Action.

Jesus loved the enthusiast, the man who knew what side he was on and threw himself wholeheartedly into the struggle. He liked energetic action, as in the men who climbed the roof and broke a way through for their paralyzed friend, or in Zacchaeus who forgot his dignity and swarmed up a tree.

He loved the generous giver.  All four Gospels quote His saying, ‘He who loves life loses it; he who spends keeps.’  It sums up His attitude to life.

He praised the man who banged on the door till he got an answer; He wanted men to show that kind of determination in the affairs of religion.  He praised the widow who badgered the unjust judge into doing justice.  He did not like playing for safety or burying one’s talent. 

It is the peace-makers rather than the peace-keepers whom He blesses.  Goodness is a positive active loyalty.

---Hugh Martin, The Seven Letters: Christ’s Message to His Church

Scoundrels, Warmongers and Saints

The church is always God hung between two thieves. Thus no one should be surprised or shocked at how badly the church has betrayed the gospel and how much it continues to do so today. It has never done very well. Conversely, however, nobody should deny the good the church has done either. It has carried grace, produced saints, morally challenged the planet, and made, however imperfectly, a house for God to dwell in on this earth.

To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul….because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.
       
— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing

Leaving Church: Jesus Has Friends

This post is by Jonathan Storment, pastor at Highland Church of Christ in Abilene:

“The Church is like Noah’s Ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it you will drown.” –Shane Claiborne

So last week, Donald Miller wrote a couple of blog posts that started a firestorm across the interwebs by telling the world that he didn’t regularly go to a local church.  Follow up post is here.

As a pastor, I appreciated Donald Miller saying this, not because I agree with him, but because it’s something I’m hearing more often from people who don’t have any reason not to say it.

To be honest, Miller’s blog took courage to write. The people who read his writing, and invite him to conferences and lectureships, are overwhelming people who are invested in local churches.

But I think Miller has brought up a good question and I would like to address it.

Churches are filled with mean, hypocritical, judgmental, conservative/liberal, unkind people. Sure, we have our brighter moments, when the sweet older couple brings over a casserole after someone has surgery, or when the ladies Bible class holds a baby shower for the single mom. I get to see plenty of stories like that, but we have plenty of horror stories too, right? The preacher who condemns a certain sin, one with which he doesn’t happen to struggle, or the elder who is embezzling money, or the deacon who is having an affair with an underage girl.

Those are way too common to just be ignored as exceptions to the rule.

So maybe a better question to ask is, why does anybody belong to a local church?

In her book, The Great Emergence Phyllis Tickle talks about the way Christian history has worked during the past couple of millennium. Every 500 years or so, the Church has what Tickle calls “a rummage sale” where we begin to look at the way we do things and re-evaluate whether or not they are important.

In other words, every 500 years the church changes drastically to make sure that she is still being faithful to her mission of making disciples and following Jesus into the world.

I think to a large degree that is what is happening today.

Traditional/institutional churches aren’t going away, but they are changing, because the world is changing. And new kinds of churches are developing all around us, from cell-groups or house churches, to churches that meet in bars or coffee shops. Churches are trying to figure out what the best methods are for us to follow Jesus together.

But that is still not enough.

A couple of years ago another best selling author, Anne Rice, spoke in an interview in the Los Angeles Times about why she “quit Christianity”.

"I’ve come to the conclusion from my experience with organized religion that I have to leave, that I have to, in the name of Christ, step away from this. It’s a matter of rejecting what I’ve discovered about the persecution of gays, the persecution and oppression of women and the actions of the churches on many different levels.

I’ve also found that I can’t find a basis in Scripture for a lot of the positions that churches and denominations take today, and I can’t find any basis at all for an anointed, hierarchical priesthood. So all of this finally created a pressure in me, a kind of confusion, a toxic anger at times, and I felt I had to step aside. And that’s what I’ve done…"

I mostly agree with Anne Rice. Except….

We say that Job is the most patient person in the Bible, but that only works until you get to the Gospels. Jesus strikes me as the most patient person in human history. “No guys, we can’t call down thunder on the Samaritans.” “Hey y’all, tell your mom that you can’t be in charge, and quit trying to passive-aggresively make power plays!” “Hey Judas, where have you been? A kiss, you’re normally not one for PDA. Oh…I get it now.”

And that’s without even mentioning Peter.

Book after book has been written about how Americans like Jesus but not the Church and I get that. I like Jesus too, and I often don’t like the church.

But I can’t get Jesus without the church, because Jesus is the one who dreamed this whole thing up, and any Jesus that doesn’t involve messy, back-stabbing, power-playing people isn’t the Jesus that the Gospels are giving us.

I think it’s interesting that at the same time we are asking the question “Why should we belong to a church” atheist communities are starting their version of churches. They’ve even started to split! (So I think they’re getting the basic principles down.)

And I’m not trying to be snarky, I think the nature of what we do when we gather together is bring people from every different age, race, orientation, and socio-economic background to come together and confront all the ways we are broken, sinful people. Of course we split, and of course we try to segment off toward people like us.  At least that way, we can fool ourselves into thinking that God grades on a curve.

But Jesus doesn’t do that. Instead, he gets people together who are as radically different as possible, teaches them to live in community, and then tells them to go out and start other communities like that.

It’s fascinating to me that the thing that was scandalous in Jesus’ day was that he ate and fellowshipped with the outsiders, the immoral people. Today, we’re fine with that. The thing that bothers us now is that He ate and fellowshipped just as much with the insiders and “moral” people.

He was teaching them that they weren’t as good as they thought, and that only those who know they are sick know how much they need a doctor.

While breaking bread, drinking wine, singing and praying, and reading Scripture together, these people start to learn how to love and forgive and reconcile again and again.

That is the dream of the Jesus of the Gospels.

If you want to love Jesus, you have to learn to love His friends.

Everyone in Church is a Saint?

"May a merciful God preserve me from a Christian Church in which everyone is a saint!  I want to be and remain in the church and little flock of the fainthearted, the feeble and the ailing, who feel and recognize the wretchedness of their sins, who sigh and cry to God incessantly for comfort and help, who believe in the forgiveness of sins.”

Martin Luther, in Luther’s Works (St. Louis, 1957), XXII:55.

Christ and the Church

“Let us suppose, in the manner of some romances, that a king was betrothed to a beautiful wife, whose picture was sent to him before he himself saw her. But when she set out on her journey to him, she fell sick of some loathsome disease, such as the smallpox or leprosy.
 

But suppose that he knew before she came to him that she should be restored to her first primitive beauty, and that even though he knew he would be troubled by her disaster, distemper, or disease, he easily quieted himself for that little space of time in which her infirmity, though greatly disfiguring her, was to continue. 

For he himself would be her physician, the only one who could cure her and restore her to her first perfect beauty, which he know he could and should do. Thus he would show all love and peace toward her, even though her disease was loathsome, in full hope of her recovery.

This is the case between Christ and the church.”

— Thomas Goodwin

Performances, Personalities, Programs and Professionals

David Platt from Brook Hills delivers in his book, Radical, a powerful picture of the church in America today that, on key points, stands in sharp contrast to what the Bible shows us about the person and purpose of Jesus Christ. 

Dependent on Ourselves or Desperate for His Spirit?

 
This is where I am most convicted as a pastor of a church in the United States of America. I am part of a system that has created a whole host of means and methods, plans and strategies for doing church that require little if any power from God. And it's not just pastors who are involved in this charade. I am concerned that all of us -- pastors and church members in our culture -- have blindly embraced as American dream mentality that emphasizes our abilities and exalts our names in the ways we do church.

Consider what it takes for successful businessmen and businesswomen, effective entrepreneurs and hardworking associates, shrewd retirees and idelistic stdents to combine forces with a creative pastor to grow a "successful church" today. Clearly, it doesn't require the power of God to draw a crowd in our culture. A few key elements that we can manufacture will suffice.

First, we need a good performance. In an entertainment-driven culture, we need someone who can captivate the crowds. If we don't have a charismatic communicator, we are doomed. So even if we have to show him on a video screen, we must have a good preacher. It's even better if he has an accomplished worship leader with a strong band at his side.

Next, we need a place to hold the crowds that will come, so we gather all our resources to build a multimillion-dollar facility to house the performance. We must make sure that all facets of the building are excellent an attractive. After all, that's what our culture expects. Honestly, that's what we expect.

Finally, once the crowds get there, we need to have some thing to keep them coming back. So we need to start programs -- first-class, top-of-the-line programs -- for kids, for youth, for families, for every age and stage. In order to have these programs, we need professionals to run them. That way, for example, parents can simply drop off their kids at the door, and professionals can handle ministry for them. We don't want people trying this at home.

I know this may sound oversimplified and exaggerated, but are these not the elements we think of when we consider growing, dynamic, successful churches in our day? I get fliers on my desk every day advertising entire conferences built around creative communication, first-rate facilities, innovative programs, and entrepreneurial leadership in the church. We Christians are living out the American dream in the context of our communities of faith. We have convinced ourselves that if we can position our resources and organize our strategies, then in church as in every other sphere of life, we can accomplish anything we set our minds to.

But what is strangely lacking in the picture of performances, personalities, programs, and professionals is desperation for the power of God. God's power is at best an add-on to our strategies. I am frightened by the reality that the church I lead can carry on most of our activities smoothly, efficiently, even successfully, never realizing that the Holy Spirit of God is virtually absent from the picture. We can so easily deceive ourselves, mistaking the presence of physical bodies in a crowd for the existence of spiritual life in a community.