• Archive of "gospel" Category

    “Going to Church” Is Not A Reality I Want For My Daughter

    July 26, 2011 // 6 Comments »

    I am one of those people who happens to believe in the importance of words.  While it’s a good thing to have a broad vocabulary, that’s not what I mean.  I mean that I think words are powerful.  Words aren’t just symbols and they certainly aren’t neutral.  Words actually DO things when we use them or hear them.

    Ever been called an idiot?

    Ever made a verbal promise?

    Ever double-dog-dared someone to do something?

    Yes?  Then you get what I mean.  Words are powerful tools.  I would even go so far as to say that words contribute to the shaping of our realities.  Just ask any teenager whose parent has told them on a consistent basis for years that they’re worthless.

    This is why I have abandoned the language of “going to church.”  This language reinforces a false reality.  A reality in which church is understood to be a place or an event rather than a Kingdom community or family of disciples.  I would submit that the idea of “going to church” is a chief hallmark of cultural Christianity, the sort of thing that, while having a ring of sincerity to it, actually reshapes our imaginations and our reality in ways counter to the biblical narrative and the purposes of God.  So, a few weeks ago, as Amy and I prepared to take our daughter to a gathering of our church community, she and I had one of our first father-daughter chats.

    I began to speak the kind of words to my daughter that I want her to grow up hearing – words that I want to shape her into the sort of person capable envisioning and receiving the story into which she has been born and invited – words that I hope will instill in her the sort of sorrowful/sick feeling that her father gets when he hears people relegate the Church to something we merely “go to.”

    I said to her,

    Daughter, you are a part of our family and our family is part of a very special group of people.  This group of people has a long, long history, filled with incredible stories that you will get to hear as you get older.  But here’s what you need to know.  God loves this world – everyone and everything in it.  He loves it more than we can even possibly imagine.  He loves it so much that he actually gave himself up for it – can you believe that?!  He did.  But lots of things are wrong.  Not everything is quite the way that it is supposed to be.  But don’t worry, God is at work.  He will see to it that in the end, all things will be made right again.  And guess what, God has invited us to join him on this mission.  He wants us to be a part of it with him as his people.  With God’s help we try to live out God’s dream for the world.  And because God’s own son, Jesus, did this better than anyone else ever did, we always try to follow his example.  That means that in many ways, the way we live is very different from the ways that other people live.  In fact, and this is difficult for me to say to you because I love you so much, it means that the more you live your life for God, the more likely it is that some people will not like you, maybe even hurt you like they did Jesus.  Even still…

    Like Jesus, we talk to God and listen as he speaks to us rather than living life on our own terms.

    Like Jesus, when people do mean and bad things, we offer forgiveness rather than hold grudges or try to get even.

    Like Jesus, when people are hurt or in need, we offer to help rather than let them suffer or assume that it’s their own fault.

    Like Jesus, we go out of our way to be friends with people who don’t like or make fun of rather than ignore them or do the same.

    Like Jesus, we give our money and things to people who need them even if they can’t pay us back rather than keeping everything for ourselves.

    Like Jesus, we will lay our lives down for our enemies rather than try to injure or destroy them.

    And that’s just the beginning!  These are just some of the ways that we get to enjoy God’s dream for the world.

    Now listen, there’s a special name for people who live this way together, they are called “Church.”  They are the people who have been called out of the ways of the way the world is, in order to live out God’s dream for the way the world should be and will be someday.  Some people think that Church is some thing that you go to, like going to a movie or a restaurant, only religious.  But that’s not what it is, not at all!  I know you won’t really understand all this quite yet, but the Church is a group of people who embody a whole new world!  Nothing you ever do will be more important than being part of this people and adventure.  Now, let’s go meet some of the people we’re on this mission with.

    The first of many more conversations I hope to have with my precious daughter along these lines.

    Posted in Amy, christendom, church, culture, discipleship, God, gospel, Jesus, kingdom, LOV, love, narrative theology, parenting, reconciliation, salvation, spiritual formation, stories, theology, truth

    The Place of Salvation in the Missional (Church) Conversation

    July 22, 2011 // 19 Comments »

    You have probably heard someone say at some point something along the lines of , “If you want to know a man’s heart or what his priorities are, take a look at his checkbook.”  The implication is that despite what we might say about our heart and priorities, how we live will always provide the true window into that reality.  We are what we do, not what we say.

    I think this same logic applies to the Church.  Though it might be an unfamiliar frame of reference for us, I don’t think many would balk at the suggestion that our ecclesiologies – the way we understand and practice being the Church – are a direct reflection of how we understand the good news of God’s salvation.  I’m not merely saying that this should by the case or that we need to aspire more to this.  I’m saying that by definition, this always is the case.  As a man’s spending habits will give you insight into what he really cares about, so too will the life and practices of church communities give you insight into how they understand the good news of God’s salvation.

    This may seem simple enough, but it’s a paradigm that I would suggest gets little to no traction amidst all the chatter over the trouble in which the Church in Western culture finds itself.  There are two ways to address the issue of someone whose stated priorities and actual spending patterns don’t match up.  The first is to ask him to work harder on spending in line with what he says is important to him.  Though it has come in many different forms and packages, I think this has been our basic approach to the plight of the Church in Western culture (purpose-driven, mission-driven, gospel-driven, house church, cell church, simple church, etc., etc.).  The second way to address the issue goes deeper; it takes a look at the man’s spending patterns and rather than saying, “These need to change,” it asks, “What does this tell us about what your priorities really are?”

    I propose that, rightly understood, this is where the ultimate importance and value of the missional conversation lies – not by first suggesting a new paradigm for understanding the nature and life of the Church, but in offering visions of the gospel and salvation that are rooted in a missional understanding of God (missional theology) and a missional reading of Scripture (missional hermeneutics), which then lead naturally to a missional understanding of the Church (missional ecclesiology).  I don’t mean to be over-linear here.  There is definitely a reciprocal relationship between beliefs and behavior, I merely want to point out the side of that relationship that I think has largely gone ignored.

    I have some good friends doing some great work through the ministry of 3DM.  A couple of them have become fond of saying, “The Church doesn’t so much have a leadership problem or a missional problem, the Church has a discipleship problem.”  In a sense, I couldn’t possibly agree with this sentiment more.  But, as I offered by way of a comment on a great blog post by Mike Breen the other day in which he was asking why more churches don’t spend as much time innovating their approaches to discipleship as they do technology, I think the underlying reason that this problem exists is on account of a flawed understanding of salvation.  As I said there,

    As long as the gospel remains something that we primarily need to “believe” in the cognitive sense, then it actually makes perfect sense to spend the bulk of your time and energy on innovating technologically because the bottom line is ‘reaching’ [see a post I offered on this a few years ago] as many people as possible. Discipleship, in this vision, is optional, auxiliary to what it means to “be saved.” My sense is that it is only when people begin embrace the reality of the gospel as an invitation into a way of life (the Kingdom of God), and salvation as a way of describing the nature of life in the Kingdom, that they begin to understand the ‘biblical logic’ that leads to the shaping of an ecclesiology in which discipleship and innovative approaches to discipleship will begin to be of primary importance.

    So, if I might sum up.  I feel like I see enormous amounts of time and energy being invested in trying to help people revisit how they understand and practice being the Church.  Fantastic!  But, let’s be honest, so long as people cling to (what I would term) Christendom-shaped conceptions of the gospel, primarily understood as something (theory of the atonement?) to which I give intellectual assent, as opposed to an invitation into a new reality that reshapes the entirely of my life, and salvation, primarily understood as getting into Heaven after I die, as opposed to my participation in the saving work that God is doing right here and now, we aren’t really getting to the heart of the matter.

    I wonder if we’re ready for this conversation?  I mean, this is treading on pretty sacred ground, right?  We’re more than ok tweaking our language about the nature of the church or even jimmying a bit with our church programs and structures.  And while it’s one thing to talk about God as a missionary God (lots of people have hopped on board with that), it’s quite another to start talking about the implications of God being a missionary God for how we understand the nature of that God’s good news and that God’s salvation. Harder conversation, but I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the one we need to give more attention to fostering if the Church in Western culture is to respond faithfully to not just the situation we find ourselves in, but more importantly, to God and the ways in which God is at work in our midst.

    Posted in 3DM, christendom, church, discipleship, gospel, kingdom, missional, missional theology, salvation, theology, truth, western culture

    Depersonalized and Taken Advantage Of

    March 25, 2011 // 2 Comments »

    I had something happen to me last week that has never happened before.  I got dropped by my car insurance company, State Farm.

    I received a letter in the mail that said on account of the three claims that I have reported in the last three years, they were no longer willing to insure me.  I looked over the letter and thought about each accident.  As I did, I couldn’t help but feel depersonalized and taken advantage of and I began to reflect on how prone we often are to do this very same thing to others.  Here’s what I mean…

    Accident #1, The Fence

    The first accident happened while I lived in Memphis.  I was driving down a busy 2 lane road and a car, probably 4-5 cars in front of me, slammed on their brakes and turned left w/o signaling, cutting off traffic that was coming the other way.  The cars in front of me all braked rapidly as did I, but as I looked in my rear-view mirror, a car was barreling down so I decided to spin the wheel to the right where there was noting but grass and a fence in order to get out of the way.  Good thing I did, because the car absolutely would have slammed into me.  The result was a good bit of damage to the right front end of my car and a few broken slats in a fence.

    Accident #2, Moving

    The 2nd accident came just over a year later and happened while we were moving into our new apartment.  We had rented a U-Haul truck to move all our stuff, so I was driving that.  At one point I had to back the huge truck down a narrow alley and out onto a street.  Once I actually made it to the street I had a friend guiding me as I couldn’t really see behind me or keep an eye on traffic.  I could not possibly have been moving any slower, but as I was backing up to his direction, I heard a crunch.  The rear bumper of the truck had done some damage to the bumper of a parked car.

    Accident #3, The Deer

    The third accident took place, again, almost exactly a year later.  Amy and I were driving home to Ohio on the Turnpike.  We were in the right lane of a two lane portion of the Turnpike heading east.  All of a sudden, a woman in an SUV pulled up to our left and began honking her horn and waving her hands.  Obviously this took our attention off of the road for a moment and on to her.  As soon as we glanced back, we saw a couple deer on the side of the road very near our lane.  Since this lady was directly beside us, there was no room for us to move over to the left and with another car directly behind us, slamming on our brakes didn’t seem like the best idea either.  For some reason, one of the deer began running beside us and then jumped in front so that we gave it a good butt bounce.  Off the deer went, but we lost a headlight and had some minor paint damage to the bumper.

    In the event that you trust my recounting of these accidents, I hope you’ll agree that it would be hard to make a case for my being a bad or negligent driver.  Instead, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that my ill state (the one who had to file a claim) actually came about by external factors (bad driver in accident 1, bad navigator in accident 2, and dumb deer in accident 3).

    My point in all this isn’t exactly to defend myself, but to point out how easy it is to depersonalize and take advantage of people when we aren’t willing to step into the details of peoples lives and circumstances.

    We do this all the time.  We depersonalize people and take advantage of them in making judgments and estimations based on appearances w/o being willing to step into the minutia of their lives, their circumstances and stories.   Doing so is not only a source of great injustice, but it short circuits the fundamental work of the gospel.

    Like insurance companies such as State Farm, it is so very tempting to just objectify people for our own purposes.  For insurance companies, getting personal and refusing to take advantage of a flawed system would adversely effect their bottom line, so they depersonalize and take advantage of people.  For us, getting personal and refusing to take advantage of the temptation to generalize and stereotype takes time, effort, and a willingness to have our most fundamental assumptions about the world called into question, so we follow suit.

    In the midst of a culture which inclines us to function with the utmost concern for efficiency and our own best interests, I believe that Jesus calls us to the inefficiency of incarnational living and the freedom of a life lived for the sake of others.  Insurance companies may take the bait, but I hope I/we don’t.

    Posted in culture, gospel, justice, money, stories

    An Invitational Politics

    November 8, 2010 // 1 Comment »

    Inasmuch as politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions regarding the way in which life ought to be lived, the Church is a thoroughly political entity. Taken together with the biblical reality of God’s Lordship over all of creation, it’s unfortunate that so many professing believers would dichotomize between “church” and “politics.”  As Christians, those who pledge their allegiance to the Kingdom of God under the Lordship of Jesus, everything we do is political.

    Lots of voting took place here in the US the other day and both in person and virtually, I found myself engrossed in conversations surrounding, not the issues/people which were to be voted on, but the practice of voting itself.

    I devoted a more focused post to this topic a couple years ago, but I wanted to add another thought that came up in the midst of these conversations.  To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s flat out and always wrong to vote.  I am saying that we do well to recognize exactly what democratic voting entails for those of us seeking to differentiate ourselves from others as citizens of another Kingdom.

    One of the reasons Christians may choose to not vote is that we are first and foremost part of a community that roots its identity in what I would call an invitational politics.  That is to say, following Jesus, our fundamental political posture toward the world is to invite people into a way of seeing and engaging life that is rooted in the good news of God’s Kingdom.

    The democratic process of voting, on the other hand, is anti-invitational.  It is (at best) 51% of a given population mandating that the other 49% conform to their particular political bents.

    Therefore, if we are to vote in democratic elections, we must concede that we are participating in a political process which runs against the grain of God’s ultimate desire for us.

    Jesus does not coerce or force people into his vision for the world.  He (and his disciples after him) live into that reality and invite others to experience it and do the same.  Like Jesus, we opt “to serve” others (and invite them to do the same) rather than “to be served” by voting our preferences so that others are compelled to obey.  Christians are those who are willing, in all matters and affairs to be counted among “the least” instead of using worldly power and influence to “lord it over” others.

    There is a flawed logic at work in our dominant political vision.  It would have us believe that the future of the world and its peoples is in our hands and we therefore have a responsibility to vote to determine our future.  Sadly, this vision completely ignores the far greater reality held out to us in Scripture that God is in charge of the course of history and is at work in Christ to “bring everything under his control.”  Does this mean we just sit back and relax because God is in charge?  No!  Instead, the gospel of the Kingdom offers to us an alternative political reality and responsibilities.

    In humility and weakness we die for that which is right before we ever dream of killing for it.  And we invite!

    We speak with courage and boldness of the sovereignty of God and his righteousness.  And we invite!

    We embody the truth we claim to believe – trusting that the truth itself and not our persuasiveness will win the day.  And we invite!

    We run to the rescue of the poor and oppressed – we spend our lives on their behalf.  And we invite!

    We invite, we invite, we invite!  And we pray to God that in the midst of our stumbling attempts to embody the sort of Kingdom reality held out to us in Scripture, that others see forgiveness, they see generosity, they see sacrificial living and a refusal to repay evil with evil and God draws them.  This is the sort of political reality and responsibility that God calls us in to as citizens of his Kingdom.

    Looking forward to some discussion around this topic.  Let’s keep it civil and be open-minded with one another, eh?

    Posted in capitalism, christendom, decisions, discipleship, God, gospel, Jesus, kingdom, politics

    Toward a Thepoetic of the Cross (Book Review)

    September 27, 2010 // 1 Comment »

    Every so often I get an invitation to read and review a forthcoming book here at lifeasmission.  Ocassionally, I get really excited about the book I’m asked to take a look at.  That’s how I felt when I was contacted by Jason Derr (see some of his articles for the Huffington Post here) and asked to review his first book, Towards a Theopoetic of the Cross.

    Most of that excitement stemmed from the fact that I had no idea what a theopoetic of the cross was!  Jason has helped me with that.

    After setting the stage for what he intends in the book, Jason turns his attention to describing theopoetics before he applies them to the cross and discipleship.

    I love theology, but I am no poet.  Few would find this to be a problem, but as Derr notes,

    There is no theology without poetry. (37)

    Poetry, like no other kind of writing, has the potential to enliven our imaginations.  As the author points out,

    The theopoet is never safe to have at dinner parties, he will turn the whole thing into a Eucharist, s/he will remind us of the spiritual possibilities of the 6 o’clock news. (42)

    Derr also points out that theopoetry is a realm of discourse for the “differently wisdomed,” a moniker which seems immeasurably more helpful in speaking of the theological contributions which might be offered by those we think of as having “learning disabilities.”

    We are reminded by the author that,

    The cross announces embarrassment to the church and to the world, that the unholy is holy, that it is revelation and that faith is not wrapped up in our neat moralities, our safe pleasantries. (58)

    In a footnote to this text Derr acknowledges that this reality can be pushed too far, but it nevertheless reminds us that the cross, despite its evolution as a symbol and icon, was, and always should be, seen as a scandalous event to regard.

    The cross, the author would have us remember, is an affront to our inclinations toward positions of power, be they “Christian” or not.  This idea flows into his final section on discipleship.

    As only a theopoet might, Derr encourages us to envision a praxiological kind of discipleship through the metaphor of meal:

    Te eat a meal, to be in love with its tastes is to enter into discipleship to it, to be transformed by it, to be driven into the school of the kitchen and to learn at its pots and pans, at its dirty dishes, at its spices and seasonings. (93)

    This brief overview hardly does justice to the book.  Derr engages with the work of theologians such as Jugern Moltmann, Gustavo Gutierrez, Douglas John Hall, Martin Luther, and others.  He talks often of the manner of our incarnational engagement with the poor and oppressed and offers his take on how the Church ought to think of the GLBTQ community.

    For those interested in sustained theological reflection and argumentation, this book will probably leave you wanting.  But, for those, not unlike me, who have to work harder to appreciate the nuances of what poetic language and thinking can do for our vision of God, this book is worth your time.

    Posted in art, christendom, church, culture, discipleship, gender, gospel, Jesus, justice, poetry, post-christendom, salvation, theological education, theology, western culture

    A ViralHope Video

    July 12, 2010 // 1 Comment »

    A few months back I mentioned the release of the book ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and everything in-between). I am one of 50 different authors who offers a brief reflection on what the “good news” might mean for my city (which was Memphis when I originally wrote).  The book has been doing quite well from what I understand and it now boasts an excellent promotional video.

    You can still get single copies of the book through Amazon, or order multiple copies through Ecclesia Press.  I hope you’ll consider spreading this video around, maybe with a link to the book.

    The video was made by Aaron Nee of the Brother NEE.  Check out this trailer from their feature film, The Last Romantic.

    Posted in books, Ecclesia Network, gospel, suburban, urban, video

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