I have been doing a lot of thinking lately. A church has expressed some interest in calling me and I am left debating. At the heart of my debate is the question of what is the church going to be? What it has been is clearly in the process of dieing. To be honest it is right that it should die. The question is what will the church look like which God is wanting to be born?
What I keep coming back to is the need for us to break out of the Constantine model of church. That is, as it has largely existed for 1700 years, as an instrument of empire. Just as we are largely still unaware the degree to which anti-semitism has corrupted Christianity, we are also painfully unaware how much are closeness to empire has led us to miss the point. It was after all a need of the empire that resulted in a church being built to ensure correct doctrine, correct structures, correct control. It was a need of the empire to have people focus on the after life instead of injustices of this life. It was the need of an empire to have religion not look to closely at its capacity for transformation. The result has been a church increasingly irrelevant, increasingly left to fight over scraps, increasingly empty.
So what are we called to? To me it seems like it is time to reclaim some of the ancient models of church, and to discover some new ones. We must learn to again be a community set apart, centered around Christ, a part, but not of the world. It seems we are being called to re-discover the transforming depths of prayer. We are called to live out prophetic action; To practice barrier bashing hospitality; compassion; simplicity; complete generosity; and to again walk into the mystery of God.
In short we are called to become communities which struggle to live out the gospel, and by living it out both proclaim and discover Christ.
The question is what will this take? How will we live this out?
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The beautiful part of this calling is that the part of the church that becoming taken over by human institution and greed is actually being subverted by the very gospel that it is preaching... it just takes way longer to do the subverting than I'd like.
Even where the church has been mixed up with colonialism in places like Africa, it then becomes the church that also joins in the fight for freedom from the oppressor.
So maybe we are called to stop pretending that we have control over the ‘church’ or that we really even understand what that might mean, and just start living out the obvious things. --- Stop hoarding, help the poor, change the structure to help the poor, free the captives, change the structure to stop making captives.
It’s almost like a simple and good idea got overly complex...
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