Christian mission and my story

Two weeks ago I spoke at a conference for Christian artists (kind of ...).  I spoke about my journey in learning about what/who we are to be as the church and a few insights I've come to.  It's a little bit disjointed, but I thought I'd share it here anyway.  This is what I wrote down to go by, but I didn't present it word for word.  At the moment, I added some things and left other things out, but these are still the basic ideas I put forth.

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About seven or eight years ago, I got really frustrated with the church and stopped going for a while.  During this time a friend let me borrow a book called “The Post-Evangelical” which dealt with what it means to be a Christian in a postmodern world.  That led me to read other books, listen to lectures, and attend conferences that were thinking along the same lines.  At the time it was refreshing to hear some of the disconnect and dissatisfaction I had been feeling affirmed, but after a while I noticed that that was almost all of what it was doing.  There was a lot of talk about how the traditional church had failed, but relatively little talk about what to do moving forward.  Every book/lecture/conference seemed to have the same things to say, just in different ways.

I ended up coming across the writings of N.T. Wright, who is a first century historian and theologian.  He has given me a much better perspective on who Jesus was (and is), what he accomplished, and what we're here to accomplish.  Modernity had a metanarrative that assumed that modernity itself was the climax of humanity.  Science would eventually break everything down into objective facts, and there would be no use for religion.  The Christian establishment reacted to that by essentially taking the same approach to doctrine:  the assumption was that we could eventually break the bible down into concise doctrines and timeless truths.  Realizing that metanarrative to be false and seeing how it is used to gain (and abuse) power, postmodernity rejected it, and as a result became highly suspicious of all metanarratives.  One frustration I've heard from Christians who are solidly grounded in modernity is that when they are trying to bring someone to Christ they hear something along the lines of “That may be true for you, but it's not for me.”  The conclusion that Wright reaches is that our reaction should be to affirm the assertion of postmodernity that the metanarrative of modernity is, in fact, false.  But the challenge is to realize that instead of throwing out all metanarratives, we are to recognize the true metanarrative, which is the story of God pursuing and eventually redeeming humanity through Jesus.  In this metanarrative, the cross is the climax and the resurrection is the beginning of a new creation.  Jesus died on a Friday.  Was in the tomb on the Sabbath – the day God rested.  And was raised on the first day of the week, signifying the beginning of the new creation.  In one place N.T. Wright  uses the analogy of Jesus as a composer writing a score and the Church as the orchestra (or whatever) that is to take that score and play it.  In other words, we cannot accomplish what Jesus accomplished, but we are to implement the Kingdom of God that Jesus was announcing.  Jesus' reply to Pilate that is so often translated “My kingdom is not of this world” is actually translated, perhaps more clearly, in the NRSV as “My kingdom is not from this world.”

So, these lines of though have been leading me to think more about how we can live out the mission that Jesus has called us to.  

This approach to ministry calls for a radically different way of looking at things, let alone doing things.  We need to read the bible as the story of God searching out humanity.  In Jesus' parables of the lost sheep, lost coin, and eventually lost son (which most of us know as the parable of the prodigal son) is is always the God character who is doing the searching.  We all know we need to think about the Church differently.  The image that I keep coming across is the parable of the wheat and weeds.  In this parable, the farmer sows good seed in his field, but an enemy sneaks in and sows weeds.  The farmer's servant asks if he should pull up the weeds and the farmer says to let them grow up together and the harvesters will sort it out at the harvest.  Statistically, the church is no different than the world at large.  We have the same divorce rates, the same unwed pregnancy rates, the same rates of bankrupcy, etc..  So why do we try to pretend that we are, and separate ourselves from the rest of the world?  We also need to change the way we think about people who aren't christians.  Every human has the image of God within them.  It's been distorted and covered by our sin, but it's still there.  Our job is to find that image within others and help it to grow.

I'm still trying to figure out how these things work out in practice.  The one thing I do know is that it will look very different in different contexts.  Some may look like what we traditionally think of as church, others will look nothing like what we think of as church.  We have to be okay with that.

I named my son Josiah, after the Old Testament king credited with restoring the Law of God and clearing the temple of idols and false Gods.  Last night, I wrote down under “dreams” that I want to raise my children with these ideas.  If we don't start changing things right now our children will have it so much harder than we ever have.  That's a real motivating thing for me.  I want to sow the seeds that my children can grow into something amazing.

“Christian mission in the postmodern world must be the means of the church grasping the initiative and enabling our world to turn the corner in the right direction.”
“The Challenge of Jesus” by N.T. Wright pg. 168