Recently I have been in many conversations with people who would like to live a re-invented Christianity - one where God is an object, and where they take the virtues they like along with a freedom to use as they will. In doing this such people are no better than the New Atheists who also profess the virtues while keeping firm hold on their private vice.
There is no right way to do something wrong, but there are many wrong ways to do something right. Many are "doing" Christianity wrong. This is what the modern world seeks to do; to take a virtue (e.g. love, imagination, pity) and hold onto this through the wrong means (e.g. many transient relationships, experimentation with drugs, or charitable conscience-massaging good works). As Chesterton wrote about our post-modern secularized world where vice roams freely: "... the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone." As a Christian I'm beginning to look at people's lives in a different light; it's not simply a matter of how do we separate vice from virtue, it's really about how to connect the virtue back to it's source - Jesus. The virtue is not the goal (but we make it so); the virtue is only the outworking of the goal - disconnected from its source the virtue will ultimately go bad, like a rotten and decayed fruit it becomes a vice. Whenever we take hold of a new thing we have to let go of another. So as we help people connect their virtues to Jesus the connections to vice will break; no condemnation is needed, no judgement is required, only the compassion of Jesus.
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1. We need more culture engagers and more churches engaging culture.
2. We need more Christians in culture creation and we need more churches encouraging them that way. 3. We need more culture defenders and churches that will stand winsomely for the truth. Read it all HERE Unintentionally there seems to have been a blog thread developing. The story goes something like this:
We began with thinking about our culture (here) which entails making difficult decisions (here), and then considering that by not addressing this we contribute to church decline (here). But church leadership also has to deal with difficult congregations (here) who have their own story (here) of trying to live in a secular world and who really struggle to know how to be relevant (here). The problem being, of course, that churches are poor at equipping Christians for living in an ethical wasteland (here). So what topics do you think our church leaders should be wrestling with, what issues would you like to bring to your leaders and get an intelligent conversation to help you in your thinking - not necessarily an answer, because of course, all decisions are ultimately our own. Here are a few suggestions of the issues that I, at least, am wrestling with in terms of how to articulate a Christian, biblical, rational, and logical understanding: feel free to suggest your own.
I'll leave the last one as a stand alone bullet because it has so many dimensions:
Living in a city its easy to forget what an ethical wasteland it is. An example (from here):
Popular (and controversial) evangelical pastor Rob Bell appeared on Oprah's Soul Food Sunday this weekend and shared why marriage is so important - for gay and straight people alike. Said Bell: "One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness....Loneliness is not good for the world. And so whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural and healthy to want someone to go through life with. It's central to our humanity. We want someone to go on the journey with." When Oprah followed up by asking Bell when Christianity would "get that," he responded: "We're moments away...I think culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defence, when you have in front of you flesh-and-blood people who are your brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and co-workers and neighbours and they love each other and just want to go through life with someone." OK, so apart from the fact that Bell has just said the Bible is irrelevant and not authoritative, what's the problem here? Well, the problem is that, using the name of Jesus Bell is defining a code of ethics that suits his preferences, and making culture the defining measure of ethical authority. Does that disturb you? How would you respond? For myself, I frequently encounter three arguments in relation to this hot-button topic:
The answer, I believe, does not lie in direct rebuttal (even though I think these arguments are reasonably easy to rebut). Direct rebuttal usually leads to confrontation which is a small step away from condemnation. Instead my approach is usually to steer the conversation toward the assumptions. Then we can see if the arguments have strength. For example:
And on that last point, Jesus stands for holiness, perfection, and the intended normality of our originally created nature. Jesus teaches that our created purpose is to be in relationship with a perfect God, the same God who defines the created normality, and its clear that practising gay relationships are not part of God's intended normality. Lastly, many arguments presume on the inner goodness of man, and deny the fallen nature. Therefore, when an action (e.g. practising gay lifestyles) co-opts a good value (e.g. love), this presumes that because there is love in the action it can't be wrong. This reasoning simply fails all common sense tests. I do not condemn anyone in the LGBT community. I stand with the LGBT community as an individual who equally has to deal daily with the complexity of being a failed creature, however this is manifest. In this my focus is to (re-)become the creature I was intended to be, by the grace and the strength I find in Jesus. My focus is not on where I've come from, or where I am, but where I am headed - its my trajectory that’s important, not so much my current position. If you take exception to that, I suggest (genuinely) talking to God (after all, He's the one who created normality). What's that actually mean - "Be Relevant"? Churches and Christians are continually being challenged to be relevant. My question is, "To who, how, where, why, and when"? I ask because most often churches seem to exist to please the pews and perpetuate the institution. OK, that's being cynical and we can all point to exceptions, but you and I also both know that much of what happens inside the church is disconnected from the real world . If it is true (and I believe it is) that "The Church is the only organisation that exists for the well-being and fraternity of its non-members" (William Temple), then what does relevance mean? Even churches (like mine) who are sincerely seeking to serve the community, struggle with irregular and poor attendance, wrestle with how to retain seeking visitors, and don't know how to be sustainable without burning out the leadership. The problem is, are we at all relevant to the people around us? Relevant is defined as "bearing upon or connected with the matter in hand". The matter at hand, of course, is the well-being of people - and being-well means to be connected to God. So a relevant church must be one whose activities connect people to God. Basically its simply the great commission and all that: Jesus' "came to seek and save the lost", and Paul's "I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some." Relevance! Huh. Easy to say, hard to be. Some churches try to do this by turning the message into something that plays to peoples desires, like prosperity teaching or liberation theology. Other churches resort to professional music performances with slick and entertaining sound bites of sermons, or else they promote comforting cotton wool ideas like "Love is all you need". In doing so they twist orthodoxy to accommodate sliding morals out of a fear of scaring anyone away. Still other churches get around the difficult issues by never talking about them. Jesus was not in a game of telling people what they want to hear just so that they would stick around. Jesus was about teaching people what they needed to hear, and if they walked away, then so be it. So a relevant church is about uncompromisingly bringing Jesus to bear on the matters at hand in the best way possible. If we want to be relevant, it comes down to how we phrase a key question. Instead of saying "While keeping our beloved conventions and traditions, how we can become relevant?", ask this question: "What do we need to be(come) so we have relevance, and after that we can ask about which of our traditions and conventions could be used to bring added value?" Its a structural reboot that takes the courage of the total sacrifice of all I hold dear in order to follow God's agenda. What have you got to lose? Because that's what Jesus did. Jesus didn't look at people through the lens of traditions, when he bothered to look at traditions it was through the lens of people's need. And he was especially scathing about the massive accumulation of human devised rules and patterns of behaviour in the religious culture. So lets put aside all those, put aside convention and tradition for a moment - don't arbitrarily throw it away because some of it has great value - but for the sake of discussion put it aside for now. (But don't put aside biblical orthodoxy - on that we will be uncompromising.) Now: what does it mean to be relevant in our city-focused and relativistic culture? It means beginning by engaging with where people are, and what the people are occupied with. What are the issues on their minds, and the inner fears they won't easily disclose? Ask yourself, "What are the conversations going on in the pubs, the restaurants, the tea rooms and cafeterias, the work place, the living rooms, and even privately in the bedrooms?" A case in point: This year's Valentine's days saw the release of "50 shades of grey". This was the biggest box-office opener of all movies in recent years. You can bet that on Monday morning this came up in lots of conversations! If you're the Christian at work, how do you (representing Jesus) join that conversation? Well, at least you can draw on the conversation you had about it at church? You did you have a conversation about it at church, didn't you? Hmmm. What are all the other conversations? Recreational sex. Global economy. ISIS. Climate Change. Tea party idiocy. Middle East unrest. Nuclear proliferation. China's growth. Fear, loneliness, and suicide. Drugs and addictions. LGBT and sexual identities. Alien in-migration (not extraterrestrials). Racism. Gender inequality. Rape. Unemployment. Crime and security. Homelessness. Poverty. Justice. Corruption. Tax evasion. Politics. Sex (again). What would Jesus say if he joined these conversations (and for sure he'd be there: in the pubs, in the living rooms, on the sports fields)? Since you and I are Jesus to this world, what would you or I say? That's a first step in relevance - bringing Jesus' perspective into the important conversations that people are having, and that means knowing Jesus' perspective. So if the conversation, and our message in conversation, is the first part of relevance, what's second? To deliver a message, there needs to be a messenger. In Jesus' time he called all sorts of messengers; fisherman (Peter), tax collectors (Matthew), and the intelligentsia (Paul). Each spoke into the community for which they were equipped, and they spoke in Joy, in compassion, and not in condemnation. So relevance-part-2 is being a messenger who can connect with the culture of those being reached. In my churches culture that means being equipped to be able to transparently interact with: 1. A lifestyle based on technology and media which hold together a virtual world of relationships. Read this and see if you best fit the questioner or respondent. 2. A world view that holds no absolute authority, where self-pleasure is (the?) priority, and happiness an ultimate goal in life. 3. Attitudes of relative morals; "if it feels good, it probably is good, and who are you to tell me otherwise". 4. Relationships based on gratification and an idealistic objectification of pleasure (steered by the media). 5. An upbringing where ambition and acquisition are glorified, despite the costs. 6. Conversations where lifestyles are not to be questioned so long as no-one is perceived to get hurt. 7. etc., etc. You know (or should know) your communities conversations. And so the real question of church relevance is this: Will you let Jesus take you down a road where many of your beloved conventions are stripped aside, where courage and compassion is needed to bless rather than judge, where we might need to go into the lives of people we'd rather avoid. It means we'll have to find Jesus' response to hard questions, be willing to become the messenger that speaks in a way that will be listened to in the places where its needed on the topics of importance. Grace. Now that’s relevant. Also see the updates at the end
UPDATES
There has been a contribution for an alternate story line, please feel free to submit your own ideas
In the 5 churches where I have been a member since I became a Christian, the one commonality has been the inevitable grumbles that emerge from the congregation. Occasionally its legitimate, most often its casual and unthinking throw-away lines about something that doesn't sit well with a persons preferences, and occasionally it will blow up into a crisis over (perhaps) a real issue of concern.
The Bible says to do everything without grumbling, so when an occasional grumble (from myself included) comes along I usually think "Ok, not a good one, but then none of us are perfect". What if the leadership grumbled out loud? Well, good leadership won't. But I sometimes wonder, as I sit in church and look around, what might the leadership grumble about if I was able to magically remove their spiritual grumble filter. Perhaps we might hear things like one of the following, which draw on my experiences of 40 years of church participation (with my apologies for any over-generalizations, and I'm certainly not suggesting that any one of these are pertinent to you, the reader!):
Arguably the majority of churches around the western world face the challenge of church decline. Many respond by adopting business-oriented practices for church growth. But what are the fundamentals of church?
Here's one provocative comment on this issue: "Stopping Church Decline", and picking up the idea of worship leading into mission. From vacation discussions about LGBT relationships, legal marijuana, drunkenness, saying "crap", and much more. Where does the Christian draw the line? Some issues are black as night, some white as light, and the edges are easy to see. But some Christians just want to make everything black and white. A generation ago it was about dancing and drinking and dating (at least overtly). Now the Christian community seems to have bifurcated. On the one hand there is the debate on topics like same-sex relationships and marijuana which seek to stretch the boundaries of legitimacy. On the other hand there's a resurgence of interest in quasi-legalism and strict behavior patterns as seen in some new-Calvinism and reformed churches. Unfortunately our innate action is to base much of our moral decisions on a morality from our parents, church, school and culture of upbringing. These mores run deep ... and are mostly left unexamined! Try this: when marijuana is legal to buy, is it ok for a Christian to smoke it? If you've automatically said yes, then how do you defend it? If your immediate reaction was a resounding NO, then was that your cultural mores speaking or your thought-through and bible-based theology? For we have an age-old problem: between the bright-shining edge of clarity and depths of darkness, where do we draw the line? Consider the spectrum that includes coffee, beer, wine, liquor, anti-depressants, pain killers, filter cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine, and stronger drugs. All these alter behavior, our biology, and our thinking to one degree or another. Where do you draw the line when there is no biblical prohibition? And broadening the scope, what about social norms around, for example, dress code or even nudity. God gave us his creation for our pleasure. He gave us each other for the pleasure of relationship. So grapes naturally ferment to makes intoxicating wine, nicotine is both a stimulant and relaxant, and conversation and sex are invigorating - Christians throughout the ages have deeply enjoyed all these, and been affected by these. Even different foods have different effects ... chocolate comforts the lonely! The question is not about those obvious situations where a decision would clearly be offensive to God (like free sex and debauchery), but about all those grey areas that are ambiguous in scripture, and which Christian culture would seek to regulate. Jesus drank wine, and presumably enjoyed it (I wonder if he ever puffed a smoke?). I presume Jesus danced and appreciated the sight of a beautiful woman. We need some thoughtfulness about how to approach this, both questioning our pre-conditioning for its biblical basis and examining our theology of, for example, marijuana (do you have a theology of marijuana?). Of course the quick and all-inclusive answer is "What does the Spirit tell me". But if we have free will and seek to exercise our partnership in God's work (not simply being a robot), then some decisions are clearly up to us. Making the problem doubly difficult is that a weakness for one person may not be a weakness for another - so generalizing rules usually fail. I suggest there are two broad criteria for grey decisions, which requires a deep honesty that can be hard to face, for we all excel at self-deception (and there's a prowling lion trying to deceive). 1) When one is in public the leading issue is whether I will cause my brother/sister to stumble. There is lots of direct and indirect guidance on this in scripture, for example 1 Corinthians 8:13 and 1 Corinthians 10:23-33. But even here all is not clear cut; sometimes my brother/sister needs to be challenged to think about their theology; to (re-)consider right living. As a generality, the question is not about offending someone (although that is a consideration), but am I causing someone to stumble? For example, the use of coarse language may provoke another to anger, or encouraging social drinking may push someone with limited tolerance into excess. If so, then as a Christian I need to exercise self-control and be more restrained. 2) In private the decision becomes more difficult. Can I get drunk alone? And when am I drunk? Is it that comfortable floating feeling after three glasses of wine? For even a single glass will affect me and its a matter of degree. So we need to think about some nuances. 2a) Our will power is not as strong as we like to tell ourselves. The slippery slope principle applies. If you think "I can handle this", well maybe you can. But remember that you've probably over-estimated your manageable limits (pride fights honesty), and its easy to go from being in control to out of control, and not even realize it. 2b) Choices that skate the boundaries of being acceptable to God risk opening the door to things that bite. For example, a propensity to addiction, or a biological reaction to alcohol. Living outside the boundaries of one's created self raises different dangers for different people. 2c) Am I enjoying God's gift of created pleasures, or seeking to avoid God's nature? Am I simply looking for ways to justify a choice I want? Much of time we cultivate a line of thinking to legitimize something on our terms. The servant-king who calls us to serve him means for us to serve within his boundaries - and putting pleasures before purpose is a path to problems. Now perhaps you expected me to say smoking marijuana is (not) ok? Or to provide a biblical sanction for some other activity, such as living together without legal marriage (I like that society recognizes common law marriage ... I wish the church did)? My first answer is that I think many of these grey "issues" are automatically branded as sin without thinking through the theology, and many could actually be gifts of God's creation. So in this way I would not be judgmental over drinking, smoking, and a host of other "trivialities" that fall foul of Christian culture. My second answer for grey decisions would be, is engaging in the activity encouraging you to be beholden to something other than God first and foremost? If so, then stop, turn around and run. My third answer is that rules should reflect God's nature, rules do not define God's nature. Thus the definitive solution to choice in the grey is to cultivate one's relationship with God on his terms. Not a god of our making (like one of those all too common gods floating around which make us comfortable), but the God who made us. My fourth and last answer is this: consider Jesus' approach. About the only people he was quick to judge were those who rationalized as Godly a behavior that was counter to God. Foremost were the Pharisees who led people away from a relationship with God and into a slavery of legalism. But for all the "normal" sinners, he first listened to them, engaged with them, blessed them in word and deed, and instructed about the way forward. Always with the sinner his answer was grace first. Bless, belong, believe. Lead into light. For example, consider his response to Matthew the tax collector (hey, let's have dinner together), the woman at the well (so tell me about yourself), or the adulterer about to be stoned (I don't condemn you, go and sin no more). But for those who presumed God's authority, Jesus was not slow to judge. Finally, would I get drunk and smoke marijuana? No, because I value my brain to keep control of my emotions lest my unconstrained feelings lead me into offense. I will enjoy some alcohol, I would even smoke if I weren't so afraid of lung cancer (I'd love to smoke a pipe). But will I judge one who smokes marijuana? No, but I would have a conversation about their relationship with Jesus. For unlike many churches, Jesus is in the grey. In my catch up reading after the vacation, I came on this three part series. If you're up to starting your year with some brain stimulation, then I'd encourage you to read and think about what this series might catalyse in your thoughts about our activities in Cape Town.
Calling for Contextualization (Part 1) Calling for Contextualization: The Need to Contend and Contextualize (Part 2) Calling for Contextualization: Knowing and Making Known the Gospel (Part 3) Calling for Contextualization: Untangling Cultural Engagement (Part 4) Calling for Contextualization: Indigenization (Part 5) Calling for Contextualization: Loving and Hating the World (Part 6) Calling for Contextualization: The Contextualization Spectrum (Part 7) Calling for Contextualization: Ruining and Recovering Relevance (Part 8) |
Important: The views expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect the official position of our church
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June 2015
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