Archive for September, 2009

Castrated Christianity?

September 25, 2009 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

In Luke 10:8-9 Jesus gives his disciples instructions as they go out to represent him. He tells them, “Whenever you enter a town and [its people] welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there and say to them, ‘the kingdom of God is near to you.’” His first command is to receive hospitality, then offer to heal/serve, and then announce what it all means. Metzler, commenting on this passage writes, “The verbal witness is needed to explain and reinforce the living witness.” (From Saigon to Shalom, p.115)

This missionary formula for identification and incarnation is lost in a communication age where the gospel can become a sales pitch, a commodity, a lucky charm, or speculative philosophy. Soren Kierkegaard tried to get this idea across to the church in his generation. He gave them a metaphor of a class of male performers called castrati who are castrated to keep their voices higher than normal.

“A man is castrated in order to make him a singer who can take higher notes than any normal man can take: and so with these preachers: from a Christian point of view they are castrati, are deprived of their real manhood…but they can take notes higher and more fascinating than any true Christian.” (From the Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, excerpted from Dissident Discipleship, p.179)

It is artificial to cut off the proclamation and explanation of the high and glorious meaning and implications of the Christian life from what is actually lived out by the community of faith. It makes for beautiful art. But it costs so much to do so. It proclaims something that cannot be reproduced. And it is the Lord himself who commanded us to “Go, make disciples of all nations.”

This same order of priority (eat, heal, explain) is also important for the community of believers. This is because witness is not an individual act, but a communal one. We are not inviting people into a kingdom of principles and disembodied doctrine, but embodied relationships-of-the-kingdom that we live together. We show and offer what we know and live, not what we hope to be true in some future place, or was true in the distant past or among a few special cases like St. Francis or whoever. Anything less than real communion-in-community is an inadequate witness in this generation. People have to see the whole thing for there to be any real meaning to the gospel. It is living life together, going together, and inviting people into a lived-out life with God that people will see, hear, and taste the gospel.

So we eat, heal, and announce to one another. We eat, heal, and announce to those we are called to love. We are witnesses in that we share what we know, not just what we have been told or hope to be true. We must not be castrati.

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Clarifying Community

September 16, 2009 at 2:13 pm · Filed under Current Events, Discipleship ·Tagged , , , ,

In Life Together Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it has sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world.” (Life Together, 26-27)

Getting more particular about this dream world Parker Palmer wrote about the modern myths of community in A Place Called Community. Here they are in a summary by Augsburger:

Myth 1 – “Community is a creature comfort, a consumer item; it is one more luxury that can be bought in retreats or seminars, purchased with small town property, obtained by paying membership dues at a country club or fitness spa, or even by joining a church.
Community is not a commodity; it emerges from common struggle for integrity, shared commitment to justice, joint covenants to work for wholeness and mutual respect. It is created when we step forward to serve, to right wrongs, to heal hurts. (italics in original)

Myth 2 – “Community is a utopia of easy access to others, of unconditional social acceptance that happens when we find the right people; a panacea for our fears and anxieties if we can afford to live in a gated community, enjoy a vacation in a timeshare that offers a paradise of fun, or join a club that promises fellowship and the agreement and acceptance of those with similar values and lifestyle.
Community is a collision of egos, a furnace for welding steel-hard opinions, a crucible for melting the hard ores of self-interest into common goals. It offers the pain of not getting our own way, the promise of finding a third way together.

Myth 3 – “Community is the fulfillment of our individual goals, an extension of our egos, an expansion of our hopes of finding people just like ourselves, a confirmation of our cherished but partial view of reality.
In true community we do not choose our companions, we receive them as gift; we cannot sort, select, and assemble our kind of people, they come to us by grace. Likeness eliminates challenge; uniformity reduces growth; sameness frustrates creativity.

Myth 4 – Community is achieved by the pursuit or the creation of an extended family of loving people who provide the nurturance and support our family of origin failed to supply.
Community is not a supra-familial network that fulfills our dreams of familial perfection of solidarity or supportive parental permissiveness; it is a network of fallible individuals and flawed families seeking together to learn how to work through the various issues they carry with them.

What is vitally important for our community to remember right now is, “Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.” (Life Together, 27)

What I loved most about Sunday night was people sharing honestly and letting our tensions and confusions be spoken out loud. In some cases we strained relationships by disagreement. This is good. Actually, it’s beyond good it is a true sign of real community shinning forth. Park Palmer wrote, “We might define community as that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.”

It’s my opinion that modern day believers in the information age live in a world of ideas and concepts and symbols. This is both positive and negative. One of the negatives is that we are not always prepared for the hard knocks of reality when they impact our thought-world. This is especially true when we are talking about “community.” Our utopian, self-serving, individualized focus on our self-actualization works against the most basic ideas of biblical community. When we come into natural, unavoidable conflict our first “fight or flight” instincts are to either pound others into our view and/or move away to find our ideal somewhere else. When we do we blame the faults of others, never ourselves. And we have a country of church-shoppers.

But true community, as Palmer writes, is more akin to a contact sport. It is something that crushes us to free us. Community is something like marriage on a massive scale. It comes with all kinds of dreams and fantasies about romance, sex, good conversation, and shared hobbies. But this never lasts. What lasts is sheer commitment, learning how to fight fair, and the constant humiliation of asking for forgiveness, being forgiven, and seeking to put the other above yourself. Anything less than stubborn, tenacious, teeth-grinding determination to not let go doesn’t work.

This is why the “calling question” is so central right now. It frames and grounds the question of community in the right place. Any other question pushes us into making decisions based on a self-serving modern myth. If the vision of the church is biblical, if our callings can be nurtured and expressed in that vision, then we can know that we have to work together through all the hard and difficult times of being immature, sinful people seeking to love as Jesus loves. If there is a disconnect at the level of vision and calling, then people need to find a group of believers who they can share the “big picture” of vision and mission with. It is the big picture context that unites our little pictures and in which the slow grind of fitting lives together takes place.

But once these things are shown to us by the Lord, then we have to be “all in.” Sharing life with one another is no longer optional. Doing the hard work of tearing down walls, confronting hurts and insults, etc is essential. Community is not a place about “me.” It’s a place about “us in Christ.” This is because our God is about making a loving Kingdom that accurately reveals Him. A Trinitarian Godhead is, by definition, an intricate, loving unity – a complex oneness. This is what his Kingdom-In-Christ is about, and what we have to commit to. To do so we have to confront our myths and walk in the reality and truth of what is required of us; however painful, uncomfortable, and insulting ”other people” may be.

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Clarifying Community Development at OTC

September 15, 2009 at 3:05 pm · Filed under Current Events, Discipleship ·Tagged , , ,

James William McClendon tells a very convicting story in his Systematic Theology text, the first volume which is about ethics. It is the story of a conversation between Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Community in Americus, GA (where Jake Warren lived and worked) and his brother, Robert Jordan, who would become a state senator and eventually sat on the state’s Supreme Court. However, before all of his fame and success his brother Clarence asked him to be the community’s legal representative.

The community needed legal help because after they were excommunicated by the Southern Baptist Convention for “persisting in holding services where both white and colored attend together” there came a time of huge persecution: vandalism, cross-burnings, beatings, bombings, boycotts, and sniper shootings. They needed help and Clarence asked his brother to be that help.

“Clarence, I can’t do that. You know my political aspirations. Why, if I represented you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I’ve got.”
“We might lose everything too, Bob.”
“It’s different for you.”
“Why is it different? I remember; it seems to me, that you and I jointed the church the same Sunday as boys. I expect when we came forward the preacher asked me about the same question he did you. He asked me, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ What did you say?
“I follow Jesus, Clarence, up to a point.”
“Could that point by any chance be – the cross?”
“That’s right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I’m not getting myself crucified.”
“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple. You’re an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you’re an admirer not a disciple.”
“Well now, if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”
“The question,” Clarence said, “is do you have a church?”

(excerpted from Dissident Discipleship by Augsburger)

I find this conversation very convicting and enlightening to my soul. It is a question (Do you have a church?) that I ask myself all the time, and one that I hope will explain my position on the place and importance of community development in the vision of the church.

It was clear on Sunday night that we have tensions and concerns about the place and importance of community development. Some are more focused on its essential essence to the church, others not so much. Here is how I think about it.

The gospel is holistic in that it makes claims and demands on a person’s (and the Church’s) whole life. It is not only individual (a personal gospel) but it effects all of life (has social impacts) and requires believers to take the whole teachings that Jesus taught out into the world to reveal his glory to the “world” (especially to the people and places he plants his church). In this understanding the category “community development” is not an optional choice within the life of the church but the very situation and circumstances in which that life is lived out and defined.

The danger of defining it as an optional part is that it lets people think they don’t have to “do it.” It opens the door to the false idea that they can select something else from the disciple’s menu more to their liking.

On the other hand, there is a danger that disciples can fool themselves into thinking that the social dimensions of the gospel are what matter most. This false dichotomy cuts the work off from the full life of the church that Jesus taught. Instead of relationships, sharing and living the gospel together, baptism, faith, discipleship, etc. we get programs and tasks.

The category of activities we call “community development” is not the gospel. However, you cannot have a biblical version of “the gospel” without the focus, activities, fear & faith that “community development” draws the church into. This is especially true of the full-orbed “asset-based community development” taught by the CCDA and to which we adhere.

I fully agree with Bill Field’s summary on Sunday night about the calling, purpose, and function of the church as being greater than the category “community development.” However, I also see it as more than just a description of activity, but is a lens and focal point to keep the church from a selfish, self-absorbed, me-directed, false gospel. While not a biblical word “community development” is a biblical concept and central to a life of faith as described everywhere in scripture.

I think that discipleship or “equipping” is a more biblical word and description. However, in our individualized, me-first thinking the Bible’s idea of equipping is totally mutilated without the focus that community development gives to the church’s purpose and mission. At the same time, there are so many places to express his life and love within a church on mission (international missions, teaching children, helping with finances, developing leaders, etc).

Does this make sense?

So what does this mean to the individual at OTC? It means that the Lord has graciously given us a way to obedience. It is an obedience that doesn’t take us to the cross, but onto the cross. None of us volunteers for the cross – this is why Jesus is essential. Yet, even when we say “yes” to focusing our lives and following Jesus (using the category of community development as a touch-stone); we still fail, get fearful, confront sin, find victory, etc. In other words, we mature. And maturing is not an option for a disciple, it is the definition of discipleship.

At the same time, no one at OTC will “volunteer you” for community development.  I will never compell anyone to an obedience that is only an act of love when it is freely given to God in response to him.  While no one will be volunteerd, I will not stop talking about it or holding up the importance of taking Christ’s love into the world. 

In a culture of privilege, privatized faith; dueling demands and huge competition for our time, attention, and energy; we desperately need community development as guide and helper to stay on the narrow path Jesus calls us to. It will offend and terrify us. That is part of the point. It will also bring freedom, joy, faith, and glory to God because he is the only one than can truly bring it about.

It is in this context that all that the Bible calls us to has significance – marriage, parenting, loving, growing, preaching, repenting, confession, baptizing, communion, prayer, worship, Sunday service, calling, Bible study, right doctrine, confronting false teaching, sharing the gospel, being a church of the nations, freedom from sin, church discipline, forgiveness, hospitality, generosity, risk taking…

In the context of going into the world as Jesus commanded to do the things that he commanded we grow into following the Jesus of scripture vs. the Jesus of America. Let me end with a quote by Augsberger:

“One can be familiar with the Jesus story, be an admirer of Jesus as a uniquely self-aware yet selfless person, know a great deal about the historical Jesus, be taught helpful perspectives on who Jesus is from the practice of a religious faith, and love Jesus in an experience of personal piety, yet fail to enter the encounter of discipleship in which one recognizes Jesus not as the popular; the mythical, the devotional, or the civilly religionist, but as the one who said “come and die.” Only when one encounters Jesus as Jesus will one feel the rush of surprise. “You’re not Jesus Christ. You’re JESUS THE CHRIST!”

(Dissident Discipleship, p.24-25)

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