Belonging then and now

Following on from my last post I thought it might be a good idea to insert the quotation from The Missional Leader that got me thinking about this in the first place:
"In the time of Tertullian, someone wanting to belong to the church had to go through a rigorous period of training focused on behaviour (how daily life was actually lived). In other words, to belong to the community of Jesus, a person was mentored in practicing change in habits. Today leaders talk about the need to create a safe, non-threatening, low threshold of belonging in order to draw people into the church. Note the two radically different ways in which the same language is being used. These approaches suggest contrasting sources of understanding. In the latter case and in our contemporary context, the source of this thinking is not theologically, biblically formed imagination but the latest marketing strategies that come from polls and studies about what people are looking for when they join a group... Tertullian's primary concern as a leader was formation of people around a specific set of habits and practices that came out of his engagement with scripture."

The quote is from the beginning of Part 2 of the book, which is probably the place to start if you're gonna read it.

Belong, Believe, Behave

Travelling over to Budapest last week I was reading Alan Roxburgh's 'The Missional Leader' - not a great book to be honest but it did prod me towards the following little rev... For years now I've heard people talk about 'Belong, Believe, Behave' as a summary of the process of becoming a Christian. I first recall Mike Pilavachi using it about 10 years ago. He spelt out the way that most churches insist that young people are required to first behave, then believe at which point they might be allowed to belong. Along with many in youth ministry my work has involved trying to reverse that process, with the least important bit being the behaving - after all, "teenagers eh!". How crazy then that I'm only now coming to see that this isn't a process at all. These are 3 incredibly important factors in anyone's Christian life, whether just starting out or approaching the finishing line. We all need to be part of a community of faith (belonging), we all need to be animated by personal faith (belief), and we all need to act in accordance with our faith (behaviour). How could I have overlooked the behavioural dimension of faith for so long? After all, 'Faith without deeds is dead.' Let's never confuse authentic Christian behaviour with how we act in Sunday worship; how we behave in that context ought to pale into insignificance when compared against the witness of our daily lives.

A story of two gardens

I've been thinking recently that the story of the bible is in many ways a story of two gardens.

In the first garden (Genesis 3) we find a man and a woman playing the blame game and going through the pain of dislocation from the one who gives meaning to their lives. They are sent out of the garden disgraced and disillusioned.

In the second garden (John 20) we find a man and a woman. But this man treats the woman very differently. He wipes away her tears, removes her shame and restores her to her purpose. She is sent from the garden rejoicing. Go and tell of the victory... sing Miriam sing... God has made a way through the sea, the time of slavery is over!

It's not surprising that the apostle Paul calls this man in the second garden the 'last Adam'.

Soul Survivor or Body Believer?

Its relatively easy for most people to accept that they have a soul that will survive death and go to heaven - who wouldn't want to believe that? And after all, the animating energy of life itself is a great mystery that keeps us guessing about where it comes from and where it goes when glowing flesh becomes rotting corpse. But for the evangelist concerned with communicating the original Christian hope (rather than its modern Gnostic variant) it's a hard sell to persuade people that our present bodies will at some unknown future moment be reconstituted to enjoy a new eternal life in a renewed cosmos. Perhaps that's why I don't think I've ever, in 30 years of being around a whole range of church meetings and evangelistic events, heard an evangelist promise resurrection. Yet I hear them promise eternity in heaven all the time.
Related to this I wonder if hope may instead be found in the practice of full immersion baptism. Above all else it's a statement about the death, burial and resurrection of the whole body. Let's get real, if we believed that the body is just a temporary shell we could indicate the presence of a soul waiting for collection in other ways, such as a sign on the forehead, a cross would be appropriate. But the authentic Christian hope is not that we will be soul survivors, rather the body is of great and lasting value in God's eternal order. But like I say, it's a hard sell.

Forrest Gump Christianity

Forrest Gump was an endearing character and when the film came out in 1994 it took the world by storm. It won 6 oscars (nominated for 13), it had a top selling soundtrack, it tapped into something. Yes, he was slow, simple and made sense of the world around him through his mothers childish proverbs. But as Forrest Gump blundered through life amazing things happened to him and he did amazing things.
And that touches us deep inside.
Because we yearn for simplicity in a complicated world.
We shrink from the responsibility of being grown up.
It’s comforting to believe that we’re OK as we are, that we don’t need to change, that good things will happen to us because we’re good people.
And so we can make a nice comfortable theology for ourselves by plucking verses from here and there; that we don’t need to worry because God clothes the flowers of the field, or that we must simply come to him as little children, or that his house has many rooms and one day he’ll come and take us there… but who are we trying to kid? Jesus did not live a Forrest Gump style existence! Neither did he appear on the earth as a finished product - an all-knowing rugrat revealing universal mysteries at the Bethlehem mums and tots group. He needed to grow into all his human potential just like we do. The bible says that he, "grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men." (Luke 2:52) Later it says that "in all things" we need to "grow up into him". (Ephesians 4:15)
No matter how much we want our growing pains to come to an end we should just think first what it really means to stop growing... it means we start dying.

Anatomy of a Stronghold

It started with a thought.
'We can change it.'
It became an atmosphere of optimism.
'You know what, maybe it will happen soon?'
It took on a focus.
'If we can do it there it will prove it to everyone!'
It turned into action.
July 4th 1789, The Bastille, Paris. The epitome of absolute royal power.

2 Corinthians 10:4-5 "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

We're often faced with full blown strongholds in life but how often do we pay attention to a stronghold under construction? If we look carefully at the words of the apostle Paul we can see that he gives us all the phases of the building process from start to finish. First there is the thought. The thought is processed into a pretension. The pretension is augmented into an argument. The argument solidifies into a stronghold. A stronghold is nothing more and nothing less than an entrenched belief that 'This is the way it is and it could never be different.' But like a mathematical equation that negative principle works out in its the positive too. All it takes to overthrow that stronghold is a thought. A thought that spreads an atmosphere. An atmosphere that finds a focus. A focus that inspires action. Action that proves, 'Oh yes it can!'

For more on this subject I recommend Paul Scanlon's Anatomy of a Stronghold audio series.

Vive la Revolution

History is one of those subjects that is very dependent on a good narrator. One guy who fits into that category is the comedian Mark Steel. I just read his book Vive La Revolution and as well as making me laugh lots it also made me think too - especially about church. You see, around 200 years ago when the revolution was gaining momentum as a movement, groups, caucuses and personalities began to emerge who would shape the future of the French nation and indeed of the world (if you consider the French Revolution to be the paradigm of all modern revolutions). The thing I consider to be significant is that none of these political groups set out with a vision of what their particular club ought to look like. They were all far more concerned with giving their attention to higher things, namely the new world order which they believed could be created and was worth fighting for. And this is where church leaders ought to pay attention. Growing their membership was not the aim. Neither were their activities an exercise in proving the primacy of their pattern of belief over the other variants on offer. For them recruitment was just a necessary step towards their goal of social transformation. Similarly, fulfillment for an individual member was not found in convincing another individual to believe and join the group, it was that they would draw all those around them suffering the same oppression into the action of removing the old order to establish a new world built on a totally different set of values.

I really think we should be spending less time thinking about church growth as an end in itself and more time devoted to sharing with people the amazing Christian vision of what life would be like if the kingdoms of this world became the kingdoms of our Lord.

Me and my shadow

I don't know if it's just part of being human, or of being thirtysomething, or simply being me, but introspection seems to take up a lot of emotional energy. I seem to be forever self-examining and self-critiqueing. If this sounds a bit familiar to you too then you'll know that the tendency is not to dwell on your good points but your bad points. Why is that the default setting? I was just considering this and began thinking of it as a fascination, or even an obsession, with my own shadow. How weird would that be? But then I thought - shadows get bigger the further you are from the source of light. Maybe if I could concentrate on getting myself closer to that light I wouldn't have as much shadow to explore.

Turning the tables

Prompted by a conversation I had in a coffee shop the other day I've been thinking about the story of Jesus getting mad with the money-changers and traders in Jerusalem's temple courts. The writers of the four gospels all give us slightly different perspectives on the event and therefore the variations in the text offer shades of meaning. But going beyond the words into a bit of architecture takes us even deeper. The key thing in this story may well be not simply what the traders were doing but where they were doing it. I don't know a lot about the Temple but I know this, the spacious outer courts were known as the 'Courts of the Gentiles' and according to the Law unless you were a full-blooded Jew you couldn't get any closer than this in your desire for connection with God. How significant then that as he violently throws over the tables Jesus shouts out the words of Isaiah 56, the classic prophecy relating to God's desire to welcome foreigners into his presence, which of course contains these wonderful words, "my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations."
I've never considered before that Jesus wasn't simply embarking on some puritan vendetta against the sharks and the charlatans; he was reclaiming worship space for the foreigners, he was making a statement about the way the practices of those who are already in the in-crowd impact those who are still trying to find their way in. The anger was a venting of holy steam - God's own desperation to receive the worship of the seekers and the wanderers. The challenge to us today is are we still building temples of exclusion? Are we cluttering the outer courts, the fringe space in which those hungry to know God can come as they are without discrimination? God forgive us if we are.

Is God bad?

OK, in most of my posts I adopt a fairly gracious, reflective posture carefully avoiding absolute statements. This one is different. This is a rant. I write in response to terrifyingly misguided 'Christians' who have somehow got it into their heads that the floods currently hitting England are in some way the judgment of God coming upon us in the 'End Times'. To such people I simply ask,
"Was the judgment of humanity's sin at Calvary not enough? Does God need to complete the work of Jesus on the cross with a bit of bad weather in Tewksbury?"
Get a life.