A fresh dialogue on the interface of Church and culture is going on over at Dan Kimball’s blog. Here was my response to his recent video on why non-believers like Jesus, but not the Church.One of the great challenges will be helping the Church to negotiate this change, Dan:
“Can the Church begin to read, listen to, and view extended perspectives with which they disagree?”
This element is not in popular Church culture today, for all the right reasons (i.e. historically - we have seen a need to protect ourselves and the purity of the message we bear).
Opening ourselves to this dialogue with the world, calling people to be who they were made to be (as opposed to a monologue, telling people who they are not and could only be if they will give our brand of discipleship a turn about the room), will radically change the Church.
I think that change will feel (as it does now) quite negative for a time, but in gravity’s pull, will come back around to a renewed strength we may not live to see.
To dialogue in this way will demand a stronger and larger Story than we are currently telling in our communities, but which N.T. Wright and other theologues are affirming in their works of hope.
The themes of New Creation, Resurrection and Eden Mission (my own phrase) stand with great strength among the most compassionate and tolerant ideologies of the day.
Our creational story is similar to many, but our redemptive story is not. We must cultivate a stronger redemptive Story in the Church for real engagement to take place.
The Story we are often presenting is simply not large enough, biblical enough, substantial enough, to penetrate the deepest feelings and thoughts of a postmodern world.
That God would “come bursting out of the center of the maze” and express Himself through one tribe of the human race, the Jews, is indeed both a joyful possibility and a stumbling block.
That the average Christian’s Story, told in a thousand ways and allowing truth to reveal itself, could speak these ideas into the heart of the world would be a significant part of the new day we are after.”
3 Comments
I agree that the Story we present is many times not big enough, not biblical enough, and not substantial enough to be effective in the present culture. Often we are seeing that the message of the church is so diluted that it mimics the myriad of self-help books that line the shelves of our bookstores. The Story we know to be true is distintive, radical, and life-changing. If people like Jesus, but not the church, we have failed at presenting the Story with accuracy.
I totally agree that this is something we have to do - to look at the larger story. It is so much easier to put everything into a place, into a category where we know what it is and therefore don’t have to question it.
But life is about questions. Even Jesus didn’t give a lot of straightforward answers! And it will be messy and ugly and scary at times, but love is that way.
It’s time for the church as a whole to stop worrying so much about what people think or what looks right or who is sinning and how they are doing it, and to be looking more at how we love people. If we trust the Holy Spirit then we can allow him to do the work of conviction.
Jesus tells us to love God and love our neighbor and that is a lot harder than it sounds. But we need to get in on that adventure and learn to love instead of learning to put things in a box.
Good comments, friends. Accuracy is elusive, but love can be well done by any person of any age - hence it’s vital importance to the Story God tells.
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