“To the cultural Christian, there is nothing attractive about a small church that expects relational community, practices regular neighborhood service, highlights the cost of discipleship in every message, has a minimalist menu of programs to partake from, and gives most of its money away (precluding a “nice” facility and assorted bells and whistles).
So many of our brothers and sisters want the compartmentalized spirituality (putting in their religious time on Sunday mornings), the six steps to such-and-such messages, and the superficiality of apathy towards real community, that missional thinking and living, gospel-saturated and Jesus-centered messages, and the demands of relational intimacy freak them out. This stuff is a foreign language to them, and I see it constantly in the so-called “Christian South,” where “everyone” is a Christian, “everyone” goes to church. - The article that this quote comes from can be found here
I think this article took me another direction. It created a bit of ire in me actually. So I will apologize in advance for my lengthy and multiple posts, but I really feel compelled to respond in a way I haven’t felt compelled to in a while.
ReplyDeleteMissional; Attractional; Gospel Driven; Christian South; cultural Christianity; etc... Man! This article wears me down just trying to figure out what all the labels mean. There’s a truckload of memes to unpack in this article. My first thought was: What an awful lot of non-productive energy is being directed at labeling churches and defining how the Church should look/work/function, pitting one method/philosophy against another. Which leads me to my next thought: it’s no wonder people are turned off by Christianity. The author decries the creation of false dichotomies, yet creates a false tri-chotomy by throwing Gospel Driven in the mix with Missional/Attractional. "I defy false dichotomies. ... I pray and preach AND BLOG and try to live a life of witness so that my churched brothers and sisters will begin to crave the gospel and gospel-centrism in their congregations." Wow. What a loaded statement. If he is Gospel Centric, doesn’t that mean he would be praying, preaching, blogging and trying to live a life of witness to reach those that aren’t Christ followers? I don’t know this guy, other than what I briefly read on the blog site where he states he is a pastor of a church, but he sounded really pretentious to me as I read the article. Without saying it directly, he pretty much states that "I/we are doing it the right way". Which means the rest of us are doing it wrong (especially the “Christian South”), which probably means I am part of the group defined as Cultural Christianity, which is summarily dismissed in the article.
ReplyDeleteThe way I read it, Gospel Centrism defined in this article is just another list of activities and rules/regulations to be substituted for the original Old Testament master list, the Jewish halakhah. In this instance the author defines it as: "a small church that expects relational community, practices regular neighborhood service, highlights the cost of discipleship in every message, has a minimalist menu of programs to partake from, and gives most of its money away (precluding a "nice" facility and assorted bells and whistles)". Really? From my perspective, I think it is a whole lot simpler than what is being written in books and propounded on blog sites like this, which feels to me like gnawing on an old bone: lots of effort with little result.
I think it was captured very succinctly in a quote from an article I read today by Os Hillman: "The primary focus...(of the church)... has been teaching and discipleship (plug in your ‘model’ here) instead of the development of a personal and intimate relationship with God. This has resulted in a form of religion, but one without power." The form of religion. A sham in other words: hollow activity that doesn’t produce life. This has been the bane of our faith since the beginning. It’s not, as David Wayne is quoted in the article, “the people of God forget or jettison their identity as redeemed people”, it’s that they chose never to enter in to an intimate relationship with God. This is the issue: Relationship; intimacy with Father God.
Christ addressed this when he quoted Isaiah 29:13 in Matthew 15:8: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” In Isaiah the verse goes on to say: “Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.” Sounds a lot like when people use the terms “missional/attractional/Gospel driven model” of doing church, doesn’t it? Merely human rules they have been taught (or are teaching).
I have a dear friend, Stan. But we weren’t always friends. In fact, for a greater portion of my life, I didn’t even know he existed. I first met Stan through another dear friend, Cameron. Cameron knew Stan. I didn’t. When I would spend time with Cameron, I often got the opportunity to spend some time with Stan, usually in the presence of Cameron, but then eventually, as we got to know each other, it would just be Stan and I. Our relationship grew over time. We are dear friends now. He has shared his concerns/his heart with me. Those concerns/matters of the heart have affected me and have at times compelled me to act on them.
ReplyDeleteI share this because this is such a simple, yet clear picture of how I believe Christianity works when it is Jesus centric, which is to say, about our relationship with God. We get to know God intimately, His heart infecting and changing ours, and we respond to life out of that relationship. If we are blessed, we are introduced, relationally, to Jesus by someone who knows him. We spend time with that person, who is filled with the Spirit and is intimate with Jesus, and we in turn become more intimate with the Father. As a result of this intimacy, the external cultural markers that everyone seems to be so focused on, occurs naturally. (Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10; Hebrews 10:16—“This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”) God does it and it occurs naturally, relationally. Man substitutes a model of activity, in place of relationship with God and we are left with religious activity, which is not compelling to anyone, and for most not worth sharing.
I don’t profess to have intimacy with God down. But I do know I hunger for more of God than I have now, and I struggle over my personal failures in this area. In the words of U2- I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I look around and I don’t know many people who are intimate with God. Oh they know a great deal about God, or so it seems. But there is no relational depth there. Christ Jesus said: I came that they might have life, and have it to the full. That’s the real marker that is the entire gospel and is at once both attractional and missional: an intimate relationship with the Eternal God that yields a life to the full; that God can use to draw others to Himself.
My take away is this: pray/beg/beseech God that you “may know Him, and the power of His resurrection”. The sharing of the Gospel (good news) is simple: Jesus Christ offers forgiveness for our sins (freedom), and wants you to know Him: Father, Son and Spirit(meaningful relationship). And you can't share that unless know Him, which is not to be confused with knowing about Him, which is why I think so many, myself included, are afraid to share Jesus, and why so many church leaders fail.
Wow Pete, you were riled up. You may need to paste these responses on Jared Wilson's blog instead of ours. I was just looking for how the two quotes related to yesterdays readings. And for the record, I think Jared is one of the "good guys." He leads a band of Christ-followers much like ours who are trying to live out the gospel in relationship and mission. I feel bad that he hit you the way he did.
ReplyDeleteSorry. I got lost in the article and lost focus on the original topic.
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