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.

The most significant growing up that any person does is to grow as a Christian.

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 int...

Birth is quick and easy (at least it seems that way to fathers - mothers have a different slant on it); growth is endless and complex.

But she also found that these 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.

The American church runs on the euphoria and adrenaline of new birth - getting people into the church, into the kingdom, into causes, into crusades, into programs.

Typically, in the name of "relevance," it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture: talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.

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. The American church has deleted Beauty from that triad. We are vigorous in contending for the True, thinking rightly about God. We are energetic in insisting on the Good, behaving rightly before God...

Without Beauty, Truth and Goodness have no container, no form, no way of coming to ...

For far too long now, with full backing from our culture, we have let the vagaries of our emotional needs call the shots.

We live our lives in the practice of what we do not originate and cannot anticipate. When we practice resurrection, we continuously enter into what is more than we are.

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 church def

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.

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:

Check out this quote.

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.

These practices include the worship of God in all the operations of the Trinity; the acceptance of a resurrection, born-from-above identity (in baptism); the embrace of resurrection formation by eating and drinking Christ's resurrection body and blood (at the Lord's Table); attentive reading of and obedience to the revelation of God in the Scriptures; prayer that cultivates an intimacy with realities that are inaccessible to our senses; confession and forgiveness of sins; welcoming the stranger an...

The practice of resurrection is not an attack on the world of death; it is a nonviolent embrace of ...

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

This is the only writing in the New Testament that provides us with such a detailed and lively account of the inside and underground workings of the complex and various profusion of "churches" that we encounter and try to make sense of.

There are fifteen named churches in the New Testament.2 All but two (Antioch and Jerusalem) had letters addressed to them.

The Ephesian letter is unique in that it is the only one that is not pro...

Ephesians works from the other direction. It immerses us in the holy and healthy conditions out of whi...

Sometimes we hear our friends talk in moony, romantic terms of the early church. "We need to get back to being just like the early church." Heaven help us. These churches were a mess, and Paul wrote his letters to them to try to clean up the mess.

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.

church is not what we do; it is what God does,

none of us ever sees the church whole and complete. We have access only to something partial, sometimes distorted, always incomplete.

So we don't read Ephesians as a picture of a "perfect church" to which we compare our congregations and try to copy what we see. Rather, 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 the Americanization of congregation. It means turning each congregation into a market for religious consumers, an ecclesiastical business run along the lines of advertising techniques and organizational flow charts, and then energized by impressive motivational rhetoric.

What I noticed first of all was something that I had never taken seriously before, the exact parallel between the Holy Spirit's conception of Jesus and the Holy Spirit's conception of the church. Luke 1-2 and Acts 1-2 are parallel stories, the birth of our Savior Jesus and the birth of our salvation community, the church.

God gave us the miracle of congregation the same way he gave us the miracle of Jesus, by the Descent of the Dove.4

Metaphors have teeth. They keep us grounded to what we see right before us.

Romantic, crusader, and consumer representations of the church get in the way of recognizing the church for what it actually is.

It is significant that there is not a single instance in the biblical revelation of a congregation of God's people given to us in romantic, crusader, or consumer terms. There are no "successful" congregations in Scripture or in the history of the church.

The items balanced in the Ephesians scales are God's calling and human living: "I beg you," writes Paul, "to walk (peripateo) worthy of the calling to which you have been called (kaleo)."

When our walking and God's calling are in balance, we are whole; we are living maturely, living responsively to God's calling, living congruent with the way God calls us into being. Axios, worthy - mature, healthy, robust.

The Bible is not a book to carry around and read for information on God, but a voice to listen to.

When the calling and walking are in equilibrium, we are worthy.

but we soon learn that we cannot have Jesus all to ourselves. If we are to get in on all that is going on in this adventure called life that we live responsively into, we must extend the conversation to include the others whom God is calling, the others who are walking in response to the call. The life into which we grow to maturity in Christ is a life formed in community.

Everybody different, everyone organically connected.

Common worship, that is, corporate worship (worship "in common"), gives the basic form and provides the essential content for this aspect of "growing up" to the "full stature of Christ." Private worship while alone i...

Maturity develops in worship as we develop in friendship with the friends of God, not j...

If we are going to grow up into Christ we have to do it in the company of everyone who is res...

Worship brings us into a presence in which God makes something happen.

Common worship functions this way in our lives in response to God's call. But it is not an imposed order. The order of worship works its way into the disorder almost imperceptibly as we sing and pray together, listen and obey and are blessed.

Rather, the order is one of redemption, an order of reciprocal love rather than an imposed order of law.

Worship is not first of all telling people how they must live. It calls us into the presence of the redeeming Christ and provides us wit...

Sanctuary is a set-apart place consecrated for worship, paying reverent attention to who God reveals himself to be and how he reveals himself in our history. The sanctuary is also a theater in which we find our place and our part for participating in the wide-ranging salvation drama.