Painting pictures of God’s Kingdom

This morning I took part in the monthly meet-up of Northwest Hothouse. Hothouse is a group of pastors, para-church ministry leaders, and community organizers who come together to explore what it means to live and lead missionally in our particular contexts. A lot of inspiring ideas and experiences are shared in these meetings. Dynamics like that of Hothouse — intelligent, imaginative collaboration — get me all the more excited about life in ministry.

 

One of the big questions — it was more of a dilemma, really — that arose this morning was this: What does it mean to appreciate missionality that is “slow steeping” and relational (not an imperialistic take-over), while recognizing that people have urgent, immediate needs to experience communion with Christ?

 

This is my attempt to answer that question.

 

First, I think it is important to give Jesus the respect of focusing our attention where he asked us to place it — on the Kingdom of God. It is the Kingdom, not a cosmic transaction, that is at the heart of the Christian story. The latter relates to the former as a means to an end. To say it differently, any truthful soteriology is entirely grounded in truthful eschatology. To say it differently still, the big picture is about the resurrection and reconciliation of creation, not “soul-winning” and an escapist afterlife.

 

We live in a Kingdom of God story. The Kingdom has come, and the Kingdom is coming. In New Testament studies this is referred to as “the already-but-not-yet.” To reverse the order, what we see around us is not as good as it gets, but it is the current creation which God has covenanted to resurrect. Creation matters because it’s creation that has been, is, and will be the project of God.

 

Like I said, it’s a Kingdom of God story we are part of. And the future of this story requires both announcement and fulfillment — pictures painted and promises kept. There is rootedness to this idea. We see the interplay of announcement and fulfillment in the words of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus — an urgent announcement to transform our ways immediately so that we can join in the gradual, progressive entrance of God’s Kingdom. Whether along the rivers of Babylon or during the Sermon on the Mount, new pictures of the Kingdom have been painted, and those pictures have inspired, befuddled, and expanded imagination. Picture are painted (immediate action) about a new reality that is being created (gradual, sequential movement). But we would be off the mark to divorce the picture-painting act from the larger sequential movement.

 

When we paint pictures, we are doing more than more than simply describing something that will someday be. Our descriptions are entities in their own right. Pictures are real. We can hold them on various levels. Pictures have thingness, yes?

 

Because they have thingness, they also have an irrevocability to them. When we see important images, they stick with us. They delight us. They haunt us. They inspire us. They speak of new realities while being themselves a new realities created. When the pictures we paint are real and true, the audiences to our picture-painting cannot help but own them in an irrevocable way. Even if we paint an image of the future, that future has just happened in that it is now been seen or heard. That is the in-breaking of the future into the present. The future exists in that its picture has been called into existence.

 

Some of the most powerful moments within our Kingdom of God story have come about when the future is called into the present through picture-painting. Again, I think of the prophets of an exilic Israel sitting along the rivers of Babylon and being filled with the dream of universal exile — a sensus plenior exile. I think also of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Did the future of which King dreamed exist at the time of that speech? We might be inclined to say that it hadn’t or even still hasn’t. There were countless race riots yet to come after that speech, and some racial tension remains today. But I imagine that if we asked those who were there in person to hear King’s dream, they would tell us that something that hadn’t existed prior to that speech suddenly did as King spoke. A new reality came into existence. And many events that have helped to fulfill that dream since the day of the speech happened only because the dream was announced.

 

Pictures create futures.

 

An unimagined, unannounced Kingdom never comes. 

 

We live in a culture that believes talk is cheap. We form a dichotomy between words and actions. Falling to the temptations of our distrust toward the spoken word, we leave little room for speech-acts — for words that not only describe future realities, but also are, in and of themselves, immediate realities. We need to reclaim the speech-act as an essential, prophetic component to our Kingdom of God story.

 

Sometimes picture-painting happens in front of a large crowd (like King’s dream), but more often it happens in family rooms, coffeehouses, and bars, with a handful of people or just one person at a time. When the picture is beautiful and real and true, there is nothing those small audiences can do but grapple with the picture’s irrevocability and possibly begin to draw that picture, or a continuation of it, themselves. 

 

As Kingdom of God pictures are painted, we experience an in-breaking of tikkun olam in two ways: our description of where the story is heading is itself an invitation to join the story, and new reality is created because we have chosen to paint.

 

It is amazing how many people — whether self-proclaimed Christians or people who are unfamiliar with God’s story — well up with hope when they hear the good news about God’s commitment to, and intentions for, creation. While it is possible to dream aloud this good news and still be met with hostility or rejection, I believe that real good news is generally better received than the incomplete good news, the news that explains a cosmic transaction but does not explain where the story is heading. As I said earlier, all truthful soteriology is grounded in truthful eschatology. 

 

When the story as a whole is told, most neighbors who disagree with us are still generally glad to be our neighbors. We can be very “Abrahamically effective” like that, when we tell the whole story, the real good news.

 

So how do we face the balance of being an incarnational presence for the long-haul in our ministry context while acting on our concern for so many who have not received what God has for them? We dream out loud. We paint pictures about God’s covenant faithfulness to creation, the Kingdom that is growing, and God’s continuous tikkun olam mission. We demonstratively look forward to a bright future, and in so doing create new present realities that cause people to hope in a way they’ve never hoped before. 

 

What the “IKEA effect” says about ministry

(photo taken from the99percent.com)

 

I read a piece on The 99 Percent by Scott Belsky, focused on something dubbed the “IKEA effect” — the connection between participatory investment and satisfaction.

 

 

“I was in a board meeting the other day for a non-profit organization struggling to engage its constituents. Along with the staff, we were trying to find ways to keep people involved and motivated over time. So much work goes into programs and communications – but sometimes people still fail to listen and engage.

 

 

“Rather than focus on the reasons for the struggle, we decided to discuss the examples of success. Why were some programs especially successful?

 

 

“One early discovery was that the programs organically conceived by participants, rather than staff, seemed to have a higher success rate. In addition, the programs with especially large programming committees (i.e. number of people leading the event) were also quite successful.

 

 

“It was at this point that a fellow board member chimed in with the concept of the ‘IKEA effect.’ When people buy furniture at IKEA, they are forced to assemble it themselves. As a result, people report a high degree of satisfaction with their IKEA furniture – largely because of the greater sense of ownership from the labor required to assemble the furniture.”

 

 

This might very well be the greatest challenge standing in front of me in terms of ministry leadership — involving people beyond keeping them informed. As Belsky writes, just as programs aren’t always the answer, communication is not always the X-factor its often made out to be. Keeping people informed is wildly different than keeping them involved and thus invested.

 

 

Here’s where the intricacy comes in. We want people to have investment — to be the builders of the proverbial Swedish sofa — without doing so by creating bureaucratic watchdog positions. It’s easy to get people involved by giving them a voice on such and such a committee, but then, before you know it, organizational decisions that should have been simple are suffocated because they need layer upon layer of approval. There’s a difference between the “IKEA effect” and having a bunch of chefs in the kitchen.

 

 

Decision-making is a legitimate form of participation only when it goes hand-in-hand with the carrying out of said decisions. To use a ministry example, we can listen to someone’s armchair quarterback opinions about the role of music within a liturgy or the direction our teaching time should take, but the “IKEA effect” comes into play when that person picks up an instrument, runs a soundboard, or gives a sermon. 

 

 

In other words, it’s easy to create positions of oversight, but creating positions of ground-level involvement is far more risky-yet-potentially-rewarding. The “IKEA effect” comes into play when people make the bed and sleep in it, too (metaphorically as well as quite-literally in the case of the Swedish furniture company).

 

 

When I think about how this connects to Paradigm and our calling in Seattle, the one word that comes to my mind is “liturgy.” Literally “the work of the people,” a great liturgy minimizes a hierarchal transfer of information in favor of something more communal and lateral. That’s not to suggest that a good liturgy is somehow leaderless; good leaders will find ways to direct while allowing others to build the proverbial Swedish sofa.

 

 

For this reason I draw a line between emphasizing learning and exalting the typical sermon form. I think people learn best when they take ownership of the “material.” In some ministries this comes into play through a dialogical sermon form. At Paradigm this means leaving plenty of room for people to engage God’s Spirit creatively in both the unison and free space components of our liturgy. The challenge for furthering the “IKEA effect” in our gatherings is to find ways that the reflections people generate during our worship can find back into the progress of the gathering.

What’s a sustainable faith project, anyway?

From the Paradigm site:

What does it mean when we say that Paradigm is a “sustainable faith project”?

 

In order to understand what Paradigm is all about, we need to know a few things about systems and connectedness.

 

A lot of things in this world operate as systems — they’re systemic in nature. Economics. Environmental degradation. Disease. The impact that broken families have on multiple generations. Physical abusiveness. Marital infidelity and sexual corruption. Substance abuse. The list goes on.

 

To focus on one as an example, think of economics. Individuals are free to make their own financial choices with their money. And we’d agree that an individual’s own decisions have a tremendous impact on his or her financial well-being. We’d also agree, however, that, regardless of how much or how little we have in our piggy banks, we’re affected by wide-scale peaks and recessions. And peaks and recessions don’t happen out of nowhere — they’re the result of a series of individual decisions.

 

Individuals create systems, and systems impact individuals. Just ask the children of abusive parents or divorcees. Or the family of a pornography-addict or drug user. Or a kid who’s growing up in the midst of AIDS and genocide. They’ll all tell you that individuals contribute to systems, and systems shape individuals.

 

The great myth within humanity is that any of us are ever alone, that we can do whatever we want because “It’s not going to hurt anyone else.” It is the central deception of sin, isolation. But the truth is that we cannot get away with doing, thinking, or saying a single thing that isn’t going to impact someone, somewhere down the road.

 

We are connected.

 

It’s clear in the stories of Scripture: sinfulness led to deadliness, which brought about more sinfulness yet. The cycle continued — a momentum of corruption and decay. But as people who believe in Jesus as Messiah for the world, we believe that his death and resurrection inaugurated a new Way. The Apostle Paul candidly writes about this in the fifth and sixth chapters of his letter to the Romans: the cycle of sin and death have been replaced with a cycle of faithfulness and life, and Christ’s followers are to further the new cycle of living. 

 

When asked by a student if Christ-followers are at liberty to contribute to the old cycle (beginning of Romans 6), Paul goes on a tangent that can pretty much be summed up as, “Absolutely not! If they do, there was no point in anything Jesus did.”

 

We know all about how cycles of sin corrupt friendships, families, cities, and people over generations. But what does it look like when the cycle that Christ began is continued today? What does it look like for people to care for the environment in a way that makes their neighbors do the same? Or for a man to respect and empower women in a way that causes his sons to do an even better job of it than he does? What if a group of people stepped back from materialism and pooled their finances to create an orphanage in an area of need, and that orphanage went on to care for generations and generations of children who need love and care? And what if children who were seemingly destined to be aborted were instead allowed to live through adoption, and became the very leaders of this movement?

 

And what if the people who were engaged in such a movement weren’t acting out of empty human-centrism or political agenda, but were letting it be known that the gospel of Jesus is the driving force behind the change? What if it was announced that this movement was about God’s plan coming about on Earth as it does in heaven? What if the participants of this new life were constantly being nourished by the words of Scripture, dwelling in prayer, and taking part in life-giving spiritual practices? What if these people had the opportunity to be discipled by spiritual directors whose interest was for them to fully realize their identity as Christ-followers, and all of the acceptance and forgiveness that comes with that?

 

What if all of that came to be?

 

Well, we might call that a sustainable movement. We would recognize that what we were seeing was the sort of faithfulness that spreads life and hope in the lives of friends and neighbors and families. Remember how systems work, how individual lives are always influenced by systems around them? This cycle of faithfulness and life would inevitably improve the world of these friends, neighbors, and families. Those people, in turn, would have the chance to join God’s people, take up Jesus’ Way, and join the mission. (Maybe if people saw how beautiful Jesus’ Way can be — what a difference it can make in the world — more of them would take seriously who Jesus claimed to be and the movement he claimed to start, don’t you think?)

 

In the end, what we’d have is this: Christ’s faithfulness creating an invitation to his Way for each of us; our faithfulness modeling that new life in Christ’s Way and tangibly spreading the invitation as we better the lives of those around us; and others accepting that invitation to the Way, faithfully participating in it, and bringing about yet another stage in this ever-growing movement. And so on and so forth.

 

It’s a sustainable faith project.

 

It’s ridiculously simple, yet it’s radical and difficult in that it calls people to actually obey the instructions of Christ. It takes leaving a life of selfishness. It requires shaking off the myth that we’re a bunch of little automatons whose actions don’t contribute to one of two systems — the cycle of sin and death, and that of faithfulness and life.

 

That’s the Paradigm vision: to faithfully live out true life in the Way of Jesus, inviting those we impact to freely choose to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah and join the mission. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, this sustainable faith project of ours.

 

The plan for bringing this about in our area of North Seattle is to tell and learn the message of Scripture in our gatherings, deepen our understanding of God and our relationships with others in communities, and to act out the redemptive message of Christ through local involvement. 

 

Is Paradigm a “church”? Yes and no, depending on what you associate with that word. If someone is looking to be part of a church, Paradigm could be a viable conclusion. But a person who is already involved in a church is welcome to take part in any or all of the three things we do (gatherings, communities, and local involvement). And a person who dislikes church might enjoy Paradigm (though we acknowledge that some people dislike pretty much everything, and it’s only a matter of time before they dislike us too). 

 

We are asking people who join Paradigm’s core team to make Paradigm their primary spiritual community and to participate in each of the three events involved in our mission, but we have no form of “membership” beyond that. We accept donations in our gatherings and through mail, and people who tithe are welcome to direct that giving toward our mission.

 

In all, we hope the project is a success, that faithfulness leads to life, and life to faithfulness.

Reviewing Wright’s Justification: Chapter Two

In the second chapter of Justification, “Rules of Engagement,” Wright sets out by saying that if we allow books like Ephesians and Colossians equal place to Romans and Galatians – letting each of these canonical texts inform the others on a basis of full mutuality – we arrive at “nothing short of a (very Jewish) cosmic soteriology.” Within Christ the world finds its summation, and now one family of Jews and Gentiles becomes “Christ’s body for the world.” (pgs 43-44)

Wright isn’t calling readers to prioritize Ephesians and Colossians over Romans and Galatians, but rather to hear Romans and Galatians outside of the old perspective by which our interpretation has been conditioned. Because Ephesians and Colossians have never fit nearly into the old perspective (Wright notes the Lutheran suspicion toward Ephesians, in particular), if we use them as a starting point we find that Romans and Galatians don’t actually fit into the old perspective either.

Immediately following that point regarding canonical conversation, Wright begins this top-notch tangent:

Supposing that had been the vision that gripped the imagination of the Reformers in the sixteenth century; supposing they had had, engraved on their hearts, that close and intimate combination of (a) saving grace accomplishing redemption in the once-and-for-all death of the Messiah and putting it into operation through faith, without works and (b) the proleptic unity of all humankind in Christ as the sign of God’s coming reign over the whole world; and supposing they had then, and only then, gone back to Romans and Galatians – the entire history of the Western church, and with it the world, might have been different. No split between Romans 3:28 and Romans 3:29. No marginalization of Romans 9-11. No scrunching of the subtle and important arguments about Jew-plus-Gentile unity in Galatians 3 onto the Procrustean bed of an abstract antithesis between faith and works. No insisting, in either letter, that ‘the law’ was just a ’system’ that applied to everyone, and that ‘works of the law’ were the moral requirements that encouraged people to earn their own salvation by moral effort. In short, the new perspective might have begun [at the Reformation]. Or perhaps we should say the new perspective did begin – when Ephesians was written. No wonder Lutheran scholars have been so suspicious of it. But why should that apply to conservative readers for whom it is every bit as much Holy Writ as Romans or Galatians?

“In particular, what Scripture actually says must be brought into creative dialogue with tradition. This is standard fare in beginner-level doctrine courses, and ‘conservative’ churches within the Protestant tradition have always insisted that they are ‘biblical,’ whereas other churches down the road are in thrall to human traditions of this or that kind. But here is the problem, which I hinted at in the opening chapter. Again and again, when faced with both new perspective and some of the other features of more recent Pauline scholarship, ‘conservative’ churches have reached not for Scripture but for tradition, as with Piper’s complaint that I am sweeping away fifteen hundred years of the church’s understanding. Of course, Piper himself wants to sweep away most of the same fifteen hundred years, especially anything from medieval Catholicism, and to rely instead on the narrow strand which comes through Calvin and the Westminster Confession. But whichever way you look at it, the objection is odd.” (pgs 44-45)

Wright then has at it with Piper’s selective ignorance of first-century Judaism. Piper claims that study of the first century context can “distort and silence what the New Testament writers intended to say,” an alarming claim he tries to support by saying that first-century extra-biblical literature has not been studied to the same extent as the New Testament, and so we lack the contextual awareness we bring to the Scriptures. (pg 48)

I can feel my mind going numb thinking about that. So the reason we can’t understand the extra-biblical literature is because we haven’t studied it enough – and that’s why we are wasting our time to study and emphasize it? Seriously? Meanwhile we do have a contextual awareness of the Bible – we just can’t muddy that by studying… its context. Piper goes as far to say that, in terms of word studies, we cannot know “how words were used in that world” outside of their biblical use. Wright responds by noting that Piper’s mindset, “seems to me dramatically to overstate the case.” (pg 49)

Conversely, Wright’s response might be an exercise in dramatic understatement. Even someone who disagrees with Piper about some or many things should be able to acknowledge that he’s likely above-average in terms of intelligence (it’s difficult to lead – directly and indirectly – as many people as Piper does without being a sharp person). Still, Piper’s attitude regarding the Bible’s first-century context is intellectually insulting, and comes across as hiding the facts for the sake of posturing an argument. It demonstrates a desperation that one would expect from a person who is trying to defend ground in a losing battle. Which then begs the question: is Piper really ready to die on the hill of his own Calvinism, or is his life and ministry about something bigger and better, the very topic of Paul’s obsession. (A witty person might ask Piper to not waste his life…) To hide or diminish the facts we can glean from first-century context to defend a philosophy of sixteenth-century origin is not the marker of a truth-seeker. If Piper is in the business of truth-seeking, he had better re-examine his mentality and motives toward the contextual setting of Scripture.

Wright devotes several pages of his second full chapter bemoaning Piper’s shirking off of first-century context in favor of a Protestant-originated interpretation of Paul, and Piper’s attitude that his is the “ordinary” interpretation, held by his oft-cited “ordinary folk.” The Bishop demonstrates his concern:

“It is worrying to find Piper encouraging readers to go back, not to the first century, but to ‘the Christian renewal movements of sixteenth-century Europe.’ To describe that period as offering the ‘historic roots’ of evangelicalism is profoundly disturbing. Proper evangelicals are rooted in Scripture, and above all in Jesus Christ to whom Scripture witnesses, and nowhere else.” (pg 51)

Reviewing Wright’s Justification: Introduction and Chapter One

Justification, N.T. Wright’s latest book, is the Bishop’s seemingly irritated response to John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minn., and a figurehead of the “neo-Reformed” sect of Christianity. Wright clarifies that, already balancing a full schedule of pastoral and academic assignments, writing a rebuttal to Piper (who himself wrote The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright after Wright’s Paul: In Fresh Perspective) is necessary because of the subject matter and its implications. 

This isn’t back-and-forth for the sake of getting petty or something about which Christians should “agree to disagree.” To Wright, there’s simply too much riding on justification.

“. . . the question is about the nature and scope of salvation. Many Christians in the Western world, for many centuries now, have seen ’salvation’ as meaning ‘going to heaven when you die.’. . . In the Bible, salvation is not God’s rescue of people from the world but the rescue of the world itself. . .  Some Christians have used terms like justification and salvation as though they were almost interchangeable, but this is clearly untrue to Scripture itself.” (pgs 10-11)

Wright cites Piper’s theology of justification ignoring Paul is four main areas: the work of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, its covenant nature (bringing about the end of exile), the lawcourt metaphor (in which God finds Himself “in favor” of those who follow Jesus; not merely allowing Jesus to transpose his moral achievement to his followers), and eschatology (a full narrative understanding of what God is doing in the entire world). (pgs 11-12)

“What’s All This About, and Why Does it Matter?” is the first full chapter of Justification, Wright comes out of the gate with frustration that Piper and similar theologians demonstrate a concern for “God’s glory” while espousing an eisogeted theology of justification that is centered on individuals finding their ticket of escape from the world. Wright does not discount the value of personal salvation but scoffs at a concocted theology that places mankind at the center of the universe (with no regard for a more universal eschatological plan). (pg 23) 

“. . . the real point is, I believe, that the salvation of human beings, though of course extremely important for those human beings, is part of a larger purpose. God is rescuing us from the shipwreck of the world, not so that we can sit back and put our feet up in his company, but so that we can be part of his plan to remake the world.” (pg 24)

This is no petty argument or nit-picking theological tangent. The nature and scope of salvation have been misstated, leading people to a Westernized individualistic construction in which the “sinner’s prayer” is an end-all-be-all ticket to otherworldliness, with little or no place give to participation in God’s great exilic work in the universe. Of the overall aim for Justification, Wright says, “I hope that the next generation, without preexisting reputations to lose and positions to maintain, will get the message.”

Piper, as well as some early reviews of this book, have accused Wright of constructing a “confusing gospel.” Wright responds to such a mentality toward him and the New Perspective:

“Sometimes, faced with a jigsaw puzzle, one is tempted to make it apparently easier by ignoring half the pieces. Put them back into the box! I can’t cope with that many! The result is of course that the puzzle is made harder, not easier. However, one can imagine someone, having made this initial disastrous move, trying to remedy the situation by brute force, joining together pieces that don’t quite fit in order to create some sort of picture anyway.” (pg 31)

The old perspective on Paul tossed out critical “pieces” of Paul’s theology: “Abraham and the promises God made to him, incorporation into Christ, resurrection and new creation, resurrection and new creation, the coming together of Jews and Gentiles, eschatology in the sense of God’s purpose-driven plan through history, and, not least, the Holy Spirit and the formation of Christian character.” (pgs 31-32)

Wright calls out Piper for completely sidelining passage such as Romans 2.25-29 and Romans 10.6-9 in his treatment of Paul and for picking out Paul’s Genesis 15 reference without consideration for the meaning of the full text toward which Paul was directing his readers. “When Paul quotes Scripture, he regularly intends to refer, not simply to the actual words quoted, but to the whole passage.” (pgs 32-33)

Of the impact of a narrative, covenantal approach to Scripture, the Bishop says:

“God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that this single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah. Read Paul like this, and you can keep all the jigsaw pieces on the table.” (pg 35, italics his)

Tony and Doug talk about the state of Emergent Village

For all that’s being said about what’s going on with Emergent Village and the greater emergence, it’s nice (I sincerely mean that) to see Tony and Doug a bit riled up in defense of EV’s present status and its future.

More on the future of E/emergent

I want to add a few more thoughts to what I jotted down Friday regarding the future of Emergent Village and the emergent movement as a whole. Just some quick thoughts that I’ll toss out there. 

*One challenge that Emergent Village and the larger emergence face is that there are, in my understanding, a lot more emergent individuals than emergent churches. My experience tells me that there is a scattering of emergent types within Evangelical and Mainline churches, individuals who read some McLaren five years ago and got inspired. My perception is that if you could tally up all the people with whom emergence resonates, the majority of them are part of congregations most of us wouldn’t classify as “emergent.”

Is this good or bad? I don’t know for sure, but I lean toward it being a bad thing, because I am pro-church planting. I believe in forming and raising up new communities. And I see a need for more communities that embody this big move of God in the Western Church that we so often call “emergence.” 

*Multiplicity in voices is good. It’s beneficial for general emergence if Emergent Village isn’t the only voice in the conversation. That’s why something like The Origins Project is a really interesting idea, though I stand by my what I bemoaned via tweeting a few weeks ago: I hope The Origins Project isn’t merely a conversation for people who would consider themselves emergent but don’t want to get fired from Evangelical or Mainline institutions. I hope it’s not the watered-down “safe” version of the conversation in which people are spurred to live missionally but never dig beneath the floorboards to deal with some doctrinal monsters we’ve allowed to crawl inside our perceived orthodoxy. There’s a connection between how we view justification and whether we’re going to devotedly live missional lives. When it’s all said and done, there should be many different networks participating in the emergent conversation, but Emergent Village shouldn’t be the left to do the heavy theological lifting all on its own.

*During the past few days of conversation about EV’s future, someone (and I can’t remember where I read this) wrote that what EV lacks is a clear vision of where it’s heading. The same could probably be said for the larger emergence.

There’s a balance that’s needed here. On the one hand, it’s not like the early Christian community in Acts knew what trajectory they were on way ahead of time. They knew they needed to make disciples and go to “the ends of the earth,” but other than that, I imagine a lot of details were foggy. In the same way, emergent types know that the call to make disciples is an authoritative and normative expectation and Christ’s message should be taken everywhere. But that’s really vague. Like the community in Acts, we know that we’re trying to make an impact, yet we don’t know what our encounters will look like or what sort of transformation will happen in our lives and in those around us because of our obedience to Christ’s call. It’s up in the air. We’re following that wild goose of a Holy Spirit.

On the other side of that coin, I’ll acknowledge that there are times when God does give us the imagination to envision things to come, times when He shows us a more complete version of the Kingdom work He’s calling us to bring about. Where are the prophets within not only EV, but the larger emergence? They’re certainly out there. Some of them have already made themselves heard. There are probably many others who have yet to chime in. 

Rather than saying we need to hear from “them,” I’ll suggest that we might be “them.” Whether or not we classify ourselves as emergent, most of us could do a better job of setting time aside to seek God for an expanded imagination for what the Kingdom could be in this world today.

Where E/emergent goes from here

Via Julie Clawson’s blog I read through a recent blogosphere conversation that was sparked by a post from Nick Fiedler (with whom I’m not familiar) titled, The Great Disappointment (A Post About Emergent). The conversation has revolved around what is perceived as a fizzling out on the part of Emergent Village, which many people seem to attribute to the movement bringing in too wide a network of people and lacking leadership.

As someone who is very much lower-case “e” emergent and enjoys brushing shoulders with the Emergent Village crowd whenever there’s an opportunity, I’m going to put out some hyper-opinionated bullet-points on the matter:

*First, I don’t think Emergent Village – or general emergence, for that matter – is fizzling out. I think it’s becoming more mainstream (not to be confused with mainline), and thus has lost its subversive feel. I imagine this annoys some who had followed the emerging conversation because it was subversive and not because of its theological and ecclesial implications. To that I say, “Get over it.”

*That said, I do see a lot of room for EV to better clarify itself and some of the different ways in which very average parishioners and church leaders can participate in the conversation. Sometimes the “us-them” feel is cultivated by poor communication. I don’t toss that out there as a definitive accusation, only a possibility.

*I have a feeling that there is tension between some EV folks with a club mindset and the larger EV and the lower-case “e”s like myself (this is evident within the comments section of Julie C.’s post, from perspectives on both sides of the tension). There’s enough suspicion within the “conversation,” that it doesn’t always feel like a conversation so much as a select few gate-keeping particular stances (to clarify, I don’t hear these gate-keeping statements from EV’s most notable voices so much as from pace-setting contributors who, I feel, give everyone else the vibe that this is an invite-only conversation).

*My best example of the last point is the issue of homosexuality. EV’s strongest voices, in this writer’s perception, lean further each day toward an attitude that the only reasonable take on homosexuality is to see it as a viable lifestyle rather than a reflection of corruption and brokenness. I imagine that vibe keeps a lot of people who agree with 90% of the EV “platform” held at bay, feeling like they don’t exactly fit as card-carrying members, figuratively speaking. One of the best things that could happen for EV is to give place to leaders who have less-to-the-left positions on homosexuality. Or – gasp – a leader who didn’t vote for Obama. (Or is our orthodoxy really not all that “generous”? )

*People within EV need to understand that not everyone they meet is going to be as disgruntled with Evangelicalism as they are. Believe it or not, some good things have happened within Evangelicalism. Why do we need to rally people based on what they’re against?

Is there room within EV or greater emergence for people who don’t hate Rick Warren but are becoming increasingly interested in re-claiming the gospel’s missional Kingdom emphasis? Or is this a conversation about being pissed off about all of the same things? If that’s the case, then screw the “conversation,” because it’s nothing like a Messiah who esteemed what he saw as good within the diverse people he encountered. (Again, to clarify: the people I see demonstrating this negativity are not the most well-known folks within EV or greater emergence.)

*For the love of God, embrace healthy leadership, leadership that is entrusted with power and uses it to organize and empower rather than confuse and restrain. This applies not only to EV but the lower-case “e” emergents as well. Leaderlessness is not the goal, is it? How ridiculous would it be for someone who was raised by an abuse mother to go around telling people that they should strive to be orphans? Leadership, organization, and methodology are not signs of failure in and of themselves. In fact, they are attributes of the Early Church.

Tony Jones made an important point in his response to this conversation:

…I bet you’re not disappointed with Shane Claiborne. That’s because, to this point, Shane has made the very noble decision to live a chaste life, and he has committed his whole self to an irresistible revolution. Meanwhile, most of the founders of emergent are raising children and paying mortgages and coaching YMCA t-ball. Martin Luther King didn’t coach t-ball; neither did Ghandi. Start a revolution if you want, but that’s not a price that I’m willing to pay.

There shouldn’t be an expectation on EV’s leaders to leave their other full-time professional and relational involvements to oversee the organizational components of the conversation, but maybe there are others who God is calling to serve EV full-time in that capacity.

*Tony mentions that books are not the future of EV. I hope that’s not the case, because it’s been his writing, along with the books of McLaren, Pagitt, and Keel that have best connected me to pulse of the conversation. There’s a carefulness in book writing that none of us truly adhere to in blogging. The books (in my opinion) have represented the most thorough and credible tellings of EV’s story.

*Tony points out that Christianity21 is going to help set a new direction for EV (and, I imagine, the larger movement). That sounds great, but I know very few people who are in situations where flight costs, $195 for event registration, and $198 for a hotel (that’s a two-night total) is a real possibility (especially since most of us are considered quasi-heretics by now and we’re not supported by Evangelicalism’s enterprise or the Mainline’s old money…). I don’t have a better solution. I’m simply pointing out that we’re stuck in the tension of getting members of what is largely an electronic conversation into the same place for a weekend.

The Resurrection, fatalism, and the problem with the Church calendar

Good words from N.T. Wright:

“To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that ‘different-ness.’ The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.”

Amen and Amen.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between a linear Hebraic approach to history and time over-against the circular mindset that Israel’s pagan neighbors and the Hellenistic philosophers demonstrated toward history, and how these preconceptions influence the way we celebrate holidays – the ways we remember our story. 

Biblical Israel celebrated their feasts with devotion, partly because God commanded them to remember the situation from which they arose (particularly in the case of Passover as remembrance of their emergence out of Egypt). But it was in the context of a people who understood that history is linear, that they weren’t designed to return to that from which they were freed. It is abundantly clear, in the instances when Israel does forget their story and re-enters bondage, that this is not God’s plan for them. The purpose of remembering the story was not to re-live its highs and lows in a circular way, but to remember all the reasons why they should continue going forward in the ways of God.

Remember captivity – don’t re-enter captivity – so that you can walk in freedom. 

Fast-forward to Christianity, which suffers still today from the Early Church’s concessions to Hellenistic philosophy and pagan ideas regarding fatalism and circular history (the gods are going to do what the gods are going to do, and everything comes around…). How does a circular view of history shape the way people remember their story?

Many churches today celebrate a “Church calendar” that includes Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost. By no means is there anything wrong with observing these moments within Christian history. It’s great that people want to be well-versed in each and every phase of their faith history (though they don’t even do that really; most Gentile Christians disregard any and all traditions and celebrations carried over from Judaism, which is a sorry disregard for our rich inheritance as those adopted into Israel). What I really want to call into question is the role a circular, fatalistic view of history plays in our approach to holidays.

When we approach holidays with a fatalistic understanding of history, we don’t merely recognize each season of Christ’s journey or our own history as a point along a line, something out of which we emerge, but rather as an endless cycle in which we are trapped. In this cycle there is no differentiation among the holidays. We aren’t living in Easter or Pentecost any more than we are living in Lent. Our celebrations become continuous dramatizations of the same cycle (a treadmill and not a trajectory). It’s different than to say that we live in a point of tension between two seasons along the linear model of progressive time (the already-but-not-yet of the New Testament and the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God); no, this is truly the antithesis of eschatology – there is no expectation for change within ourselves or within our world.

We just go round and round. Bound to the cycles of history. Pushed around by the gods.

Again, this is in clear contrast with the Hebraic understanding of linear time. Again, there’s a difference between remembering you were set free from captivity in Egypt and trying to simulate that captivity. Going further, there is a danger in simulating that captivity: you could very easily begin to define yourself presently in the images and terms of that captivity. 

This is what happens to the Church calendar when approached from a circular, fatalistic lens. It’s no wonder that a Hellenistic, fatalistic, circular view of history leads to a diminished expectation toward Christ’s impact on humankind (am I making up a term to say “Christoanthropology”?), such as that which was held by Augustine, who was certainly trapped in a circular view of history.

A person’s view of history seems to, by necessity, correlate with his/her thoughts on the potential for humanity (not the necessary trajectory of humanity but the possibilities for humanity’s trajectory).

Let me put it differently: say a person undergoes a three-month period of real darkness in his life – maybe extreme substance abuse or something along those lines – but breaks away from that darkness and is now staying clean. It’s possible that, in stopping his abuse, a lot about his lifestyle changed – the clothes he wears, the music he listens to, his sleep schedule, etc. It might be a good idea for him to set aside a concrete time when he can give recognition to the fact that he came out of hardship (maybe he’d celebrate the yearly anniversary of cutting off the substance abuse and living clean).

But wouldn’t it be weird as hell for that person to devote a three-month period of his year to commemorating his emergence from his old life by going back to his old clothes, music, sleep schedule, etc.? None of us would think that was a good idea. What if he went around telling people he is, in present time, an addict? What if he actually went back to the drugs? None of us think that’s a healthy way to “remember,” do we? There is a huge risk in self-definition if he goes through with any of these bad ideas, and we’d all agree that it’s overkill.

Where I’m going with this is that we are, as Christians, Easter people. And we’re invited to be Pentecost people. These are things that are true of us and our reality in real time. A lot of things are valuably true about our past, but these things are intended by God to be part of our present-tense lives.

In real time, we aren’t waiting for a Messiah. In real time, he came.

In real time, we’re not merely Incarnation people. In real time, we’re people who incarnate the beginning of realized Easter hope. And we are meant to have the tools of Pentecost at our disposal as we live incarnationally in real time. 

Now I’m all about giving our history due diligence. As a matter of fact, maybe the most widely read thing I’ve ever written is an article about not reading Easter into the Christmas story, but celebrating Incarnation for Incarnation’s sake. So I’m not being a hater here. It’s just that it seems we get into trouble when we can’t celebrate the past without understanding that history (and, by result, our self-definition as Christians) is to be understood in potentially-progressive linear terms.

Otherwise the Church calendar only fuels our spiritual impotence. We become people who neglect the faculties and possibilities of Easter and Pentecost because we are too busy playing fatalist dress-up.

The resurrection stops being central to our story because, in needing to define ourselves in the terms of Advent, we center our story around the hope of a returning Messiah (rather than taking up the invitation of an already-here Messiah to build his Kingdom).

Rather than seeing Lent as a season out of which we’ve emerged, we define our present lives in its language. So when trouble hits, we muster up some motivational speech about finding solidarity in a Suffering Servant while giving no attention to the idea that Pentecost provided us a Helper to overcome at least some types of suffering. I’m not saying that we never suffer, or that solidarity with Christ is entirely unimportant. But thank God we have more than solidarity with a dead, decomposed Suffering Servant. 

But isn’t that where a lot of people are in terms of self-definition? The hope of Easter and the strength of Pentecost are matched, if not outweighed, by a whiny emo gospel in which we have no victory over sin and death, just a heroic martyr to identify with as we celebrate our frailty.

Even within missional-emergent circles there is a reluctance to really live in the real-time events. I’ll prod and maybe make enemies by going ahead and saying that I think the reason for this failure is due, in large part, to low pneumatology and connected fear of looking more ecstatic than hip. It’s as much of a control game as anything we saw in modern (as opposed to post-modern) forms of church.

In a culture that loves self-promotion and dreads embarrassment, maybe emergent Christians don’t want to risk the diminished mystique of fully abandoning themselves to the work of the Spirit. It goes against our culturally-conditioned obsession with all things moderate and mild-mannered. 

There’s safety in going round and round in a cyclical calendar with our fatalistic assumptions. We don’t have to be torn away from that which used to define us (we’re like the passed-over Israelite who decides to return to Egypt, or the recovering addict who goes back to his old habits to give recognition to that chapter of life).

And no one will mistake us for being radicals. Our persona is in-tact.

I’ll come back to my opening quote from Wright:

“To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that ‘different-ness.’ The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.”

Or, to put it differently, we might consider some words from the Apostle Paul (Romans 6.4-11): 

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I affirm what the Apostle Paul and N.T. Wright are saying: the resurrection and its ensuing Pentecost are our defining moments. We have a rich history worth acknowledging – filled with important moments of expectation and suffering. But history is not a circular mechanism, nor are we defined equally by all of these events. 

The possibilities, energy, equipment, faculties, and potential of Easter and Pentecost are readily available to all who want to follow Christ out of unnecessary cycles and into a linear trajectory toward something beautiful.

Framing stories, new exodus, and excitement

Paradigm gatherings begin this Sunday, and I’m excited (as well as appropriately nervous) about them. In contributing to this new work, I’d like to think that we’re going to be able to meet the needs of anyone and everyone who visits with us and/or commits to our community in the long-haul. But I realize that I can’t guarantee that or make any lofty promises – people might check us out and be sorely disappointed, and, to a certain extent, I need to be alright with that.

From a teaching standpoint, I really like what we’re doing in the next few months. While in general I think we’ll do a lot of exegetical preaching – straight through an entire book, chapter by chapter (not necessarily divided by the chapter break, but you get the idea) – but we’re starting with a couple ideas that we think will make a good primer for our future encounters with Scripture.

Call them our primers. Our motifs. Our framing stories.

We’re beginning to teach on the new exodus and the Kingdom of God. The exodus series will take us on a quick tour of Exodus (of course), Isaiah, the Synoptics, Romans, and 1 Corinthians. The Kingdom of God stuff is a bit more stationary, as we’ll spend almost all of our time hanging out in Luke before transitioning (seamlessly, I hope) to more exegetical exploration of Acts at Pentecost.

I don’t think that this motif approach will be easy – way more page-turning than sequential-exegetical and topical approaches. We’re going to be careful to use big enough chunks of text that it’s clear we’re keeping with authorial intent and the larger narrative of Scripture, not slipping into itsy-bitsy proof-texting.

But the flow over the next months will generally progress as follows: contrary to what you’ve heard, Jesus didn’t come to offer you the “status” of salvation so that your “immortal soul” is ready for an “other-worldly afterlife”. Rather, Jesus offers you liberation from sin and death – enabling you to walk in the Way. You’re saved for something. And that something is participation in the Kingdom of God, which isn’t the institutional church you often see in your cities, nor is it the “Jesus-is-my-homeboy” individualism that pervades our culture; the Kingdom is a third other, which is good news. It turns out the Kingdom of God is the primary thing Jesus taught about, so might want to approach it as our primary concern and not some passing fancy. How do we best participate in the Kingdom of God? By receiving, discerning, and obeying the work of the Holy Spirit. When we’re not about the Kingdom or when we aren’t actually led by the Spirit – that’s when things go awry, when a group of people merely tighten their fists around the title “Christian” while not actually functioning as the people of God.

So anyway, that’s what we’re up to at Paradigm. We’ll see what comes of it. But I’m excited to get into the gospel with everyone. Hopefully Seattle will be better off for it.