I am usually the one who sits and listens to people talking about Christianity or the church and what it could be thinking, "Something is off here." I am usually the one asking all sorts of questions from a different perspective. I am usually the one that is the "Devil's Advocate" in settings such as these.
All week, I have been wrestling with the following question:
"Why am I not disagreeing with this person?"
Answer: I have finally found my people!
I heard of a story recently concerning a women who left to go the grocery store (somewhere in South East Asia). Somehow, she got on the wrong bus and ended up in a place where nobody knew her language so nobody could understand her. She was lost for--get this--25 years! Finally, someone traveled to the area where she was who could understand her language. Upon hearing her dialect, he spoke words to her. She was understood for the first time and was able to understand someone speaking her language for the first time in 25 years. Imagine what that would have been like! She found her people.
I watched a movie called Happy Feet which totally resonated with me. It moved me deeply--more deeply than I care to admit to most people. I wrestled for several days--Why did this movie move me so? I finally realized that Happy Feet (a dancing penguin that is exiled from a singing penguin community) was me. I don't know how to sing. When I open my mouth to try, I squawk and make an awful mess of things. What I do is dance. Instead of learning how to sing, Happy Feet taught the village how to dance. My call is to keep on dancing and, in so doing, teach my village to dance. I'm not a singer. I am dancing, this week, with a couple of dancers. I'm finding my "people."
I was dancing with two such dancers this afternoon after class where we spent time discussion what missional incarnational impulse is and the power of organic systems (more to come on this later). After a beer at a local pub, I asked them (realizing that they don't know me well yet) what they are observing about my journey this week through interactions with them, class dialogue, etc.
Charlie: You're an apostolic leader who is probably an excellent communicator who is incredibly agitated. You likely feel isolated in your context. If you're not careful, you may be thrust into a position of leadership that is unhealthy for you.
Patrick: (From a Spiritual Formation Standpoint) There could soon come a point where everything that has worked in the past isn't going to work anymore and it is going to force a crisis. Know that God uses times like this to pull emerging leaders out, form them and teach them so that they can really spread their wings and fly. God uses life (good and bad) to form us. He is probably doing that right now and it might intensify soon.
My current biggest wrestling:
I think God might be focusing who I am becoming this week. I remember the discussion He and I had where He said to me, "I want to tell My story with your life. This is what I've built you for." I've thought about that over and over the past four days. I think He is focusing that call and I don't think it includes the institutional church. I don't think it includes the conventional church. I think it includes the unconventional. I think it includes that which is undefinable. I wonder what the best training for me is...
I'm finding my people. I'm hearing a couple of people speak my language and dance my dance. It's bizarre--
Let's release one another from the poverty of imagination about who we are and what He's calling us to!
3 comments:
Unconventional,
I love the dialogue bursting forth from this page! More importantly, I believe Jesus loves it too. I imagine Him sitting with us laughing, eating, guiding our discussion with questions, and more questions, gently and directly cutting to our hearts exposing to ourselves our continuous need, reminding of us of why it's a daily necessity to humble ourselves while praying that He be magnified.
I recently read that there is a sign that hangs on the walls of New Jerusalem that reads, "We cannot fully recover until we help the society that made us sick recover." I love that! It means we take an active role in our own recovery! Christ asks of us, "do you want to get well?" While there are miracles that happen everyday where people are just healed, I am finding that so much healing comes from seeking to be active in God's work WHILE we are seeking healing for ourselves. Meaning that God uses the broken, even as our dignity, and independence is spilling through our cracks. We forget that God works with the little people, the forgotten, the dirty, far more than He works with the clean, polished, and educated.
I am thinking the best kind of training is not to seek it from man, but to get out and live for Jesus, taking Him at His Word, allowing yourself to be Jesus with skin on. Becoming the Word Flesh! Being Jesus!
I am struggling right now with the idea of comfort vs. discomfort. I have found that i grow the most from discomfort, and God embraces me in these times. While I praise God in the times of comfort, I look back and realize there was little growth. So I wonder: what is better? Can I say one is better than the other?
Another thought that comes to mind when questioning the framework of the American Church is a quote I heard a few years back: We have to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for his bride, not a harem."
Too any times it seems, that another church is established right down the street from another, and breaks its back, and its budget, screaming its differences from the one down the street. why? If we are the church, it shouldn't matter our differences, except when we are celebrating the vast diversity there is God's beauty! We are the church, we should be one. Not many.
hey man,
it was great hearing your insights and getting to know you this week! keep pressing hard after Jesus, because i want to hear more stories of what God is doing through you, your family, and your community!
and yeah, i'm right there with you about releasing one another from the poverty of imagination!
jonathan bowden
jonathan@kreathaus.com
Unconventional,
You said:
He said to me, "I want to tell My story with your life. This is what I've built you for." I've thought about that over and over the past four days. I think He is focusing that call and I don't think it includes the institutional church.
I think that God is telling each one of us believers "I want to tell My story with your life. This is what I've built you for." But, I don't believe this desire of God necessarily means that everyone is being called as you are, to begin a missional/discipling movement outside the institutional church. I believe that this desire of God and the call you are sensing are consistent with one another as they should be, but they are two separte things.
I believe that God wants me to work for the renewal of people in the institutional church. One reason why I got invoved with Open Door was to support you and Mark so that you two could grow as leaders. I felt that God wanted me to have a small part in helping you two in this ministry so that both of you could influence and enable others to tell God's story with their lives. I praise God that you and Mark are doing just that. I believe that there are many others at Open Door now who are responding affirmatively to God's desire to tell His story with their lives.
I plan to remain within the institutional church. However, I too have felt out of place. I hold many of the same ideas you do about what Jesus is calling us believers to do. Let us encourage one another to move beyond conventional church practices to become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ.
Rather than going to church to be fed, we should be allowing God to feed us spiritually by doing the will of Jesus Christ and finishing his work. "My food," said Jesus, "is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. (John 4:34) If this is Jesus' food, it should be our food as well. "Then Jesus came to them and said, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.'" Matt. 28:18-20 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." John 14:34
Rather than seeking to feel good about ourselves and demonstrate to others how much we love God by how mightily we serve our CHURCH, we should simply do what is right, love the lost, and love each other. "This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother. (1 John 3:10)
John Frame has written that, "Worship is the work of acknowledging the greatness of our covenant Lord." ("Worship in Spirit and Truth," p. 1) Rather than find and attend church worship services that please us, we should practice mercy all week and make the worship services our opportunity to do the WORK of acknowledging God. The worship service is our opportunity to serve God, not the time for our worship leaders to serve (or worse, to spiritually "service") us. It is not the job of our worship leaders to create a pleasurable worship experience for us. They are work leaders in the community-wide effort to "acknowledge the greatness of our covenant Lord." "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." Hosea 6:6
Rather than being ambitious for our church, we should be ambitious for God. I think it is all too easy to develop the mindset that the success of the church depends on the work of the members rather than the work of God. If we focus on the church as resources to be stewarded and processes to be managed rather than sheep to be led by Jesus Christ, we turn the church into an idol – a work of our hands.
Rather than compartmentalizing our lives by focusing on doing church stuff on Sunday and doing work and family stuff the other six days of the week, we need to do whatever it takes to live in Christ every moment of our lives. As Thomas Kelly said, we need to be decided Christians. "True decidedness is not of doctrine, but of life orientation. It is a commitment of life, thoroughly, wholly, in every department and without reserve, to the Inner Guide [Quaker for Holy Spirit]... It is a life lived out from an all-embracing center of motivation, which in glad readiness wills to do the will of the Father, so far as that will can be discerned. It is a life of integration, of peace, of final coordination of all one's powers, within a singleness of commitment…It is the final elimination of all tolerated double-mindedness." "The Eternal Promise" p. 4 "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." (John 15:5)
I would like to end by paraphrasing Hebrews 13:12-14:
"And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the church meeting place, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come."
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