discussions over those two weeks, there had also been planned for us some side trips. Being with our hosts in the Catacombs of Priscilla and concelebrating with them the Eucharist in one of those underground chapels where our early Christian forebears had worshiped and done remarkable frescoes on the walls and ceilings reminded me that I was heir of the faithfulness of those who had endured horrible dangers and persecutions in order to assure that there would be the witness of God’s love for us in Christ communicated to the generations which followed. We were taken to Subiaco, and to the cave where St. Benedict had his vision of Christ and so launched a preaching order within the church. We also were taken to Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis. Francis is still a figure who fascinates us (I sit next to a small statue of him in my garden-patio).

And being a missiologist by design, I am always aware of those many giants in the church’s attempts to be faithful to the mission of God in heralding his ‘gospel of the kingdom’ to every ethnic group in the world. There were Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier in the middle ages. Then there are my Roman Catholic heroes in Latin America: Bartolomé de las Casas, and more recently of the martyr Archbishop Caesar Romero. These were all Roman Catholic. But the list is infinite. We will never know, this side of glory, all of those stories. We can be armchair critics of how the missionaries went to India and China with the colonializing British Empire—but they went, and they sowed the seeds of the gospel. Through the fire of the Communist revolution and it ‘cultural revolution’ the church they initiated in China went underground and is now, arguably, largest Christian church in the world.

I am not all that familiar with the Eastern/Russian Orthodox traditions, but I know that over the centuries it was a witness to Jesus in its culture. During the whole Soviet era, when the church was outlawed, the Orthodox Church and the despised Baptist churches were the ‘gospel incarnate’ in the Soviet Union, so that when the Soviet empire fell, it was the Orthodox priests leading the parades with their vestments and crosses celebrating that deliverance. Even more, it turns out that the true evangelists in that era were the Christian grandmothers, who passed along the gospel to children and grandchildren. It is all the story of the shoulders upon which I, and we, stand. We are debtors. But that’s just the beginning. There is more to come. Stand by …

BLOG 10/5/14 QUESTION: HOW CAN GOD’S ‘NEW HUMANITY’ PEOPLE GO TO CHURCH, IF … THEY ARE THE CHURCH?

The total confusion of so many of us about the ‘church’ could be amusing if it weren’t so misleading. It could even be humorous, were it not so consequential. The other ‘Calvin’, the Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, invented his transmorgrifier (which was a cardboard box with dials printed on the side) by which he, in his imagination, transmogrified himself into all other humorous kinds of reality. The mistaken, or transmorgrified, conception of the church is that it is a ‘place’ to which one goes to observe certain expected rites and liturgies.

That is exactly why such a misleading understanding—misunderstanding—of the church renders it into something that has no basis in the purpose of God in Christ. The word church (as I have noted from time to time in these blogs) was a common term in Jesus’ day for a people, or an assembly, called out for a purpose. It is rooted in the concept of one’s calling, and in the purpose of that calling. It has nothing to do with creating religious institutions … and everything to do with Christ’s calling of individuals to himself and to his new creation. This, in turn, brings about his calling into being of communities of those who have responded to his calling to be the bearers of his life, and to be the communal demonstration of that new creation.

… all of which means that we cannot go to church, because we are the church—wherever we are, individually or corporately, there is the church. We are individually and corporately the flesh and blood incarnation of God, the Body of Christ, in whatever neighborhood we happen to be inhabiting at the moment. We, if we have responded to Christ’s calling, are those also inhabited by his Spirit, which gives us a total love and bonded-ness to those others who have also responded to his calling. Those called by Christ out of darkness into his marvelous Light, find each other in all kinds of venues.

When the young church was seduced into accepting the favors of the Roman empire (Constantine in his enthusiasm for his ostensible new found faith) and being provided with sanctuaries and priesthood so that it would, reportedly, have the prestige of the pagan religions, a huge subversion too place. One then went to the sanctuaries where officially designated persons performed the rites. That was the beginning of the era, which we call Christendom, and that has persisted until recent times. Such a concept is so alien to New Testament teachings.

But I want to add my voice to those who challenge that misunderstanding. The church consists of those who have responded to Christ and through repentance and faith become the bearers of his life, heirs of his reconciling work on the cross, and the missioners of his design to make all things new. They meet each other, to be sure, around scriptures, in prayer and in the Eucharistic partaking of the bread and wine given them by Christ, and in mutual responsibility for and accountability for one another.

Yes, I know, I may be oversimplifying this, but you catch my drift. We are a pilgrim people and the colonies of us who find each other takes on many forms. In our day it will be quite different in places that are now post-Christian … from places that are quite alien to such Christian faith. The church in this post-Christian (often hostilely anti-Christian) generation will be communities boldly calculating how to function and prosper without buildings and church professionals—but rather by being colonies of believers contagiously and spontaneously growing and evangelizing and spawning new colonies wherever we sojourn.

And finally, too much of the traditional ecclesiastical tradition we have inherited from Christendom, along with its training centers, has totally missed this point. Don’t be transmorgrified.

In my next blog I will attempt to speak to our indebtedness to the Christendom era.

BLOG 10/1/14. ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE: SURVIVAL COLONIES

As we (whether we like it or not) have moved irresistibly out of a culture formed by a Christendom narrative what with all of the traditions and forms thereof, …and are now undeniably seeking to orientate ourselves into an alternative post-Christendom narrative, and how we are to become the communal incarnation of God’s New Creation in a scene for which we have no patterns, there are a few realities that we need to acknowledge.

The Christendom narrative was formed over the period of a millennium and a half by the church significantly dependent upon the church as an ecclesiastical institution with its patterns of church sanctuaries, of clergy/church professionals/charismatic leaders, upon ecclesiastical and denominational hierarchies of control, and upon missionary organizations. Give them their due: they have been of enormous influence and blessing.

But that narrative is now history. The majority of the world’s population is now under 25 years of age. We have a generational culture that is totally not the product of that Christendom narrative. It is, however, a generational culture of awesome pragmatism and creativity. It is a generation of followers of Christ that will either find those communal expressions of God’s new humanity that have authenticity of that which Christ and the apostles set before us in scripture—or will create for themselves new forms. They will create some form in which they can realize reconciled and mutually loving relationships with those other followers of Jesus, and more pronounced in their formation by the teachings of scriptures and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Social media cannot meet such colonies. There is a need of real persons with whom to relate.

Meanwhile, there are those, usually a bit older, who are still attached to the forms of the fading Christendom narrative, and the church institutions thereof, but which churches are forgetful of their raison d’ètre—are like rudderless ships. But within these institutions many survivors seek out and find one another. They form themselves into classes, or support groups. I call such: survival colonies. Truth be told: such survival colonies could function just as well as colonies of God’s new humanity in any other venue as they do in the familiar setting of those church institutions—they could function as colonies of God’s new humanity as well on the porch of Marlay’s Irish Pub as they do in a vacant classroom at St. John’s-on-the Boulevard Church.

Their pilgrimage has involved them in those institutions of the Christendom narrative, and so they inhabit such institutions while not at all dependent upon them or theirs clergy leadership to equip them for their lives of discipleship. Their danger is that of not asking the question of such institutions: What does any of this have to do with God’s making all things new through Christ?

The context of our post-Christendom narrative is quite too much one of new challenges, of changes, of increasing diversity, of hostility, of cultural agnosticism, of transiency, and of depersonalization … to find encouragement in ossified church institutions. But there remain within such institutions those survival colonies. They, unbeknownst to themselves, frequently are the expressions of the very alternative narrative that is now irresistibly emerging, not dependent upon church institutions or ecclesiastical hierarchies or clergy control, … but rather healthy colonies of ministries to “one another” which are so much at the heart of New Testament teachings about the purpose of the church.

Being myself a pilgrim and a fellow-sojourner with such survival colonies for so long, I can only articulate my persuasion that such alternative narrative survival colonies are one of the to-be-expected, but disruptive, results of such a period of ‘liminality’ as we transport from the past Christendom culture, and into the unknowns of the church’s new generational and cultural challenges of post-Christendom. This will be an adventure full of unknowns.

BLOG 9/24/14. COLONIES OF GOD’S NEW HUMANITY: NOT PERMANENT

Identifying the ‘church’ as colonies of God’s new humanity raises an inescapable question, namely, what is the life span of such colonies? Let’s begin with an inescapable Biblical principle: God calls his people to always be aware that they are “sojourners/aliens/pilgrims and exiles/strangers” (I Peter 2:9ff) … and such sojourners and exiles are not called to build sanctuaries and seek permanence! They are called to seek to be faithful to be their calling and mission as a holy nation, … a people of God’s possession and to proclaim the excellence of him who calls them. Not permanence but obedience to Christ’s calling. Not sanctuaries and permanence, but rather to incarnate their new humanity lives in their daily engagements, and as colonies to encourage each other, teach and admonish one another, and to share in the Eucharistic table.

Unfortunately (even tragically) many don’t get this, so that there have been for a millennium and a half a focus on permanent church institutions and church sanctuaries, replete with a professional clergy and sacralized rites as the major focus of the church’s life … which often have little or nothing to do with God’s metanarrative for his ‘called-out people’—for his New Creation community.

Yes, there is some confortable security to being a ‘member’ of such institutions of religious Christianity (Bonfoeffer’s description)—but then God has not called us such security, or to comfort … but to obedience to Jesus Christ. Our comfort and security are to be his promises, to his assurance: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

It is my observation and that of many others that we are living in the final days of such institutional expressions of what pertains to be ‘the church’ (but are hardly so). Impressive sanctuaries replete with commendable architecture … are decreasingly inhabited—many up for sale (It might be a huge favor to the cause of Christ if the civil magistrate would tax church property, which it has every right to do!).

There are a plethora of articles recently about: “Why Millennials are Leaving the Church.” What is unspoken is that they may not be leaving the church, but rather seeking some more authentic form. (The Boomer generation may well be the last generational culture with a sentimental and traditional affinity for the church institutions of their parents.) Millennials are pragmatists. They, (and their successors in the ‘iY’ generation) are the generation that has produced the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), and a host of other mind-boggling innovators and solvers of ‘impossible problems’.

My prediction is that we will see emerge marvelous and fruitful new forms of God’s new humanity in innovative colonies that are flexible, versatile, and mobile—eschewing any temptation to permanence as they incarnate Christ’s passion to make all things new, to be light in the existential darkness of their everyday lives. But such will make the colonies even more critical and the agents of mutual encouragement and edification for God’s people.

Am I dreaming? Not really. Already we are seeing the still emerging phenomena of such creative and fruitful communities functioning without any quest for permanence, without the encumbrance of maintaining vast real estate holdings—such as Redeemer Church of Upper West Side in New York, in its quest to reach the confused God-seekers in that urban culture. Along the way that church and its mission have proliferated a multitude of church planters, created an institute to help them know how to engage daily workplace with excellence and faithfulness … while planting other such creative colonies in the metropolitan area (and in other cities). It’s happening. There are a whole lot of surprises waiting us out there! But not permanence!