The Messiness

I certainly wish I could say that I’ve got my life all figured out now that I’ve removed myself from institutional Christianity. I wish I could tell you it all makes a lot more sense “out here,” or that I have a grasp on what church, ministry, or my own life ought to look like.

It simply isn’t true, however. Less structure means more mess. And for a recovering control freak like me, it throws me for a loop more often than I’d like to admit.

One thing institutional church has going for it (at least, for us control freaks) is that it has structure. You know where everything is, you know how everything should be, and you know where you fit in the midst of it–or at least, it present the comforting illusion that you know. Same thing with theology, and with religion in general. When you think you have God figured out, you can form a whole framework in your mind as to how to contain Him. I know people who really like religion for the simple reason that it helps them measure their own success spiritually.  It all fits together neatly.

When you divest yourself from that structure, the resulting chaos can be mind-blowing.

Outside the walls, basically, there is no grid, no formula, no prototype to follow. Other than Scripture itself, there’s no standard unit of measure by which to tell whether what you’re doing is “working.” Now that I’ve been “out here” a few years, there are a lot of things that make sense looking back, but I can’t say that things make that much sense looking forward. I’ve hoped for clarity of vision for a number of years now, but the truth is, there aren’t enough landmarks out here for me to find that clarity. It certainly requires more faith to have a vision for mission outside the walls, because there is far less by which you can measure or describe it.

There are times in my life today when I stop and ask myself what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks I’m doing out here. I still consider myself to be in ministry and on a mission, but I have a hard time describing what I do to people because all the standard vocabulary has gone out the window, along with all the metrics by which I used to measure a ministry’s effectiveness. I wish I could mark off how many people were “saved” this week, how many meetings we had, and how many people responded. It would certainly help me validate this mission to people. But I can’t. It’s just not that cut-and-dried. I know we’re being led by the Spirit, I believe we’re doing the right things, and I can see certain moments in my interactions with people when I know He’s involved, but that’s about all I know at this point. That just doesn’t read well on a ministry newsletter.

It’s not that nothing’s happening; it’s just that it’s messy. Ministry and life and faith are all jumbled up in this pile where you sometimes can’t tell one from the other. Don’t get me wrong: I know God is a God of order. It’s just that His order isn’t always that clear to us, and things that make perfect sense from His vantage point can look very messy from ours. And that’s where the faith comes in. I have to trust God with the messy parts, the parts that don’t make sense, and the parts I can’t explain to others because I just don’t have the vocabulary to do it.

But here’s the thing: it’s really that messy inside the walls, also. The whole order thing? That’s mostly a man-made illusion. I have to remember that this is why I detached in the first place. I began to see that what I thought was real, wasn’t real at all. I began to see through the facade of religion, and how the structures I’d relied on were not only un-Biblical, but were actaully doing more harm than good. I began to see that the walk of faith itself is far less predictable than all that. I also began to see that to the point that I can control something, I don’t really need faith.

I have to remember that I didn’t move this direction out of anger or rebellion, but out of hunger. I wanted something more real. It’s just that real is more messy than we think.

So this messy life I have outside the walls? It’s not really because I walked away from structure. It’s more of an admission of the truth.