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Little Flowers: Believing, Belonging, Behaving

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Previous Post – Reflections on my YWAM Family

As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent last week with the staff of YWAM Canada at our national staff conference in Pinawa, MB.  In addition to it being a great time of connecting and refreshing, it was also a time for us to collective challenge one another, asking the difficult questions that face us when we actively seek to live Christ together for the purpose of His mission.  In many of those discussions, especially on what it means to be an inclusive and embracing people, we quite often came to a place where someone would say, “Ok, but where do we draw the line?”

This question all too often left me frustrated, as though we were asking the wrong question.  This is not to say that the underlying concern of this question is not important.  I do believe that inclusion and embrace inevitably must have boundaries.  The question, though, is how and where and what is involved in setting those boundaries in place.  All too often we feel we have to start with a line, start with a set of deal-breakers which people have to adhere to (or at least acknowledge) before they can meaningfully belong to the community of faith.  I think this goes against the heart of how Jesus embodied these dynamics.

When asked to explain it another way at the conference, I decided to try and communicate through an analogy.  The following is what I came up with on the spot.  Now, before we start taking this to extremes, I acknowledge that this is an imperfect analogy in many ways, but it provides a simply touchstone (icon, if you will) into the deeper dynamics.  So bear with me.

In Mark 9, when Jesus responds to the man whose son was being tormented by an evil spirit, the man declares, “I do believe; help my unbelief.”  Here we see a person who clearly believes in Christ and His authority to heal his son.  Yet he also acknowledges that he needs to be saved from his unbelief.  To me this is the mustard seed, the seed of belief.  Belief as seed says a great deal- it is a tiny medium of promise and potential.  It holds within it the potential for something far great than itself.  A seed on its own is nothing.  A seed must be planted.

Often it is here that we presume that belief plants itself in our hearts, and while there is an element of truth there, the soil in which seed of belief will sprout new life in Christ.  Like a seed, we must die to our sin-isolated selves before we can spring to new life in Christ.  Here is where the shift in our thinking takes place, because again we are prone to look at our salvation in Christ through purely individualistic terms.  Rather, Jesus has (by the Holy Spirit) made the Church His Body.  Therefore, it is in the soil of belonging in the embrace of true community that the seed of belief can be reborn to new life.  Unless that seed has the life-giving, life-sustaining soil in which to plant, we cannot expect it transform.

As the seed of belief does sprout new life in the soil of belonging, it begins to be shaped DNA inherent in the seed.  It is being raised into the image of the resurrected Christ while also being restored to its intended nature of being created in God’s image.  It spreads its roots in the soil of belonging and sprouts into the world as the flower it was meant to be.  As clumsy as the term might sound, here I call this the flower of behaviour.  The flower acts and grows and reproduces according to its nature (again Christ).  It did not have to behave like a flower into order to belong, but rather it was only able to be a flower after it had been embraced, rooted and nurtured in the context of belonging.

So where are the boundaries?  Unlike seeds and flowers, our free will means that we do make choices that go against the intentions of God, that our behaviour doesn’t reflect the DNA of Christ reborn within us.  However, this understanding teaches us that the for new life to be born, we have to accept a degree of uncertainty when embracing people with “unflowered” belief.  Jesus did not teach us that we need to examine each seed before we plant it, He said we will know the nature of the seed by the nature of the fruit it produces.  This demands that we allow fruit to be produced first.  This is risky.  This is messy.  This is complicated.  It is necessary.

Further, this forces us to realize that the nature and quality of the soil should be one of first and primary concerns.  So often we spend so much time and energy requiring behaviour of people before they can be accepted into our communities.  Rather, we must be looking to the planks in our own eyes (or the weeds, in this case), not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the delicate seeds of belief that are seeking to take root among us.  Rather than purity-police trying to protect the integrity of what is ours, we need to see it as mothers protecting and nurturing the vulnerable new life within us.  We bear the greater responsibility at this stage.  It is our behaviour that must be held to a high standard.

I cannot help but think of the story of the woman caught in adultery who was brought for Jesus for judgment.  By the letter of the law of Moses this woman had legitimately “crossed the line”.  Her exclusion from the community was so clear that it allowed for absolute exclusion- death.  And yet Jesus does not exclude her- don’t miss how critical that is as a first response- but rather stoops down and begins to draw in the dirt.  Then He turns to the accusers- again addressing the sin of the believers before the sinner- and invites him without sin to cast the first stone, then returns to the dirt.  When He stands up again, He see that He and the woman are alone.  He asks her if no one accuses her, to which she replies that there is no one.  Then Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you”- Jesus is the only man who could have rightfully condemned her, yet He does not- then says, “Go and sin no more”.  It is here, at the end of this process that Jesus finally address behaviour.  He knows that her behaviour is more likely to be transformed by His loving defense (at His own real risk) and embrace than through fear of the the judgment of the law, legitimate as it may be.

Where do we draw the line?  Sometimes, when I read the story of Jesus and this woman, I imagine that when Jesus stoops down that He was drawing a line in the sand.  He drew a line in the sand between the accusers and the woman.  And He stood on her side of the line.

Where do we draw the line?  Why do we draw the line?

Tags: Belief, Forgiveness, Missional
Posted in Bible, Community, Evangelism, Missional, church | 18 Comments »

Being Missional In A Culture Of Compromise

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Previous Post -Gardening In Exile

Last night at Little Flowers Community small group we were discussing the kind of community of faith we hoped to become.  We started by reflecting on experiences with church in the past that were particularly negative and disappointing.  Then we reflected on experiences with church that stood out as positive or even exceptional, asking what was required for those experiences to be possible.  Finally we examined what the different examples had in common.  In the end, we were able to clearly see, not only what we hoped to become as a community together, but what it would cost each of us to get there.  Our answers were calling us to give more time, energy, consistency, priority, sacrifice- things that seemed obvious but were important to be reminded of.

At one point, it came up that people would more involved if we were doing more in the community- outreach of some kind.  After all, they said, they had been involved off and on in a number of other ministries in the city that had been great.  While they were right to affirm this direction, I found myself sighing with frustration.  This was a conversation I seemed destined to repeat over and over again.  As positively as I could, I affirmed the suggestion and asked: “So what are you waiting for?”

When push came to shove, the answer came down to this: they were waiting for someone to start the ministry so that they could join in.  And this was a problem for me on several levels.  First, “someone” almost always referred to myself or my wife.  Now, the fact that we are career missionaries with many years of experience gives the expectation some credibility.  However, our experience has also been that people also want others to lead so that their involvement could be based on their convenience.  In other words, when it wasn’t convenient, the “leaders” would be left to fill in the gap themselves.  Our small missionary team (which had planted Little Flowers Community and continues to work full time in the neighbourhood) tried this before and led the group to near-burn out.

Second, and most importantly, this pattern inevitably discipled those some-time volunteers in an experience of missional engagement that was divorced from the nitty-gritty, mundane aspects of ministry.  By allowing people too much access to missional context with requiring them to carry the cost creates the illusion of missional living that can proved dangerous to all involved.  Of course, I am well aware of how such a pattern has emerged.  While some might blame it on influences such as “short term missions” (a claim with some, but less truth than most people might imagine), it has more often been born of desperation and necessity.  Let me explain.

The ability to get people to meaningfully and sacrificially engage in lives of missional service is very, very hard.  We live in a culture of consumer Christianity where people have to be convinced (sold) on an idea or activity.  Even then, their participation and/or support is seen as their exceptional contribution rather than the base-line for required service.  However, the need for people to be involved continues to grow, especially in contexts where the needs are so severe and the resources so scarce (such as in our inner city context).  Therefore, in order to bring the needed people in, we accommodate or even compromise.  One way of doing that is to do all the “behind the scenes”, mundane work so that people can in and participate in the more dynamic aspects of ministry that interest them.

This needs to stop.  By doing this we are actively discipling people into a way of Christian service the affirms and entrenches the individualistic, consumer-driven impulses of our culture.  Further, it creates an illusion of what it means to be missional people that in the end is little more than a shell of the sacred vocation that God calls us to.  Of course God, in His grace, will work through these situations in spite of us.  And of course the the unique gifts of some will predispose them to certain roles and not others.  However, these points do not mitigate the danger and compromise of the approach that is all too common.

What scares me most about this is the fact that, whenever we resist this impulse, we find ourselves standing quite alone.  The Dusty Cover, the ministry that gave birth to Little Flowers Community, had to be closed due to a lack of people willing to consistently and selflessly serve.  By requiring even a little more from people, we’ve seen many move on to more accommodating ministries.  It is discouraging, disheartening and more than a little disturbing.

I am grateful that the core group of people in Little Flowers Community are beginning to see this.  It is particularly difficult for single 20-somethings (who make up the majority of our church) to realize this and adjust to it.  However, the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few.  Has the familiarity with that truth numbed us to the urgency of its message?  We need to begin to require more of ourselves and each other.  We need to resist compromising and begin to call ourselves back to the radical vocation of being the community of Christ, a community called daily to lives of sacrifice, even unto the cross.

What do you think?  Is this a problem for your community?  How do we change this?


Tags: Community, culture, Missional
Posted in Community, Discipleship, Leadership, Missional, church | 13 Comments »

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