Past Division and Towards Unity in Christ

5)  How do we move the church past division in theology, evangelism and mission to work towards unity in Christ?    


Here, the answer is flagrantly Jesus.   The issues that divide us and fragment our denomination are many.  We argue about homosexuality, and about how to approach people who are not Christian.  We squabble about what it means for the bible to have authority in our lives together.  We go at each other over pretty much everything and anything, because we're chasing after different priorities and different goals.

Absent a clear sense of shared and common purpose, any organization or group will tear itself to pieces.  Diversity of focus and emphasis can exist just fine within such a group, but if it's not absolutely clear that a community of human beings has a unifying purpose, that community will come apart at the seams.


Here, the oldline denominational churches face a much mightier challenge than the new mainstream nondenominational churches.  Nondenoms function pretty much the same way that a corporation functions, meaning they're organized around a single core product or service, with identity focused on a single board and a single iconic CEO...I mean, pastor.  Establishing identity is really straightforward.  Just listen to pastor-slash-brand.  That holds true right up until that pastor leaves/dies/resigns after canoodling.    


In the oldline, we function much more like a political system.  There's mess and disagreement and difference of opinion.  This comes naturally to democratic systems of governance, but it doesn't give univocal organizational certainty.


For that, well, we have Jesus.  The question arises, of course...which Jesus?  Is it the Jesus of the evangelical right, oozing plasma and corpuscles for our salvation, wrapped in Old Glory, and takin' down Satan with his FNH F2000 with a 4X ACOG sight?   Or the transgendered person of color Jesus of Queer Theology?  


Then again, there's also the Jesus whose ethos and teaching can be fairly easily established from a plain-text reading of the Gospels.  The Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain lay out an ethic of self-giving, transformative love that's radical and cohesive.  The nature of the Kingdom he proclaimed is pretty clear, particularly when you get into the implications of that Kingdom for how we are supposed to live together.


When we wander outside of the synoptics into the witness of John's Gospel, we have a distinct but harmonic vision of the relationship Jesus had with God, and the relationship he expected his disciples to have with one another.


This is the Jesus...formed by and speaking into the ethos of first century Jewish apocalyptic thought, while simultaneously subverting and transcending it...that pops up if you set aside your presuppositions and cultural biases.  The teachings of this Jesus, if we give them authority over our lives, have the power to unite us.


We resist that Jesus, of course.  He's not us.  He doesn't neatly fit into either side of our squabbles, and instead demands that we love those we disagree with, to the point of forgiving them even if they crucify us.


If we can follow that guy?  We'll still be different, of course.  We won't always agree.  But though different, we won't be divided.  Not in the way that causes pain and brokenness.

The Unique Presbyterian Voice Regarding Vital Ministry

4)  What unique voice to we, as Presbyterians in the Reformed tradition, bring regarding vital ministry in churches and society? 


Answer:  Jesus.  As Presbyterians in the Reformed tradition, let me deepen that a little bit.  I think what our unique voice has to offer is  יֵשׁוּעַ, with a side order of Ἰησοῦς . 


What that means, put a bit less coyly, is that what Presbyterians have to offer in this coming century goes well beyond seminars on how to run the most agonizingly complicated possible process for bringing a pastor to your church, or books entitled The Seven Ways Robert's Rules of Order Can Spice up Your Love Life.


Oh, wait.  That's still coy.  Let's take another swing at it.  


This is an era in which history has been forgotten.  In this age of the interwebs and the 24 hour infotainment cycle, what pours through us from that big data pipe is the right now.  It's immediate, lizard-brain amygdala data, gratifying our desire for gossip and sex and violence and tension and kittens, sometimes all at once.  It affirms that we are wonderful, the center of everything, and that even given the wonderful thing we are, there are all manner of electronics and pharmaceuticals that would make us even more amazing.


It is not a deeply literate era, or an era that sees past itself and its own immediate hungers.  That impacts how Jesus is interpreted and understood in ways that is increasingly driving the majority of Christians away from the essence of his teachings.   Christianity, as it exists within the realm of our globalized society, is increasingly focused on matters that pertain not at all to the core teachings and ethos of the Gospel.


We come to Jesus so we can be successful and live lives filled with an abundance of material prosperity.  The Gospel of Health and Wealth is easily the biggest growth market for AmeriChrist, Inc. and its international subsidiaries. We come to Jesus to affirm our political positions, particularly as it pertains to those uppity hoe-moe-seckshals.  We expect Jesus to embrace the binary conflict dynamics of our culture, and pay no attention to what he told us was the core decision point against which we either stand or fall.  We want a neatly packaged, soundbite faith, and so chop the great story of redemption and reconciliation into verse-by-verse prooftexts that meet that basic human desire to not think, not imagine, and not understand. It's just easier that way.


In coming to Jesus with those things front and center on our shopping list of demands, we walk away from our interaction with the Nazarene precisely the same as we were when we walked towards him.


We want a commodified, packaged, and marketable Jesus, one who meets our needs and gets us what we deserve.  And Lord knows, we get what we deserve.


In the face of this dominant cultural approach to Christianity, what Presbyterians have to offer is countercultural.  We remember.  As Reformed Christians, we pay attention, not just to the now, but the great arc of history.  We understand the nature of what the church has been, how it has moved across languages and cultures, how it has stumbled from being in the thrall of the state to being a pitchman for the market.


We understand the character of the sacred texts that guide us, and the forces that formed them from outside the crucible of the Right Now.  That may mean that we're no longer front and center as a force in cultural Christianity.  But as cultural Christianity pitches out consumerist treacle, pop psychology pablum, and literalist straw men, what the Reformed Tradition offers is a sentient Christianity.


Not all will want that.  But it is what makes our witness unique and valuable.  It's our gift, and we should both cherish it, develop it, and be willing to make the case for it to those who are disaffected by the  spiritually self-evident failings of marketized and politicized Christianity.  

Priorities and Challenges for the 21st Century Church

3)  What do you think are the highest priorities and challenges for the church in the 21st century? 


Answers: Jesus.  Why?


Here, the question is twofold.  Priorities are pressing concerns.  Challenges are those things that materially or conceptually countervail against the norms that govern a person or organization.  For the church in the 21st century, just as the church in the 20th, 13th, 3rd, and First centuries, the teachings and person of Jesus of Nazareth represent both the ultimate goal of the church as a movement and the primary challenge to the church as a human organization or institution.


Teaching the essence of Christ's message needs to be front and center for any gathering of bipedal hominids that claims itself as a church.   Insuring that we're conveying the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and embodying the grace, justice, and mercy of Jesus is the central priority for both the Church with a Capital C and that particular place you go on Sunday.


Yeah, the world has a whole bunch of other things wrong with it.  We're mangling our ecosystem, our society is bleating and baa-ing its way to a globalized oligarchy, and for some reason people keep watching Jersey Shore.   Our culture has become a seething, directionless mess of commodified sexuality and political polarization.  Churches have a prophetic voice about those things, and shouldn't be silent in the face of injustice, but those things themselves are not the gravitic center of our purpose and identity.  


Jesus is.  


And that is where the challenge comes in.  As we attempt to be relevant and engaged within our culture, it becomes really easy for the church to become consumed by the ethos of our environment.   It can become just another reason to justify ancient bigotries and hatreds.  It can become so "relevant" that it stops being the Gospel.  It can become co-opted by political persuasion, to the point at which being a Jesus follower can be just a front for a particular ideological position.  It can become just a light gloss over almost any social interest or group.


A straight-up reading the core teachings of Jesus challenges all of those highly seductive ways of being church-that-is-not-church.  No matter where we are in the arc of human history, no matter what the sociological, cultural, or technological context might be, our assumptions tested, tried, and transformed by our relationship with Him.  

The Great Diversity of Our Country and Our Community of Faith

2)  What characteristics will draw the great diversity (racial ethnic, age, gender, etc.) of our country into our community of faith in the 21st century?


Answer:  Jesus.  Why?


The Presbyterian Church (USA) is in the peculiar position inhabited by so many generally progressive but majority Anglo institutions.  We think/write/meet about diversity on an almost pathological basis, wringing our hands about just how flagrantly Anglo Saxon we are in appearance every Sunday.  We commission studies, and create materials, and talk about welcoming the other.  Our pastors wear kente cloth stoles, and occasionally attempt to rap their sermons. "yoyoYO! Jeeeeezus iz in da Hooooows!"  


This rarely goes well.


Our choirs clap arrhythmically and sway awkwardly back and forth against each other as they try to sing gospel.  On World Communion Sunday, we read a few snippets of a lectionary text in mangled pseudo-Chippewa.  We really do try, in a good hearted earnest way.


And yet, institutionally, we're still only margin-of-error more diverse than the Aryan Brotherhood.   


The analogy is painfully close, even more so if the Aryan Brotherhood was entirely comprised of  skinhead septuagenarians, 'cause our efforts to be generationally diverse haven't exactly been radiantly successful, either.  We want to reach out to the young people.  We love the young people.  But they don't show up at our services or come back after college, no matter how earnestly we strum our guitars and talk about the internet.  


Why?  Why are we so bad at diversity?


I think, honestly, that we're over-thinking it.  That's what Presbyterians are best at, after all.


Wait.  Can you think about over thinking?  Doesn't that make it even worse, sort of a meta-analysis paralysis?  Hmmm.  Perhaps we should form a task force to explore it.


If we're to be diverse, then we need to do several things, all of which paradoxically revolve around not obsessing about diversity.


First, churches that are ethnically diverse see Jesus as radically shattering the boundaries of ethnicity.  One of the enduringly frustrating things about the Presbyterian fellowship is our maddening insistence on calling non-Anglo churches "Racial Ethnic" ministries.   They are not.  They are churches, full of disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.   An African American church or a Korean church or a Salvadoran church or a Ghanaian church is no more "racial ethnic" than an entirely Scots-Irish Honkey-American congregation.  


We. Need. To. Stop. Doing. This.


If you want to welcome someone, you seek that thing you have in common.  And what we have in common, if we're in a church, is that we're personally interested in the message of Jesus, and are endeavoring to live our lives in such a way that they reflect his teachings.  That "endeavoring" can take a range of different forms, based on macro- and micro-cultural dynamics, but the essence is the same.  We are following Jesus.   Congregations and denominations that successfully engage diverse perspectives embrace this, and will thrive in the richly pluralistic social ecology of 21st century America.  


Second, our theology should be diverse, multilingual, and rooted in a range of cultural experiences.  As we talk about our relationship with God, we need to be able to bring our full selves into that relation.  


However, if our understanding of our Maker doesn't point us to that paraclete place of spiritual commonality with the Other, then it is an active impediment to diversity.  This is a challenge for Presbyterians, because theologies of particularity are now deeply embedded in the theological academe of the old-line.  By theologies of particularity, I mean that strain of scholastic god-thinking that defines the conversation in neatly compartmentalized segments of gender, sexual orientation, culture, and linguistic structure.  They lead only to fragmentation and irrelevance.


The Tower of Babel was made of ivory, after all.  


Congregations and fellowships that can set aside theologies of particularity and find their way to theologies of inclusion will thrive and grow.  Focusing on Jesus and following the Way?  Guess what?  It does that real good.


Third, our communities need to reconsider the generational dynamics we've unquestioningly folded into the way we "do church."  Ours is the structure of the marketplace, as we neatly chop our fellowships up into age-delimited programming.  Growing up in the church, the faith life and struggles that exist amongst the adults exist outside of the range of our children's vision, across a firewall of youth programming.


That's fine when children are children.  But when children heave themselves through the fires of adolescence towards the adult they are to be, our continued insistence on separating them from adults mirrors not the Gospel, but the way of the world.  The best way to learn how to be a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth is to learn from the struggles and joys of those who are further down that path.  And by that, I don't mean "spiritual superior."  I mean they've lived longer and wrestled longer with their faith.  There is more weight and heft and wisdom in such a life, and when we don't allow our younger folk to be organically connected to the older church, we rob them of it.


Yeah, it ain't how the world works these days.  But since when were we to be entirely of the world?


If we're to be focused on Christ's teachings, then it needs to be clear that we expect the same focus in our younglings.  "Church" is not tae kwon do or SAT camp or soccer or karate.  It's not something you're made to go to as a way to assuage your parents' subconscious consumerist social anxiety.  It's a place that defines your being.  We need to be a tiny bit more intentional about making sure our kids know that.


Does that mean Jesus Camp Christianity?  No, it does not.  A focus on the grace and mercy and justice of the Nazarene, coupled with a willingness to accept struggles and doubts and human failing, well, that's a far cry more robust than glazed eye Jesusbot programming.  


But if we want our kids to stay, to spend their lives as part of our faith communities, and to be...well...Christian...then we need to be more front and center about prioritizing Jesus to 'em.  

The Church in the 21st Century

I think there's a cross on that necklace.

Question 1)  What is your vision for the church in the 21st century?

Answer:  Jesus.   Why?

There's a strong propensity on the part of folks who like think a great deal about things (read: Presbyterians) to focus intensely on the particularities of a given time or era.  They then assume that because there are differences between that point in human history and other points in human history, there is a significant difference in how Christians need to articulate their faith.

There's some truth in that.  Our culture is radically different now than it was even when I was being confirmed into the church way back in the early nineteen eighties.  Industry and entertainment are now essentially globalized.  The flow of information has increased exponentially, as our ability to communicate through new and interactive media has shifted the dynamics of culture.  With the ascendence of global capitalism, our interactions are increasingly defined by our positions in consumer culture.

As those trends continue and accelerate, it's easy to project out a vision for the character of the church that is radically defined by the changing culture into which it speaks itself.  If you want to succeed and to "grow churches," then you need to be able to articulate yourself into the context of the culture.  The question, though, is whether in seeking contextual relevance we are changing the world, or the world is changing us.

We see this strongly in the rise of the megachurch, as Christian communities structure themselves as corporations.  Like corporations, they seek to appeal to particular demographics, with ministries and worships that, like products, are crafted and packaged to appeal to the self-image every market segment, unified by and marketed as a carefully protected brand.  

We also see this in the intense success of scriptural interpretations that focus on material prosperity.  Self-help, name-it-and-claim-it abundance, getting ahead, and doing well are the goals of the self-made entrepreneur, and that seven-bullet-points-for-highly-successful-whatever approach to faith increasingly define the faith-life and language of Christian communities.

This is where the church is going, and will continue to go as the ethos of the marketplace presses more deeply into the character of our fellowship.  This, if we are to know our vision by the fruit, is clearly the "vision" of the church.

But it is not a vision of Jesus.  The vision of Market Jesus has as little to do with the Gospel as one of those fat prosperity Buddhas you'll find in Chinese restaurants has to with the Noble Eightfold Path.

For those who find the incursion of contemporary market culture into the faith troubling, there is another path.  There is the path that uses new media to communicate, not just with those who fit neatly into our market niche echo chamber.  Instead, that communication is vigorously intentional about boundary crossing and shattering.   This is the path that articulates the identity and person of the Nazarene, who refused to allow gender or socioeconomic status or race to get in the way of his message of the Kingdom of God.

If we are the Way, then it's important to recognize that the Way is not changed by the ever churning ephemera of our culture.  The specific moral and spiritual requirements of being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth articulate themselves in radically similar ways no matter what the cultural context may be.  Kindness and patience and mercy and grace are discernably cut from the same cloth, whether they be blogged or vlogged or tweeted or shown on that treacherous, dusty road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  

That's the particular vision we pursue, and it stands in defining and transformative dialectic with culture, no matter what the century.

The Nature of the Church in the 21st Century

Oh.  Wait.  This one's
the Nature of the Church in the 25th Century

As my fading denomination wrassles with ways to become relevant and revitalized, things look a bit on the grim side.  We continue to bleed out members faster than a hemophiliac with a bad case of Ebola.  Our fellowship seems unable to do much more than fight amongst itself, that is, when it's not engaged in long, hard-hitting meetings about the soteriological ramifications of the carpet in the narthex.

What?  You don't know what a narthex is?  You know, come to think of it, I'm not quite sure either.  I think it's next to the thorax, right in between the carburetor and the uvula.

So to get past this, we've done what Presbyterians always do.  We've commissioned a task force to do a study.  Yay!  More study!  Oh, how we loves us some study.

From that task force a series of questions have arisen, to which the task force has invited input and response.   They aren't bad questions to be asking, and while I have no expectation that my inputs will have any impact on the dialogue, it's still worth pitching out there.  So, here are the questions, and some preliminary answers.

1)  What is your vision for the church in the 21st century?  Hmmm.  A tough one, and with complex nuances grounded in the significant sociocultural dynamics of a globalized economy and the shifts in ethos driven by new media.  

I'd say...um...let me think...Jesus?

2)  What characteristics will draw the great diversity (racial ethnic, age, gender, etc.) of our country into our community of faith in the 21st century?  Wow.  Another tough one.  Let me think on this for a moment.  Taking into account the underlying demographic shifts from the most recent census data, I'd have to say that the preponderance of research points to the answer being Jesus.

3)  What do you think are the highest priorities and challenges for the church in the 21st century?  Clearly, this is more than one question.  A substantive answer requires us to parse out priorities, which relate first to vision conceptualized generatively and as a radically normative lens.  Second, we approach  challenges, which require us to assess those extrinsic and intrinsic factors that will force us to reconsider the central operating paradigms of our ecclesiology.  

For priorities, clearly, it's Jesus.  And for challenges?  Well, gosh and golly, look, it's Jesus again.

4)  What unique voice to we, as Presbyterians in the Reformed tradition, bring regarding vital ministry in churches and society?  As Presbyterians in the Reformed tradition, I think what our unique voice has to offer is clearly יֵשׁוּעַ, although I think we also have to include Ἰησοῦς in any comprehensive answer.  

5)  How do we move the church past division in theology, evangelism and mission to work towards unity in Christ?    As you may have ascertained, just like the 15 Minutes Of Fame Rent-is-Too-Damn-High Guy, I've got pretty much one answer to any question on this topic.  

Once again, how? You said it.  Jesus.

What?  A cop-out, you opine?  Just pitching out sophomoric substanceless Sunday School silliness, you say?

Alrighty then.  Let's unpack each question one at a time.  A blog series it is.  Follow the links on each of the questions, and let's get it done.