Why Pyromaniacs Are Right At Home in the Church

People in our culture generally like Jesus, but they generally don't like the church, so why bother? In other words, why does the Church exist?

Elton Trueblood's answer: "The Church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning." I recently had lunch with a church consultant I met through an odd series of events who echoed Elton's thoughts.

Every church exists by vision, he says, whether it's something that's articulated or not. If it's not, it's what he calls a "default vision." That default vision usually means something like, 'run our programs, keep everyone basically happy, keep the structure running that's gotten us here.' Without leadership, I suppose any group defaults to that sort of maintenance.

If the church is to burn, he says there are three crucial elements.

Vision.

Strategy (to move toward that vision).

Structure (to support that strategy).

If the default vision isn't challenged, then real vision ends up coming hat-in-hand to structure, asking if it can play a bit. A very backward arrangement. Nothing burns.

David Bosch in Transforming Mission nails it:

Mission [is] understood primarily as being derived from the very nature of God. It [is] thus put in the context of the doctrine of the trinity…The classical doctrine of the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit [expands] to include yet another ‘movement’: Father, Son and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world…mission is not primarily an activity of the church, it is an attribute of God.

God is a missionary God.

Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God into the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is a church because there is a mission, not visa versa.

Then the question--and challenge--becomes what is that mission and how do we live it? Jesus was pretty clear. I'm not so sure we are. This is the best description I know of what Jesus means by that. And here's the result when we do that:

• People confront their demons and find them already overcome by the Risen Jesus.
• People change.
• The past is healed.
• Love grows.
• Hope flourishes.
• Communities are transformed.
• Kids have better parents.
• Employees have better bosses, and bosses have better employees.
• Beauty flourishes through the arts.
• Single moms find help.
• Marriages blossom.
• 13 year old girls trapped as prostitutes in the dark corners of the world are rescued.
• Mosquito nets keep babies safe from malaria in Africa.
• Clean water wells are dug in remote villages so kids don't die from some simple like diarrhea.
• The Kingdom of God comes on earth, as it is in heaven.
• Jesus is Lord.

Is anyone in their right mind not for all that? But in order for it to happen, we must be set ablaze. So then let's get on with it and burn.

Repent (ye vile and filthy sinners!)

It's a warm fuzzy word, isn't it? It just makes you want to pour a hot cup of coffee and pull up to a roaring fire.....or not. It's now freighted meaning usually conjurs up such crowd-pleasing images as judgement, condemnation, eternal hellfire and an occasional dash of brimstone just for effect.

And if it is one of Jesus' basic messages: "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near." then, uh-oh for Jesus, right?

Well, we need to rescue the word in word, practice and deed because it's absolutely crucial to human flourishing. The word in the original Greek is metanoia, which literally means "with mind" or "with new mind."

In today's language we might say it this way, "he had a paradigm shift." When we say that, we mean he was inside a way of seeing things that caused him to act, feel and live a certain way. Then a window opened and he shifted his position to an entirely new way of seeing things. Everything became clear and subsequently made sense in a whole new way. It was like he was seeing things again for the first time, with an entirely new set of eyes.

So if two people are comitting adultery (I've walked several people through this as a pastor), they are inside a system that has them seeing, feeling and acting as though this foreign object to their marriage will somehow make them happy/give them the thing they think they've always wanted/make them feel a certain way about themselves. If they do not repent, that is, have a paradigm shift, everything they know will be destroyed and the resulting relational shrapnel will literally scatter for years. They will not flourish.

This is just one example, use your imagination and extrapolate it out to any situation. It always holds true. Repentance, properly understood and done, is a fundamental key to human flourishing.

That's why preaching, when it's done well, always invites people to repent--to shift their paradigm. Mark Beeson, leader of a great church, took some notes on preaching for repentance here.

Too often that call for repentance is done in shrill religious-ese. We fail to show people the new paradigm (Jesus' new paradigm was always the Kingdom of God) and so they never give up on their old paradigm. They hear it as "you should stop being like you and be more like me, because I've got it all figured out." That almost never works. I'm not suggesting we can make people repent (we can't), just saying it needs to be given serious and careful consideration (note made to self) every time someone stands up to preach.

One of the best ways I know to do that is through story. A story easily gets past my defenses and gives me a picture of either what I am, or what I can be. I'll post a repentance story tomorrow.