I was in Boston last week for the Blue Ocean Summit. This is a conference for faith leaders who are thinking differently about the whole enterprise of Church and Secular Culture. What I love about this Summit every year is the connection with other, like-minded people. And the clincher? They are all brilliant!! Participants included sociologists, physicists, theologians, philosophers, film-makers, authors, doctors, and business leaders, all seeking how to re-envision faith for a postmodern, secular culture. They even let in a few regular guys like me. The collegiality and love was incredible. People sincerely care about one another.
I know this whole re-envisioning thing has been tried before in the Jesus People, the Vineyard Churches, the Emergent Movement, house churches, non-church churches, and countless other approaches. However, I love the fact that Blue Ocean is not Stage 3 rebellion against church. I have seen a lot of that in all of the other efforts of rethinking church. Most of them are defined by "not being conservative church". That's all fine and good, and I wholeheartedly agree with 99% of their issues with traditional church. In my desire to be more mystical and stage 4 in my faith, I see some very precious things in our tradition. I am not seeing throwing away all things church as valuable. Far too many good and valuable aspects of our faith tradition would be lost.
The other problem is that I have no desire to be defined by religion. Religion is a cancer. If we are completely immersed in religion and religious activity or, at the other end, we are doing everything we can to reject that worldview, we are in bondage to religion and defined by it. Religion is like any other sin (and, yes, I include religion and Christianity in the category of sin). If we obsess about avoiding a particular sin, and focus on steering our lives away from that sin, we are totally controlled and dominated by that sin. We are living in that sin. In other words, we cannot define ourselves by what we are not. That is a negative reality, and it is nothingness. We need to be defined by what we are moving toward. In my case, I want to be defined by Jesus. In this understanding, which is a fairly consistent take with centered set thinking, I can't have it both ways. Being defined by Jesus costs me everything. There is no room for anything else. So, even my desire to be seen as "non-religious" is a distraction and a negative reality, compared to my true definition and identity in Jesus. It takes me away from who I am meant to be. It fogs everything up.
How can I call religion and Christianity a cancer, right after affirming the beauty of the tradition of church? Well, I can't, if I am a stage 2, rules-based Christian or a stage 3, rebellious Christian. It seems to me that being a Christian, defined by Christianity, requires me to be either stage 2 or stage 3. I have to either be absolutely sold out for all the stuff of Christianity: the religious doctrine, dogma, rules, morality, cultural trappings, ordinations, creeds, and behaviors, or I have to absolutely reject all of those things and contend for my faith in maintaining a spirit of rejection. If I take a half-way stand as a Christian, rejecting some parts and accepting others, I am luke-warm, mediocre, and hypocritical. I am not on solid ground. But the Church is not equal to religion, just as Jesus is not equal to Christianity. Jesus came to start the Church, the medium through which he would establish his Kingdom on earth. He did not come to start a new religion. He did not come to reform Judaism, as many have postulated. I have to actually rephrase that a bit. He didn't even come to start the Church. He came to set us free and to give us life to the full. He established the Church as the means to spread that message of life and hope through the world.
It was never in the vision of Jesus for the Church to become religion. As soon as it did, after Constantine blessed it and declared it the official religion of the Empire of Rome, the Church became distracted and lost. Jesus was no longer the center. Maintaining power and authority in the world became the focus. Thus, a religion was born, and the true mission of setting the captives free and making disciples was lost. Institutionalization means death. The earth-shattering power of the dynamic, transformative, prophetic, and revolutionary voice of the People of God gave way to the political and empirical machinations of the systemic evil of Institution. Beginning with the establishment of Christianity as Religion, doctrine needed to be invented, established as absolute truth, and staunchly defended. If following Jesus costs us everything, then how can we keep feeding the machine of religion? That machine has an insatiable appetite. It also demands all of us. Unfortunately, unlike Jesus, Religion wants all of us for consumption. Jesus wants all of us for redemption, blessing, and restoration. I see Jesus loving the Church, and I see his hatred for Religion. In the absence of other, updated commands, it seems that Jesus has not given up on the Church. I just think he wants it back. He wants to clear the slime of Religion off of it, and he wants to redeem, bless, and restore the Church. How do I know this? Because we ARE the Church. By working those miracles in us, Jesus, by definition, is also working those in the Church.
Jesus saw Religion as a mountain in the way of God's plan to renew God's connection with the People. He flipped over tables in the Temple. He cursed the entire Sacrificial System, upon which the vast majority of the 613 Laws were based. He cursed the Temple, declared it dead, and warned of its future destruction in 70AD. He was standing by the Temple, when he told his disciples that if they had but faith the size of a mustard seed, they can order that mountain to move, and it will be so. Religion is a mountain that requires demolition and removal. It is not the way to God. You can work a religion perfectly, and it has no ability to get you even one millimeter closer to God. Jesus is the way - the only way. Jesus is the truth - the only truth. Jesus is the life - the only life. All else is distraction and folly.
So, as a senior pastor of a church, I have been really struggling lately. The Church needs redemption. This, again, is an outflow of our fragmented identity. We are desperately grasping at straws for definition. Religion is simply such an attempt, and it is a symptom of hearts without meaning, direction, identity, and hope. My struggle is in figuring out how I can be part of that redemption, rather than part of the problem.
When I went to Boston, and I was interacting with bright and hopeful leaders, in an incredible mix of cultures, races, and backgrounds, all focused on moving toward Jesus, I experienced CHURCH. I was thinking at the time that if we were to vote this group in as President of the United States, we would still have our AAA credit rating. We would have no deficit or debt. People in our country would not be hungry or lack medical care. We would not be depleting our natural resources. And, we would be able to turn our attention to caring for other nations, without converting them to Christianity, Capitalism, or any other religions. We would be able to love them as Jesus does. That is the answer to all of our issues. Then, all the rich, Tea Party Individualists (another religion), could move to a country where Capitalism is embraced and is working. Good luck finding that. They can find and befriend a real unicorn as well! I digress. The fatal flaw of my plan would be the same as with Constantine, however. As soon as that group was put in power, they would become institutionalized. The Blue Ocean conversation and idea would become a machine of its own, requiring feeding.
All of this hit me, when Dave Schmelzer, a pastor, author, and founder of Blue Ocean, Inc., handed out a model for involvement with Blue Ocean. It was a baseball diamond, like that of Rick Warren at Saddleback Church. I found myself immediately reacting. Then, when I saw that the diamond didn't do a very good job of actually defining Blue Ocean, I calmed down. People need to be defined by Jesus. We desperately need identity and to be better defined by the center of our set. When ideas and conversations become defined, they become religious and institutional. This diverse assembly of people was already unified in our center, which is Jesus. Any further definition will take away some of our dynamic reality. The New Testament writers warned of a One World Religion. There is a radio station in Green Bay that is convinced that just about everyone, except the Berean Baptists, is leading people into this One World Religion of the Antichrist. I agree that One World Religion would be bad, but only because it is a religion. However, the Bible writers were not warning us of a person. They were warning us of institutionalization. My local Christian radio station doesn't realize that they are as guilty of following the spirit of the antichrist as the pluralistic humanists they fear. Antichrist is not a specific world leader or single person. It is anything we worship instead of Jesus. Religion demands our worship. Only Jesus is worthy of it.
My struggle is the same as it has always been, only magnified this time. How, as a senior pastor of a church, can I still experience the fullness of Church (the People of God gathered together and doing life together, living completely free, and spurring one another toward Jesus, the only absolute Truth), without the institutional crap that completely covers it? I have stopped calling myself a Christian. I have no investment in that term or its accompanying definitions at all. I call myself a friend, disciple, and student of Jesus. But is that enough? I want to have church with all of those people at Blue Ocean. I want everyone in my church now to see what's possible. But is it a tease? It was awesome being all together in meals, conversations, respectful debates, teaching, worship, drinking beer, prayer, and loving one another. All of us, completely diverse and remarkably unique, still found unity in the center of our lives: Jesus. No one discussed the size of our churches, the doctrine we are working through, the sins we confront in others, or who we hope will be the next National Director of the Vineyard Churches. We were all relieved to just talk about real, deep, and abiding realities of our lives as leaders that centered on Jesus. It was utopic.
However, God seems to always stop us from pitching our tents on the mountain of glory and to head back down. As we all departed for home, I realized that even our churches that are models of Blue Ocean faith are still not fully reflections of the Kingdom, standing in stark contrast to the gathering we just enjoyed. Our churches tend to be frighteningly homogeneous. Our African-American pastors went back home to mostly black churches. Our white pastors went home to face their mostly white congregations. We have people in our churches who are stage 2 and just haven't yet realized how much they hate us as leaders. We have a lot of stage 3 people, who like us simply because their parents would hate us. We still get put in positions, as Evangelical Pastors, to look at the gross, Capitalistic abomination that is American Evangelicalism, and somehow paint it as a bunch of lovable misfits, when it is actually a force of oppressive power and anti-Gospel, political deception.
Here's my point. Can I just follow Jesus as a leader in the Church, when the Church is so covered over by Christianity? As I get healthier, I am more and more convicted that Jesus is calling me to full integration. I have to be true to who I am in Him. When everything about being a pastor is compromise (unless I shut up and adopt the Religious rhetoric as true), can I still be that, while effectively working for change and reform? Am I even positioned to be effective? This is all still about identity. When dealing with this, does a healthy leader keep leading, even when to do so feels like a violation of self?
More on this later...
Recent Comments