Genuine Transformation - Part 3
11/28/05

 Answering the question, "What kind of Christian do I want to be?" naturally leads to a second question, "What kind of church do I want to be in?" You would think the answer would include being in the kind of church that can help us to become the kind of Christian we want to be. But that is not the case in all circumstances. Many people are in churches that not only cannot help them to become the kind of Christian they want to be, but actually get in the way of that goal. One thing that has become very clear to me as I have worked with these questions is the fact that our basic problems as Christian communities are rooted in issues that are so obvious they get overlooked. A simple thing like asking what kind of Christian I want to be or what can of church I want to be in is as elementary as it gets. You would think everyone asks these questions all the time. But I am convinced most Christians - including clergy - never ask these questions. Yet, no genuine transformation can take place without answers to them.

As we begin to think about the second question - What kind of church do I want to be in? One preliminary comment needs to be made. I believe the de-churching of Christianity is a very alarming sign for the church and for those Christians choosing to go it alone. Surveys tell us the majority of Christians now believe the church is not essential to Christianity. I understand people's disillusionment with churches. When members of my student congregation while I was at Union Seminary inRichmond started attended KKK rallies on Saturday night a mile from our building, I gave serious thought not only to quitting ministry, but quitting the church altogether. But I also question how effective any individual can be in being Christian without being part of a community of faith.

I want to underscore the fact that I did not say "being a Christian." Rather, I said, "being Christian." The distinction is important. Being a Christian is an appropriate noun to describe our identity. But being Christian is an essential adjective that describes a way of life. Seeking the reign of God first is the key to avoiding idolatry. That loyalty needs support and nurture, which underscores the fact that being Christian is necessarily a communal act. We need other Christians to keep us faithful, loyalty, Christian. Lone ranger discipleship is a dangerous thing.

But worrying about this problem is not enough. Those of us who believe being in the church is indispensable bear the responsibility to ensure that the church is the church. It hasn't always been the church, you know. It has been a partner with the Empire. It has refused to challenge racism, sexism, ageism, materialism, militarism, and on and on. It even refused to challenge Hitler in exchange for being left alone in Nazi Germany. Some would argue the church has more often not been the church than it has been. Maybe that is why Hauerwas and Willimon argue that the most political thing the church could do is to be the church (Resident Aliens). Theologian Letty Russell once commented that she believed the trouble with churches today is that instead of being "in" the world but not "of" it, they have reversed the prepositions and are now "of" the world but not "in" it.

She may have summarized the root of the modern church's weaknesses in that one statement. What she was saying is that churches can and have opted to be like the dominant culture rather than offering people an alternative community to it. Hauerwas says this is the idolatry of the modern church. It is, he says, the primary temptation churches face, even as it was for ancient Israel. In cultural terms, following Jesus is a choice between being an American Christian and being a Christian American. Loyalty to God is the first obligation the church has. Not growth, not prosperity, not patriotism, but faithfulness to God. But we know faithfulness gets defined in different ways by different Christians. That is why what kind of Christian we want to be is so important. It determines what kind of church we want to be in. My hope is that mainliners have sufficient agreement about the qualities that define who we are, as I tried to suggest in previous Reflections, so that the task left for us is to become the kind of churches that can help us be the kind of Christians we want to be.

I am working from the premise that we are not those kinds of churches at the moment. If your congregation is, then you are ahead of the game. Many of us are in churches that are so focused on survival that we hardly give a thought to the kind of church we are or want to be. Some of us are in churches doing reasonably well, but which are still caught up in reflecting the dominant culture more than the gospel.  Last year, for example, I did a book tour for What's Wrong With The Christian Right. Each time I called on mainline Christians to start speaking up about the direction our nation was going, about the fact that morality is more than sex and abortion, that government budgets are moral documents, about the fact that Christians are called to be peacemakers, not the justifiers of war, and so on. More than once pastors came up afterwards and said they were frustrated because when they sought to address critical issues from a biblical perspective, they were accused of political partisanship. Apparently in many churches speaking on behalf of peace, economic and racial justice, environmental stewardship, and the like, is now thought to be partisanship rather than the Christian gospel.

In some of them, controversial issues are avoided altogether, such as The Church of The Resurrection in Kansas City, one of the few mainline mega-churches around. In a recent newspaper article, Jewish writer Steve Rose wrote a complimentary article about the church. In it he said, "The message tends to more upbeat, one of empowerment. And the message is always very positive?The idea is to be inclusive and inoffensive. There's usually no talk of controversial issues such as abortion or homosexuality?[The pastor, Adam] Hamilton is not about to alienate any of his members, a mixture of liberals and conservatives and those in between. He sees further growth as a mission for his church."

In an ideal world, I think such an approach to church would be wonderful. But in the kind of world we have that is teeming with serious social and moral problems, such an attitude, as Walter Bruggemen said years ago (The Prophetic Imagination), can easily lead churches into a state of  enculturation wherein they derive their identity more from the definition of American success than the life and teachings of Jesus. Whether or not that is the case with COR is not for me to say, but I can say that enculturation is a temptation all of us face daily, and to give into it is to lose our soul in an effort to gain the world.

Thus, what we face in the church today are two interwoven temptations: (1) enculturation and (2) institutionalism. They are not to be taken lightly because they are two primary reasons so many churches cannot nurture their members in being the kind of Christians they want to be. Enculturation comprises the truths found in the gospels about how to live here on earth as children of God. Institutionalism sidetracks those who are not enculturated into what a colleague of mine calls "doing church work instead of doing the work of the church." Enculturation destroys our identity as followers of Jesus. Institutionalism gives us a fake one in its place. We become church members without being Christian. We go to church but we don't go with Jesus into the world of discrimination, dishonesty, suffering, pain, isolation, and injustice. An enculturated church is a friend to the world. An institutionalize church is irrelevant to the world. Ultimately, an enculturated and institutionalized church is "of" the world, but not actually "in" it.

These temptations are more threatening to the church's life today than numerical and financial decline. I don't say this as if I am facile about the need for people and money. As the co-pastor of a new church that is as needed as any church can be for both, I know the importance of them. But I also know churches cannot want either at any cost. Sometimes I fantasize about meeting up with a rich young ruler who could easily make put our church on a solid financial footing. I imagine telling him about the covenant membership requirements we have at Spirit of Joy that define what being a member means, and then it is only for a year and you have to recommit. After explaining it all to him, I hear him say, "Gee, that's asking too much of me at the moment. I would like to join your church, but I just can't right now." When this happened to Jesus, he, of course, let the man walk away, but in my imagined encounter, being honest with myself, I hear me saying, "Wait a minute, I think we can work something out."

Yes, I know the need for people and money, but I also know that the absence of both is not the church's worst problem, any more than the absence of money is the worst problem we can face personally. Health is what matters most to us individually, and it is what matters most in churches. The issue is never how big we are, how many resources we have, how important we are seen to be in the larger community. It is how spiritually healthy we are that matters most. Enculturation and institutionalism make us unhealthy. The former corrupts our values. The latter kills our spirit. Their effect on church life is what should concern all of us. If we are spiritually healthy, we will become the kind of churches that can nurture us in the kind of Christians we want to be. The "future" of churches is not our responsibility. The "today" of our churches is. So "today" I would call us to consider these ways of battling the temptations of enculturation and institutionalism.

The first is to connect worship with justice seeking. Worship is the anchor of a church's life. It is the primary means of spiritual nurture. It is the one time weekly when we come together as the community of Christ to strengthen our devotion to God being first in our lives. That means worship is about preparing ourselves to do God's will as best we can discern it in regard to the important issues of our day. The Bible is quite clear that justice seeking cannot be separated from worship. Isaiah 58:5-14 put it this way:

5  Is such the fast that I choose,

a day to humble oneself?

Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,

and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?

Will you call this a fast,

a day acceptable to the LORD?

6  Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

⁷             Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them,

and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

⁸             Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

and your healing shall spring up quickly;

your vindicator^ shall go before you,

the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

⁹             Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;

you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

¹⁰            if you offer your food to the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday.

¹¹            The LORD will guide you continually,

and satisfy your needs in parched places,

and make your bones strong;

and you shall be like a watered garden,

like a spring of water,

whose waters never fail.

¹²            Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;

you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;

you shall be called the repairer of the breach,

the restorer of streets to live in.

¹³            If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,

from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;

if you call the sabbath a delight

and the holy day of the LORD honorable;

if you honor it, not going your own ways,

serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;^

¹⁴            then you shall take delight in the LORD,

and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;

I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,

for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Worship is an awesome responsibility, Isaiah is saying, because it has to make connections with matters of justice and mercy. It should come as no surprise, then, as we have already said, that Jesus made the degree to which we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick and imprisoned, and help the poor the final measure of faithfulness.

 Admittedly justice seeking and peace making are not easy tasks. We do not all agree on issues, from the War in Iraq, justice for homosexual person even in the household of faith, how best to help the poor in this nation and in the world, but we can all agree that our responsibility is to think through our attitudes and actions in such a way as to reflect the will of God when we confront these issues. Any church whose members seek to do this will be a spiritually healthy congregation.

            A second way to confront the twin temptations of enculturation and institutionalism is to embrace the church's role as a prophetic community. If our churches are to be alternative communities to the dominant culture, we cannot align ourselves with any culture or nation. Our vocation is not to be cheerleaders for America, or any other government. Our calling is to offer support for policies that are right and just and to criticize those that are not. In this regard, the church and the press have much in common. The real story surrounding the jailing of NY Times reporter Judith Miller is the apparent fact that she gave up her journalistic integrity in becoming a cheerleader for our nation's build-up to the Iraq War.

The integrity and conscience that are to guide American journalists are qualities of equal value to American Christians. We are called to make a prophetic witness to justice and peace. Enculturation wants to convince us this is not a good thing to do, but Israel's prophets, including Jesus, stand over against such a compromise. Churches that live by Micah's challenge to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before God (Micah 6:8) will offer by way of their very life a prophetic critique of the dominant culture that values money over justice, advancement over integrity, and power over humility. We should not claim to speak for God absolutely. But the church's vocation is to speak all the truth it knows without claiming to know all the truth there is. Churches that embrace this vocation will be spiritually healthy.

A third way is to battle enculturation and institutionalism is to be more disciplined in becoming spiritually mature Christians. The world is seeing enough spiritual immaturity in the extremism of some Christians, Jews, and Muslims. All three Abrahamic traditions are being poorly served by this immaturity, and that is the kindest way to describe it. Spiritual maturity is the key to any faith having credibility. My experience is that churches have put up with immature Christians in various ways as if they do not harm the health of a congregation. I am here to say they do. They can in fact make churches very sick. None of us is as mature in following Jesus as we can be, but it is also true that many among us can do much better than they want to. Spiritual immaturity is an excuse for not taking discipleship seriously. When we willfully chose not to love others, not to forgive, not to treat all people with respect, not to accept the possibility that we could be wrong about an issue, not to put the good of the whole about our own personal needs and interests, this hurts the whole church. It is one of the primary causes for mainline decline about which we can do something (many causes are beyond our influence).

Some years ago a group of elders in a church I was serving made the decision to become leaders in transforming that congregation's life. Consequently they decided to change their meeting time from Tuesday evenings to Saturday mornings, to stop trying to be power-brokers they once were but had long since stopped being, and to study,  pray, and candidly discuss the issues we were facing as an urban church in a changing neighborhood. They all agreed to honor confidentiality in their meetings except for Chester. He said he would not agree, that it sounded to him as if they wanted to have secret meetings, and he could not support such a thing. In spite of efforts to explain this was not the case, he would not relent. It looked as if the whole effort to work on transformation was going down the drain, which, of course, we all knew was his real intentions, until Chuck Hammon spoke up. He was not one you would have expected to speak as he did when he calmly said, "Well, Chester, I guess that means you won't be coming to our meetings any longer."

It was a critical moment that helped that church take a major step forward. Chester was having a negative impact on that group's life, as well as the entire congregation. Refusing to grow into a mature Christian, it took a man who wanted to grow to prevent Chester from keeping everyone else in the state of immaturity he was in.

Churches are often naïve about the negative impact of spiritual immaturity, and, therefore, let people say and do things that diminish the spiritual life of their congregation. Church members tend to believe the next minister will be the one who turns things around, as if they play no role in the quality of the church's spiritual life. Those churches that recognize the need to work hard at spiritual development are healthy churches. We can describe such work in many ways. I have said it was learning to love Jesus and love the way Jesus loved. Dallas Willard describes it as living our lives the way Jesus would live them if he were us (Renovation of The Heart). Perhaps you want to call it "being born again," but it will be again and again, if you think in those terms. Whatever we call it, growing into spiritually mature Christians is effort-full. It does not just happen. But it must happen if anything else of transformative substance is to happen in our congregations.

At Spirit of Joy we recently called ourselves into a sabbatical time to focus on this work. Sensing we were falling into institutionalism, the trap of serving the organization rather than it serving us, of doing church work without the spiritual deepness that leads to doing the work of the church, we decided to stop doing everything in order to have time and energy to focus on study, pray, and worship. Calling ourselves into sabbatical time has become a common occurrence that works for us. It may or may not work for you, but every church concerned about spiritual maturity has to find a way to attend to that dimension collectively rather than leaving it as work for the individual alone.

Finally, churches that want to resist enculturation and institutionalism will be passionate in their desire to follow Jesus and to live out of true abundance. If it is difficult for individuals to make following Jesus their highest priority, it is just as difficult for churches. Church leaders, both clergy and lay, have priorities that press against this one. Professional advancement, congregational prestige, power brokering, and many other desires are barriers to genuine followship.

The same holds true for living out of abundance. Churches, like individuals, can become confused about needs and desires. Believing abundance is having enough and to spare can penetrate congregations and groups within them as they make mission decisions. Recently a church in Minneapolis completed a 40 million dollar building program. Was this a need or a desire? Was it an example of living out of abundance, or living by American standards of success? What do you suppose the One who had no place to lay his head would say about this church's allocation of resources? Are expenditures a relative matter, or are there lines that when crossed constitute a breach of discipleship integrity?

These are important questions congregations would do well to ask themselves if they want to follow Jesus into living out of abundance. Differences in circumstances will probably lead to different answers for different churches. What is important is that the questions be asked and honest answers be given.

It is difficult to imagine how the churches we serve or belong to can help us to become the kind of Christian we want to be if they are bound by enculturation and institutionalism. I believe the linkage between these two questions is foundational to a changed mainline church environment. Having worked on transformational issues for a long time, I am convinced that focusing on the kind of Christian we want to be and the kind of church we need to become that kind of Christian is the road to travel. It is not a smooth road, of course. But it is the means by which we can live the Christian life and be the church in the 21^st century.

The next question we face, though, is whether or not we truly want these qualities to define the churches we are in. That is what we will discuss next time.

            - Jan G. Linn, Spirit of Joy Christian Church, Lakeville, MN