‘To be a witness means to offer your own faith experience and to make your doubts and hopes, failures and successes, loneliness and woundedness, available to others as a context in which they can struggle with their own humanness and quest for meaning.’ --Henry Nouwen (Spiritual Direction)
I didn’t get a lot of response to my previous post Deconstructing The Great Commission but here’s some rambling in response to one of the comments:
Ken Bussell pointed out that the verses associated with The Great Commission don’t say anything about “sharing the gospel” – instead the verses speak of making disciples and teaching them to obey Jesus’ commandments. Thinking about that and taking into account what Jesus said and taught I start to get the sense that The Great Commission is not so much about converting people to a particular belief system but much more about teaching a way of life. Of course it is easier to tell people what to believe than to show them how to live. Living life is a lot messier – it often seems to pull the legs out from under absolute statements that belief systems are typically built on. I notice that people were always trying to pin Jesus down about what they should believe about all sorts of things, but Jesus didn’t seem that concerned with absolute statements that could be spouted off. In fact, it seemed that he went out of his way to show that life would more often than not turn those statements on their head. Just when someone thought they were being obedient Jesus would demonstrate that their form of obedience violated the very essence of what he was all about.
I guess at this point I would say that I am getting a picture that living out The Great Commission is much more alive and fluid than traditional teaching conveys.
As many of you know I’ve been doing a lot of deconstructing of Christianity over the last few years – examining what I’ve been taught, what I believed about God, Jesus, and scripture, and what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
Let me tell you…it is a very, very, very long process – especially for someone with no formal theological training. Not only is it a long process but at times it is a very uncomfortable process – living with the questions, the doubts, the “not knowing” – dealing with people who proclaim you are going to hell, saying you shouldn’t call yourself a Christian and assigning all sorts of negative labels to you. At times I want to give up, but I don’t – not because I am this great person who is pushing themselves through this process, determined not to give up, committed to persevering (blah blah blah) but more because it is what is happening to me. I am trying to follow Jesus and as I live my life these “things” keep coming up – it’s sort of like “shit happens”. So, here I am today with another “thing” that I am trying to understand – and it has to do with “The Great Commission.”
I was taught that every Christian is commanded by Jesus to be a witness for him and that means telling others about the gospel (i.e. how he died on the cross to pay for our sins and how believing in him can save you from going to hell) and that our ultimate goal is to convert as many as possible and win the world for Christ – this was called “The Great Commission.”
When I first began to deconstruct this teaching I focused on “the gospel” – I deconstructed what I had been taught and began to try to understand what scripture had to say about “the gospel” (what was the good news?) – I eventually came to a different understanding from what I had been taught all my life but that is not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to ask some different questions. I want to ask:
“Is the Great Commission a promise or a commandment?” “Was Jesus really speaking to all Christians or just to the apostles?” “What was the goal of the instruction that Jesus gave to the apostles?” “What about all those things that Jesus said would happen – casting out demons, picking up snakes with their hands, speaking in new tongues, healing the sick?” “Are these passages relevant for me today?”
You see, when I read the first chapter of Acts it sounds to me that the only commandment Jesus gave was the one to wait in Jerusalem until something special happened (the Day of Pentecost). When I read Acts 1:8 it doesn’t sound like a command as much as a promise. It sounds like Jesus is explaining what will happen after the Holy Spirit comes upon them.
And when I read Matthew 28:16-20 and Mark 16:15-20 in context it sounds like this is a contextually limited instruction given only to the apostles and that there is a political aspect to the instruction that has to do with the Roman Empire. I also sense that the purpose was much narrower than what I’ve been taught and that there may have been some immediate urgency to make something happen before something else happened.
Could Jesus’ instructions to the apostles serve the purpose of creating communities that would “be” the “new creation” among all the nations and these communities would be the witness of Jesus because of the way they functioned? Was there an urgency to do this before the destruction of Jerusalem – was that the reason for all those special signs?
I sense that there is a past, present and future wrapped up in these passages. I believe that there is something in these passages that is relevant for me today but that it is different than what I have known up to this point.
I have more questions and thoughts but I want to stop here for now.
I could use some help thinking these things through and so I am inviting you to come here and have a conversation that I can listen in on. I am interested in all feedback but please be courteous. (And not to be rude, but I already know the traditional teaching very well and feel that it is incomplete in some ways and embellished in others – I am looking for some new perspectives and insights that might help me to explore my questions. Oh – and I am better with “not knowing” than trying to simplistically explain away my questions.)
Rob Bell recently tweeted a modern telling of The Beatitudes and my friend Jonathan Blundell (@jdblundell) gathered them up and posted them on his blog “Stranger In A Strange Land“. Here they are:
Blessed are those who don’t have it all together.
Blessed are those who have run out of strength, ideas, will power, resolve, or energy.
Blessed are those who ache because of how severely out of whack the world is.
Blessed are those stumble, trip, and fall in the same place again and again.
Blessed are those who on a regular basis have a dark day in which despair seems to be a step behind them wherever they go.
Blessed are you, for God is with you, God is on your side, God meets you in that place.
The gospel is the counter-intuitive, joyous, exuberant news that Jesus has brought the unending, limitless, stunning love of God to even us.
I can’t be a part of a religion that will objectify humanity as a target – as somebody who is just there to be reached. – Samir Selmanovic
Samir Selmanovic, author of “It’s Really All About God” offers a new way to embrace each other’s religious traditions while maintaining our own. Watch this compelling video by Samir:
I rarely go to church these days. It all started about three years ago when several things happened within a short period of time. Between dealing with some real life situations that made me begin to question a lot of what the Evangelical Christian Church typically taught and moving to a new community, I stopped going to church.
It didn’t happen all at once. At first I slowed down on the things I participated in. I had taught Bible Studies for years and I stopped teaching mainly because of the questions and doubts I was dealing with. I also scaled back on a lot of participation in other areas. If the program wasn’t missional in nature or for the purpose of creating community I eliminated it from my roster (there were a few exceptions, but not many). Then we moved to a new community and although we visited churches for almost two years (several for 2 or 3 months) I never got connected. So, for the last year I have attended church very rarely.
This is unusual for me because I was one of those people that went to church “every time the doors were opened” and volunteered/served a LOT. It seemed that when I started to scale back on some of the things I volunteered for I discovered that many (to be honest, it was probably most) of my relationships at church fizzled out – which led me to think that the relationships were sort of superficial and based more on activities than actual relating. That was sad.
I miss the way things used to be and yet the way things used to be doesn’t work for me anymore.
The closest anything came to working for me in the last couple of years was a small group (about 10 ppl) that met every other week. We did some service projects together, some fun things, read books and discussed them, studied scripture and prayed together, and talked with one another about our lives, faith, families, hobbies, relationships – really everything and anything. But after a couple of years the group stopped meeting because two or three of the couples broke off from the group for various reasons. This group had grown out of a Sunday morning Bible class from the church we had attended for years. We continued to drive the 50 mile roundtrip every other week to meet with the group just because it was such a good fit for my husband and I, but living as far away as we did we didn’t want to start trying out other small groups at that church. We haven’t found anything similar in the community where we now live.
There are still a few churches that I am interested in visiting but it seems that the ones that I am drawn to don’t have any teens at all and I would like my teenage son to have some peers to connect with.
It’s an odd time. I mourn for what I have lost even though what I lost is still there. I’ve changed and that means I don’t fit in anymore. It’s sad.
At the same time I enjoy sleeping in a little on Sundays (which I hadn’t done since I was in my twenties) and having both Saturday and Sunday to run errands, clean house, do the laundry – it seems to make the whole weekend more leisurely. I like the extra time that our family has together during the week when we used to be all going in a lot of different directions due to all the church activities we were involved with. But…I feel like a piece of the puzzle is missing.
The first thirty pages of Don’s book is available for free and you can read them right here on my blog at the end of this post.
Full of beautiful, heart-wrenching, and hilarious stories, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details one man’s opportunity to edit his life as if he were a character in a movie.
If someone tells you they’ve read this book and they “enjoyed it” or they “liked it” or they think it’s a “good hook” then maybe they didn’t read it – it’s well written and funny and interesting and all that, but it’s also disturbing. Really, really disturbing. Don is into provocative territory here, wrestling with The Story and the role each our stories play in it . . . this is very convicting, powerful, unsettling writing. I felt like this book read me more than I read it. —Rob Bell, author of Velvet Elvis
In the first few chapters of Don’s new book, Don got me thinking about Don and his interesting life. Then for several chapters, he got me thinking about my own life. And then for the rest of the book, I couldn’t help but think about God and other people and the kind of future we’re creating together. That sounds like solid evidence that this uniquely talented and sagely writer/thinker/storyteller has given us another wonderful and life-enriching reading experience. —Brian McLaren, Author, Speaker, Activist, brianmclaren.net
You can preorder the book here, follow him on twitter @donmilleris, find out about his tour dates here, and read his blog here.
This post is part of a synchroblog on Christian approaches to health care.
When it comes to the current health care reform debate I am totally dumbfounded that conservative Christians (for the most part) are against a public option and/or a universal health care plan. I understand how Christians can fall on both sides of the abortion issue or both sides of the same sex marriage issue (for the record I am pro-choice but not pro-abortion and I am in favor of legalizing same sex marriage) – but I do not understand how they can be against a public option and/or a universal health care plan and not have it conflict with their faith.
I know that there is contention over the issue of abortion but perhaps it should be considered that many of the private insurance carriers to whom we pay premiums presently cover abortion care.
I think the “socialistic” argument is bunk. We have medicare/medicaid and public schools – they are federally funded to educate and care for others and no one calls them socialism.
The other arguments I hear seem to mostly have to do with individual rights and conveniences and it seems that those arguments fly in the face of the Christian faith.
Do I have scripture to support a public option and/or a universal health care plan? No, I don’t – but neither is there scripture to oppose such a thing (although many twist and turn and contort scripture to support their position). Although there isn’t a specific scripture that I can offer up to support a public option and/or a universal health care plan I would go so far as to say that it seems much more likely that the heart of scripture would support such a thing. Scripture repeatedly calls us to care and provide for the poor and the sick, to give up our own rights, to put other’s interests above our own, to take action to help those less fortunate, to protect the most vulnerable, to share one another’s burdens, to be a voice for the oppressed and the weak.
From a Christian perspective it seems we must look at this from the perspective of the needy, of the poor, of the uninsured…and I don’t think we will hear many (if any) needy, poor, uninsured people rallying against a public option and/or universal health care plan. From a Christian perspective it seems we must look at this from the perspective of Christ, the one who identifies himself with the least of these.
Last year I attended a women’s bible study for a short period of time. We met on Monday evenings for a couple of hours. We prayed together, studied scripture together and socialized. We are new in the community and I was hoping to make some new friends. It didn’t turn out that way.
One evening, a few weeks into the study, I shared with a few of the women that I had been participating in an interfaith dialogue and that I was really enjoying it. They had never heard of such a thing and wanted to know more. They were uncomfortable with the idea that an interfaith dialogue is not focused on trying to convert others to Christianity. They could not grasp that we, as Christians, could learn anything of value from someone outside of our faith. They thought it was probably a sin to be willing to take the position that we might discover that we are wrong about something we believe. In the end they believed that there was some sort of evil involved in the idea of interfaith dialogues and that there was probably a hidden agenda of syncretism. The result for me was that I became someone they, at least, were worried about or, at worst, suspicious about. Needless to say, I didn’t keep attending the Bible study for long after that.
My understanding and experience has been that interfaith dialogue does not require one to give up or hide one’s own beliefs. It is true that it is not a dialogue that is focused on validating one’s own religious conviction but at the same time there is a need for one to be rooted in their own tradition in order to have a meaningful dialogue. I believe that the dialogue not only offers us the opportunity to learn about the faith of others but to also discover dimensions of our own faith that may have been unknown or forgotten by us. In addition, I believe that interfaith dialogue opens up the possibility of people of different faiths working together for the common good.
Still, there are many who believe that it is not worth the risk of our faith becoming polluted with what they would consider false ideas and beliefs and that the most probable outcome is a blended belief system.
What do you think? Is interfaith dialogue a slippery slope that leads to syncretism that will just end up dilluting and harming Christianity? Or is interfaith dialogue a worthy endeavor that will heal divides, make the world a better place and lead to Christians becoming better followers of Christ because of our encounter with others?
This month a group of us have decided to synchroblog on syncretism. The synchrobloggers so far:
My post today is part of the Bridging the Gap Synchroblog. The purpose of this synchroblog is to share positive stories, ideas, suggestions on how we can bridge the gaps between people on the topic of faith and sexuality. Another way to put it is, “How can we embody mutual honour and respect in our conversations and relationships with those with whom we may disagree on the topic of homosexuality?”
(After this post had been published for a few weeks I learned that the term homosexual is offensive to many in the LGBTQ community. I was unaware of this and will know better in the future. Please accept my sincere apologies for this faux pas.)
It may surprise you to find out that a straight, fifty something, evangelical (that label doesn’t fit so well in the last couple of years), Christian woman can be taught some valuable lessons about faith, hope and love from homosexuals – but it’s true.
I have learned a lot about love from friends of mine who are homosexual. I have seen some of the most Christ like love and grace demonstrated by some of my friends who are homosexual. I have seen them love their families even when they were rejected, I have seen them love their neighbors even when they were treated like they were a criminal in the neighborhood and I have seen them love their church community even when they were not allowed to serve and participate in the church after they were honest about their sexual orientation. I have seen them show concern for those who are uncomfortable with their sexual orientation, in fact I have even seen them broken hearted for the ones that seem to be hurt by their sexual orientation and I have seen them be forgiving to those who come to their senses and sincerely express sorrow for the way they have treated homosexuals. My love is often less Christ like. I tend to love those who agree with me and like me; or those who look to me for help and make me feel special; or those who treat me like a first class citizen and notice that I have something valuable to contribute – but through the help of my friends who are homosexual I am learning to love better.
I think it is sad but I often see my friends who are homosexuals have very low expectations of Christians in general. Most of the time they just hope that Christians won’t be mean to them. You would think that Christians would be a little more in touch with the concept that everyone is valuable and should be loved and cared for and respected, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. I personally think that Christians should be expected to demonstrate an extravagant and beautiful love that shocks the world – instead it seems that we can shock the world with a little tolerance these days. However, even though my homosexual friends seem to have low expectations of Christians, they haven’t lost hope. They are some of the most hopeful, resilient and persevering people I know. They hope for a day when they won’t be judged because of their sexual orientation, a time when they can marry the person they love and don’t have to worry that they won’t be allowed to participate or be hired because they are homosexual. They hope for a day when their character and their actions and their talents will be as important to others as the fact that they are attracted to the same sex – for a day they aren’t made to feel ashamed or guilty for the way they are naturally. I have a tendency to stop hoping if things don’t go my way after a while, I don’t want to deal with the disappointment, I don’t want to hope for something I might not see come to fruition in my lifetime…but through the help of my friends who are homosexual I am learning to not give up so quickly, to be more resilient, to persevere when things don’t seem to be getting better – I am learning to hope more.
My friends who are homosexual have also taught me a lot about what it means to keep the faith. I often wonder what I would have done if I was gay. Would I be faithful to Christ or would I have just given up on the whole thing because of the way I was treated by Christians? Would I have continued to attend church, to read the bible, to sing worship songs? knowing that so many hurtful things had been said about homosexuals and done to homosexuals in the name of Christ. I am in awe of the way my Christian friends who are homosexuals remain faithful to following Christ and trying to live a Christ like life. They haven’t seen that much Christ like behavior committed by Christ followers and yet they are still faithful to believe that Christ is loving and good and worthy of following. I don’t know if my faith would have been so enduring but with a little help from my Christian friends who are homosexuals I am learning what it means to keep the faith.
With a little help from my homosexual friends I am learning to love better, to hope more and to keep the faith.
Of course I could tell you some stories of homosexuals who aren’t good examples of faith, hope and love – but I am afraid that in between the lines of those stories we would have to point out that they had some pretty good reasons for their lack of faith, hope and love – reasons like being made fun of and ridiculed, being rejected and treated like second class citizens, reasons like shame induced bible studies and people telling them that they have “chosen” wrong and should change that which they are powerless to change, reasons like not being loved or respected or cared for, reasons that would cause most of us to give up on faith, hope and love….but I think that it serves all of us much better – that it has the greatest potential to bridge the gap – if we look for the good – if we gain some humility and become people who can learn from each other – if we take a long hard look at ourselves through the eyes of others.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 1 Cor 13:13
You can find the other synchroblog participants here.
Last year I attended a women’s bible study for a short period of time. We met on Monday evenings for a couple of hours. We prayed together, studied scripture together and socialized. We are new in the community and I was hoping to make some new friends. It didn’t turn out that way.
