Enchanted Community

BLOG. 5/4/14. ‘ECCLESIOCENTRIC’ – VS. – ‘CHRISTOCENTRIC’ CHURCHES.

It cannot be said too loudly, or too often, that those church communities, which may have begun well, easily, and all too soon forget their essence? Who they are, who called them into being? What is their mission? … and … Who is to be the object of their love and faith and worship—the One who deserves their adoration and obedience? Does that sound too obvious? It’s not. Many writers, especially in recent generations, have defined this forgetfulness as Christ-less Christianity, or maybe ecclesiocentric Christianity, where the focus is on the church itself as the good news, rather than on Christ, i.e. where the church community itself becomes its own gospel.

I became bewildered by this factor when I was quite young in church leadership, and at our (Presbyterian) presbytery meeting we were to receive by transfer of his ordination a very brilliant and distinguished American church historian, he having been called to the faculty of a prestigious local divinity school. He was charming, articulate, witty, and gave this colorful account of his whole fulfilled life in the confines of the Presbyterian church, and assuring us that he was looking forward to our company in his new passage.

Nothing wrong with that—or was there? What he had left out was any reference to his faith in Jesus Christ—Jesus who ostensibly was the Lord of the church about which he would be teaching. Nobody seemed to notice. All were quite proud to have such a person in our ranks. But as an impetuous young guy, I found myself on my feet reminding him of this oversight, and asking if he would mind telling us about his faith in Christ. He was genuinely embarrassed and thanked me for pointing this out, and so gave us a very convincing affirmation of his faith.

I have watched this happen a multitude of times over the past half-century. The church becomes a meaningful and essential part of the social fabric of persons’ lives, and they appreciate its company, and all of the significant roles it plays in their lives, … and yet so often—apart from expecting the normal celebrations of the liturgical year—seem to have no dynamic, personal, and transformation relationship to Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection makes it all possible, and to whom worship and obedience is due.

I often think of the ebullient and prominent lady leader, whom I met when I was the guest preacher at her Episcopal Church, and who, with a flourish (cocktail in hand), told me that she hadn’t believed in God in years, but that she loved the Episcopal Church. That may be extreme and humorous, but I find it is often difficult to elicit a convincing statement of faith out of church members. O yes, they have been part of the church all of their lives, and they find the church meaningful, and know that God is always near when the need him—but for all one knows they could be deists, or one of many expressions of religious community. Be it known also that ‘clergy’ can easily fall into this trap, and may even been a significant factor in its pervasiveness.

So, let me just remind the readers of this Blog that the Jesus of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” (of the church’s creeds), and of New Testament Christianity, is: “the pillar and ground of truth” (I Timothy 3:15). When this Jesus is subtly displaced in your life or your church community, then a huge systemic darkness pervades. After all, it is in and through Jesus that God has made himself known, and no one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ.

I am pursuing an alternative narrative for the church in these Blogs, in this liminal ‘whitewater’ between cultures, and I will be adamant in my assertion: “that there is salvation in no other, and there is no other name given under heaven and among men by which we must be saved” other than Jesus Christ. Whatever forms the church takes in these fascinating days; it will never be a Christ-less one if it is to have any authenticity. The alternative narrative will begin upon this foundation.

BLOG 4/30/14. ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE: “DELIVER US FROM THE EVIL ONE.”

In our pursuit of an alternative narrative for the church in the emerging culture, it is unforgivably naïve to assume that we do this in neutral territory. The same Lord’s Prayer that begins with the petition that God’s kingdom will be realized on earth, also ends with a petition (easily dismissed) that God will “deliver us from the evil one.” The reality of Satanic animosity against Christ’s church, and of the virulent animosity of his dominion is ignored to our peril. If Satan can deceive, or neuter, the church’s leadership as to his reality, how clever and strategic is that deception.

In a conversation with the probing mind of one of my young friends a while back, he was pressing me on this whole subject. In the course of our long conversation, I asked him: “Alan, for the sake of our discussion … let me direct a question to you: If there were some such malicious supernatural, clever personality out there, where do you think he would begin? How do you think he would accomplish his goal of immobilizing the church? Like: How would he try to immobilize or incapacitate the present day church?”

Alan chewed on that on in silence for a few minutes, and then typical of his mind, came up with this answer: “That’s simple. I’d go for the nerve center, go for where it is all formed and initiated, where decisions are made, where the images come from, where community formation originates. Go for the strategic source of all that determines the life and character of the church. Go first for the church’s leadership and those who have influence. Get at the nerve center and control that … and everything else follows. For instance, let me toss in a few dimensions of this.

“I think, maybe, if I were some dark lord, some Satan (whoever he/she/it may be), I would tamper with the church’s imagination, with its cognition—maybe even with its metacognition (its capacity to even think about thinking differently about the church). If I could attempt to so capture the imagination of the folk that make up the church community so that they wouldn’t expect anything other than a humanly explainable religious institution, then I would have accomplished my goal.

“It wouldn’t take much … just recalibrate its sense of purpose and mission ever so slightly and imperceptibly off on a tangent, which tangent would ultimately take it out of any contention in the warfare. Like: obfuscate or redefine its self-understanding, then distract it with other really good activities and commendable agendas that have nothing to do with the church’s divinely given mandate. Along the way, let the essentials of the gospel fade into the secondary, into liturgical nostalgia … or be forgotten altogether.

“Then populate the community with non-expectant religious folk who’ve never been discipled into kingdom understanding, or behavior. Recruit members who’ve never renounced the dominion of Satan, nor intentionally entered into God’s radical newness in Christ—and probably don’t really expect anything remotely like a church engaging the darkness in a holy war … but only want to be identified as members in a safe and successful (and prestigious) church institution. Then make it all seem so normal, so ‘spiritual.’ But first go for its leadership and those who have influence. How does that sound?”

________

To my readers, I have quoted this conversation out of a whole study and conversation of mine in the book: The Church and the Relentless Darkness (Wipf and Stock Publishers, pp. 9-11) since I think it encapsulates an incredibly essential issue in any of our considerations of the church as it rushes inescapably into whatever the post-Christian culture holds. Feed me back your comments and I would be grateful.

BLOG 4/27/14. THERE IS NO EASY ECCLESIASTICAL ALGORITHM

It is an established fact that only a small minority of the populace has the capacity to think into the future. Most are consumed with trying to preserve the past, or, at best, the present. This is also true of the dearth of imagination within church institutions to think other than what they now know and have experienced. Church folk become defensive about the present state of things. Such should not come as a surprise to those who have a heart for the integrity of the church institution.

It is quite easy to forget that within a generation of their apostolic founding, the seven churches in Asia, who are addressed in Revelation 2-3, were mostly quite content with their lives, even though the Risen Lord told some that they had a name that they were living, but were actually dead. Others are reminded that even though their community was quite successful, even rich and increased in goods and in need of nothing (i.e., they had balanced the budget). Some were oblivious to the subtle aberrations to the apostolic message, or that they had embraced within their community alien influences and philosophies. They had ears but couldn’t hear what the Lord was saying, and they had eyes but could not see what he saw. Only the two who were undergoing persecution had maintained their apostolic authenticity. Jesus reminded them that their candle could be removed from the lampstand, i.e., they could cease to be churches.

Such was also the diagnosis of Israel in the 7^th-8^th centuries B.C. The Jewish folk, for the most part were quite content with the appearance of the temple establishment, of the magnificence of the temple, and the priesthood—but Jerusalem (as one paraphrase puts it) was a city empty and without meaning, having forgotten its unique calling (Isaiah 24 in loc.).

I say all of this because it is a well-established fact that we have passed out of a culture of Christendom, and of the prominence of the church within that Christendom, and the forms and subversions of the Christendom church … and are now in that liminal period between what was and what will be. This has been designated: a liminal period, a time of extreme change, and a time without patterns—a cultural ‘whitewater’.

I could wish that there were some easy ecclesiastical algorithm by which we could measure the integrity of what each of us experience as the Christian church. The huge number of those Christendom church communities of the past, what with their splendid buildings, staffs of church professionals, stained glass windows, and familiarity is measurably diminishing. I always insist on qualifying my remarks about these church expressions by saying that that church expressions are always complex and ambiguous. Churches have a life span. The problem is that when they lose their true purpose, and have outlived their true calling and purpose, so many of the participants are too immunized by the church’s survival and self-promotion, and its role as an institution of stability, that they are unable to even imagine anything other than what they have experienced. They are institutionally loyal, and will “go down with the ship.”

But … back to my thesis: there is no neat step-by-step ecclesiastical algorithm about where we go from here. But among an increasing number of those—especially from the emerging generation—the sense that the church is a true community that is called by Jesus, not to permanence or to success, but to faithfulness to the Word of Christ and the mission of Christ. A more adequate image of the coming church would be something like the team of whitewater adventurers in one of those inflatable whitewater rafts, dependent upon each other, at the mercy of the river, avoiding obstacles, seeking a common goal, sharing dangers and joys, coming to know each others’ weaknesses and strengths, growing in true intimacy day by dangerous day, and so becoming bonded in their mutual purpose of obeying Christ, and demonstrating his light and life and creativity and transformational community wherever the journey takes them.

BLOG 4/23/14. ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE FOR THE CHURCH IN THE DIGITAL, SOCIAL-NETWORK CULTURE

Reading Sherry Turkle’s provocative study: Alone Together, raises a most compelling question in my/our quest for an understanding about, and the form of, the church for the emerging generation, which generation is obviously not too taken with the church is so much of its present expressions. She spells out that this culture, formed as it is by artificial intelligence, social networking, text-messaging, internet communication, robotics, and such … has rather displaced true intimacy and communication with a substitute intimacy in which we can create our own personas, while staying hidden from any real encounter with true intimacy. She notes that: “we are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”

I’m biting off more than I can chew in one Blog, but indulge me a bit of caricature here, … all too many familiar church institutions fall into the same substitute with a kind of ‘quasi-fellowship’, that allows us to participate while remaining hidden from any of the risks of intimacy. Folk “insecure in their relationships and anxious about intimacy” resort to iPhones, text-messaging, Facebook-created images of themselves, and laptop journeys into the Internet, to give themselves some sense of relationships. We, similarly, put on our ‘churchy’ personas’ ( that includes ‘clergy’ as well) while remaining strangers to one another. Such guarded participation enables folk to sense belonging to something that has some link with the transcendent—but it doesn’t create the true intimacy that God intends.

I think it not too much of a stretch to say that all-too-many church institutions are inhabited by just such folk who fear intimacy, but are rather like ‘churchified robots’, who sincerely ‘go to church,’ who respond to all of the expected services, who are polite and friendly, who participate in the institution’s activities—but which religious institutions are rudderless, and seemingly oblivious to the purpose for which Christ calls out his people to be (as we have said in recent Blogs) the incarnation of Easter hope, and the demonstration of true New Creation relationships—or community that is being recreated into intimacy with God and each other.

The demise of such ‘religious institutions’ into oblivion would not be too great of a loss to the Kingdom of God and the mission of God.

In our quest for an alternative narrative for the church, a ‘macro-priority’ will be that of both re-conceiving, and refounding the church into its true purpose: that of being the very incarnation of the community of God’s New Creation, i.e., Kingdom, in our relationships of true intimacy, of true communication, of shared lives, of the “one another” dynamics implicit in the New Testament teachings. This will be a key component of our Easter incarnation. There are real dangers to such, but there is no hope of its becoming real without the risks. Even Jesus had his Judas, you remember. It will have to be composed of those who have intentionally chosen the straight path and the narrow gate that leads to eternal life—true repentance and faith in God’s purpose in Christ. Such communities will be communities of grace for all kinds of folk with self-doubt, failure, fears, arrogance, pride, brokenness in many forms—you name it. The confession of sin will be a critical component of our self-understanding, because that’s who we are. In such communities we are free to come out of hiding, but the result is true freedom, true faith, true hope and authentic love.

There’s much more to be said, but a good clue is that such communities must be small. The post-Pentecost church in Jerusalem did indeed have its large gatherings, but it was more importantly formed in homes, sharing in true intimacy (koinonia/fellowship), in the apostle’s teaching, in eating together, and in prayer (Acts 2:42-43). You can’t hide in such expressions of the church!

Catch my drift? The recreation of true intimacy and relationships in the community of the New Creation.

BLOG 4/20/14. WHAT ONE’S ‘EASTER INCARNTION’ LOOKS LIKE ON THE STREETS AND IN THE MARKETPLACE.

The enthusiastic comments and responses to my last Blog—about Easter not being held captive to Easter Sunday church services, but, rather, turned loose into the streets and marketplaces of our lives—also raises for me the question as to exactly what that would look like, given the huge diversity of daily occupations of those who subscribe to these blogs. I think that there are some common denominators that I can provide, and the come in the example of my late wife, Betty. Let me spell this out for those of you who never knew her (which is most of you).

Betty was a ‘salt of the earth’ Mid-western girl, but who came with a very modest amount of self-confidence. She could never realize the positive effect she had on those who knew her, and were the recipients of her wisdom. At the same time, she had a sense of integrity that ran deep. She didn’t like pretense. But being married to me (a teaching-pastor) she had thrusts upon her the role of being ‘the pastor’s wife,’ which was not ever comfortable for her, since it brought with it a set of expectations and caricatures that didn’t fit her sense of personal identity.

All the same, while being a super-mom to four kids, she accepted some ‘out-of-the-limelight’ ministries of Bible teaching, and of being a mentor and mother-figure to a host of young women. Her life was deeply formed by the Christian message, by the teachings of Christ, and by our calling to walk as ‘children of the Light.’ She quietly walked this understanding, always with a fetching humility and warmth, and good humor, and genuineness. People, who weren’t too sure of her husband, always trusted Betty. Which brings me back to my point.

After forty years as the pastor’s wife, when we moved here to Atlanta so that I could assume a position with a national organization, whose purpose was church renewal, Betty no longer had to assume that role which was always a bit unreal to her. Her comment to me was: “I want to find something useful to do here in Atlanta that doesn’t involve church people.” So while she did continue to teach a ladies group at the church with which we were identified, she began the search to find where she could involve herself as a volunteer. What she found was the possibility of being a volunteer and a docent at the Carter Presidential Center—which is an amazing ministry focused on global health and human rights.

So for the next fifteen years that was the most fulfilling focus of her life. She really worked at being most excellent in what she did. She was able to give guided tours of that center to people from all over the world, and was highly regarded by the permanent staff there. But her more fruitful Easter incarnation was in her relationships to the other volunteers, whether collaborating in President Carter’s correspondence, responses, mailings, etc. or simply in the informal coffee-break and lunch break conversations. She did her quiet volunteer work with excellence.

Her Easter incarnation, that made her so influential in so many lives, was the sheer authenticity of her love for them, her warmth, the Christian hope and freedom that are so much the fruit of the gospel … and her quiet wisdom. She had a delightful sense of humor. She was caring. She was modest. She was a good listener (unlike her husband, alas). She was sought out by the other volunteers who sensed in her a quality and authenticity of Christian life that made her to them to be ‘salt and light.’ And, … what they didn’t know, but I did, she prayed regularly for those Carter Center friends. They all turned up at her memorial service with testimonies that corroborated all that I have said here. She left a legacy of true marketplace Easter incarnation.

Easter incarnation on the streets and in the marketplace is not aggressively looking for some sermon to preach, or some person to assault with ‘Christian witness’ but it is the love for others, and the readiness to give answer to any an answer for the hope that is in us (I Peter 3:15-15). As such we fulfill God’s calling of us to be “his own glory and excellence” (II Peter 1:3). Go for it!

BLOG 4/16/14. EASTER BELONGS IN THE STREETS AND MARKETPLACE … NOT…

Easter is a radical redefinition of hope and, please note, it belongs to be intentionally taken by those who believe in it, not primarily into much-hyped Easter Sunday church services … but turned loose into the marketplace and onto the streets. If it is trapped in once every Spring church celebrations, then its ostensible adherents have missed the point.

Twenty years ago this April, Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun. Kurt Cobain was a huge figure musically, and the leader of the musical group: Nirvana. Nirvana was at the forefront of the grunge rocks scene. Kurt Cobain is reported to have said or written about his despair at the end of his life: “But what I really need is God.” [I would be grateful is some of my readers can track this quote for me. I had it in a book about him but can’t find it. Thanks.] Cobain was plagued with despair, hopelessness. He desperately needed hope, and found himself alone, though in a community populated by folk who celebrated Easter, but were not contagious with it.

On the other hand there would be the Pussy Riot, that Russian protest musical group of young women who staged a major protest concert against Vladimir Putin in the cathedral in Moscow, for which they were arrested, beaten and imprisoned. They were more recently released, and in an interview were asked why they staged their concert in the cathedral? What did Christ have to do with their protest against the policies of Vladimir Putin? they were asked. Their answer: “Christ has everything to do with our protests against his injustices.” They publicly invoked prayers to Mother Mary to remove Putin. The Pussy Riots hold the radical hope that ultimately Christ’s resurrection guarantees the triumph of justice.

But then there is the remarkable and creative phenomena of the Millennial and iY generations, who are pressing the boundaries as a whole new digital culture takes shape by their hands. They are so often bright, attractive, unconventional, not-trapped-by-what is, but changing the whole way we live. And yet, often when you engage them in serious conversion you find that when the iPhones and laptops are turned off they are faced with a subliminal hopelessness about their future.

So, where do we go with this? Palm Sunday (if I may give my interpretation) was the celebration of a misplaced and merely human hope. The Jewish folk in Jerusalem longed for a religious and political messiah to deliver them from the oppressive forces of religion and empire, but their hope had no place for such a deliverer as Jesus. So that false and merely human hope was demolished on Good Friday, on the Cross. The Emmaus Road companions lamented: “We had hoped that this was the messiah.”

What Easter declares is hope radically redefined and turned loose in the world. Easter authenticated Jesus radical agenda, which is called: the Kingdom of God / New Creation. With Christ’s coming that New Creation was announced, on the Cross it was secured, and with the resurrection it was authenticated and turned loose in the world. It did not fit any of the anticipated patterns held by those early witnesses. The resurrection brought eschatological hope, fearlessness, the willingness to suffer and die in order to see it ultimately triumph. It was turned loose in the streets and in the marketplaces, and it changed, and is changing the world.

Paul would later write: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). Gordon Fee, commenting on this passage writes: “Such future oriented people live in the present in such a different way, different from the rest … as so confident I the future that they can pour themselves into the present with utter abandon, full of joy and peace, because nothing in the present can ultimately overwhelm them. Such people make the Christian faith a truly attractive alternative.”

May such Easter blessings be yours. Turn it loose in the streets and marketplace. Blessings!

BLOG 4/14/14. THE SHAMELESS COMMODIFICATION OF EASTER

So many thought are swirling around in my head as I sit here in the midst of my fellow caffeine imbibers on the patio of Dancing Goats Coffee Shop. I am contemplating the whole of the Holy Week phenomenon, but my observation is that most of my fellows here on the patio have hardly given it a thought. If they are typical of most of their young generation they are engaged on their laptops searching out some information to assist them in their current project. Or, in Atlanta, maybe they are talking about the Dogwood Festival, or the Masters Golf Tournament, … but Holy Week is something ‘out there’ that some church people get all excited about, but it remains a non-factor in their lives.

Yet to get here to Dancing Goats, I had to drive down the road passing glitzy digital church signs, or large banners advertising all kinds of special activities, and inviting the passers-by to join them for Easter. I read advertisements for parades of animals, and people with palm branches on Palm Sunday, or special concerts calculated to attract folk into their meetings … and the suspicion comes into my mind that maybe these ‘churches’ are not so much passionate about the Cross and the Easter gospel …  as about recruiting new members to shore-up their diminishing and forgetful memberships.

Another thought goes through my mind: that immediately after the so-called ‘triumphal entry’ of Jesus into Jerusalem on that Sunday before the Jewish Passover, he went to the temple itself and proceed to overthrow the tables of the money-changers, and to invoke against those who had made his Father’s house of prayer into a place for dishonest money-changers, and the profanation of what is holy.

It makes me long again for the simplicity of my Reformation and Puritan forbearers, who, early on, steadfastly refused the co-opting of both the celebration of the incarnation (Christ’s birth), and of Christ’s passion and death by the pagan culture, which had its own holidays celebrating the winter solstice and the spring equinox, which then resulted in a ‘Christianized’ version of those pagan celebrations, which we now observe as Christmas and Easter. My forbearers were most passionate in holding that every Sabbath was a celebration of Christ’s incarnation, and of his passion, death, and resurrection. The implications of those two events speaks to the deepest longings of the human heart, … but it all gets lost in the ‘hoopla’ that they have taken on.Then, that reminded me again of Annie Dillard’s insightful comments about it all: “Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?… On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares, they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return” (from Teaching a Stone to Talk, pp. 40-41).

For my fellow connoisseurs of good coffee, I could wish for those authentic expressions of thrilling news of God’s New Creation in Christ, which would speaks to the deepest longings of their lives, of acceptance by God demonstrated on the Cross, of a radical and transformational hope turned loose in the world by the resurrection—where death is no longer the enemy. Where the transforming grace and love of God in Christ, and for whom every day is Christmas and every day is Easter. Hey! Maybe we could plant a vital church here at Dancing Goats! Now there’s an idea.

BLOG 4/9/14.  A CRITICAL PRESUPPOSITION FOR OUR ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE FOR THE CHURCH

Picking up on my previous Blogs about an alternative narrative with reference to the church for the emerging generation I need to make a point, … it may seem almost too obvious, or simplistic, and yet it is not. Churches, historically, have tended to forget who they are and why they have been called after a generation or so. This tendency first emerges in Revelation 2-3 with the churches in Asia Minor. It is still so. A church community forgets how it is to be the alternative community that incarnates God’s New Creation in Christ. I want to focus here on how and why the individual participants of the Christian church, i.e., New Creation community, are the critical factor—how and why they must all be intentionally formed by the Word of Christ, and the mission to which Christ calls them.

Maybe, on this opening of the baseball season, I can retrieve the humorous question of Casey Stengel when he had been called to manage the newly minted New York Mets, and when they were having a disastrous season. To those in the dugout: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” I think of that exasperated question of Stengel so often in my engagement with numerous congregational leadership retreats.

Let me give you one such example (of many). Some several years ago, a younger pastor friend of mine was frustrated that his very prominent congregation in a small Southern city was essentially becalmed, not going anywhere, and content with life as it was. He asked if I could come lead a Sunday afternoon leadership retreat for his Elders. So I did, and we gathered at a lovely rustic-elegant retreat lodge with leaded glass windows overlooking the mountains. These elders were a cordial, successful group of mostly professional folk for whom the church was an essential part of their social fabric. Nice bunch. Friendly, and seemingly open to the event. I was introduced and proceeded to give some basic Biblical background for the purpose of the church and its leadership. All seemed accepting.

Midway into the afternoon we broke for coffee. Again, laughter, and camaraderie among them. But when we gathered again, I have a troublesome habit of asking questions, and since they all had nametags on, I could address them by name. So without warning I asked one to tell us how he came to receive Christ. He stumbled around and gave a not-too-convincing account of how he always felt God near in time of need, etc. I asked another why Christ called us to be the church? To another: how does the church relate to God’s good news in Christ? To another: how does your role as an elder make you responsible for the faith-walk of the members of the church?

You catch my drift here. Well, if I could grade their answers, they would all be somewhere between barely passing and failure. That gave me my clues for my concluding presentation. Then it was all concluded by the pastor, with a celebration of the Eucharist. After they had all departed, I turned to my young pastor friend and told him that I thought his problem was systemic unbelief among even his leadership. To put it in Stengalese: they didn’t know how to play baseball, i.e., they were obviously not formed by the Word of Christ into the radical newness of the gospel.

So it all returned to normal. It had been a pleasant event. Nothing changed. This was all they had ever known. The church continued as a socially congenial, but essentially a “stagnant pool of religious Christianity.”

That being said: in my/our quest for an alternative narrative for the church in a newly emerging culture, it must begin with the engagement of those persons, those believers, who have forsaken the “wide gate and the easy way that leads to destruction,” and have deliberately entered into “narrow gate and the hard way that leads to life …” (Matthew 7:13-24 ESV). We’re looking for persons contagious and irrepressible with Christ’s “gospel of peace.”

BLOG 4/7/14. A WORD YOU’RE NOT LIKELY TO HEAR DURING HOLY WEEK

Our traditional Holy Week services have a tendency to become a bit sentimentalized, and to do re-runs of the events of those days leading up to and then consummating in the awesome event of the cross … without ever probing into the depths of why such as a necessity. But even more, you will probably not hear in many churches even the mention of the Biblical word: propitiation even though it is an essential component of what took place on Calvary’s cross.

Why? Because the fact that Christ was set forth as “a propitiation by his blood …” (Romans 3:25 in loc.), … and propitiation refers to averting or delivering us from the wrath of God, and few preachers want to get too close to even dealing forthrightly and honestly with the God’s wrath. There is, of course, a common caricature abroad of a God who gets angry, and so is derided by rebels against the Christian faith as some kind of a wrathful, vengeful deity, etc. But look closer.

God’s anger is not vengeful at all, or destructive or petty anger. God’s anger is broken-hearted anger. God’s anger is anger that is the result of his love for his creation that deals with the consequences of our human quest after autonomy, our sin. In our human scene it is more akin to the anger of a loving parent at a cherished child making stupid and destructive choices. Consider that the Creator-God brought into being all of this awesome creation, and that he created it an expression of his own divine nature, what with beauty, harmony, intimacy with Himself, purpose, meaning, love, and so much more. Total shalom. And, note, He created men and angels in his own likeness, and to be able to communicate and be intimate with their Creator. He   gave them life. But God also gave them the capacity for moral and intellectual decisions, i.e. a will that could choose between alternatives.

It is here that we encounter the origin of the problem of evil, which is far too complex for a brief blog. But the Biblical record communicates that there was a rebellion that took place among angelic beings, and which then enlisted those first parents with the tragic fallacy that they really didn’t need to knuckle under to God, but that they could be their own ‘god’ and make their own rules. The whole beautiful and harmonious creation was violated, and into the place of shalom came disharmony—‘thorns infest the ground,’ and the whole tragedy, which we encapsulate in the term: sin. God was rejected as God. And with that rejection were unwittingly rejected life’s meaning, its hope, its love, its divine beauty—all were tragically distorted and scarred.

Was God angry? No question. Were there consequences for such a cosmic rebellion? Without a doubt. Was God’s love violated? Absolutely. But … did God’s anger cause him to forsake that which he created and loved? No, a thousand times, no!  Right away a promise of hope in the “seed of a woman.” Right away began to unfold his love for the world that would bring salvation, which would include propitiation. Paul speaks of this as the “mystery hidden from the ages, but now made known in Christ.” What unfolds is that God himself came into his creation in Christ, providing the propitiation for our sins, and reconciling the world to himself through the blood of the cross. God offered himself in Christ, and in love, as the one delivering us from the circumstances of our sin, from the wrath of God. We need to deal honestly with this reality.

We need to explore God’s wrath, God’s holy wrath. We need to confess that we are deserving of his anger. And we must flee to the cross. But, alas! propitiation, the deliverance from God’s just wrath, as one of the purposes of Christ’s death that will not be a theme that heard often enough in the days before us, … and yet it is a thrilling, liberating, joyous, necessary dimension of the gospel of Christ.

“’Tis mystery all! The immortal dies: Who can explore His strange design?” (C. Wesley)

BLOG 4/2/14. THE CHURCH … AS HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE?

Would you believe that I, as a (would be?) missional-ecclesiologist, am fascinated reading the account of the Google guys: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. These two very young geniuses in information technology, mathematics, etc. have put together a company that is awesome. They are, to be sure, eccentric, elitist, and probably not the most personable chaps one would want to deal with. But there is a sense in which they become models for me of what the church needs to retrieve. Their biographer records that they are “rabidly dedicated to Google and to promoting its mission” (of becoming the major search engine in the game).

But check this: they personally interview the folk they employ to discern not only their exceptional credentials, but that they are those who believe in the impossible. They want a whole team (now several thousand) who are passionate about their mission, so are willing to do what is necessary to realize their goals, and discover new breakthroughs to make it happen.

I like that. Sounds like something I read about in the New Testament, about how Christ’s followers/disciples are to be passionate about the humanly impossible mission of seeing that “this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations” (Matthew 24:14). Yes! Doesn’t it seem inescapable that every one who is baptized into Jesus Christ then becomes one who becomes equipped and engaged in fulfilling this eschatological design for the church? It does to me.

Yet our landscape is dotted with quite commendable church institutions that seem oblivious to this passion of our Lord for his church. So many of these are venues for all kinds of good activities, both humanitarian and aesthetic … yet it is not uncharitable to say that they are only marginally ‘the church’ that Jesus has ordained. Such church institutions are humanly explainable. They may have a wonderful pulpit, be well administered, sponsor many helpful activities, balance the budget, have a good name in the community … and yet forget their ultimate mission, and so be only marginally ‘a church.’ Living and authentic church communities are never humanly explainable. They are the dwelling place of God by the Holy Spirit. Recruiting members is a human activity. The making of disciples requires radical conversion. Awesome.

Let me unpack that. Christ’s calling of every one of us has a goal that is humanly impossible. The church is only possible by divine empowering.The very task of making disciples is humanly impossible. Our calling to go and turn men and women from darkness to light is impossible, and even more to turn them from the dominion of darkness to the dominion of God’s dear Son. Face it: conversion that comes with open eyes and ears and hearts … is humanly impossible. Getting the joyous news of God’s new creation in Christ into resistant, and often hostile, settings is humanly impossible.

But that is precisely the mission we are to be engaged in. And when we obey, then we are accompanied by the power of God through the Holy Spirit (which is why the early church had as its major activity, that of praying for that power). A sign of an authentic church is that it is reproductive, since all of its participants are equipped to be contagious with the gospel, to be passionate about the mission, to be the every day incarnations of that gospel in their sphere of operations. And growth is always of destructive. The “new wine of the gospel” cannot be contained in rigid wineskins, as Jesus reminded us. Passionate members are formed into the image of God, and so make disciples of others. Such a church can never be static. It is always a community of aliens and exiles—but it is alive and it believes in the impossible. It is passionate about its mission and goal.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their mission with Google, provoke in me a desire to see such belief in the impossible, but much more eschatological goal pursued in what is often a forgetful church scene. I trust that such does not seem too bizarre to my readers.