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THE CHURCH (9) – Real Church 1.3

The vital question is… by what criterion are we to judge that the Church is now headed in the right direction?
Answering first in the negative, Kung comments, …the Church is not on the right path so long as it adapts itself to the present; nor is it on the right path as long as it holds fast to the past. 
How do we know the Church is on the right path? — … the Church is headed in the right direction when, whatever the age in which it lives, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is its criterion..

This post is mostly a stream of consciousness regarding “How do we know the church is on the right path?”. I prefer “How do we know the church is on the wrong path?”. I am much better at seeing what is wrong than what is right. As I continue to ponder, I’m finding a lot of threads to pull. The church tapestry I created over many years is unraveling.

This quote from Kung cited earlier is an example of one those threads: “… the salvific act in Jesus Christ is the origin of the Church; but it is more than the starting point or the first phase of its history, it is something which at any given time determine the whole history of the Church and defines its essential nature.”
The restoration movement, which is my heritage, marked the Day of Pentecost as the origin of the church. The NT book of Acts was the blueprint for the church, particularly 2:38-47. ( I wrote a post about my church heritage. You can read it HERE.) The Day of Pentecost as the church’s origin shaped our ecclesiology profoundly. For example, the book of acts was the primary resource for teaching and preaching. The rest of New Testament was relevant but clearly secondary. The four Gospels were admired but were mostly for devotional reading while the important work was done in the instruction manual, Acts, and the apostle Paul’s epistles. Cornerstones of true church’s buildings were engraved with “Established AD 33″. The Old Testament was irrelevant to ecclesiology. I remember the distribution of handy little —”The New Testament and Psalms ” — Bibles. The endgame was getting church right, everything else became a means to that end.

Perhaps you find what I described above as troubling as I do. However, I suggest that premise is widely held in western Christianity and shapes perceptions about what church is and should look like. There are many variations but at the core is Pentecost. It seems to me, more than ever, the endgame is getting church right. It is for that reason, I find Kung’s declaration : — “…the Church is headed in the right direction when, whatever the age in which it lives, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is its criterion.” — an important shift from getting church “right” to embracing the origin of the church as “God’s salvific act in Jesus Christ”, a concrete reality in which the essence of Church — real church is found.

It is difficult, maybe impossible, to set aside preconceived notions of church and reimagine church. Perhaps some Sunday school “desert island” speculation could be helpful.

What if ?, there were 200 God believers on a desert island, born and raised with no contact with the outside world, except for a bottle that washed up on the beach which contained the following note:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life; he has rescued you from the dominion of darkness and brought you all into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
Limited to a single statement of God’s salvific act in his Son, what would their ecclesiology be?
As with most “desert island” questions, its improbably tempts one to discount any relevance, but if the origin of the church is God’s salvific act in Jesus Christ, it seems to be a good starting point on the path to discovering real church.

At this point, I say, with reasonable confidence, that their life and community would be characterized primarily by what Good News produces — gratitude .

Posts to follow will continue exploring ecclesiology of “The Good News in a Bottle Church”. Creative insights are welcome. Critiques also.

Still on the journey.

So Much to Think About

If we only change because our circumstances change, then who is our God?
Matt Redmond

Rebecca Manley Pippert writes,
“Our problem in evangelism is not that we don’t have enough information—it is that we don’t know how to be ourselves. We forget we are called to be witnesses to what we have seen and know, not to what we don’t know. The key on our part is authenticity and obedience, not a doctorate in theology.”

I need to know another person’s story so well that I can identify all the ways I see God at work in their lives, even without them noticing.
Michael Frost

Good News
The message of “Good News” is this: You are loved. You are unique. You are free. You are on the way. You are going somewhere. Your life has meaning. That is all grounded in the experience and the knowledge and the reality of the unconditional love of God. This is what we mean by being “saved.”
Richard Rohr

Truthiness
in October 2005, Stephen Colbert defined “truthiness.” What matters, he argued in a hilarious imitation of a hard-charging right-wing television pundit, isn’t whether some statement about the world is true; it’s whether it feels true.

Cognitive Dissonance
We don’t like to live in the tension between thought and action, or between contradictory thoughts. There’s even evidence that cognitive dissonance can sometimes be so profound that it creates physical discomfort. So we deal with the tension. We can change the thought to match the behavior. We can change the behavior to match the thought. We can add thoughts or rationalizations to resolve the tension. Or, we can simply trivialize the tension and decide that it’s so insignificant that it doesn’t really matter. 

Knowledge
…there is a difference between knowledge “on ice” and knowledge “on fire.” For many Christians, their belief is often just knowledge “on ice,” not experiential, firsthand knowledge, which is knowledge “on fire.” Even though we call them both faith, there is a difference between intellectual belief and real trust. There is a difference between talking about transformation and God’s love and stepping out in confidence to live a loving life. Only the second is biblical faith: when our walk matches our talk.
Richard Rohr

Guilt & Shame
The language of guilt isolates responsibility for a single event; the language of shame assumes that you are now that event waiting to be visited upon all. Guilt suggests punishment or restitution; shame declares that no matter what you might do, you will always be that person.
Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the front porch
The most universal expression of all is a smile, which is rather a nice thought. No society has ever been found that doesn’t respond to smiles in the same way. True smiles are brief—between two-thirds of a second and four seconds. That’s why a held smile begins to look menacing. A true smile is the one expression that we cannot fake.
The Body – Bill Bryson


Still on the Journey

THE CHURCH (8) – Real Church 1.2

…real church is not adapting to the present nor is it holding to the past — now all I need to do to find real church whose criterion is the Gospel of Jesus Christ! 
In the next post, I intend to wrestle with what a church looks like whose criterion is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Often when I am thinking and writing about a particular thread, a related post, article and/or reference mysteriously appears. Today was one of those occasions. With the ink barely dry on my previous Real Church post , Michael Frost’s post entitled “If Jesus planted a church, what would it look like?” hit my in-box.
He addresses directly the challenge to wrestle with what a church looks like whose criterion is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. His insights provide an excellent starting point for further conversation. I encourage you to read his entire post.

I intend to incorporate his thoughts as I continue to pursue real church. Here’s a sample:

Here’s what the church that Jesus built looks like – a people who acknowledge him as their king, offering all of their lives under his authority, working on living out this constellation of values:

This is not the first time Michael Frost has dropped into my life unexpectedly. Several decades ago, I discovered he and Alan Hirst were conducting a seminar on their book “The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church”. Attending their seminar and reading the book was a significant influence in the development of my evolving ecclesiology. It is good to hear from Michael again.

Still on the journey