Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ

by Eugene H. Peterson

A metaphor is a word that makes an organic connection from what you can see to what you can't see.

So, birth. Then growth. The most significant growing up that any person does is to grow as a Christian. All other growing up is a preparation for or ancillary to this growing up. Biological and social, mental and emotional growing is all ultimately absorbed into growing up in Christ. Or not. The human task is to become mature, not only in our bodies and emotions and minds within ourselves, but also in our relationship with God and other persons.

Growing up involves the work of the Holy Spirit forming our born-again spirits into the likeness of Christ.

First birth and then growth. Neither metaphor stands alone.

the metaphor has been torn out of its origin in biology and emasculated into an abstract and soulless item of arithmetic, a usage as remote from the biblical soil as is imaginable - an outrageous perversion of the metaphor and responsible for an enormous distortion in the Christian imagination of what is involved in living in the kingdom of God.

growth is endless and complex.

She gave birth to the baby. Sheer ecstasy, beauty, goodness. She had never felt so much alive, so uniquely herself. And then, after a few weeks, she fell apart. She knew nothing about life.

American churches seemed to know everything about being born in Jesus' name but seemed neither interested nor competent in matters of growing into the "measure of the full stature of Christ."

They were doing everything religious except following Jesus. They

growing up "healthy in God, robust in love." That is my subject:

The formation of our minds and spirits, our souls, our lives - our lives transformed, growing up strong in God, growing to maturity, to the stature of Christ.

Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place: quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The American church is uneasy in these conditions.

By delegating character formation, the life of prayer, the beauty of holiness - growing up in Christ - to specialized ministries or groups, we remove it from the center of the church's life.

Plato formulated what he named the "universals" as the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. He held that if we are to live a whole and mature life, the three had to work together harmoniously in us. T...

We are vigorous in contending for the True, thinking rightly about God. We are energetic in insisting on the Good, behaving rightly before God. But Beauty, the forms by which the True and the Good take shape in human life, we pretty much ignore...

Without Beauty, Truth and Goodness have no container, no form, no way of coming to expression in human life. Truth divorced from Beauty becomes abstract and bloodless. Goodness divo...

most of our ancestors in both Israel and church have spent most of their time watching the paint dry, that the persevering, patient, unhurried work of growing up in Christ has occupied the center of the church's life for centuries, and that this American marginalization is, well, American.

For far too long now, with full backing from our culture, we have let the vagaries of our emotional needs call the shots. For too long we have let ecclesiastical market analysts set the church's agenda. For too long we have stood by unprotesting as self-appointed experts on the Christian life have replaced the "full stature of Christ" with desiccated stick figures.

A lively sense of Jesus' resurrection, which took place without any help or comment from us, keeps us from attempting to take charge of our own development and growth.

When we practice resurrection, we continuously enter into what is more than we are. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus, alive and present, who knows where we are going better than we do, which is always "from glory unto glory."

So, why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death, the country William Blake named, in his comprehensive reimagining of the spiritual life, "land of Ulro." Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world. It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom.

superficial experience with church often leaves us with an impression of bloody fights, acrimonious arguments, and warring factions. These are more than regrettable; they are scandalous.

Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, deat...

Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation. Death by electric chair, lethal injection, and hanging. The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life. This practice is not a vague wish upwards but comprises a number of discrete but interlocking acts ...

The single most astounding definition of church!

The practice of resurrection is not an attack on the world of death; it is a nonviolent embrace of life in the country of death. It is an open invitation to live eternity in time.

In the face of all the easy dismissals, the widespread condescension, and the epidemic disillusionment, how are we going to maintain the practice of resurrection in the company of the men and women in the church?

We've been at this for two thousand years now, and people are not clamoring to join us.

We've been at this for two thousand years, and we have just been through the bloodiest and most violent century in recent history, and the present century hard at its heels seems to be hell-bent on surpassing it. Obviously, the church is not an ideal community that everyone takes one look at and asks, "How do I get in?" Clearly, the church is not making much headway in eliminating what is wrong in the world and making everything right. So what's left? What's left is this: we look at what has been given to us in our Scriptures and in Jesus and try to understand why we have a church in the first place, what the church, as it is given to us, is. We are not a utopian community. We are not God's avenging angels. I want to look at what we have, what the church is right now, and ask, Do you think that maybe this is exactly what God intended when he created the church? Maybe the church as we have it provides the very conditions and proper company congenial for growing up in Christ, for becoming mature, for arriving at the measure of the stature of Christ. Maybe God knows what he is doing, giving

Ephesians is a revelation of the church w...

it is an inside look at what is beneath and behind and within the church that we do see wherever and ...

Ephesus church was a missionary church established by the eloquent and learned Jewish preacher Apollos (Acts 18:24). Paul stopped by to visit this fledgling Christian community in the course of his second missionary journey, met...

That three-month visit, following the dramatic encounters with the seven sons of Sceva and the mob scene incited by Demetrius over the matter of the goddess Artemis (Diana), extended to three years. Paul was in Ephesus three years, pa...

God's will, Christ's presence, the Holy Spirit's work. This, not what we do or do not do in belief and doubt, in faithfulness or betrayal, in obedience or disobedience, is what we simply must get through our heads if we are going to understand and participate rightly in any church that we are part of. This is the only writing in the New Testament that provides us with such a detailed and lively account of the inside and under...

The Ephesian letter is unique in that it is the only one that is not provoked by some problem, wh...

Ephesians may have been a general church letter that circulated among the firs...

It immerses us in the holy and healthy conditions out of which a mature life can ...

But the dominant concern in this Ephesian letter is not to deal with the human problems that inevitably develop in church - no church is exempt - but to explore God's glory that gives the church its unique identity.

"Glory" is a large word in our Scriptures, radiating the many dimensions of God's grandeur, brightness, effulgence, and illuminating everything around it. The letter also makes it clear that none of us can comprehend this individually, each Christian picking out items that appeal to him or her, cafeteria style. We do this as a church, a congregation of Christians who sit down at table together and receive in gratitude what is prepared and served to us by our Lord, the Spirit.

what makes church...

Ephesians provides us with an understanding of church from the inside, the hidden foundations and structural elements that provide grounding and form to the people, whoever they are, and the place, wherever it is. Ephesians documents the Trinitarian realities from which congregations are formed, however incomplete or fragmented the formation. We have the Ephesian letter before us so that even though we are surrounded with immature and deficient and incomplete churches, we can acquire a feel for what maturity is, what growing up in Christ consists of. By means of Ephesians we get an accurate account of what God is doing and the way the Spirit is working at the heart of every congregation. As such, it is a great gift of revelation.

we read Ephesians as the revelation of all the operations of the Triune God that are foundational beneath what is visible among us and at work throughout each congregation. This is what makes us what we are, however imperfectly or neurotically we happen to be living it out.

The first letter of Paul to Timothy is his counsel in how to deal with the Ephesian church. The picture we get from the letter is nothing remotely like an ideal congregation. The Ephesians come off the pages of Paul's letter as a talkative, argumentative gathering, engaged in silly speculations and "meaningless talk ... without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions" (1 Tim. 1:6-7). Paul goes over some very elementary things about appointing leaders. As he comments on the congregation that Timothy is now in charge of, Paul mentions the danger of "profane myths and old wives' tales" (4:7). He notes that "some have already turned away to follow Satan" (5:15). He w...

Ephesus is the first to be addressed. Jesus commends them for their "patient endurance" (Rev. 2:2). These are hard times, and he commends them for their magnificent stand against evil. But this is followed by a most devastating rebuke: "But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen" (2:4-5). A congregation without love? This doesn't sound like an ideal congregation. No, the Ephesian church is not the ideal church.

what I want to do, for as long as it takes to read and ponder this Ephesian letter, is set aside for the time being the problems of behavior, the heresies of belief, the sillinesses of immaturity that concern us in the congregations that we belong to. These matters of bad theology and bad morals and bad manners are all addressed in other New Testament letters.