What If the Community Became Our Sanctuary ?

Since I have been back in Australia, I find myself looking at this country, looking at the church through the eyes of a missionary. I can’t help it and I can’t help wondering what is applicable from those experiences back here in Australia. I have a restlessness in my spirit because I think we have reached an edge place. How we respond to this margin in the next few years will determine whether the Kingdom of God gains or continues loosing significant ground in this country.  I have witnessed God working in amazing ways in the two-thirds world. It is time for those missional practices to come home. It is time for them to find local expression in the first world… in countries like Australia.

What impressed me in both Africa & South East Asia is that when you are in a place where the church isn’t, it makes you ask key missional questions. Questions like, ‘How am I prepared to change so I can connect the gospel with these people ?’ and ‘What am I prepared to do so that the Kingdom of God finds a meaningful & powerful expression in this place ?’, even, ‘How can I help people follow Jesus in ways that are natural, vital & life transforming – in both a personal and a communal sense ?’

It has been my observation and my personal experience that answering these questions has always involved a journey. This has been a movement away from what is familiar – a shift towards relearning the world from the perspective of the people I am serving. In both places our success has never been based upon our commitment to and the frequency of our team meetings, it has always involved deeply listening, being present and practically involved in the community.

If people were hungry – we found creative ways to feed them and develop more effective farming methods, if people were suffering from aids, that meant developing programs of support for those afflicted families, if people were troubled by demons, it meant prayer ministry, if people were troubled by their dreams it meant dream interpretation. We were always experimenting.  Failing forwards meant persevering with each other – finding ways to celebrate our differences. It meant praying – praying about everything – particularly all the obstacles and the resistance & sickness that seemed to come our way.

Always there is an emphasis on sensitivity, persistence, on generosity openness & intuition. Our weakness was our strength and our vulnerability guaranteed our dependence upon the Spirit of God. 

A few weeks ago I was reading a publication from Global Interaction, the missional org. of the Baptist Churches in Australia. They have as their mission statement, ‘Empowering communities to develop their own distinctive ways of following Jesus’. There is something very local and global about that statement that allows for difference and diversity.

Do you also notice there isn’t any mention of building great churches or even finding news ways of attracting people to come to church ? 

When the people won’t come into the church, the church must go to the people.

I keep finding myself wondering mischievous thoughts like what would happen if my local church choose a statement like this ? What sort of church or even network of churches might it become if the community became our sanctuary instead of our building ? 

Holy Bedlam

Luke 4 describes Jesus spending time in the desert, out in a place where people and civilisation were absent.

Out in the desert under the blazing sun, Jesus is distilled & concentrated so that all that’s left is a focused and very determined Son of God who finds the heart of what his mission will be.

Scriptures says that Jesus returns from the desert filled with the Spirit of God, and the very next Sabbath he stands up in his hometown Synagogue and reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”

What is Jesus saying here ?

Jesus is boldly declaring what is called the Great Reversal. Essentially Jesus is saying that the Spirit of Almighty God is leading him to engage in concrete actions that will fundamentally reverse the status quo.

In other parts of the Gospels this movement to reverse the vast litany of injustice in the world is called the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God refers to a future time when all peoples will be united in all their diversity in a kingdom of justice and righteousness and mercy. There will be peace and equal prosperity and even harmony among men and women. Essentially the Kingdom of God is a future time when the reign of God will be universally recognized and established among people.

The message of Jesus was that this future is has made its beginning. It is breaking into the world right now in the person of Jesus.

What impresses me about Jesus is that he walks out from the Synagogue, through the middle of a murderous crowd & does exactly what he says he will do. And as he wanders about teaching his gentle message of freedom and justice and reconciliation, while he is healing people and working miracles – Jesus attracts a vast following of people from all walks of life. At the same time Jesus deeply offends other people… people of power and influence, people whose position is best maintained by keeping things exactly as they are.

Now the outcome of Jesus pursuing his mission was that the religious establishment conspired to killed him. And the outcome of that conspiracy ended with Jesus being killed off on the Cross.

What makes this Great Reversal so potent is that 3 days later Jesus began appearing again to his closest followers.

And you know what, Jesus’ message didn’t change after he was resurrected. Instead of saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”, Jesus tells his followers, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon you because he has anointed you to bring good news to the poor. He has sent you to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”

“Go on, go and share this teaching with all people. Go make disciples of all nations… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…”.

By the time the Apostle Paul begins writing to the early Christian communities, this broad sweep of Jesus’ teaching has been distilled and concentrated again into a potent confession that propels would be disciples on their way. It says, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord & believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved.”

Here we have it… People who follow after Jesus, people who say Jesus is the main thing are people who deeply, truly, profoundly believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. As a result they begin to re-orientating their lives around the teachings of Jesus. They become participators in the Great Reversal. They seek to embody God’s justice and mercy and goodness. They group their lives together and they become God’s alternative community and the Risen Jesus is their ‘living middle’.

When people associate their lives together, when this Risen Jesus becomes the living middle, then it is possible for community to arise among them and the Kingdom of God spreads like a wildfire !

Living Middle…

Martin Buber says when people associate their lives together, when they gather around a living middle then community can arise mong them.

If we stubbornly chose to live our lives in close proximity to other people that means there will be times when they see us weak and vulnerable, times when they experience flashes, even prolonged periods of our darker shadow side, the side we like to hide.  As night follows day, there will be times when we mess up and make mistakes.

Life lived in the presence of others, if it is to be life that is lived truly will be glorious sometimes, yet often it will be inglorious even tedious. Sometimes it will be energising & synergistic, often it will be painful – even self-defeating. Sometimes there will be intense joy yet at other times there will be boredom- even sadness.

Yet here’s the thing. When a group of people make Jesus their rabbi, when Jesus becomes the living middle, then all that chaotic mix and clash of egos and different hard-edges opinions begins to become plastic and malleable and refined in the fires of love. What makes community possible is that they fail and they fail and they fail… The value of that failure is that they are failing forwards and they are doing it together.

And when people who associate their lives together don’t fail, they are magnificent in the quality of community that arises among them.  Together what they can achieve is just so much more ! They participate in the Great Reversal and they change the world. They are truly God’s alternative community who are establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth.

The Knife Edge Cutting Deeper

 “the Egyptians pursued them, all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, his chariot drivers and his army…”

The image we are given is of Pharaoh relentlessly bearing down. He is rapidly advancing towards the Israelites with his murderous host. The Israelites can see the dust and hear the thundering chariots and they are afraid. They can do nothing because they are trapped on the edge of a very large expanse of water. This is being caught between a rock and hard place… between the devil and the deep blue sea.

And as the Israelites totter on the edge of chaos, their courage evaporating by the second, Moses says to the people, “Do not be afraid, the Lord will fight for you… stand firm!” And immediately God speaks. He says to Moses, “Why do you stand there and cry out to me – go forward !”

Now logic would dictate that ‘going forward’ would mean the Israelites moving into battle against the Egyptians. Scripture says that the Israelites went out from Egypt prepared for battle. However that wasn’t what God had in mind. Instead, God intends this mass of newly redeemed slaves to move forward, out into the sea ! 

The Israelites camped on the edge of the sea is a group of people who have pitched their tents on the edge of chaos. A tremendous mass of newly redeemed slaves moving out into the sea is like Peter the wily fisherman stepping out of the boat and into the angry water to walk to Jesus… It is beyond logic, it is beyond wisdom. This is a holy paradox. Yet in such a place a man can walk on water and a teeming throng of people & their vast menagerie of animals can walk through the banked up water on ‘dry ground’ to the other side.

Like the waters of baptism the Israelites went into the Red Sea as slaves and emerged on the far shore as a community of God’s chosen pilgrim people. Most of the time after that, while they wandered around with God in the desert, they whinged and they whined and they were so barely faithful. Yet instead of standing still, they were now a community whose identity was being forged on the way.

Pure Oxygen

Recently, a friend of mine asked the question, “If you were going to use a passage from Scripture to describe the kind of community you think God would like us to be, what passage would you choose?”

I had to think for a bit but the longer I did, the more I liked the Exodus image of being a pilgrim people in the wilderness. Lawrence Kushner says the wilderness is a place that demands being open to the flow of life around you. It’s a place “that demands being honest with yourself, without regard to the cost in personal anxiety… a place that demands being present with all yourself… possessions cannot surround you… preconceptions cannot protect you… guilt can no longer place you safely in the past”.

There is a sense of weakness and vulnerability, of depending upon God alone that goes with this image. It’s an idea of community that says if we don’t work this out together we are going to die here. This basic survival orientation focuses attention outwards, demanding openness to newness & difference. It is a picture of a community of people who are working out their relationship with God ‘on the way’.

Mars Hill is a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan – who have chosen to locate their story in the deep channel of the Exodus story. This grand narrative of Scripture lends movement, intention & focus to their community. It is the idea of having a deep story that they can keep checking in with to make sure their unfolding communal story is located in a place where God alone is the living center.

Kushner says of dwelling in the wilderness, “That such a way of being would be like breathing pure oxygen.” That we would long to breathe air of such intensity & purity in the Church. Amen, amen & amen again.