LIVING JOYFULLY IN THE TENSION

Once a month our staff meets in a place called South Village, where we step outside of our weekly agenda and talk about the course of the future. We try to pay attention to trends, voices, books that we should be reading, readings that shake us. I like how Kafka once put it: “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?” A book, as he puts it, “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Some recent reads fit that category, including Sittser’s Water from a Deep Well (guaranteed to deepen your soul); excerpts from Barna and Viola’s new book, Pagan Christianity (guaranteed to make some of you very angry); a reread of Taylor’s Leaving Church, a memoir of her ministry and decision to leave the pastorate for the academy (guaranteed to unsettle some in ministry); The Shack, a fictional piece of one confronting God through human tragedy (certain to blow one’s imagination when it comes to the person of God).

In our time yesterday, recent readings and re-readings encouraged me to rethink, along with our staff, just what we are trying to be as a church. I have used such words as “Emertional” in other blogs to talk about the place we have aimed the course of our church. That is, a course in which we find ourselves on neither side, be it emergent or institutional church. Honestly, in many books, I cannot find voices that describe who we are.

We certainly want nothing to do with institutional, if by the definition it means we are a church molded by an ancient Christendom, culturally respectable at any cost, suburban, mainstream, forming greater and greater rigidity (I really resent voices that put all of us in churches over ten years in the same category). Nor are we interested in trying to appear emergent or hip because we have chosen a particular sound or expression over another, ancient over present, etc. Frankly, we couldn’t if we wanted to.

Like others (how many I have no idea), we live in this tension—finding ourselves somewhere between the following--

      -liquid vs solid

      -informal vs formal

      -fluid vs institutional

      -community vs buildings

      -egalitarian vs hierarchical

      -dialogical vs monological

      -incarnational vs attractional

      -follower vs consumer

      -community vs audience

      -image vs word

      -younger vs older

      -post modern vs modern

Each, it seems to me, needs the other. Each must find a way to live with the other. The question we keep asking ourselves is this—is it possible? Can a younger generation of Jesus followers do ministry together with boomers and those older? Maybe the better question is—will they? Can we take the wineskins necessary for the fermenting wine (the necessary structures, policies, facilities, programs, staffing, etc through which Jesus works) and keep them from becoming hard and brittle? How do we take advantage of the things that make an institution, without becoming institutional? How do we keep pressing forward without ever arriving, knowing that atrophy begins at the highest point? Can we celebrate the past, while aiming the church towards its best years yet? Can we become larger, while at the same time growing smaller? Can we expand our facilities to do ministry, while stressing issues of community, justice, movement?

Exiles seems to be a pretty popular phrase to describe those outside of the existing church (Frost, Brueggemann, etc). I wonder if churches like ours are becoming the real exiles—that sometimes seem to feel a bit homeless in the larger landscape.

Comments

[Dustin]

"Can a younger generation of Jesus followers do ministry together with boomers and those older?"

I think that reversing the question sheds some good light as well "Can the boomers and those older do ministry with a younger generation of Jesus followers?"

I've experienced the tension going both ways. I feel like both groups have a tendency to write each other off.

[mike mcmullin]

Great post. Sometimes we shed that tension for comfort and perhaps God wants us to stay uncomfortable, unsettled.

[JD]

I agree McMullin, not entirely but very much so. I'm not sure he wants us to always be that way but I believe he does much of the time. If we settle into a comfort zone with our Christianity we have problems reaching people but at times we need to feel comfort before we can venture, because secuirty is important to God as well.

[Randy Ehle]

John, I appreciate - no, I seriously praise God for - your willingness and desire to live in this area of great tension. Would that more followers of Christ would ask the questions you do.

Here's another question to ponder: how do Jesus' words about putting new wine into new wineskins, not old, relate to this tension between (for lack of better terms) older churches and newer churches?

And another book to consider - The Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne. This is one of the few "rock your world" books I have read. Many will write it off as the musings of a left-field radical (a big focus is on economics: communal living, redistribution of wealth, the responsibility of "rich" believers to care for and share with "poor" believers, etc.). I prefer to describe it as the musings of one who would actually have us believe that we should take Jesus seriously! If you dare read Claiborne's book, read it with these questions in mind: Did Jesus intend for us to take him seriously (e.g., when he said to sell your possessions and give to the poor, Luke 12)? What would it look like for me to take Jesus seriously with statements like that?

[mike mcmullin]

I'll add "for a season" to my comment. We have seasons when we are meant to be in the tension.