Tag: theology

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Courage of Being You

I did not intend to be ‘Stanley Hauerwas.’ I am aware, however, that there is someone out there who bears that name.

So begins the memoir penned by, of course, Stanley Hauerwas. One of the things I believe Hauerwas eludes to is his recognition that the person he has become is not the well-crafted result of a life wrested toward this end.

I believe it one of the grandest illusions of modern humanity, this notion that we can make ourselves to be whoever it is we want to be. I don’t tell my sons that they can do whatever they put their mind to. They have many options, and there are years ahead to discover what is in their heart and how they are to give what is in their heart away to their world. However, there are some things that simply are not meant for them.

The problem is not lack of will or tenacity. The problem (which really is no problem at all – but a gift) is that we are particular beings, with particular bents and unique treasures. Our narrative is uniquely ours, and this narrative is made up of all kinds of intricate details. What we love, what we hate, what we see and how we see it, what makes us cry, what makes us want to gouge our eyes out. All these things make who we are.

I am not made to be anything. I am certainly not made to be everything. I believe each of us are created to be someone particular, to offer something particular. No matter how hard I try, I will never be an Olympic marathoner or at the helm of a Fortune 500 behemoth, thank God. I’m free from that bland and crushing expectation.

However, I also think Hauerwas’ wry line hints at his belief that who he truly is may not be who everyone has imagined him to be. The name and the image have taken on a life all their own. Most of us spend far too much of our time attempting to be a good version of ourselves, an acceptable version, a moderate version, a version that lives up to the billing. Too often, I am too aware of other’s reactions to me, gaging whether or not I should put on the brake, tone down the language, give someone an easy exit.

But if I do any of those, if I become who I’m expected to be rather than who I actually am, I silence the distinct and remarkable gift God intends to offer the world through me. And the same is true for you. It is an act of holy rebellion to refuse the safe path of meeting other’s expectations. It is courageous to listen to God’s voice, to hear God tell you who you are and what you are to be in this world. It is courageous to hear that – and then to live that.

And, let me tell you, our world needs courageous people. We need you.

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Joy

There’s much to lament in this world. Every day offers a hundred reasons to cry. But, I also believe every day offers at least a hundred reasons to laugh or sing or make love or give an extra big tip or do something that costs you much – but brings a revelry all its own because you feel the pleasure of having done right, done well.

If it is the easy thing for us to slap a cheery word on top of misery, then we need to connect with the reality of sorrow. But if it is the easy thing for us to wallow in dismay, then we need to jump heavy into joy.

For many of us, joy is the harder effort, certainly is for me. I’m not sure why. Perhaps we have been disappointed too often. Perhaps we are comfortable in the gloom. Perhaps we don’t have eyes to see or ears to hear what the Apostle John calls the “river of joy overflowing.”

The good news is you can find joy just about anywhere. For instance, this week I found joy in my seven-year-old:

Seth: Par Fat? Par Fat?? Mom, this is going to make me fat?!?

Miska: No, Seth, that’s Parfait. Parfait.

Joy can surprise you at any turn. Watch for it. I’ll bet you find it.

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The Undertaker

Tonight I told the boys I had a new book to pick up at the library for our evening reading. A friend recommended Ferrol Sams and his tales of Porter Osborn, Jr., a boy growing up on a Georgia farm during the depression.

Wyatt was eager. But Seth needed one detail clarified: “Does anyone die in this story?”

Last Friday, we watched Where the Red Fern Grows, the new version with Dave Matthews looking right at home in those baggy overalls. During the infamous scene that shall not be named, Seth was mortified. He cried out and jumped up on the couch with Miska and me and buried his head in the covers in a futile attempt to erase the horrors he had just seen. “This is a bad, bad movie,” he said, gulping down the tears. “Why would anyone watch this???”

Now you understand why, when he heard that a story was coming about a boy and a farm, Seth wanted to know whether anyone or anything would be meeting their maker. He’s no fan of death.

Fair enough, neither am I.

Still, we’re all heading there. The line about death and taxes may be tired, but it’s true. And I wonder why we don’t talk about it more, why we don’t plan for it more, why we don’t ponder if how we are living will help us be the people we hope to have been when the time for living’s done?

On the bookshelf next to me, I have a book by poet Thomas Lynch who also happens to have a day job as an undertaker. The title alone deserves a read: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. Lynch’s first page begins: Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople.

Every year, come rain or shine. And it’s the same in every town and hamlet and village world ’round. There’s nothing much more common than dying, you’d think we’d be good at it. But we aren’t, least not most of us. A couple days ago, one of my friends mentioned that he’s thinking about reading an obituary every day during Lent, the spiritual discipline of remembering who was here, who lived and who isn’t living anymore. The idea isn’t to be morbid, but to remember, to “count your days” as the Psalms instruct. The point really isn’t death at all — but life.

Eugene Peterson once said that the pastor’s job is to prepare people for a good death. When you do that, you’re preparing them for a good life. On this month when we are thinking about beginnings, let’s also ponder endings. And then let’s live well toward that.

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Mustard and Mulberry {into the story}

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, `Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. 
{NT reading for the 22nd week after Pentecost, Luke 17:5-10}

I’ve never much liked this story. While there’s some debate about whether or not Jesus actually referred to a mustard seed (poppy seed is one of the other possibilities), it makes no difference. Either way, the point is the same: the seed is tiny, minuscule, next to nothing. And Jesus says that if we have even itty-bitty faith, just a dollop, we can command a mulberry tree to lift its roots out of the crusty earth and walk its way right down to the sea. Matthew’s account is even more dramatic – there, we are told that pint-sized faith moves mountains. Moves mountains. What??

When some read this account, it stimulates exciting, supernatural possibilities. That’s all we need, a thimble full of faith – and look what could happen. Hold on, everybody… When I read, though, I am bewildered. I’ve never moved a mulberry tree, certainly no mountains. A couple weeks ago, my mom received word that she has bone cancer. I’d love to take a drive to Texas, say a blessing over her and know that vile cancer would evaporate. But I can’t. I don’t possess that kind of faith.

I’m wondering if that might be (at least partly) the point.

When Jesus spoke these words, no disciples jumped up to start tossing trees. In fact, a wider reading suggests that the disciples were confused, perplexed – humbled, we might say. The disciples consistently attempted to commandeer Jesus’ kingdom imagery and displays of power into resources for their own agenda. And Jesus would always refuse. Jesus would say something outlandish that would put them in their place. For instance, Jesus would invite the disciples to gather up their 1/2 teaspoon of faith and rearrange the hillside. An offer like that is bound to take a person down a notch.

Perhaps Jesus’ response to the disciples’ mixed-motives request for an increase in faith wasn’t intended to help them gain a positive vision of their endless possibilities, a divine pep-talk. Perhaps the nod to mulberries and mountains was to show the disciples how small they were, how much they needed God.

God isn’t one we use, one to provide us with material for divine magic tricks. God is, well, God. God is the one we worship. The one we love and obey. The one we hope in. The one who, in Jesus, died and rose again to defeat evil, embody redemption and commence new creation.

With the mountains and mulberry trees, perhaps Jesus was suggesting we don’t first need bigger faith. We need a bigger view of God.

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To Live {why the church.5}

He felt…another kind of awake. {Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin}

Jesus is our shalom…creating within his body a new humanity, a new way of being human. {St. Paul}

In these bodies, we will love / In these bodies, we will die / And where you invest your love, you invest your life. {Mumford and Sons}

Perhaps the plainest way to say it is this: the church exists because Jesus rose from the dead.

Easter happened, and Easter is the prototype for all God’s intentions for the world. God did not raise Jesus into the spiritualized psyches of his followers. God did not raise Jesus by enshrining Jesus-ideals into an ethical philosophy for cultures to emulate. God raised Jesus’ rotting, blood-crusted flesh from a dark, musty cave. Dead Jesus lay in the tomb, but alive Jesus walked out.

So now, whenever we hear the prophets and the apostles speak of God’s cosmic project of New Creation, we know what they are talking about. Dead things coming back to life. Old things restored, new. Not ideals, but a reality. Physical. Present. Body, God’s Body.

The church is what happens when resurrection gets to work. Humans are communal creatures. I feel a bit silly pausing to make this obvious point, but… Without friendships, we are lonely. Without a love or a child or an intimate relationship, we are not whole. When we call someone a hermit, we aren’t passing a complement. We are hardwired for committed, intentional, sustained, I’m-with-you-even-when-I-don’t-like-you relationships. Against this, though, we all have horror stories and vast mounds of disappointment. Maybe we’ve given up. Maybe we’ve settled for something shallow or cheap, imitations. Maybe we’ve grown cynical – perhaps the most damaging turn of all.

But resurrection happened, and now we’re discovering what it means to be alive. In other words, we’re learning anew what it means to be truly human. And to be human means, at least in part, to live a physical, particular, embodied life within God’s physical, particular, embodied community, the church. If God were only trying to elevate disembodied souls into distant heaven, perhaps the church wouldn’t matter much (other than to organize, strategize and get this work done efficiently – but I think I’ve sufficiently run that horse into the ground). However, if God is reconstituting (resurrecting) the whole of his good and beautiful creation, well then, the church (the physical, embodied people of God) becomes ground zero.

Knowing this, we could never act as though the community of God is merely a means to something God is doing. Rather, the community of God rests at the heart of what God is doing. And God is doing a heck of a lot. God’s mission is to rescue and love and remake and welcome and forgive and embrace and basically overrun this whole sorry mess with the wonder of resurrection. The old Hebrew word works best: shalom. Wholeness. Well-being. Utter, comprehensive goodness.

This is God’s mission. Not ours. God is doing resurrection. And God will resurrect in a God-way, a Trinitarian way – forming a people who begin to live in Trinitarian love and begin to embody resurrection in the tangible spaces, the streets and dining room tables and nursing homes. It’s slow. It’s messy. Most days, it looks like an absolute disaster. But if relationship and communities, if each and every individual story, matters – then this is the only way.

Here’s the crux of why I need church. I need church because I’m selfish and cynical and proud and a shadow of my true self. I’ve lived among death for too long, and I want to live. I want to be a human alive, a human resurrected. And true humanity is physical, relational, with others, over the long haul. I need the church because Jesus rose from the dead, and I want to rise up from among the dead too. I want to learn “another kind of awake.”

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So, I’m not sure when I’ll return to this series. Might be done. However, I would love to interact to any questions this raises for you – especially if you are struggling with finding your life and place within a physical community, a church. Why do you struggle with this? What questions do you have? Why do you think that maybe it isn’t important? Email me (winn [at] winncollier.com) or post here. If it’s the sort of question I could interact with on the blog, I will. If it is more appropriate just for email dialogue, fine too.


[further why the church? posts:part one, two, three, four]

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God’s Body {why the church.4}

The church is not an ideal to be striven for; she exists and they’re within her. 
{Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest}

In retrospect, I can say that I joined the church out of basic need; I was becoming a Christian, and as the religion can’t be practiced alone, I needed to try to align myself with a community of faith. {Kathleen Norris}

Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world. It is not the kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom.
{Eugene Peterson}

We are tempted to think of the church primarily as a human affair, our human arrangement to try to get religious stuff done. We believe God wants us to follow certain principles and directives, that God wants us to make our world better – but it’s up to us to figure out how exactly to go about it. Church, in this paradigm, is the way we organize our religious activity for the greatest efficiency and broadest impact. God gives us the goal (sometimes articulated as getting to heaven or raising healthy families or transforming society), but the energy, the strategy, the humph — well, that’s all us. It makes sense then that when the church isn’t “working,” when it doesn’t seem efficient (and it rarely is) or productive, we should take our leave. We cancel our membership in the club and go look for another, more productive stratagem. Or we just give up, dog-tired and disillusioned.

However, the church is not what we are making of the world. The church is something God is making in the world. The church is God’s creation, not ours. The church is first an expression of what God is doing (and has been doing since In the beginning…). The church exists as this physical mystery crafted from the raw material, the timber and stone, of God’s people — those people whom God is “fitting in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together.”(Eph 2:21)

And this imagery of God as a master craftsmen fashioning a strong, sturdy abode is pitch-perfect for how Scripture describes what God is up to in and among us. God does not meddle primarily in theories or abstractions. God’s core impulse is incarnation. God always goes physical. Christian faith is not ideals and principles and morals separated from the mortar and sinew of physicality and relationships. Christian faith is always embodied. This is why Paul would say, “we see [God’s people, the church] taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.” (Eph 2:22)

We see it. We touch it. We live in it, with others. We experience it. We love (and are loved) within it. We are frustrated by it. We hope for it to be more. We are surprised by the grace it offers. We find it clunky. We find it strange. And we know deep down that we are missing something true whenever we are distanced from it…And, in those distant spaces, we often sense a yearning within us to return home.

It almost sounds like, well, a family.

Family is about right. Paul uses precisely this picture to help us grasp a sense of the church’s essence (Eph 2:19). Scripture gives us multiple other images as well (one theologian counted ninety-six), all unique and varied, multi-faceted. However, what we will notice with almost every image is its physicality. It is something of substance, something tangible, something you can get your hands on, something you can live in or with. Something you see. The church is a city (Rev 21:2), a tribe/people (I Pet 2:9), fishermen (Mark 1:17), salt (Matt 5:13), branches on the tree (John 15:5), God’s farm (I Cor 3:9), God’s building (I Cor 3:9) and a letter (2 Cor 3:2-3), to name a few. The church is not a philosophy,  an ethical system, a warm, gooey sentimental feeling. The church is flesh and bones.


It’s popular to say we like Jesus but we don’t like the church. I understand; I’ve said it myself. However, Jesus and the church are inseparable. The church is Jesus’ body (I Cor 12:27). The church is how Jesus embodies himself in the world. The church is how God goes physical. To say we want Jesus but not the church is like saying we want love but not marriage. Or friendship without the tangible commitment of time and presence, desiring some vague notion attached to the concept of friendship without the hard work of actually being a friend.

My hunch is this: many of us give up on the church because we expect both too much and too little. We expect too much because we have been sold big jugs of grade C moonshine. It never tastes as good as promised. We’ve bought an ideal, what the church is supposed to be, a place where no one is lonely and everyone gets their God-fix and we are always fulfilled (or quickly moving that direction) — and we are certain to see tangible, immediate results of how our life is better, our kids are clean and keen, and our world is being transformed before our very eyes. But we aren’t an ideal. We are a family. And families have weird uncles and feuds and kids who get carted off to jail. Families have lots of love and rich stories, but there’s always pain and disappointment and seasons where it’s just plain vanilla, unexciting. Families need to forgive and to repent. And keep becoming more and more who God has in mind for them to be. However, there is something of profound beauty and value embodied in a family, even amid all its lunacy and disfunction.

At the same time, we expect too little of church. We miss the mysterious and everyday ways God takes on flesh and bone. We need eyes to see how we are being formed into a new kind of person, amid a new kind of community. These long stretches of commonness — living with others, hearing each other’s stories, discovering our vocations, working through the irritation of friendship with people who see the world differently than we do, raising our kids, loving (and being annoyed by) our neighbors, working through the joys and pains of our marriage (or singleness) — are the necessary, mundane ways God has chosen to take up residence it this world.

Every bit of this is physical, every bit necessary. There is no other way.

[further why the church? posts:part one,  two, three, five]
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Tadpoles and Sacraments {why the church.3}

The church is a sacrament of the world’s possibility. {Luke Timothy Johnson}

The church is not ideal. {Eugene Peterson}

Queenlight shines through things, through everything. {David James Duncan, The River Why}

Last Saturday, the Collier men hit a bike trail that, for most of its winding path, runs alongside the Rivanna River. The loop tracks a couple miles with meandering curves and a couple narrow passes, cutting back and forth between dense forest cover and green open spaces. One of the boys’ favorite spots is where the trail dips under Free Bridge, creating a short, eerie stretch Seth has dubbed, “The Tunnel of Doom.”

I enjoy these experiences. I appreciate the quiet and the wind in my face. I enjoy Seth and Wyatt, very much. Still, for me, it’s fundamentally a bike ride. I mount my brown Specialized Hardrock, and I ride, there and back.

Wyatt and Seth understand these Saturday jaunts differently. Usually, we’ve only been on the trail a few minutes before our leader (Wyatt, most often) pulls over and, quicker than I can catch up, has his bike down, his helmet off, backpack undone. Time to snack. After a few rounds of Cheez-its and Fruit Roll-ups (indeed, dad supplies nutritious fare), we are back on the trail. But not for long. We need to stop under the overpass because the boys want to touch the water and jump in the mud and throw dirt. Later, they detour to pick up rocks for their collection. Rocks. And by rocks, I mean gravel.

The ultimate detour, however, is when we stop at Tadpole Pond. Pond is a bit generous. It’s an 8 inch deep, 4 foot wide hollow in the bankside granite. More of a large dimple really. But this spot is magic because a couple weeks ago we discovered hundreds of tadpoles swimming there; and we spent a good chunk of time catching those fast, slick little boogers. Tadpole Pond is now the main attraction. So we stopped; and the boys renewed the chase. A couple they caught (all catch-and-release, of course) had sprouted micro-legs. A few were teeny-tiny frogs. Most were still just tad-poling around. For at least 45 minutes, the boys rollicked with their slimy friends. They even named a few (Charlie, Bob, Tim and Charlie.2).
Instead of chomping for them to hurry up, I made a choice (this once) to let the quest to get on with the ride recede for a bit. I laid back on a cool rock under the refreshing shade. I listened to my boys laugh. I watched the tree branches sway. I was present, and at least for the moment, I understood that getting there and getting back really wasn’t the point. The ride and the river and those poor little tadpoles offered a generous invitation to experience the joys of being a father and the pleasure of having sons. My boys’ detours are not a hurdle to my completing our ride. Our rides are an opportunity for me to be on detour with my boys.

What I’ve tried to say is that the church isn’t only about “the ride,” about getting God’s stuff done. The church is God’s invitation to experience, receive and participate in the messy, detourish ways that God is forming a new kind of community in his world. And this new community is not theoretical or abstract. It is physical, embodied. What does God want to do here, now, with us? Scripture tells us that God desires to form a people, a community, who enjoy and embody his very presence in the world (and we must remember, God is Trinity: perfect, divine community). God does not have a metaphysical philosophy for us to spread or an individualistic moral agenda for us to carry out. God wants us. God wants us as his people in his world.

And terms like these – us and people – are inherently, inevitably, always plural, communal, trinitarian. When we look for what God is up to, we find God alive, active and present among his creation. God amid God’s community. To say we can enjoy God’s hope for us without being bothered by God’s community is like saying I can experience the joys of being Wyatt and Seth’s dad without being bothered by tadpoles.

And this touches on what we mean when we say the church is a sacrament. A sacrament provides a place where heaven and earth meet, a physical moment of grace. A sacrament, by it’s mere presence, mysteriously offers an encounter with the Trinity. A sacrament doesn’t have to do anything, anything other than carve out a physical space where hope and life and God come to us. In the Lord’s Table, we taste mercy. In baptism, we are drowned by God’s love. In marriage and friendship and on crisp mornings above the timberline, God arrives amid words and kisses and sunrises. Physical. Present. Mystery. Sacrament.

So, in the church, amid laughter and repentance and relationship, amid works of mercy and justice, (all messy but all necessary) God touches us. God loves us. God is present. What the Eucharist offers each of us with bread and wine, the church offers to the world with presence and tears. And joy, lots of joy.

A note to my pastor-friends: If we sell the church on utilitarian terms (“God and church will make your life work” or “Our main purpose is to get busy doing God’s work”), we shouldn’t protest when people leave the church for utilitarian reasons (“it isn’t working for me” or “I’m burned out”). We’ve spotted the consumerism rampant in the way people use the church, but have we owned up to the consumerism riddled throughout the ways we motivate and lead?

A note to my leave-church-behind friends: God’s community doesn’t always “work.” I’m sorry if someone told you it did. And working isn’t exactly the point. There’s something there, for sure. But there’s something else first. God is first, what God is doing in you – and in you with others. Sometimes, you really need a few detours. You need an afternoon of tadpoles.

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I have more to say, but I’m curious where this is taking you. Any push back or questions or brimming hopefulness? I’d love to interact and see where we might head next. Peace.

[further why the church? posts:part one,  two, four, five]

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The Economy of Church {why the church.2}

Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitute the basis of our community. What determines our brother-hood is what man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. {Dietrich Bonhoeffer}

We are part of God’s great renovation project for human beings. We work, but we work resting. {Richard Foster}

Being a dad is a significant job. We have a crucial task to raise our children to be moral, virtuous adults. The world needs better people, more civic-minded citizens who will live and work to serve society. The most effective tool to change culture and counteract rampant violence and greed is to raise a generation who, when their time comes, will clean up this mess. My first role as Wyatt and Seth’s dad is to instill good values in them so that they can in turn utilize their skills and influence to change their world for the better. If I properly leverage my fathering efforts, providing my sons with the correct mixture of affection, discipline, vision and training, I believe our world will improve.

******

What a bunch of rubbish. Are you repulsed by me reducing the wonders and joys of fatherhood to a formula to implement some cause, even a cause as noble as improving the world? Are you agitated that I would suggest maneuvering fatherly love for a calculated agenda rather than simply cherishing and nourishing ones God has given me to love and share my life with?

Many of us, perhaps unwittingly, think of church in these same sterile, exploitative terms.

Many of us talk about the church primarily in terms of what the church is to do. We know God has a vision for his world, to love and renew and restore it – and we understand the church sits at the nexus of how God intends to get on with this vision. Our response, however, often follows typical American entrepreneurial fashion. We see a job to be done, and so we roll up our sleeves and mastermind a strategy – and then push and prod to work it. In this schema, the church is primarily God’s publicity arm. God tells us his action priorities, gives us a range of resources to utilize for the enterprise, and then we amass the energy and effort to make it happen. Essentially (perhaps this will sound familiar), God leverages his efforts, providing his sons and daughters the proper mixture of vision and affection and instruction – and then God watches for us to make the operation take shape.

Thankfully however, God’s intentions for his people in his world do not begin with what we are to do but rather with who we are. Unfortunately, we are much better at arranging our activity than we are at knowing our identity. We are competent (in varying degrees) at exegeting culture and formulating (or critiquing) structures and adjusting both our theology and our praxis. We can start a movement or an anti-movement. We can organize a church’s leadership flowchart and motivate people to works of justice and mission and mercy (and to opening their wallets). All good things, but they aren’t the starting point. Or the ending point, for that matter.

Eugene Peterson recently shared his concern that many of us have “no ontology of church. It is all pragmatic – what we do for God.” We prioritize our responsibilities and maneuver our tasks, but we have no comprehension of what our presence (just the fact that we exist in God’s world) actually means. We don’t know who we are to be, and we keep jumping to what we are supposed to do in order to make up the gap. This kind of activity will always be hollow. And, for many of us, it has worn us out.

In this way of things, the church is always looking for the next fix, the next idea, the next angle or inspiration or cultural sea change. Whether we are progressives with our social agenda or conservatives with our evangelistic blitzkrieg, what we share is our conviction that everything rises and falls on God’s expectation that we make something happen. We are just trying to figure out what to do, dammit!

Of course, we can not talk about the church without talking about the church’s work in the world; but we must talk about God’s work within the church first. We are to live in community, but the Spirit has made us his beloved community first. We are to bring shalom to our neighborhoods, but Jesus has made us a people who receive and experience shalom first. We are to announce God’s love to the world, but God has first made us a people drowning in his love. (This touches on my hesitation with some “missional church” language, where we define mission primarily in functional terms while we relegate other portions of the church’s essence to serve as only a means to a “missional” task.)

This distorted vision of God’s dream for the church falls flat, leaving us empty and disillusioned. I’ve lost count of the number of my friends who have walked away from Christian community because they felt as though they had been exploited and misled. Much of our church talk of creating meaningful relationships ends up feeling as though it is really only a ruse to keep people in the seats and writing checks (buns and funds). A lot of the strategies and ministry pushes lead to more activity but rarely to more life.

If we act as though the merits of church are ultimately defined by results and getting things done, we shouldn’t be surprised when people pack it up. No one likes being used for results. And truthfully, on these criteria we don’t always stack up that well against the competition. The church has its moments, but other movements have had their successes too (the ONE campaign has had better luck addressing third-world debt than any collection of churches I know). Depending on your concern, better bang for your buck might move you elsewhere…if results or bang for your buck is the name of the game. But perhaps we have irreplaceable, intrinsic value far richer and deeper than the bottom-line, more essential even than the results we churn out. Perhaps we should follow Peterson’s advice and “eliminate success from our vocabulary.”

Defining the church first and foremost as God’s way of getting things done makes God the ultimate utilitarian. God cast as an industrialist, myopically focused on efficiency and production. No wonder we feel used. If we are merely commodities in God’s economy, what is our inherent beauty? Thankfully, we are not merely economic units to fuel divine output. Chastened capitalism may be the best arrangement humans have cobbled together, but God does better.

God certainly has grand purposes for his world, and our vocation is certainly right smack in the middle of how God intends to set the world right. However, I’m pleading for us to work from first things before we move to second things. God has not placed a people in his world simply to carry out his agenda. God has placed a people in his world to embody and revel in – and serve as an encounter with – the Trinity’s divine love.

What if the church’s mere existence in the world is itself a central piece of God’s work. What if God’s people are a Trinitarian sacrament, a community whose presence offers tastes of laughter and righteousness and restoration, glimpses in the now of the new creation that is to come. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

[further why the church? posts:part one, three, four, five]

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Why the Church?

“I like God; I just don’t like organized religion.”

“Why would I need to be part of a church? I can be a Christian just as well on my own, without all the headache and without all the hypocrisy.”

I’m a pastor, so I hear these lines a lot. A lot.

And I get it, really do. Most of us have set in pews (or theater seats), bored out of our minds or steaming with anger. We’ve been shamed and manipulated and talked down to. We’ve heard sermons hyping the next cause, the next “vision,” only to realize soon enough that the whole enterprise has way more to do with the pastor’s ego or the institution’s survival than with the truths we intuitively know – just know – Jesus would be about: compassion, justice, mercy, integrity. We’ve been burned by a church’s political agenda or theological haggling or myopic culture or moral shortcomings.

Our hopes have been trampled by the many (many) relational disappointments. Often, we find more of Jesus among our friends who wouldn’t be caught dead in any church than we find among our acquaintances who appear dead in just about every church.

So we chuck the whole thing. I understand; I’ve cycled around that block a few times myself.

Noticing this trend toward disillusionment with church, a fair number of us pastor-types kick into high gear, trying to prove how different we are from those churches, how relevant or authentic or organic or missional or postmodern or post-postmodern we are (and if you have no idea what a few of those words mean or why any church would label themselves such, I applaud you). Not your grandpa’s church, we say (I jest not – I once thought use the line and thought myself quite clever). But still, it all seems huckster. We’ve been sold the same entree before, and the newfangled packaging doesn’t make it any better this time around.

We feel used. Bored. Fatigued. Done. We may not even intend to walk away. We just drift – and there is nothing solid anymore, nothing of value or meaning, to keep us connected to this community of faith we once knew. So, we go about our lives. We are still moral. We love our families. We certainly maintain some kind of spiritual dimension. But church? Not so much.

Does it matter? I think so, and I’d like to take a couple posts to tell you why. I’ve wrestled with this a long while. I’ve been disillusioned too, thought perhaps the whole affair a farce. And yet here I am, and a big chunk of my life is spent among a small community known as a church. I’ve come to believe it really matters.

This is one of those blog moments that I especially hope would turn into a conversation, but that will of course be up to you. And for my friends who are not Christian or who claim no religion of any sort, please bear with me. I’d love for you to listen in – and interact too if you like. At the least, you’ll understand more of why this exercise in Christian community has, against the odds, warmed my imagination and given me fresh belief that God really does intend good for this world.

[further why the church? posts:part two, three, four, five]
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Parting Words {The Challenge of Easter}

This shared experience has been a good one. Each author has given us something unique, and I have enjoyed the reading and the stretching. Thank you, all.

I keep coming back to the basic question: why the resurrection? When everything went haywire back in Eden, why didn’t God just send in a new species to start over from scratch (maybe in a hovering ship, V-like). Why are we even having this conversation when it would have been so easy for us to simply never have been, for everything to have ended just as swiftly as it began – concluding with only an Adam and an Eve and a sly snake and a great dream gone wildly wrong?

Apparently, there is something about the sheer presence of life (even life that may seem insignificant at the moment) that God is resolutely unwilling to abandon. I imagine God understood the consequences of allowing this story to play out the way it has (and this is where we could offer the long litany of human evils), but still – here we sit. God would not abandon, never. Rather, God would rescue.

In this telling, resurrection is not the last-ditch effort of a God frantically flinging his final hope at his venture careening out of control. Rather, resurrection is the inaugural salvo of God’s decisive endgame for the redemption of his original project. Resurrection is like Normandy. After D-day, it’s only a matter of time. One day, God will again call all of his creation good. Very good.

Given this, Jesus’ resurrection does not (contrary to many versions) primarily look backward, as if it’s main function is to serve as shock-and-awe proof that we better listen to what Jesus has to say (though we should listen to what Jesus has to say). Instead, Jesus’ resurrection mainly looks forward to all the resurrection that God intends to do all over the place. In my heart, and yours. On my street, and yours. In third-world red light districts and among nuclear arsenals and even – can we imagine it – on Wall Street.

Jesus’ resurrection is not so much the exclamation point but rather the new beginning. Jesus’ walking out of the tomb was like the opening line of a novel’s climactic scene or the first note of a symphony’s rousing crescendo. Resurrection is not just what God did in Jesus, but resurrection is the prototype for what God plans to do in us – and in every nook and cranny of his creation.

So, does it matter if resurrection is, well, real? Physical? It depends. We only need resurrection to go as much into life as our world has sunk into death. If Eden and all its beauties and bodies and joys and pleasures were truly, physically good – and if God really intends to call all that good again – then resurrection had best roll up its sleeves and (apologies to Olivia Newton John) get physical.

But maybe we fudge on this whole physical thing and opt for some disembodied hope because the straight forward version just seems too good to be true. Our longings hint that we are, as Wright said, “made for relationship, for stewardship, for worship – or, to put it more vividly, for sex, gardening and God.” However, our longings seem too fanciful, too dreamy, too childish, too mythical, just too much, way too much.

Maybe. Or maybe “too much” is exactly what God has in mind.

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