Monday, July 25, 2005

Struggling to truly live with Christ together

These thoughts are coming after a conversation with Miller this morning. I originally posted this on his blog... it's a piece of a conversation between two simple-church leaders trying to figure stuff out - like why the frustrations often associated with traditional, institutional, American Christianity are easily manifested in less traditional models (organic, simple-church, etc), especially when those models were supposedly designed to counteract those very problems.

So now the organic/simple church people are starting to discover that our revolutionary new models are not the answer that is going to solve our real problems. Good!

After our conversation this morning I'm trying think about where the 'crux of the matter' is, or at least a helpful question to ask that will get us dealing more towards the heart of the issue. I'm just sort of thinking 'out loud' here.

From what I think I've seen, the people who tend to frustrate us most with their apparent satisfaction with mediocre spiritual life are often just as frustrated as their leaders. But since they don't know any different they keep on with what they know, hoping for a different result (which is the popular definition of insanity). I'm sure a significant amount of blame can be accurately placed on everyone involved (the leaders and the led), regardless of our intentions.

I wonder how close to the heart of the issue the question of allegiance is. If someone could watch us all week long and see us accurately, how would our lifestyle and actions indicate that we prioritize our allegiances? What things, in order to keep them, are we willing to sacrifice degrees of spiritual/relational authenticity for (authenticity with each other and with God)? And how unconsciously do we constantly make those trades? In America, the deck is stacked against authentic spiritual shared life with God - the blend of secular and religious culture that provides the very categories with which we think works directly against the kind of life Jesus invites us into. To steal Dallas Willard's analogy, we're flying our fighter planes upside down, and can't figure out why we keep crashing into the ground every time we try to fly 'up.'

I am not willing - and never will be, I think - to say that everyone has to be able to analyze their culture at the worldview level in order to undo the programming/brainwashing that hinders life with God. By that I mean I'm not willing to say "everyone has to get an M.A. or they're doomed to spiritual futility." It's not like a certain degree of education can be directly correlated with a high degree of spirituality! Worldview analysis cannot save us, the right church model cannot save us, a high degree of desire, passion, and determination cannot save us. To experience the salvation - life in God's Kingdom - that Jesus talked about, I think we have to take what He said seriously, and be willing to do whatever it takes to pursue life with Him on His terms. Our message ought not to be about emergent church, simple church models, missional theology, the [fillintheblank] Movement, etc. It may involve or employ those things, but those are not what the message is about. Those things can drastically hinder the pursuit of God, but they cannot produce it. They can only allow for it, facilitate it to better or worse degrees, encourage it. In other words, our stuff (theology, models, movements) can break (severely hinder) but not make life in the Kingdom. Whatever we actually end up doing should be determined by the goal: life together with God, through Christ, empowered by the Spirit, in the Kingdom of God. Isn't that what church is supposed to be for anyway?... facilitating and encouraging real life together with God? It's God's life and mission, not ours. Therefore, our 'stuff' (whatever it may be, theology, models, etc) is only a contributing factor, an influence. It cannot produce, it can only encourage. It cannot create, it can only facilitate. If we are the ones creating and producing, then our product is something other than God's Kingdom.

When people 'come to church' for reasons other than what Jesus talked about, what we're building is not the church - or at least it is not the church in a very full sense. Our message will play a big role in what we end up building and what people's expectations are. When our message is: "Don't waste your time with all those traditional, institutional church problems. Come do church our way and voila! - you'll find that spiritual something you're looking for (even though you don't really know what you're looking for and probably wouldn't recognize it if you saw it - and neither would we)"... we are setting ourselves and those we attract up for failure. That's not God's mission, it's ours. And that's the message that gets communicated when we constantly bring up the inadequacies of regular church and appeal to people who are fed up with regular American Christianity. Even when we use the right words, parroting Jesus in the NIV, the message those words communicate in our context is often pretty different than what He meant when He said them.

And I'd also wager that we - the leaders ourselves - don't really have that accurate an idea of what we're trying to talk about anyway re: life in the Kingdom. That's O.K. if our allegiances are in place because then we are positioned to grow and learn. Leadership then more truly becomes - in spirit, word, deed, and function - an invitation to simply join us on a journey of discovering life together with God in His Kingdom.

I'm just throwing out thoughts here.

3 Comments:

At 7/26/2005 09:15:00 AM, Blogger miller said...

great post.

you are correct concerning the question of our allegiance. i think i wrote something a while back about Peter's denial... i couldn't find it but it had to do with what i believe was really happening in the mind of Peter in that moment.

like most of us, i have always heard about Peter's cowardice and attempt to save his own neck by denying his relationship with Christ. however, i don't think Peter had a cowardly bone in his body. he walked brazenly past the teeth and right into the mouth of the dragon that night. he promised Jesus "Even if all fall away, I will not... Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you."

Peter was convinced that his church model would work better than the one Jesus had in mind! his denial of Christ was more than one layer deep... he denied Christ by refusing to know him, but he denied him in a much deeper way by refusing to accept his plan for saving the world!

he had a problem of allegiance. as i said in my previous post today, i do too. i have not had in mind "the things of God, but the things of men."

it is about the model! i just haven't been thinking of the right one... Jesus. he is the model we should adopt... the model i will adopt.

 
At 7/26/2005 03:41:00 PM, Blogger miller said...

AAAAAAAAAAAMEN!

i love your vehicular metaphore!

another metaphore i have been thinking about (i wish i had been the one to think it up... but alas). at one time there was a lot of talk of mimicking the first century church, "we just have to be like the first century church... viva acts 2!" you know... that kind of thing.

have you ever used a photocopy machine? when making copies, what do you place on the glass, an original document, or a copy of that document?

when you copy a copy, you lose resolution and read-ability. trying to copy the first century church is like that... they were a copy of the original! Jesus is the "document" we want on the "glass"!

soooo. to carry this little metaphore out... getting focused on the model is really the same. low res and low read-ability. if we really are the fullness of him who fills all things in all ways, then what we look like in any given context will be slightly or not-so-slightly different. Jesus never responded to an individual exactly like he did another. i was just reading about the guy who got spit rubbed in his eyes to recieve his sight. Bartimaeus didn't get any spit!

the deal with models is that we are trying to, not be like Christ, but to be Christ to those around us. it follows that, like Christ, we will behave somewhat differently in each instance.

Therefore, as you have so eloquently said, we should not impose one model on anyone as the one true model.

can i get an amen? ;)

 
At 2/26/2006 01:21:00 AM, Blogger SM said...

7/26/2005 12:06:53 PM

I think I agree with what you're saying.

When I wonder about how conditional my allegiance to Christ may be, I sometimes think back to the apostles question to Jesus after His resurrection, "Lord, are you going to free Israel now and restore our kingdom?" (Acts 1.6). All those years when they were with Jesus in the flesh, hearing and seeing him teach, they were thinking political kingdom, the glory days of Israel's national history. I like the NTL's rendering, "...and restore our kingdom?" (I know that's stretching the literalness a bit, but I think the point stands regardless.) I imagine many people refused Jesus because He would not deliver the salvation they wanted: political freedom and national dominance over the Romans. That expectation of Jesus is wrong on a few levels (like an un-Christlike desire and use of power, for example), though it is so easy to see why they would expect that, and if I was there, I imagine I'd probably be thinking politics when Jesus said "Kingdom" too.

So, what expectations do I have that may seem obvious, that I'll get very frustrated and disilliusioned if God doesn't come through on? Whose kingdom am I pursuing?

I think I understand what you're saying here...
"it is about the model! i just haven't been thinking of the right one... Jesus. he is the model we should adopt... the model i will adopt."
... that our focus should be Christ and nothing else - that Christ should take the place in our lives that is often occupied by a model, a theology, or a trendy movement. (I assume you aren't saying we should look at Christ, build a formal ministry model off of His activity, and declare that model to be the One True Model that will save the church and the world.)

This may be too simplistic, but I had this thought in the shower. If we take an Indy car and try to drive it on a dirt road in rural Africa during the rainy season, that car will soon disappear into a puddle or rain rut and never come out again. If we take a Hummer and try to race on an Indy 500 track, we'd be too slow to keep up and seriously inefficient with the fuel economy - a useless waste, though the African road might require a powerful, less-fuel-efficient vehicle. But even if we matched the right vehicle to the right road, if we drive like idiots and/or in the wrong direction, we'll be heading for the wrong place and people will have serious concerns about who it is that's teaching us to drive. We won't get to where we're supposed to go in the way we're supposed to get there.

The kind of road, and thus the best vehicle for the job, changes from place to place around the world and from time to time in history. In the Western world at this time, our road is undergoing drastic changes quickly, and we're finding out that our old vehicle is growing less appropriate for the conditions.

But the point is to (1) get down the right road (God's truth), (2) in an appropriate way (God's love). Our direction and driving-style must attempt to reflect God - Who God is, what God is up to, and consequently, who we are and where we fit in - if we want to be in God's Kingdom and not our own. Hence, the importance having a theological (rather than purely pragmatic) foundation, imperfect as our theology is doomed to be.

 

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