Relocating To Elfland

What on earth is the church of Jesus Christ doing? What’s our mission here in the world? What’s the end game of all our Christian ministries under the sun?

I’ve observed two dominant approaches to answering this question. One says our mission is to rescue people (perhaps more precisely, to be instruments through which God rescues people) from everlasting destruction. We want to see people saved. We want to see them enter God’s kingdom. That’s not the end of the story, by any means. But it’s the main storyline: people being saved from hell and put on their way to heaven. It’s the Pilgrim’s Progress story: everything is about getting on the right road, and then not getting distracted from the pearly gate at the end.

The other approach says our mission is restorative. Rescue is important, but it’s just a beginning. If it’s big news that God is emptying the kingdom of darkness, it’s perhaps even bigger news that He’s filling His kingdom of light – and there’s an awful lot going on in here! It’s good news that we’re no longer God’s enemies, but in a sense that pales in comparison with the news that we get to live as His children, that we get to become a holy people, a nation of disciples.

Now both of these emphases are important, but what I want to suggest is that the first can (and often does) function almost to the exclusion of the second, resulting in all manner of distortions; while the second cannot but include the first, while bringing it to its divinely intended fruition. Let me explain.

I’ve been a part of church ministries that were all about people getting saved. Are you in Christ? Are you in the door of the kingdom? That’s the thundering question that gets all the attention. What’s interesting is that I’ve seen two very different sorts of church ministries grow out of this underlying emphasis. On one hand are the churches that immediately strike you as being very different from the world. The tone of the pulpit ministry is heraldic, authoritative, even oracular. Sinners outside of Christ (whether visitors or longtime members) are warned, threatened, and commanded to repent. Along with this comes a veritable horror of ever “looking back” once one has left the city of destruction; one’s entire previous life must be forsaken, lest one be like Lot’s wife, and so all things cultural are viewed with suspicion at best. Separation from the world is explicitly or implicitly identified with separation from culture. What is certainly absent is any positive program for culture. Who hath time for culture when there are souls to be saved?

The second type of church growing out of a rescue emphasis is much more easygoing. That may seem strange at first, but it makes sense when you think about it. Here also the great goal is to get people saved, only this type of church does everything in its power to “contextualize” the gospel so people will come and hear the message of salvation. Surrounding culture here is not an enemy – it is not the city of destruction – it is the friend of the gospel, since if one can use popular stuff from the culture to get people into church, the chances of their getting saved are vastly improved. Hence, the immediate “feel” when you walk into this type of church is that you haven’t walked far from the culture. This also affects the way the church talks to its members. If the first type of church spends a lot of time warning members that they may not be “really saved” after all (one can’t be too careful of thinking one is in when one is really out), or warning them against looking back (Lot’s wife again), the second type spends a lot of time assuring its members that they are really saved (it talks constantly about justification, for example, and resists anything that could make hearers feel unsafe, ashamed, or insecure), and it pretty much leaves the personal lives of its people alone. Indeed, how could it do otherwise, since its various methods of drawing people in to hear the gospel message assume that the life forms of the surrounding culture are kingdom-neutral, if not a positive good?

What one finds in both types of rescue church is a kind of cluelessness among its members about how to connect everyday life to the gospel. In the first type of church, there’s a lot of fear, and a lot of people tend to keep their personal lives as separate from the churchy life of the church as possible. In the second type, there’s often a lot of passion to help the church get people saved; but beyond that, apart from the most basic elements of morality, and of course personal “devos,” there’s virtually no imprint of the gospel in everyday life. Church life is one spoke in the wheel of life; it certainly doesn’t dominate the whole. And how could it? It really has almost nothing to say to the whole. The real program, after all, is getting (others) saved.

But let us imagine a different kind of church altogether. Here the basic understanding is that in the gospel God gives us our life back. The gospel is about the grace of God restoring nature in Christ, so that we can once again, under His fatherly kingship and in fellowship with His people and our neighbors more generally, live well. The good Shepherd has come that we might have life more abundantly. To be reconciled to God through Him is just the beginning of this.

This church believes that “the gospel of the kingdom” is just that: good news about the restored kingdom of God on earth, and restoration of human life in that kingdom. The work of this church is, therefore, nothing less than making disciples. It isn’t interested in people simply believing certain truths and getting through the pearly gate (being suitably moral and undistracted along the way); it is interested in whole ways of life being renewed and transformed by the Word of the Lord, who is King over every square inch of life and whose covenant is comprehensive in its outworkings. Moreover, this church has little use for “Jesus and me” Christianity, because if there is anything the Bible makes clear about restored human life, it is that this life is enunciated in the first person plural: we are the children of God, we are the people of God, we are a peculiar people and a holy nation. The kingdom is not just about me; it’s about us.

The tone of the ministry of this church, then, will be calmly instructive. It will turn a critical eye on the ways of human life outside of Christ, it will be able to show those still lost in their sins the emptiness and foolishness of life without God, and to its own people it will speak with the aim of cultivating discernment between what in surrounding cultures expresses the goodness of creation and what in culture expresses a profound falling short of the glory of God. It will warn without fear mongering; it will have an appreciation of the difficulty of certain questions, and the reality of “gray areas.” It will certainly speak forth the law of God and warn those who break it; but its aim, both in the conversion of the lost and in the sanctifying of its own people, will be maturity, the flourishing that can come only through costly discipleship.

An enormous amount of time will be spent in this church neither issuing screeds against culture, nor commandeering all sorts of cultural forms for the purpose of packaging the gospel, but rather developing a positive biblical program (grounded in creational norms) for human flourishing. It will be deeply interested both in the formation of culture by humans and in the formative power exerted by culture upon humans. It will thus be cautious in its engagement of existing cultures (it will certainly not hop on the bandwagon of every cultural fad), even while it is enthusiastic about doing all things well to the glory of God.

A great practical difference, I think, between the rescue church model and the restoration church model will be that you can’t be long in the latter without discovering the gospel has everything to do with your everyday life. You may not like it (!), but you won’t be able to persist in the notion that church is one spoke in the wheel of life. No, life in the kingdom is all of life. The King rules it all. And while this certainly won’t answer every hard question, it will make you feel the call of saving grace all the time, everywhere you are, whatever you’re doing. And that’s great salvation.

The solution to abuse of God’s gifts is not rejection of God’s gifts but thankfulness for God’s gifts.

“The Bible and God are relevant in this culture and in every other culture. He and His gospel are relevant. Always. We are the roadblocks to relevancy, not the Bible. We live in a way that makes God seem irrelevant, but He is not to blame.” Ed Stetzer, “Developing Missional Churches for the Great Commission”

Any church that has ever wrestled with the issue of what it takes to grow (there are, incidentally, churches that don’t wrestle with this: they think growth is 100% the Holy Spirit’s business, thus planning for growth is a waste of time, which could explain why they don’t grow, but that’s not what this blog post is about) has confronted the question whether its worship is “accessible” or “relevant” to the unchurched and/or the underchurched. Ought a Christian worship service to be “contextualized” so those who don’t know Jesus (and may know almost nothing about the Bible, Christianity, or this thing called “the church”) can feel like they “connect” to it?

To be clear, if the answer to this question is yes, it’s going to be very hard to justify any sort of traditional, much less liturgical, form of worship. Very, very few unchurched or underchurched people in the modern world, especially if they’re under the age of 35, are going to walk into a traditional or liturgical service and say, “Yeah, I get what’s going on here.” Most such people have never in their lives heard a psalm or hymn; they’ve never sat and listened to anyone other than a college professor talk at them for 30–40 minutes (and it totally put them to sleep); they haven’t the foggiest notion what atonement, grace, propitiation, justification, sanctification, theology, depravity, holiness, or even salvation mean; and they don’t see the point in a bit of bread and wine that are supposed to be about a crucified Jewish woodworker named Jesus. It doesn’t work for them. It doesn’t connect. And since I happen to be a church planter in a church that practices liturgical worship, this matters to me. Admittedly, I’m biased. But hear me out.

I don’t think worship is where an unchurched or underchurched person is initially supposed to “connect” to the church. It may indeed happen that way. It’s even likely to happen if you have a rock band play the worship music, all the songs sound like popular radio, your preacher talks for ten minutes about movies, and you serve iced cappuccinos in the lobby. Admittedly, this brings its own complications: not least, that you’ll have to keep changing your worship track to keep up with the radio; and at some point it might be important to explain to your new friend that meeting with the Almighty God isn’t supposed to feel quite like a U2 concert; but be that as it may. If you practice traditional or liturgical worship, by contrast, I’d say it’s unusual if a non-churched person walks in and immediately “connects.” I’m also saying that’s okay.

The reason it’s okay is that hard-core Christian worship should have the “feel” of a called-out covenant people meeting with their sovereign covenant God; reenacting the great story of His saving grace in the world; and being called, cleansed, equipped, and commissioned to carry out His mission in the world. If this feels immediately “relevant” to an outsider, I would wonder if it’s being done properly. But that doesn’t mean the outsider shouldn’t connect to the church at all; what I’m proposing is that the connection will usually start elsewhere.

Where? In the everyday life of God’s covenant people. Worship isn’t normally what convinces outsiders of the “relevance” of the church; worshipful lives are what convince them of this. One missional writer has said that people often belong to the church before they believe in Jesus. That makes complete sense: if outsiders don’t feel like they have a connection to God’s people, how on earth are they going to feel a connection to the worship these people offer to their God? I’m not (again) saying that it can’t happen (we need, for example, to work out the implications of 1 Corinthians 14:24–25), only that the normal order of things is to be impressed with God’s people before one is impressed with Him. “You are My witnesses,” and so forth.

You, dear saints, are the relevance of the church to the world. Not first your pastor’s sermons, not first the worship music and anthems of Zion, not first the Table of the Lord (though these things should be tasteful and attractive, and pastors in particular must preach as men convicted that the gospel is the most relevant thing on the planet, because it is). You are the epistle known and read by all men, even if they never darken the door of a place of worship. And if they don’t discover the relevance of the church in knowing you – in your loving service, in your gracious friendship – the lights aren’t likely to go on just because you haul them to a worship service.

“O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat, and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men – to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve thee as thou hast blessed us – with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen.” (Capon, Supper of the Lamb, pp. 27– 28)

“Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods – to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 20)

“The caricature of the ‘creative artist,’ estranged, unconventional, professionally eccentric, anxious about listening too closely to the voices of others in case it deafens him or her to his or her own inner creative urges and surges, is, of course, a caricature, but sadly not without its contemporary representatives. And, as we have seen, the ‘postmodern self,’ a descendant of the romantic self, is perhaps most clearly seen in the contemporary consumer of music, for whom music (in fleeting and ever-new forms) becomes, above all, a means to satisfy the desire for immediate sensual stimulation and, through the very act of consumption, a means to establishing at least a minimal sense of identity.” (Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, pp. 268–69)

Thesis:

A basic problem of human society is how to move from singularity (single instrument) to diversity (multiple instruments) without creating disharmony, and how harmony can be sustained without compromising diversity (resolving to a mere unison).

Discuss.

Those who cannot embrace deep disappointments without bitterness are unfit for love.

Following Jesus means:

– Hungering so others may eat
– Being empty so others may be fulfilled
– Hurting so others may heal
– Being weakened so others may be strengthened
– Weeping so others may laugh
– Being made low so others may be raised up
– Laboring so others may rest
– Being humbled so others may be honored
– Dying so others may live

If this isn’t a road you’re willing to walk, you’re looking for a messiah other than Jesus.