Do We Get the Gathering?

 When you hear the word ‘church’, what’s the immediate picture that comes into view?

“Ecclesia” – a common Greek word referring to periodic political gatherings, was used to describe something about the new movement of Christians when they started to gather.  It has been translated as ‘church’, and has morphed from that sense of gathering periodically for a purpose, to describing the organizational expression of that gathering.  

When pastors call you back to ‘church’ in their post-pandemic effort to repopulate the pew, and when they say ‘you can’t love Jesus and not love the ‘church’, it may have a lot more to do about coming back to the ‘big house’, to the regular weekly ‘worship’ service, to the financial support and volunteer positions that need to be filled, than it does to the principle of being gathered around the purpose for which we exist. I am pushing buttons here, but please read on...

What is that purpose?  Jesus zeroed in on this when responding to a question about the most important commandment.  Read the exchange in Mark 12.  It was a question many people have: “What constitutes the core of faith, of devotion to God”?  The questioner wanted to know what they really needed to do if they were to be truly following God.  Jesus revealed the profound simplicity of what it means to live according to the Kingdom of God:  Love God fully, and equally so love your neighbour as you love yourself.  That’s it.  Jesus emphasized this is a more intimate proximity to the purposes of God for us than all our rituals, practices, programs and other accoutrements of our faith(s).

For the current expression of the ecclesia, the gathering called the church, the biggest question then becomes:  “What of your offerings & sacrifices, your services, programs, practices and organizational expressions, actually reveal and turn people toward loving God AND their neighbour?

I want to be careful not to project my own thoughts and experiences as universal, but I am having so many conversations with friends, colleagues, leaders, and believers outside my usual circles, who are deeply struggling with the current expression of church.  Call it what you want – a post pandemic malaise, apathy or laziness – but I think it’s critical to explore this at a deeper level.  Could this not be a movement among true followers who are asking themselves whether the very essence of their faith, loving God and loving their neighbour, is being facilitated, enhanced and enabled by their ‘ecclesia’?

We believe the Holy Spirit of God perpetually illuminates the truth of God to the world.  How we gather right now has not always had this form.  What we believe about God, Christ and the Kingdom has not always been understood as we know it now.  There is a constant metamorphosis to our personal and collective encounters with God.

What is the Spirit illuminating right now to you personally, and to you as a leader of a ‘church’?  

The World is Too Loud

I am emerging out of a period of blogging silence.  For the last while I have been in an unplanned, unforced season of quiet. Some of that was due to my waiting for personal clarity on aspects of my vocational and spiritual life.  I was reflective, but just couldn’t write it down for some reason. Sometimes, it’s just good to be silent and sit – especially for those of us who like to comment on things, stir the pot, and challenge conventions.

It’s a pretty loud world out there. The planet is a cacophony of crises.  There’s constant competition for minds, hearts and money.  How about the loud cheering from the opposite poles of political ideologies?   I have tinnitus – but these sounds are even more annoying!

There’s another noise that aggravates me.

I am a follower of the Jesus Way, desiring to reflect and demonstrate how His way of life makes us more authentically human, and our world a healthier, more abundant place.  Yet the noise around Christianity-as-religion largely drowns out that message.  When I try to put myself in the place of an outside observer looking into whether Christianity ‘works’ or not, I don’t think I’d join up.  Public expressions of my faith/religion are too often issue-based, politically motivated and sometimes just outright hateful and exclusive. There’s a definite leaning toward ‘otherness’ rather than embrace, towards pointing out the darkness rather than shining a light into it, and towards outreach/mission to the world rather than a participating in and with the world to make it a better place.

Now in the US (and it’s bleeding into Canada), there is an unabashed political movement toward Christian nationalism that completely bypasses the Grand Story of God for humanity & the planet.  It is co-opting Christianity as a political platform for narrow and often distinctly un-Christ like ends.  The noise is deafening.

So what do we do – send out a louder, more positive message to counteract all this?? 

There’s a more powerful, more quiet way.   It’s Jesus’ way, and is more silent that you may have been led to believe if you are listening to public Christian rhetoric.  Jesus the Christ isn’t competing to be heard.  He is silently, quietly and powerfully present (in and through us as His representatives), to bring hope and change.  He brings justice and abundance to the world without raising His voice, without loud speeches & demonstrations.  Rather, He demonstrates persistent acts of gentle love and justice.  In a passage in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 12, verses 14-21, Jesus is described as one who is not quarrelsome, and whose voice is not heard yelling in the streets! He is one who will carefully handle a broken reed so that it isn’t further damaged, and will keep a smoldering wick going so its light doesn’t burn out.  This is a gentle, silent and truly transformative power, and we are to act in this Way.

I am a fan of Robert Service’s poem The Call of the Wild because it ‘places’ us humans in the context of Creation so that we humble ourselves in its magnificence.  One line in particular applies to what I have been saying here, and has implications for how real change happens in this world.  Change for the good is not ultimately reliant on government programs, grand social contracts & movements, public or private initiatives or religious efforts.  These are all helpful, but it’s “The simple things, the true things, the silent men (and women) who do things…” that is the unseen, underlying power for transformation.

Be quietly UN-noticeable.  It will truly change the world.

Harv Matchullis

A Pull Toward the Light

Had friends over for a dinner last night.  A welcome return to this form of hospitality we have missed during the pandemic. 

It was a challenging night.  Both are suffering.  One with memory loss.  The other with chronic pain.   Not how they envisioned life for themselves. The dinner conversation had much to do with suffering and our experience (or not) of God in our pain.  More so, it was an acknowledgement that our faith has not grown easier as we age as much as it has become more mysterious and yet, strangely real.

Suffering deeply challenges and changes our comfortable and packaged concepts of the Divine.  In suffering we do not experience a God who acts according to our expectations, hopes, or calculations.  God is frustratingly close and far, intimate and distant, comforting and seemingly callous, with us and against us.  Some eventually abandon God.  Yet some grow deeper.  Why deeper in the face of such struggle to understand? I believe it is because the faith we have, if we have it, is a gift.  God draws us.  

Even in the dark there is a pull toward the light.  Even during God’s silence, as I cry out in pain and frustration, is that not the evidence of a gift in action? Why would I otherwise choose to lash out to the God I feel has abandoned me? To leave God, to fully abandon any conversation or argument, is to be truly alone in this universe.  That is the most frightening suffering of all. 

Have we lost the plot?

Love is the greatest sign and characteristic of Christians according to Christ, their namesake.  Yet looking around at some public displays of Christianity lately, you simply have to ask the question, along with the Black Eyed Peas so long ago:  “Where is the Love?” 

Much of society views Christians as unloving, irrelevant, impractical, arrogant, and narrow.  Can you blame them?  “Christ” has been co-opted to advance political agendas, bully the outsider, judge the ‘other’, and justify positions, statements and protests on just about anything.  Tragically many also use Christ as a means to power-up over others and exert superiority over them, including toward their fellow Christians.  There’s a warped theology-of-sorts behind that which I won’t get into here, but it exists and it shows.

Some Christians have lost the plot.

So many Scriptures, like 1 Corinthians 13, repudiate the arrogant and unloving posture of Christians.  Without love, we are like noisy gongs and clanging symbols – noticed, but unpleasant and without a harmony of meaning.  Christ often speaks to the fact that it is not grand displays of our version of spirituality and moral values that draw people to the love of God (see Matthew 6:5).  Instead it’s the quiet, localized and faithful expressions of love that makes the difference.

Don’t think that God needs you to ‘defend the faith’.  Don’t believe the rhetoric that you have to go public or viral with your faith in order to ‘make’ society or individuals conform to Christian principles.  Christ doesn’t give you a bully pulpit. He needs none of that.  He’s  chosen, as Robert Louis Stevenson expresses in The Call of the Wild, “the simple things, the true things, the silent men (and women) who do things” to eventually change lives.  The small things, like being yeast, seed, salt and light eventually change the environment in which they are scattered.

Eugene Petersen

Put down your placards. Silence your horns. Stop separating yourself from ‘them’. The thing we are to do is to come alongside others and love - unequivocally. That’s how the world will know we are Christians. But it’s not even our ‘reputation’ as Christians that is the important thing here. Since love is the very character of God, it is through demonstrating that love that the world is changed into the design God had for it from the beginning.

It’s not about your design for what this world should be.  It’s about God’s.  You won’t see that happen without doing it His way – the way of love.  

The Gospel Story has one plot - the Love of God.  Don't lose it. 

Melancholy in the Middle

 

 

There’s a relentless sadness in my soul.  I wish I could shake it and be like some friends I know who seem to always express eternal optimism.  Their version of faith in God seems to protect them from sadness and discontent.  I am not there.  Wish I could belt out the worship songs like “Good, Good Father” with conviction.  But then the news of the world, the marriage break up of my neighbour, makes me choke back those words and wonder.  

 

Perhaps it’s just me.  If you’ve read my blogs you know I have an apostolic, prophetic bent.  It’s an orientation that requires me to manage my perspective ‘by faith’ to ensure I don’t descend into depression or cynicism. However, in truth I am pained by the gap between what is possible and what is, between the deep (potential) reach of the gospel into systems, neighbourhoods and relationships, and the limited impact we as an organized church seem to effect on society.  Perhaps my sadness comes because I am in the final phase of my career and have become jaded and cynical. Perhaps the pandemic has overwhelmed my outlook, making me incapable of sustained hope.  Perhaps I am dangerously close to not giving a damn anymore.  Let someone else; let another generation take up the angst and the action. 

Trying to maintain hope of God’s Kingdom promises amid the brokenness and pain of this world is a tough gig.  We all live in between goodness and brokenness, between hope and reality.  In the middle ground is sadness and melancholy. 

I remind myself that this emotion is NOT a sign of lack of trust in God.   Nor is it a negative character quality.  In fact, it’s an utterly human response to the gap between the promised abundant life of God’s Kingdom and the lived-in reality we face on earth.  If we choose not to feel this sadness, letting it grip our soul, we either retreat into a spiritual selfishness of Christian activity & forms of expression that cocoons us from the brokenness around, or we shift into high gear as activists, believing by our good efforts we can change the world, irrespective of any divine involvement.

Could it be that God is also sad, and that our sadness at the state of our world reflects His?  Could we perceive of a Creator who expresses this emotion, this unsettledness between hope and reality? Could it be that the melancholy in the middle that we experience is a sign of our being created in God’s image; a reflection of the divine in us?

One example of MANY expressions of Gods’ sadness comes via the prophet Jeremiah, who profoundly expressed the weeping heart of God. At one point God communicated through Jeremiah these sentiments: “Speak this word to them: ‘Let my eyes overflow with tears night and day without ceasing; for the virgin daughter, my people, has suffered a grievous wound, a crushing blow.’” (Jeremiah 14:17).  That’s divine sadness over the gap between hope and reality.  God also stays close to our own human sadness when He promises that He is “close to the broken-hearted.” (Psalm 34:18). How can God be close to someone who is broken-hearted and not feel their pain? Because our Creator feels pain.

This melancholy in the middle isn’t just an emotion.  It certainly isn’t a sign of weak faith.  It is the proof of the divine Spirit of God calling into your soul with the words “this shouldn’t be this way”.  Then, out of that sadness Christ speaks:  “There is a better Way.  Show that to the world”.

Harv

PS – For an inspiring story of someone who feels this sadness, yet steps into the gap between promise and reality, listen to Father Gregory Boyle here

This is a Good Thing

We thought we could do it. Our activism and proactive planning bore that out.

No longer.

Our ability and freedom to act as we think we should in order to build the Kingdom of God (or our own kingdoms?) has been severely curtailed.  The way to the future is now murky.  Attempts are being made by leaders to get back to what was, but those attempts aren’t bearing fruit.  They likely never will.

Perhaps this is a good thing. A gift from God.

We were reduced to digital reaches and initially were giddy at the potential.  However, the stats around actual engagement are dubious at best.  We could still connect personally, but that was reduced to small circles of family, neighbours and co-workers as pandemic rules allowed.  Our reach narrowed.  It was simplified.

Perhaps this is a good thing. A gift from God.

Previously our actions and even our prayers were a means of putting us in charge of the growth and the affairs of God’s Kingdom.  We planned, executed, made policy and processes, developed seminars, services and studies.  Activism. I dare say that even our prayers accompanying all those plans were assertive and even demanding of God.  Activist prayers.  And now, control is no longer in our hands.

Perhaps this is a good thing. A gift from God.

Could this be a time, now that so much of our previous power, control and freedom has been taken away from us, to reconnect with our identity as God’s servants, and begin to pray as Mary  - “let it be done to me (us) according to your word”.  That is a servant’s prayer, not that of the activist.  A prayer that asks God to make us the person(s) through whom He can reveal Himself and bring His will into being in this world.

Pray.

Wait.

Move when He prompts.

Sit when He is silent.

Be present in the moment.

Accept the daily bread as enough provision for the day, the moment.

Surrender control.

Like a servant.

A god we can use.

Poor god.

These days everyone is making a claim on 'god'.  He/She is popular because people find that eliciting the support of a deity gives legitimacy and even power to their particular point of view.  Religious groups, terrorists, healers, political parties and just about anyone seeking a way to justify their position, often brings 'god' into the equation.

What or who is this 'god', this popular Purveyor of Power, this Authority on Anything, this Collaborator on Convictions?  Whomever He/She is, I wonder what they think about the attention they are getting in this world?

A god without a name, without a self-defined identity is a very convenient god.  That is a god we can use according to our own personal needs. You can mold that god into anything you want as you sort out your existence & 'place' with neighbours, politics, morality, lifestyles, economics, community and yes, even vaccinations.  A god like that is just so useful!

But what if this god has a name?  What if they are self-defined?  A name means something.  Your own name identifies you.  It's not merely a label as though it was an impersonal number.  Your name comes to represent YOU - your character, convictions, loves, dreams and a host of other qualities.

God has a Name.  But what a name!  God Self-revealed as Yawheh/Jehovah, which was a name deemed too sacred to even be spoken, so other names (dozens and dozens) were used to help paint the picture.    This is important, because a name means something.  If the name of God is too sacred to be spoken and takes multiple other descriptors to define, that in itself should keep us from turning God into whatever thing we want to use God for. He is not for us to define.

Yet even we who follow Gods incarnate Christ often make God into a thing we use.  Allow me to unpack an example by turning my attention to myself and my peers who lead other followers of this God.

It is baffling to understand how the institutional church, the gathering that is meant to reflect God to the world, can ignore or minimize the Creators' omnipresence in the nooks and crannies of life on this planet, and virtually ignore how the ways and presence of Yahweh has everything to do with community life, creation care, social and political well-being, economic structures, treatment of the marginalized - I could go on.  The institutionalized church does this by concentrating almost exclusively on how to ensure the activity of the congregation preserves and adds to the longevity of the organization.  The intention and rhetoric may be 'missional', but the reality is that too often God is used to justify the efforts to perpetuate the organization.

YAHWEH, JEHOVAH, CREATOR, acted and spoke though a people in history as told in Scripture, although He Himself is beyond Scripture.  Yet we have used those same inspired words and stories as talismans and tools so we can use God for our purposes.  It was/is Christian leaders who have found theological justification to align with political despots, to support and service anti-human programs of government (residential schools), and to hide sinful and illegal behaviour within their congregations from the law  - all to preserve the institution. Less onerous but just as relevant is how we connect alignment to the denomination or local church with a persons identity in Christ.  It's wrong, but it is a convenient way to use God for our purposes. 

And we have become addicted to it.  

As Elijah encountered in his various confrontations with Baal worshipers (former Yawheh worshippers by the way) that culminated in that grand spectacle on Mt. Carmel, there's an addictive quality to worshiping a convenient god you can use, conjured up as needed to fulfill a need or want.  That was Israels' relationship with Baal.  How about us - do we have a convenient Baal-like image of God?

To give up our image of God is to give up our control of, and influence over, God.  We no longer can have our way with Him in order to keep the church in order.  Even in the face of the true God's power, Ahab & Jezebel (and many others) maintained their addiction.  Do we?  Eugene Petersen reminds us all that even in the face of God's Truth, it's very hard to "let go of the comforting illusions that allow us to live with guilt-free dishonesty". (The Jesus Way, p 125.)  That guilt free dishonesty by the way plagues our relationship with indigenous peoples in Canada, even in the face of Gods' truth that all humans are equally made in God's image.

This is a call to you to seek and submit to the God with a Name, who is not, and will not be defined by your constitution, tradition, dogma or your forms for worshiping Him. This is a call for you to pay attention to the living and active voice of God Himself, to examine the ties that bind your obedience to convenience, pragmatism, dogma, denomination or religion. Stay alert and knowledgeable that the rituals of your so-called faith may be more a religion of useful convenience than they are expressions of submission and obedience to a living and active God.

Who is this God?  

Who are we before Him?

Harv Matchullis