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From Rodney Clapp’s A Peculiar People

Hearing the story of God preached, through the exercise of praise, Christians learn and rehearse what it means to be Christians. Liturgy is the primary responsibility of the church because without worship there can be no people capable of seeing and witnessing to the God of Israel. Just as capitalistic Americans could never become such exquisite consumers apart from the rites of advertising and credit cards, so Christians can never achieve the skills and vision necessary to be the church without attention to baptism and Eucharist.

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My friend Andy Storms recently directed me to larknews.com, a website devoted to Christian satire. I remember going here once before and thinking all the stories were true. They aren't, but they do tell the truth in very revealing ways. I appreciated this story:

DENVER — Connection Metro Church, which used its foyer coffee bars to attract visitors to its eight satellite churches in the Denver area, has decided to abandon ministry altogether to focus on coffee.

"People liked the coffee a lot better than the ministry, according to congregational surveys, so we’re practicing what we preached and focusing on our strengths," says former teaching pastor and now chief marketing officer, Peter Brown.

Many in the congregation seem downright relieved.

"The sermons were okay, but the vanilla frappes were dynamite," says one woman who regularly attended the church for two years so she could enjoy the special brews. "I even brought my Jewish neighbors and they loved them."( Read more )

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From John Wright's Telling God's Story

"The present situation cannot be beneficial for the church. Preaching has largely ceased to incorporate individuals into the concerns created by the Christian Scriptures. Instead, preaching has become the application of an individualistic, therapeutic biblical language to contemporary concerns or disembodied calls to social justice. The church in North America has become adept at translating the Scriptures into the narratives that already shape the lives of believers and nonbelievers alike. . . . The biblical text becomes translated into a therapeutic experience within the life of the individual. Yet it seems that such an approach misses the crucial question, a question necessary to maintain the faithful witness of the church across time. The question is not, How can we make the Scriptures relevant to individuals in need of therapy? but, How do we translate human lives into the biblical narrative to live as part of the body of Christ in the world?"

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I recently read an incredibly important book (!) for understanding how the church has gotten to where we are today, as well as what choices faces us as we approach tomorrow: Craig Carter's Rethinking Christ and Culture. The whole book is a re-analysis of what H. Richard Niebuhr called "the enduring problem" - how Christ (and/or) the chrch relates to culture. Regardless of whether you've ever heard of him, Niebuhr has shaped the way all of us think - at least those of us who are Christian and American and have lived any time from 1950 to today. In 1951 he wrote a book called Christ and Culture, which was an instant classic and has been read as a textbook in colleges and seminaries ever since. In this book Niebuhr laid out five options for how Christ has been and can be related to culture by his followers: Christ of culture, Christ against culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture. Among other things, this work popularized the idea that pacifist Christians can only remain pacifist at teh expense of responsible engagement with society.

Carter's book is a thorough critique of Niebuhr's work; Carter's main gripe is that Niebuhr fails to account for the underlying assumption between all five types: Carter calls "Christendom," which basically refers to a world where the church functions as the religious arm of the state as part of a unified system in which both are seen as partners in God's efforts to run the world. I'm oversimplifying horribly, and I'll try to offer a better analysis after the other books I promised to blog through, but for now I just want to mention a fe specific things. Oh, let me say one more general thing about the book first: Carter locates the dividing line between faithful and unfaithful Christian approaches to culture precisely at the church's willingness (or nonwillingness) to engage in state-sponsored violence of any kind. Very interesting.

In this and the next few posts I'll discuss a few specific points Carter made that line up exactly with thoughts I've been having lately. It was actually eerie at one point, when Carter made the very same claim I tried to articulate in the last post: "Like Jesus, we are called to live lives that make no sense if there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead" (208). I know, crazy! :) Let me say again that I think this is absolutely crucial to following Jesus faithfully. How we talk about God (theology), how we aim to be good and do right (ethics), how we lead churches, how we pray, how we get and stay married (or don't get married at all), how we raise children (whether ours or someone else's) and everything else in our lives must be founded upon, line up with, and draw its resources from the central reality of resurrection. Stating it bluntly, to the extent that our lives and choices fail to require resurrection in order to make sense, they should not be described as "Christian."

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I promise more Romans soon (Andy!), but until then I have some thoughts to share about the mission of the church. I have been wrestling with questions about this for some time now, and I don't ancitipate stopping this wrestling soon. But once in a while I like to stop and bring together my thoughts up to this point. The immediate initiator of these thoughts is a new vision statement our church has adopted, which is something to the effect of "being a church non-churched people enjoy." I resonate with this on a deep level, not least because it seems that one of the problems Jesus had with various Jewish groups of his time is their failure to realize their core calling to welcome outsiders into the realm of God's blessing. At the same time, however, I hesitate to make it so central that it is the vision statement for a church. I think it is important, but it needs to be placed properly. So I am trying to do that with the following "aims" of the church:

1. To be a church that proclaims the gospel to whomever will listen: the good news that Jesus is the Messiah, the Lord and Savior of the world, through whose death and resurrection God defeated evil and reconciled all things to himself.

2. To be a church that seeks to rightly worship the God revealed in the story of Scripture: the God of creation, Israel, Jesus, and the church; the God we know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

3. To be a church that pursues radical discipleship to Jesus' way of cross-shaped and resurrection-empowered faith, hope, love, and peace.

4. To be a church that encourages and equips God's people for works of service in the church, in our families, in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, and in the whole world.

5. To be a church that refuses to conform to the patterns of the world, but instead cultivates character befitting the holy people of God.

6. To be a church that provides an atmosphere where non-believers feel welcomed and loved, and a church experience they may actually enjoy.

7. To be a church that is an agent of Christ-centered change in the world, bringing justice, hope, and healing to the poor, oppressed, and forgotten.

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I am very aware of two things. First, there is a big difference between getting the mission of the church right on paper and making it happen in real life. I, however, also truly believe that we will never accomplish the second without giving much thought to being faithful in the first. Second, this list is by no means perfect. I can already see big omissions - there is nothing about the unity of the church, nothing about acknowledging our long heritage ("church history"), nothing about walking people through disillusionment with God ("the desert"), etc. I'd love to hear any thoughts you have. Is there anything here you have a problem with? How would you say things differently? What have I missed that you could not leave off the list? I eagerly await your thoughts.

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I am currently taking a class on the Church ("ecclesiology") at Fuller, and am learning a great deal about many things. One of the coolest things about my class (and Fuller in general) is the wide variety of students. In this class there is a Roman Catholic girl who often speaks up in defense of Catholicism. While I usually don't care for (a) students who defend themselves, and (b) students who speak up often in class, I am always glad when she raises her hand because she always has intelligent and well-balanced things to say (and she is not personally defensive; I get the sense that she genuinely wants to learn and also help us learn). In one of the classes recently she said some things about the Catholic practice of confession that I though were worthy of sharing. Protestants often condemn this Catholic practice on the grounds that Christ is our only mediator so we don't need another human being to tell us our sins are forgiven. (Nevermind the clear Scriptural command to "confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed" (James 5.16), not to mention the fact that Jesus gave people the power to forgive and withhold forgiveness (Matthew 16.17-19 and John 20.21-23). Anyhow, here are the important points she made. ( Read More )