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The Church is being reinvented in response. We are dying, perhaps, but even death is part of our story: it comes right before resurrection.
It’s already happening globally—on the margins and among the disenfranchised, in the outsiders and the grass roots. I’m sure the great bastions of power and leadership within the Church are feeling the strain of the shift.
We fight the very thing that is meant to free us. It is only by releasing ourselves, giving ourselves fully over to the pain, and riding its cleansing wave that we find new life.
Saving your own life can be perceived as leaving everyone else behind.
We thought the Spirit couldn’t really move until we’d sung the chorus at least seven times. We just kept singing until something changed.
I lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus.
We create Jesus in our own image, don’t we? “It is always true to some extent that we make our images of God,” wrote Brennan Manning. “It is even truer that our image of God makes us. Eventually we become like the God we create.”6
Even as I grew more disenchanted with organized religion, I was still hanging on to the hem of his garment, begging for healing.
Jesus is the perfect expression of God’s
thought, character, and will. He is God’s self-definition to us. We have seen that in Christ, God defines and expresses Himself as a God of outrageous love. He is for us, not against us. God also defines humans as undeserving people with whom He is nevertheless in love. This is the Word and image of the true God.7
We all do it, progressives and conservatives alike. Jesus isn’t our mascot and He isn’t the magic word.
I read those words—“You must begin with your own life-giving lives”—and suddenly I understood why Mary spilled her most precious perfumes and soaked His feet with her tears, drying them with her hair. No wonder the Bible uses the word “immediately” to describe how quickly fishermen dropped their nets and livelihoods to follow the man from Galilee. One of the biggest gifts of that season of my life was revisiting the stories I thought I knew and discovering that really, I didn’t know them at all.
I wasn’t bringing Jesus into my life; He was welcoming me into His. As Brennan Manning puts it, “Jesus Christ has made Himself the vital center of the Christian life. Jesus is not only the heart of Christianity, He is the center of humanity and reveals to us what it means to be human.”
“This concept for remaining or abiding moves all religion out of any esoteric realms of doctrinal outer space where it has for too long been lost.”14
Theology is simply what we think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now lives.
If our theology doesn’t shift and change over our lifetimes, then I have to wonder if we’re paying attention. The Spirit is often breathing in the very changes or shifts that used to terrify us. Grace waits for us in the liminal space.
When you feel afraid of going too far, remember these words of David: Is there any place I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute—you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, “Oh, He even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!” It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you. (Psalm 139:7–12 MSG)
God isn’t a different God than He was in the Old Testament; it’s just that Jesus gave us a new perspective, the true perspective, on God. And in stark relief, the Bible shows us this very truth.
Jesus came to show us the true God: God in the world and in our lives and in our relationships with one another. If we want to know what God is like, we can look to Jesus. And if we want to read the Bible well, we need to start with Jesus and remain in Jesus, and we need to let Jesus explain it. The Bible doesn’t trump Jesus; Jesus interprets the Bible.
But God transcends our labels and our translations to meet us right where we are, right in the midst of our story, in the midst of our pain, in the midst of our trauma.
If you have needed to walk away, I know you’re grieving. Let yourself grieve. When something ends, it’s worthwhile to notice its passing, to sit in the space and look at the pieces before you head out.
My friend, don’t stay in a religious institution or a religious tradition out of fear. Fear should not drive your decisions: let love motivate you.
The Church is sorting and casting off, renewing and reestablishing in the postmodern age, and this is a good thing. The old will remain—it always does—but something new is being born too. If it is being born in the Church, it is first being born in the hearts, minds, and lives of us, the Body.
Sometimes we have to cut away the old for the new to grow. We are a resurrection people, darling. God can take our death and ugliness and bitterness, our hurt and our wounds, and make something beautiful and redemptive. For you. In you. With you.
You aren’t condemned to wander forever. Remember now: after the wilderness comes deliverance.
We do not work toward external objectives of the Kingdom of God, but rather, we are the means of the Kingdom of God—we are the foretaste, the beginning of the presence of His kingdom. We should not make plans to “build” the kingdom and then include God as an appended blessing to those plans. Rather, we must work to establish God’s end so His ends are represented by our means.14
Sometimes we are living out the big metaphors rather effortlessly, in the end.
Because at the end of the service, we practice the priesthood of all believers and anyone can pray for anyone else. Just go ahead and pray, go ahead. Talk to each other, you don’t need a sanctioned commissioning, you are already part of this Body, so go on then.
I think that part of our souls, our spirits, our bodies, our minds, locks into focus. It wasn’t a dream, no, that is what’s real.
I don’t think we give enough credit to the ones with questions. Oftentimes they are simply saying out loud what the rest of us are thinking or wondering. The questions aren’t the threat—it’s the alternative to growing numb and complacent, the specter of a stalled-out journey, the encroaching quiet desperation that terrified Thoreau,2 or the silencing of one’s true self out of fear or a need to belong. Blessed are the wonderers with the courage to live into the questions. Seems to me that sooner or later, whether we like the outcome or not, theirs is the answer.
The discovery of the Kingdom of God not only reoriented my faith, it drew me right back to the Church I thought I could leave out of my faith.
Our lives are prophesying the Kingdom of God right now. When we follow Jesus, we are meant to be outposts for God’s way of life. So what are our hopes? What do we believe and know about the life that Jesus came to give us, the life more abundant? Imagine the world fully redeemed and restored and rescued. Go ahead. Imagine it. (And it’s okay, you can weep for all the loss and the pain and sorrow of our world as it is.) But then, we live into that envisioned life, right now, as exiles establishing a kingdom for a soon-coming king. We use our imaginations prophetically, and then we begin to
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I got my start in the small, organic faith churches of western Canada, and it was good, but I needed the kindness of the conservative Southern Baptist pastors’ wives I discovered in my early twenties, and I needed the Mennonites to teach me about pacifism and thrift, and I needed the megachurch’s passion and anonymity, and I needed the intense studying of newly reformed friends, and I needed the mysticism of my charismatic roots, and I needed the desert abbas and ammas.
The more I study and dissect and critically discuss my experiences and my beliefs, the more deeply convinced I have become of God’s breaking-through power and of the need for the wild goose of the Holy Spirit soaring among us, beautiful and ordinary, in this present age.
First the death, then the resurrection. We like to skip that first part. We like to think we can have the resurrection without the death.
Who do you say He is? And not the proper Sunday-school answer, not the lists of attributes or the memorized Bible verses—not here, not in this place. When we are sorting through our very core self, this isn’t the time for the mask of right answers. This is the time for the honesty. In your heart of hearts, in your raw place of grief and suffering, in your rich center of love and redemption, who do you say God is? There, in that place, who is He to you now?
And the truth remains: the crucified God, as personified in Jesus, revealed that God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found6 and God’s endgame is resurrection.
There is nothing to say. Stop thinking there is something to say to make it go away. It won’t go away. Abandon your answers. Avoid your clichés. Don’t blame God and don’t blame him. Learn to sit in the sadness. This is not the end, this is not the end.
I want my work and witness to be marked by whom I build up, not whom I tear down. I want to be known as one who speaks life, not death, one who empowers and affirms and speaks even the hard truth in love and invitation. I want us to be the ones who boldly deconstruct and then, with grace and intention and inclusion, reconstruct upon the Cornerstone. I want to embody the character and nature of the Kingdom of God, of our holy God, even when it seems so foolish.
It’s no wonder we developed an evangelical hero complex: we were surrounded by hero worship, Christian celebrity, video venues, names in lights, book deals, and big-name preachers. Like any student of mass media communication, I know my Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. And in this case, the medium or habits or central figures of our church experiences communicated a louder message than we could bear. The bigger and more influential and powerful the ministry, the better for the Kingdom of God. Obviously. God liked big and powerful, right? The more influence and resources we had, the
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Who are you if you don’t have your name anymore?
For us, leaving full-time vocational ministry was basically an identity crisis.
Instead, when I went for a walk in the wilderness, I found the Spirit alive and active and moving in all corners of humanity. In art, science, literature, nature, marriage, laughter, beauty, work, housekeeping, cooking. I found God in suffering and in grief. I found the people of God out here in the world, quietly getting on with the work of the Gospel, far away from stages and book deals and clear job descriptions and designated parking spots at the front of the church. The Holy Spirit doesn’t require titles or 501-3(c) official nonprofit status.
If we assume we hold the market on God’s truth and redemption, we miss all the different ways that God is at work in the world right now. If we narrow the holy vocations to a select few, we turn a blind eye to the places where God is already active in the world. The redemptive movement of God includes all creation. God doesn’t need our stamp of approval to be at work. In fact, I have often found evidence of God’s presence in the strangest of places, far from our neat and tidy categories. It has reminded me of His vastness, His boundary-shattering love, His wild and terrible habit of including
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Here I go: I don’t believe God wants to use me. Not in the least.
I wasn’t created to be used. We were not saved, set free, rescued, and redeemed to be used. We aren’t here to work and earn our way; we aren’t pew fodder or a cog. We aren’t here to prove how worthy we are for the saving. There isn’t anything left to earn.
God saved you because He loves you and longs to restore your relationship. You were rescued and redeemed to be with God, the One who delights in you, yearns to walk with you, to enjoy your presence, to see you become fully human, fully alive, fully your own self. God does not want to use you: God wants to be with you because He loves you.
Taste and see: we are invited to the God-with-us life. In co-creation with the Creator, you’re a namer, a maker, an altar builder, a lifter-up of the name and the Cross, and you are a pilgrim, a disciple, made in the image of God; you are the one who walks with God without shame.
Now, I’ve learned—and I am learning—to respect and celebrate the work of all of us, the people of God. Like Paul, “pray that our God will make you fit for what He’s called you to be, pray that he’ll fill your good ideas and acts of faith with His own energy so that it all amounts to something.”10 We serve the God Who Sees, and I want to see with those eyes.
One soul is as valuable as thousands, millions. One soul is as important as ninety-nine. One soul is worth leaving behind everything to rescue. If there is one soul in your care, one face in your loving gaze, one hand you are holding, then you are holding the world. The work you do today, the love you give and receive and lavish on the seemingly small people and tasks—all of these “little” things tip the scales of justice and mercy in our world. Everything we do, from the mundane to the glamorous to the difficult and all points between, can testify.
