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.

Jesus of Scripture or Jesus of CNN

More by Donald Miller in "Searching for God Knows What"

"Sometimes I think it is easier for you and me to believe Jesus is God now that He is in heaven than it might have been back when He was walking around on earth. If you would have seen Jesus do miracles, and if you were one of those who were healed by Him or if you were one of the disciples, then it would have been easier, but for most people, especially the Jews, Jesus would have been a stumbling block.

At the same time, however, we are at a disadvantage because the Jesus that exists in our minds is hardly the real Jesus. The Jesus on CNN, the Jesus in our books and in our movies, the Jesus that is a collection of evangelical personalities, is often a Jesus of the suburbs, a Jesus who wants you to be a better yuppie, a Jesus who is extremely political and supports a specific party, a Jesus who has declared a kind of culture war in the name of our children, a Jesus who worked through the founding fathers to begin America, a Jesus who dresses very well, speaks perfect English, has three points that fulfill any number of promises and wants you and me to be, above all, comfortable. Is this the real Jesus?

Is Jesus sitting in the lifeboat with us, stroking our backs and telling us we are the ones who are right and one day these other infidels are going to pay, that we are the ones who are going to survive and the others are going to be thrown over because we are Calvinist, Armenians, Baptist, Methodist, Catholics; because we are Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, or liberals; because we attend a big church, a small church, an ethnically diverse church, a house church.........

Or is Jesus acting in our hearts to reach out to the person who isn't like us....the oppressed, the poor, the unchurched.......and to humble ourselves, give of our money, build communities in love, give our time, our creativity, get on our knees before our enemies in humility, treating them as Scripture says, as people who are more important than we are? The latter is the Jesus of Scripture; the former, which is infinitely more popular in evangelical culture, is a myth sharing a genre with unicorns."

Life Happens While You’re Doing Something Else

By Donald Miller

Just yesterday my girl Paige and I were doing some grocery shopping and started talking about how much of life is lived to maintain life itself, that is we farm (or shop) to eat, we make (or buy) clothes, we monitor our bodies and employ them to rest and to exercise, all to farm and make clothes.

After thinking about this idea more, I meshed it in my mind to the story of the Tower of Babel and how God destroyed a cultures attempts to reach God, a luxurious and ridiculous effort born from the modernization of the culture, the existence of a slave culture, no doubt, and a lot of free time.

The narrative of that account combined with the amount of time it takes our God-designed bodies and minds to simply sustain our temporary existence leads me to some comforting facts:

1. God is not interested in using you to build anything that might be used to replace him or give you the false sense you can interact with him without giving him all agency.

2. What God wants us to do here on earth is something we can do while doing something else.

And so I’m learning that the stuff that God wants us to do happens while we are shopping for food and making clothes and walking the dog and clearing the table to do the dishes.

In my opinion, the stuff of life is about this, then:

1. Loving each other, and learning to do so as unconditionally as possible, which will also require a leaning on God.

2. Forgiving each other, and leaning on God to do so.

3. Providing for each other and working together for the good of those we love.

4. Giving our lives to God in the sense we must learn not to grapple for control.

I don’t believe God is helping you build a Tower of Babel, be that your career or your church or your perfect family. But I do believe God wants to help you love, forgive, be patient, provide for those you love and give him control of your life.

What gets built with God’s help, then, is less tangible. The Kingdom of God, at least on earth in our time, is perhaps a relational construct.

What do you think God is helping you do? And what do you think people believe God is doing that you aren’t so sure he’s involved?

Life Happens While You’re Doing Something Else is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Me....

From Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller:

There is a poem by the literary critic C.S. Lewis that is more or less a confession...I always come back to this poem when I think soberly about my faith, about the general precepts of Christian spirituality, the beautiful precepts that indicate we are flawed, all of us are flawed, the corrupt politician and the pious Sunday school teacher. In the poem C.S. Lewis faces himself. He addresses his own depravity with a soulful sort of bravery:

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;
I talk of love - a scholar's parrot may talk Greek -
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

I talk about love, forgiveness, social justice; I rage against American materialism in name of altruism, but have I even controlled my own heart? The overwhelming majority of time I spend thinking about myself, pleasing myself, reassuring myself, and when I am done there is nothing to spare for the needy. Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one.  Me.

Sheep (Again)

photo © 2005 Jule_Berlin | more info (via: Wylio)
 

















By Donald Miller:

In John chapter ten Jesus calls Himself the Good Shepherd. To those listening, His language is vague. They want to know who is right and who is wrong, who gets into heaven and who doesn’t, and they want to be able to measure the metrics. Jesus doesn’t give them anything they can use to judge that sort of thing, at least not in this chapter (elsewhere, He says if you love me you will obey me). But here, Jesus simply says that He is the Good Shepherd, and the sheep will know His voice.

Not only does Jesus say the sheep will know His voice, but He says He knows them, too. He even says He knows their names. The picture is intimate, guiding, loving and protective. Jesus talks about the enemy of the sheep, the previous guys who didn’t own the sheep but were put in charge of them, and how somebody who doesn’t own the sheep will flee whenever a wolf comes around. But Jesus implies He will not flee, because He loves the sheep.

So how do we know if we are the sheep, if we are hearing Jesus’ voice? Well, at this point we can only conjecture, but I think the conjecture is safe. As we read through the gospel of John, for instance, do we find ourselves sensing there is something special about Jesus? Do we find ourselves curious enough to want to keep following Him, even though we don’t know exactly what that means? Are we hopeful that we can set down all our religious checklists that give us false security (an an insatiable desire for more security, like an addiction) in exchange for a person, the person of Jesus? Do other religions or philosophies (perhaps even what we previously thought of as Christianity, or some mechanical version of Christianity) feel like dead ideas while Jesus seems to be living and breathing and in our midst? If this is true for you, I’d be willing to say you are one of His sheep. After all, He did say that you would hear his voice.

And when we are one of His sheep, Jesus says we will find rest. He says in John chapter ten we will be saved and go out and find pasture. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Not only this, but as we trust Jesus we begin to realize He knows us, personally. He is not like the faith in ideas we previously subscribed to, He is living and breathing and interacting with us. We feel like the Apostles, scurrying behind Him asking silly questions. And it’s comforting to know that He loves us and knows us, even as He and the Father love each other and know each other, which is the kind of love He describes in the same chapter.

Tomorrow, I want to look at a group of people who Jesus stated clearly were not in His flock, and did not hear his voice. It’s sobering stuff.

What Does the Voice of Jesus Sound Like? is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog