Lately my mind and heart have been abuzz with the questions of what it means to be church. What does it mean to really live the Good News? How can the message of Jesus be communicated most effectively through his followers? How do we embrace the diversity that God created in order to make our body a more accurate and vibrant reflection of the Trinity? And possibly the most important questions of all, are we asking these questions and evaluating ourselves in light of Christ, or are we remaining stagnant?
It seems that disappointment in the church is most often the catalyst to conversations around these questions. I am grateful that I am not the only one of my friends here in Church of the Saviour that is willing to ask hard questions and have open dialogue about them. I need those conversations to tell me that I'm not alone, we are living in the vision of God's kingdom now and coming. The conversations don't always lead to answers, in fact, they often lead to more questions. But those conversations, along with time spent listening to God on the matter of his church, those things are the most valuable spaces to me right now. In my attempts to be creative in the Spirit, I get frustrated at my own and others inabilities to know what is the right thing to do and do it. Then instead of trusting God more, I put more emphasis on myself and what I can or should do.
For the most part at the moment, my thoughts are centered around the sustainability of a any one church community over extended periods of time. That leads me to question whether sustainability can happen without diversity. Without diversity, the church dies when the old guard dies. With diversity, there is always room for new expressions of our faith and a current that allows change in the structures of the community.
This touches on the communication of the church's message of the good news of God's kingdom. Right now I am particularly discouraged because I find that CoS has a good understanding of the call to an life of inward/outward tension that encourages deep personal growth in Christ and a missional expression of that spirituality in the world. The main issue that I see is that the church has a hard time communicating that message. I feel like the church is speaking a different language than much of the world around it. Those who are already attuned to that message can sift through the garble to find it. But what about people who can't get past the foreign language to hear the message? If we want to have a diverse body of believers in the image of God and to best do God's work in the world, then we need to have a church that reflects that richness of cultural language so that everyone can hear the good news.
This is where the dichotomy of cultural relevance and integrity of message gets dicey. We don't want to be culturally relevant for relevance sake - for the cool factor or for the diversity factor. Those things just make us self-righteous that our "style" is better than another's. We want to be culturally relevant so that the message of Christ can be understood by all.
I am encouraged, though, that Jesus' example gives us a simple path to follow. Once we're on that path (and continually checking to make sure we are staying on it) we can trust that God will use that for his glory and his in-breaking kingdom. This scripture passage about the very beginning of Jesus' ministry has been especially helpful for me to calm down and gain perspective: "Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him." (Matthew 4:23-25) In this description of Jesus' ministry, I see that the example we are to follow is to share the good news (teaching and proclaiming) and to live the good news (healing and ministering to pain). If I can simplify my questions down to whether the church is doing those two things well, then maybe I can seek ways to strengthen the current initiatives and/or prune branches that are not bearing fruit and/or find creative new ways to follow Christ's example of sharing and healing.
No comments:
Post a Comment