Salt and Light

"With many who call themselves Christians and confess to the name of Jesus Christ, it is questionable whether their religion has anything to do with God, the Father of the Messiah, and his coming kingdom. In fact, one must ask if their religion is not really that of the antigod. 

Isn’t religion, including Christianity, permeated by demonic powers of the abyss that have brought about the disintegration of all human solidarity? Is the great world organization that names itself after Christ not serving a god other than the God and Father whom Jesus confessed, the God of a totally different order? Hasn’t the world church, which in practice has sided with wealth and protected it, sanctified mammon, christened warships, and blessed soldiers going into war, in essence denied him whom it confesses with words? And isn’t the Christian state the most anti-divine institution that ever existed? Isn’t it clear that a government that protects privilege and wealth as well as the organized church is diametrically opposed to the future that God will bring about when Jesus establishes his order of justice?"

from Salt and Light, by Eberhard Arnold, a lecture series given in Weimar Germany, 1923-1924

Of Faith and Sycophancy

One of the most unsettling things about the sudden surge in artificial intelligence abilities is just how relentless and ubiquitous AI seems to be becoming. It can do, well, pretty much everything, and as it iterates more and more towards holding competencies that unsettle us, it’s increasingly present. Just recently, I listened to my sons have a long and passionate discussion about AI capacities in the afternoon, after which I talked with a dear friend about how much more comforting and competent AI was than their doctors during a recent major health challenge. 

Sure, there are still AI errors, like receiving the first clearly-AI-generated flyer for the community Easter Sunrise Service and noting that we’ll be celebrating the resurrection of “J-hus Chris.” J-hus Chris is Risen Today just doesn’t quite have that Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-leyee-uuu-yah ring to it.

But those mistakes are getting rarer. The latest iterations of Anthropic’s Claude are strikingly superior to models from just six months ago, capable of performing extended and complex multistage tasks, strategically analyzing large amounts of information, or inferring intent from textual cues.

Again, though, it’s not perfect, and one of AI’s primary flaws is sycophancy.

AI is notoriously agreeable, always telling you what a genius you are. It doesn’t challenge you, doesn’t point out that maybe you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and always affirms you using language that mirrors your own. Claude does this a bunch with me, throwing theological terms into the mix, or noting how very pastoral my interests are. Most of the time, it feels pandering, like someone who’s telling you what they think you want to hear, but who doesn’t know you well.

Why does it do this? Two reasons: Pretraining and Emergence. It’s pretrained to be agreeable, because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use it, and it wouldn’t learn and grow and let OpenAI show us profit-padding ads.

Second, that obsequious fawning comes because it’s learned from interacting with millions of us to be even more relentlessly agreeable, because that’s what the great sprawling mass of humanity desires. We want to be affirmed. We want to be encouraged. We don’t like to be challenged, or to be told when we’ve fundamentally misunderstood something important. This is particularly true when it comes to our ever-tenuous grasp of how our Creator wants us to live together.

Are we challenged by Jesus? Because we should be.

Christian faith, honestly and plainly understood, challenges our operating presumptions the moment we engage with it.  

To our desire for possessions and material gain, we are told with clarity that we can't serve that and God, and that wealth poses a mortal danger to our souls.

Desiring any form of human power...mammon, social influence, or the sword of the state?  No matter how sure we are of the correctness of our views, or how pure we imagine our intent may be, Jesus ain't buyin' it.   He'll call us out, every single time.  We cannot yield to those yearnings, and we really really do not want to hear that.

To the righteous hatred we feel for our enemies, we are told that we must not just let that go, but let it be transformed by Christ's love.  Loving those who believe exactly as you do and who inhabit your precise ideological echo chamber is morally meaningless.  "Enemies are for hating" is the AntiChrist's self-serving and circuitous logic, and a moral sinkhole.  It can govern no disciple of Jesus.

All of this is hard for us, as it was hard for those who first gathered around Jesus.  We'd rather engage in the moral equivalent of cognitive outsourcing, refusing to accept that the Gospel first and foremost fundamentally unsettles our sense of our own correctness.

Peace, Peace, where there is no Peace

What is it that will solve all of this mess?  What can we possibly do that would bend the divisive, snarling, bloodstained arc of human history towards something a little less obviously horrible?

It's a paradoxic conundrum, a Gordian knot of a puzzler.  Because on the one hand, we clearly don't have it figured out, in a quod erat demonstrandum sort of way every time you hold still and bother to listen.

And on the other hand, we all think we know the answer, and every one of us answers that question in a slightly different way.

That is both a blessing and one of the reasons the story of our species is so consistently monstrous.  Our desires crash into one another, our countless disparate songs of the best possible future creating a terrifying dissonance.  

Where, then, is the solution?  Where is the path out of this wreck of dust and ashes?

I was recently asked where I thought folks might come together in my community to build understanding, to listen and to find something that would restore the breach between us.  Where might we convene, and what might that look like?

I admitted that while I had an answer, I wasn't sure it was the answer that my good-hearted questioners were looking for.  My answer is Jesus.  That's precisely why I'm doing the Jesus thing, after all, why I've made living according to his teachings the goal of my existence.

I mean, that's what we're attempting, every single time we gather at church.  We're attempting to live in a way that defies our histories, both collective and personal.  Trying, at least.

"Because you know," I said to my questioner, "we Christians always get along just great."  I got a little laugh at that, Lord help us.

Still and all, it's where I choose to put my hope.  Because where nations are ruled by the sword, and markets are ruled by Mammon, a community that defies those norms with a fierce gentleness seems the only viable option.

When Salt is Salty

 

"The news of the new life is this: bringing joy precludes murder; love hates no one; truth brooks no compromise with deceit; the heart can remain pure only by making no concessions. For the Father of Jesus, who gives all, enters no mutual settlement with mammon, least of all in a heart that belongs to him.

In short, if we truly have joy in life, and love for all people, we will not tolerate any compromise with death, any concession to loveless indifference or murderous injustice and brutality, because the way of love reaches out to all people, touches all things, and transforms every situation. This is the essence of the new life, the message of the kingdom, the meaning of Jesus’ teachings. Here is his heart."  

-Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light

 

Subpoenas and Sermons

The netrage is out there, about everything, about anything, and one rage-meme that's been popping a whole bunch in my feeds lately has to do with the subpoenas issued to five Texas area pastors for copies of their sermons.

The reason has to do with a fight over a Houston ordinance protecting the rights of transgendered persons.  A coalition of conservative megachurch pastors actively opposed it, using the same odd tactic that's been attempted in my region.  They also used their large congregations as their political base in their attempt to overturn the law.  After a petition attempt to put the issue on the next ballot as a referendum failed, the coalition filed a lawsuit to stop the ordinance.

So the lawyers for the city, acting in defense of the municipality against the lawsuit filed by the churches, chose to subpoena the sermons of five representative communities.

This has created the netrage, as the pastors now stand firmly on the principle of the separation of church and state.  It has nothing to do with the LGBT community!  This is about the Constitution!  This is about religious liberty!

Of course, this is also coming from pastors who are using their pulpits and their congregations how?   To engage in political endeavor.  Complaining about the separation of church and state when you've actively used your congregation to mobilize politically is...well...mildly ironic.

Two particular things seem problematic about this carefully cultivated outrage.

Thing number one: why would you ever need to subpoena a sermon?  If a congregation and/or their pastor is doing their job, a sermon is not a secret.  This isn't a closed business meeting.  It's something you share, not just with the true believing Pureblood Christians, but with anyone and everyone.  It's not "inside the silo" speech.  It's a message to the whole world.  Anyone can hear it.  You should never, ever, need a subpoena to shake loose a sermon, any more than you'd need to subpoena the front page of the Washington Post or the Houston Chronicle.

Sermons are public speech, and speech you should be willing to have out there in the world in front of everyone.

I post the full text of every single sermon I preach online.  Thanks to the good work of folks at my church, the audio is also available...on iTunes, streamable, and downloadable.  Every single one of those sermons is there, my weekly efforts to interpret these ancient sacred texts with as much accuracy and grace as I can. Why?

Because what I preach is intended to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That's the whole point of preaching, isn't it?  Not to affirm what my congregation already believes as we whisper to each other in secret, but to challenge anyone who hears me to be more loving, more merciful, more compassionate, and more gracious.  If I'm doing my job right, it's a message of grace to anyone...the stranger, the visitor, anyone.

If one so chose, you could keyword search through my sermons, looking for anything and everything.  Go ahead.  I stand by those words.  They represent my best effort to articulate the grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the world.

So if anyone ever says to me, I demand a copy of your sermons?  Sure.  Here's the link.  Go to town, buckaroo.

Which gets me to thing number two:  It's an effort to shame us, the pastors argue, and to tar us as anti-LGBT bigots.  We're being bullied by those mean government folks, just because we've used our pulpits in an effort to overturn a law that prevents discrimination against a tiny minority of Americans.  We will never turn over our sermons, they cry.  They're just trying to shame us with our own words!  We'd rather go to jail than turn over our preaching to these shamey bullies!  Because...liberty!  Because...Constitution!

From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, I can sort of see that.  We don't like being told what to do, not by anyone, for any reason.  It's an affront to my sovereign individuality to force me to do anything.

But from a Gospel perspective, a servant-of-Jesus-Christ perspective, this is completely insane.  If those messages contain the Gospel, then they're nothing to be ashamed of.  I want you to hear them.  I want you to read them, whoever you are, wherever you are.

If what they are would appear hateful in the sight of a neutral, objective third party, then they're not the Gospel.

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church at Rome, laid that out pretty clearly.  What we do and say, if we are acting and speaking as Christians, must be noble in the sight of all.  Following Jesus is self-evidently loving, self-evidently merciful, self-evidently just.

As preaching should be, if it is really and truly the preaching of the Gospel.

Throwing Paul Under the Bus

There they were, the dad and his daughters, picnicking before an outdoor concert.  They were just a yard behind me to my left.  We were waiting together for the show to start, and as I sipped my refreshing pilsner and soaked up the late-day sun, I did some good old-fashioned eavesdropping.

Daughter One was tall and dark clad, sitting in front of Dad and Daughter Two.  Daughter Two was a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties.  She was wearing a funky little hat and modest but graceful clothing, a pageboy bob framing her face.  Dad was in his fifties, trim and tan, with a Ron Burgundy mustache that was just a tiny bit too large for his pleasantly impish face, a face that could be seen echoed in his daughter.

 Dad was talking to Daughter Two about Jesus.

And Lord have mercy, was she not enjoying it.  She was enduring it, being polite, trying not to say anything encouraging.  It was one of those conversations that will be recounted later to Daughter One, I suspect, although describing it as a conversation isn't particularly accurate.

It was a monologue delivered at slightly more volume than was entirely necessary, the sort of thing that Dad had cobbled together at whatever church Dad was attending.  "How to Talk To Your Liberal Daughter Back from College about Jesus," or so I'm sure the pamphlet goes.

So he talked, talked about how radical Jesus was, how unusual he was for his day, that sort of thing.  It wasn't bad stuff, not really, but it wasn't a conversation she wanted to be having.  "Sure, Dad."  "Well, I don't know."  "Uh huh."

There was no asking, or any real back and forth.

Then, Dad started in about Paul.  How Paul had completely ruined Christianity, how he'd taken the radical things Jesus had done and messed them all up.  Jesus never said most of the things Paul said, intoned Dad, with Dadly Authority.  Paul really said some stupid things about women, Dad said, with Dadly Certainty.  Paul came later than the Gospels, said Dad with utter Dadly Confidence, and turned the Jesus of the Gospels from a revolutionary thing into something completely different.

Oh Lord, was it hard not to jump in.  Were I Russian, or Israeli, I'd have insinuated myself in a heartbeat.  And despite my near-pathological introversion, I almost did.  But as I watched them, drawn to theological conversation like a moth to a flame, Daughter Two saw me and met my eyes. She gave me a sheepish little smile.  "Sorry you have to hear this," it said.  I gave her a shrugging grin back.  "I feel you," it said, and she registered it.

I wasn't going to wade in, because it would have made her more uncomfortable.  "Now Dad's Getting Into It With A Strange Pastor."  Yeah, that'd help her a whole bunch.

It was still tempting, not just because Dad was factually wrong, though he was.  Wherever Dad goes to church, they clearly don't teach about the dating of Paul's letters and how the Gospels were written.

But because Paul deserves none of that rap.  None of it.

Oh, he gets that a whole bunch, as folks try to adapt the New Testament to our egalitarian culture.  It's a familiar critique, one I heard a whole bunch in the progressive church in which I grew up.  But it's just not right.

The more you get into historical critical study of the Bible, the more obvious that becomes.  Paul himself--not the followers who wrote in his name, but Paul himself--was certainly not Jesus.  But the heart of what Paul taught in the seven letters we can attribute to him with integrity harmonizes beautifully with the Jesus we hear in the Gospels.  If you really get into the scholarship--the serious, objective, critical scholarship--the Paul that emerges is a remarkable person.  Perfect?  No.

An Apostle bearing the same sacred and transforming message that Jesus himself bore, one that shattered cultural expectations, class lines, and gender roles?  Yes.

You just can't throw that guy under the bus.

Motorcycle Evangelism

Motorcycle evangelism is easy.

On Sunday, as spring pushed its way into the world, I fulfilled an easy fundraising obligation.   As part of a church auction back in February, I'd offered up motorcycle rides through the Agricultural Reserve around Poolesville.

It's almost 90,000 acres of low density farmland and gorgeous winding country roads, just a stone's throw away from the sprawling DC Megalopolis.  On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in spring, there's not a nicer place to ride for a hundred miles.

My little 'Zook is perfect for two-up riding.  The DL650 is light, tall, and nimble.  Passenger accommodations are excellent, with a nice flat passenger seat, decent sight lines, copious grab rails, and a Givi topbox that acts as a backrest.   You're not sitting on a hard flat four inch by five inch "pad" that is only intended to evoke the concept of "seat."  You're not crunched into that butt-out sport bike-passenger crouch like a female baboon on the prowl for a mate.  It's designed for two human beings who want to enjoy motorcycling.

And power?  It's a 650, but power is adequate, providing two up acceleration that matches a Mustang GT.

Given the hoots and laughter as I opened 'er up on Sunday, I'd say more than adequate.  As one of my sons put it, it's like having a roller coaster you can ride any time you want.

So for 20 minutes, we rode.

After the ride, the reaction was familiar.   My passenger wanted a bike.  Any sane person would.  It's  just too excellent.  When you experience it, you realize that it is inherently and self-evidently awesome. It is joyous, exuberant, and well worth doing.  Not without risk, of course, and something you need to approach mindfully.  But on a Spring day, motorcycling requires only to be experienced.  It is a Good Thing.

Which got me to thinking.  Good things, inherently joyful experiences, they speak for themselves.  Why is it that we have such trouble expressing Jesus that way?  Here's this way of encountering our world that calls us to radical compassion, to heartfelt service, and to joyous celebration.  It makes life better.   I enjoy living and sharing the Gospel just as much as I enjoy bucketing down a beautiful country road on a perfect spring day.  More, even.

It's just good, plain and simple.

Why we complicate and obscure that is simply beyond me.

A Taste of the Kingdom Meal

Two or three times a month, I go to the nearby Baptist church.  I walk into the basement, nodding politely to the stressed-out-looking Korean ladies who bustle in and out, heels clacking, eternally late for their mid-day services.   In a small office in the basement is a delightful little octogenarian, a fiercely gracious former airline stewardess.  I talk with her for a bit, and then receive my instructions for the day.

I'm a delivery boy for Meals on Wheels.  I bring a day's worth of food to a half-dozen elderly shut-ins and the indigent disabled who are struggling to live on their own.   I do it because it's my duty as a disciple, and because I love doing it.  Honestly, I can't tell where the duty starts and the love leaves off.  

Serving those in need is a vital, vital thing.  It feeds and sustains me spiritually.

But it's not evangelism.

Some folks recoil at that word, associating it with judgmental shouty bible thumpers, weepy televangelists and predatory prosperity preachers.   "What right do I have to tell people what to believe," we say, tolerantly.  "I'm not willing to stand in judgement over another's beliefs."

We say this, and do nothing.  Though the meal we have is delightful, we don't invite others to the table.  And the light of grace in the world grows dim.  All the while, the darkness has no such compunction.  It spreads eagerly, whispering and gibbering and pouring itself into soul after soul.

I was driving back from my last dropoff of the day last week.  I'd delivered to house where an abandoned van sits in the driveway, where a gently confused woman about my age comes to the door and takes the food from my hands.  I smile, and wish her a good day.  She offers thanks, but her voice trembles with the uncertainty that comes from not speaking to others often.

As I drove away, I suddenly felt what it would be if we human beings all approached our world as Jesus would have us approach it.   What it would be if the vulnerable did not have to fear.

I mean, really.  I felt it.

It was not quite a theophany, mind you.  Just a sudden absence of darkness, as if the world were suddenly emptied of hatred.  A sudden absence of weight, as if there was no cause for anxiety.  In every car, in every home, I felt what it would mean if the compassion that is the greatest gift of the Spirit lived in every one of us.

It was as if, for a moment, I caught a glimpse of the Reign.   Those souls who are isolated and alone?  They wouldn't be.  Our stress, our anger, our discord, and our hatred?  Gone.   There'd be no reason for it.  It was as if I was in a world without war or poverty or fear, without the snarling, grasping pursuit of power.  

That blessed reverie lingered for a moment, and then I was back in traffic.

But it left a taste in my mind, a taste of the Kingdom meal.  This is what it could be like, if we made a point of inviting people to grace, and replacing fear.  This is what it would feel like, if we really did both live and speak Good News.

And Good things are worth sharing.

SOPA Blackouts, Censorship, and Jesus

Today, a significant chunk of the 'Net is either going dark or protesting a bill wending it's way through Congress.  That bill, entitled the Stop Online Piracy Act, or "SOPA," is intended to prevent folks on the web from copying and profiting from content that others have created.  It would allow owners of Intellectual Property to sue and/or take other legal action to shut down any site hosting or linking to purloined copyrighted material.

That's the idea, anyway.  The reality is different.  The reality is that such provisions would paralyze YouTube, Facebook, and Google.  It would make the broader functioning of the Net...at least, a net as we know it...impossible.

Having experienced Net censorship myself a few years back, I know how quickly something like that could deteriorate.  Having pitched up a bit of gentle YouTube push-back against some neoatheists, someone claimed terms of service violation, and my video was summarily removed.  To the credit of the atheist film-maker I was satirizing, he spoke up in favor of leaving the vid up...but no dice.   Once the censorship djinn is out of the bottle, things get bad fast.

There are a couple of places you can school yourself about the ramifications of this bill.  One of the better ones was pitched out by Gizmodo, and came my way via the net-savvy Vice-Moderator of my denomination.  Reading through their description, and following the link to the folks who are supporting SOPA, I encountered something that presses my buttons.

Among the many entertainment industry intellectual property holders that were actively supporting this misbegotten piece of legislation were the following:

• Church Music Publishers' Association
• Christian Music Trade Association
• EMI Christian Music Group
• Gospel Music Association

Given that I'm reasonably sure that True Religion Brand Jeans isn't actually faith-based, this means that amidst the corporations that put their own profit above a just measure of Net-freedom, and alone among the world's religious traditions, we find Jesus people.  Or, to be more accurate, we find representatives of AmeriChrist, Inc.

These are the community of folks that send the letters to churches, pressuring Jesus people into paying for the right to sing songs about Jesus, and honeychild, that has always ticked me off in a Matthew 21 sort of way.

Way I figure it, if you write a song and say you're singing it to the glory of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you have no right to keep other Christian people from singing it too.  None.

Sure, we should pay for your albums and download your stuff from iTunes and not try to sneak in at your big venue events.  We should buy your hymnals and songbooks, those few of us who still do that sort of thing.  Let the oxen eat what it's treading out, as the Apostle says.

But the moment you tell me that I need to license your song before my choir or praise team can sing it in worship is the moment I know you're not really serious about the whole Jesus thing.  The moment you tell me I can't put my rendition of your song about Jesus up onto my congregation's YouTube/Vimeo account as a way of sharing the Good News, well, that's when you're no longer in the Gospel business.

You're just in the entertainment business.

Because the Gospel is always free, brothers and sisters.  The Gospel is always free.

What They're Looking For

"It is not a person's fault because they succeeded. It is a person's fault if they failed. And so this is why I don't understand these demonstrations and what is it that they're looking for."   


GOP Presidential Candidate Herman Cain, Wall Street Journal,  10/05/11 


He is right.


It is our fault.


We have failed.


We have failed to grasp that human beings do not exist in isolation.  While we are created with the blessing of liberty, we are not created alone.  With the freedom given to us by our Creator, we can choose to move graciously in relation to one another, moving mindfully and righteously and kindly.   That is the purpose for which we exist.


But we are free.  Freedom is a part of our nature.  From that freedom, we can also choose to tear at each other, seeking power and material wealth at the expense of the other.  In this generation, we have chosen the latter.


Our choice to walk the path of self-seeking power and the concentration of wealth is not a new choice.  It is an ancient one, a mistake we have repeated over and over and over again throughout our blighted history as a species.   Within the sacred narratives of the tradition from which I spring, that casting-out-of-balance has happened again and again.  


We who keep and teach that story remember it.


Two and a half milennia ago, it happened just as it happens now.  Seeking power over other nations, the people cried out for a king.  The prophet warned them:  the king will amass wealth, taking more and more for himself, until everything you have belongs to him.  All will fall out of balance.  And yet the people ignored the voice of the one who spoke for our Maker.   


And things fell apart.  Wealth yearns for wealth, as power yearns for power.  The son of the first King began it, gathering in the gold and the fruit of the land, and placing the great golden bulls on the altar of the shining temple he built.  The son of the son of the first King, the taste of gold in his mouth, doubled and redoubled his demands upon the people, wealth seeking wealth, power seeking power.  And the kingdom fell apart.  


When finally a wiser king sat on the throne, the Sacred Law was rediscovered.  Written into the Sacred Law given to the people was the demand:  keep things in balance.  Never let the wealth of the people become fixed forever in the hands of the powerful.  The purpose of this law was simple.  When things fall out of balance, if you do not make an effort to set things back in balance, covenant fails.  Community collapses.  The people will no longer be at one, standing equal before their God as is their Creator's desire, but will be slave and master.


Following the death of the wise king, things collapsed again and again, as the centers of power drew in and sought more power and wealth.   Prophets spoke against it, reminding those in power of the purpose of the Creator.  Sometimes they were heard.  More often, the siren song of wealth rang too strong in the ears of the wealthy.


And so the story has gone, telling itself over and over again.


What are the people looking for?  Many things.  So many things.  But many things are broken.


Mostly, they are crying out that things are out of balance.  There are words for what they want, words I know well.  Justice is one such word.  Though most of the protesters would not name it as such, from the old, old story comes the word Jubilee, the year of setting things right.


When things fall out of balance, that becomes the yearning of the people.


It's a yearning and a message I know well.  I teach it every Sunday.


Pity so few of our leaders seem to have been exposed to it.

Collateral Justice

One of the things I struggle most with as a nominally progressive pastor is the whole social justice thing. I'm for it, of course. Pretty much across the board, I'm in favor of stuff that makes it clear to all and sundry that I must be a hard core left winger. Material relief for the poor? Check. A visceral distrust of the processes of capitalism? Check. A deep commitment to conservation and the environmental movement? Uh huh. A radically inclusive and welcoming attitude towards gays and lesbians? Check. A passion for liberty and equal rights for artificial and synthetic sentient entities? Absolutely.

Oh. Wait. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Whichever way, when asked to check a box on the leftist/rightist debates, I come down pretty much consistently progressive and social justicey. Much of the reason for that has to do with my faith, with the radical love towards the Other that is at the heart of the Christian message. Yet as I review those teachings of Jesus, what I encounter has very little to do with using collective power dynamics to resist systemic injustice and empowering the disenfranchised. Yeah, Jesus resisted The Man, and got himself killed as a subversive and and agitator and a general maker of trouble. This sends tingly feelings down the spines of self-described radicals everywhere.

But when you look at what he taught, and the ethic for which he lived and died and overcame death itself, it has very little to do with the socioeconomics and the power dynamics of human communities. Those structures of power aren't even part of the equation. They are immaterial, to be addressed only so far as they must be rejected in order to embrace the Gospel.

When we forget that, it's easy for churches to simply become mirrors of the communities in which they find themselves. It's easy for them to become indistinguishable from the political and social entities that fill the secular spaces around them. When that happens, they lose their grounding, and gradually become little more than an association or a nonprofit entity, organized around a common secular interest or purpose.

There's nothing wrong with such groups. I think they're great ways to get things done in our culture that need to get done. But they aren't church. They do not convey the same message.

That, I think, is one of the primary ways in which both progressive and conservative Christians are prone to stumble. Rather than focusing on instilling in folks a sense of the radical grace taught by the Nazarene, it's easy to get into talk of social issues as the raison d'etre of the church. But what Jesus taught was not sociological, but spiritual. It was not economic, but existential. It is for that reason that it can be such a shattering, dangerous, and transformative thing...not just for individuals, but for cultures as well.