How One Statement Can Explain Two Years

Kathy over at Carnival in My Head just got back from Africa with her family, and posted a preliminary report about her trip on her blog. One of the most profound moments she described was when she said her missions team was the first American team ever to actually stay at the orphanage they were visiting–that most teams sleep at a nice hotel an hour away. One of the teachers at the orphanage expressed gratefulness at this, saying, “people come to help, but they don’t really want to be with us and live our life with us.”

Ouch. In so many ways.

Actually, this one statement has reverberated through my soul, and The Wild One’s as well, ever since we read it–because it underscores not just the need in third-world countries, or even the poverty in our own, but the need for a monumental shift in the way we look at church and ministry in general. This one statement runs incredibly deep, and in fact lends itself to me, helping to explain (at least in part) more than two years of compulsive blogging. Because without wanting to be all negative, so much of the fuel for this blog is this profound conviction that something is foundationally wrong with how we believers are viewing the world and the church, and our roles in both–and it’s processing a lot of thoughts on how to effectively change that viewpoint, starting person to person.

Maybe you don’t yet see the connection. Lemme ‘splain. 🙂

In my search for something better, one of the more impacting concepts I’ve learned is the idea of incarnational ministry. This way of seeing ministry takes its cue directly from how Christ came to us. He didn’t descend from heaven with lightning and thunder and royal robes and blinding lights and earth-shattering force–although He could have. He came as a baby–a human man. We call this His incarnation. He became one of us. And for the time He spent enfleshed here, He didn’t commute to earth daily and return to heaven at night. He stripped Himself of His heavenly glory, took on our form, and lived our life with us.

And then He said something truly remarkable: “As the Father has sent Me, so I am sending you.” This is the heartbeat of what I have come to believe our earthly ministry ought to be.

And then I look at the state of the church today. We have taken the “don’t-forsake-assembling-together” thing–one verse of Scripture–and used it to completely shape the church as an attractional thing, rather than an incarnational one. The church comes to the world pre-packaged, with its own separate culture (and now its own separate marketplace), and instead of going to the world, we keep trying to find ways to attract the world into our culture.

Even worse…this church culture has become a “safe haven” for believers where if they play their cards right, they can get a job in a Christian setting, have all Christian friends, and go to meetings at church several times a week, and live an entire lifestyle steeped in religion without ever having to make contact with the world outside. And if we do work “out there”, we do it sometimes grudgingly, and as sparingly as possible, running back to our own culture several times a week to cleanse ourselves of the supposed defilement. Occasionally, we’ll engage in some short-term missions thing, not because we truly love the people, but to make ourselves feel less guilty for our seclusion, and for the stark absence of The Great Commission in our lives. And when we get back, we talk more about how the trip affected us, rather than honestly weigh whether our actions and presence made a difference to the people to whom we were sent–yet another sorry indicator of how disconnected we’ve become from the world.

Sorry if this rant is a bit harsh. I just feel this pretty passionately right now. Our entire system, our entire picture of “church”, is truly the opposite of how Jesus was sent to us. We might mingle with the world from time to time–but we make sure we have our cushy hotel to go back to at night. We don’t become one of them the way Jesus became one of us.

And you know something? People know. They can spot a phony a mile away. They can tell when we outwardly act charitably toward them, but inwardly judge them for not being “one of us.” We’re not fooling anyone; people know when they are being thought “less than.” (Heck, even my family and I, committed believers, can tell when other believers are inwardly judging us for not being “in church” the way they define it. How much more would a non-believer feel it?) And yet, we continue to think our system is working, and pray week after week for God to miraculously send people into our Sunday gatherings, and wonder why they don’t come.

“People come to help, but they don’t really want to be with us and live our life with us.” Egad. How many of our neighbors feel this way? I think we’d be surprised and devastated to find out.

Now, I don’t mean to say (on the other side) that I judge Christians who attend Sunday church meetings–in fact, I’m helping one out by leading the worship for them. Nor am I trying to guilt all of us into selling all our possessions and living on the streets or going to Africa (although if God leads you that way, it’s best if you obey). The issue actually runs deeper. It’s just that I think Sunday morning gathering has been so much the focal point of our faith that in many ways it has become a stumbling block. I’m not saying we shouldn’t assemble; I’m saying we’re so consumed with assembling together, and measuring one another’s spiritual health by it, that we have no concept of the incarnational ministry Jesus modeled. And we haven’t for a long, long time.

I can’t say I have all this figured out, but what I can say is that this deep conviction has been moving our family to take a radically different approach to this in our new town. We’re not really trying to start a church; we’re trying to be the church–the incarnational church. In our various creative efforts, we’re making an honest, no-hidden-agenda attempt to be part of the existing creative community–to live life with the friends we’re making, not viewing (or treating) them as some kind of target. We’re not focused on “soul-winning” (another way-overblown concept), but on simply practicing our faith in the midst of others, and seeing what Jesus Himself might do with that. After all–He’s the one who bought those “souls” with his own life, and He knows better than we how to “win” them.

We’re way early in this process, and I can’t tell you as some sort of expert that it works. I can say that so far it’s going the way we hoped it would, and like I said–we’ll see what Jesus does with it.

I’ve been blogging for two years, trying to process this issue and others like it…and some lady in Africa pretty much sums it up on one statement. Hm. That sounds just like something God would do. 🙂