Origins…

What is the point #2: What?

Here is post #2 in the “what is the point of church series of blogs.” This week is brought to us from the lovely Heidi West. If you are interested more in what she is saying please add her to your RSS feeds by going here and reading her blog. Also… I forgot to tell you all that you can check out more what betsy has to say over at her blog here… it is wonderful. Any way onto the post:

Particular...

“If I ever get to the point where I feel that I am playing it safe, I stop. That is all I can say about how I plan for the future.”

— Miles Davis

“If we are to keep growing, we must continue to risk failure throughout our lives.”

—Brennan Manning

Church.  From the day I was born, for better or for worse, church has been in my life—I’ve gone to it, been part of it, wanted to run from it, gathered more than my share of collected wounds from it.  And yet it often feels as though I’ve been chasing this illusive Bride as wildly as Christ himself for nearly as long.  Despite the mix of weeds and wheat that pervade the Body, there is something that keeps me searching, restlessly pursuing what our Creator had in mind for us when he gave Eve to Adam.

Strange as it is, in the midst of all the disillusionment and all the hurt that has come at the hands of The Church, the question that continues to drive me is “What does the body of Christ really look like,” but never has the thought Why bother? entered my mind.  Something in me keeps believing that the answer to the first question is worth fighting for more than anything else.

I do not believe that we can ever really understand what the purpose of the church is or our role in it until we sit down and consider what the entirety of our lives is even about.  I think we begin to ask, “What is the point of church” when we allow ourselves to think of it as something else we have to do, when we compartmentalize our faith and spirituality into a realm disconnected from our real lives, when we fail to allow the rule of God to take over the whole of our beings.  The truth is, if we really believe that Jesus really came to do what he said he came to do, following Christ means claiming and entering a whole different way of thinking and living; if it is for us an act of taking on a whole new identity, the church simply becomes the context in which we truly come to realize and flesh out the implications of our true citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

In an interview a number of years ago, Rob Bell said this: “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who you were created to be.  To be about anything else is sin.” This idea has come to pervade much of my daily pursuit because I think it truly speaks to the heart of what our lives are about.  How can we even begin to consider how to live, what we are about, what will even make us happy, without considering what we were made for?

The more I come to know Christ, the deeper I enter the heart of the Father, the increasingly engrained his Spirit becomes in me, the less my life becomes about attaching the right things to my life for the sake of acceptance and validation and the more it becomes about realizing who the Creator has had in mind for me to be since the beginning and learning to live that life.  The more I journey, the more I search for what is really true, the more I find that the old, dead parts of me must give way to reveal what part of His Image the Lord has endowed me with.

And so, what can the Church be other than the context in which we come to truly understand who we really are?  In his excellent book, “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places,” Eugene Peterson speaks of our place in the Body of Christ in this way:

“There can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play.”

–Peterson, “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places”

Because our culture and lives have become so tragically hijacked by the false security of individualism and isolation, coming to know the deep beauty of what God intended in the experience of knowing and being known by one another seems to be one of the most difficult areas of the Kingdom to enter. Yet, I love what Peterson says here: I am not myself by myself.  I am not an isolated entity, acting upon the world as I see fit for the fulfillment of my own desires.  The truth is that we are a part of something much larger.  Dallas Willard provides a beautiful picture of what that “something bigger” looks like:

“In Eden, one of [the] specifically human powers was the power to interact, not only with the organic, the other living beings such as the creatures of the air, earth, and water, or even with the inorganic, the nonliving matter, but also with God and his powers. But the death that befell Adam and Eve in the moment of their initial sin was also the death of this interactive relationship with God, the loss of this central closeness as a constant factor in their experience. And with this loss came the loss of the power required to fulfill their role as God’s rulers over the earth.

This original job description for humanity hints at a power far beyond what it now possesses independently of God’s Kingdom order. I believe men and women were designed by God, in the very constitution of their human personalities, to carry out his rule by meshing the relatively little power resident in their own bodies with the power inherent in the infinite Rule or Kingdom of God.”

–Willard, “The Spirit of the Disciplines”

Claiming our identity as members of God’s family is essential to our participation in the restoration of The Kingdom. I cannot become the person God had in mind for me at Creation without bringing to light the fallen parts of me that still remain in the presence of others who can see in ways I cannot see myself.  I cannot truly live out the energies, passions, and affections that Lord has given me without taking a risk on relationship, without risking failure.  I cannot truly come to understand the fullness of who God is without believing that his image is to be found in the deepest parts of those around me.  I cannot actually believe that the Father loves me without limit as his Child and work of art if I am unable to imagine how he could love those around me with that same love.

The truth of the matter is that we ask the question “why bother?” because I think there are few risks greater than vulnerability.  We wonder if it is really worth it in the end.  Relationships are messy, messy things.  It is one thing to say, “Yes, Jesus, I will bring before you my sins, my shortfalls, my weaknesses,” but quite another to trust that he is great enough to remain and restore when the exposure of our broken humanity to one another results in rejection, hurt, and disappointment.  I don’t know if I believe that the incredible greatness of truly experiencing the Image of God in another is worth the treacherous journey of vulnerability and risk of disappointment it takes to get there.

The deeper the Lord draws me into life with him, the more I come to realize that perhaps entering into relationship may be the greatest step of faith we can take.  There is no investment we can make in one another without the risk of rejection; there is neither guarantee of outcome nor promise of met expectations.  It seems that with each relationship, with each person I come to know, I become more convinced that humans are perhaps the most beautiful, most volatile, most powerful, most complex, most dangerous beings on earth.  There is always a promise of both beauty and pain when we come in contact with one another because our bodies house the very breath of God.  It seems impossible to come in contact with another human being without being impacted in some way, whether we even realize it or not.

Therefore, there is truly great danger in entering relationship, investing something of ourselves in community, in Church.  We will not escape unscathed.  There is sometimes more promise of loss than anything else.  Yet, as we grow in faith, as we move deeper into the realization of our true identity in the context of this Body, bearing the Image of God in its multitude of facets, we come to know a life that draws from a source much deeper than the fulfillment we may ever seek in one another.  We may come to lean on one another, but only in the sense that each heart that comes in contact with our own is but a momentary a gift of the Father, sent to bring us a little closer to who we really are, to invite us deeper into himself.  We cannot be refined without fire.  The iron will not be sharpened without the clashing of the metal.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to speak about the Church in a context independent of the all-encompassing reality of God and his purposes in us at creation.  The church must be the context in which an entirely new reality is lived out and that life must begin with a new understanding of our identities.  The Church must be the place in which we are free to risk it all on one another and on the world around us because we are, at the heart, a Person born out of an understanding that we do nothing apart from the father.  We can give ourselves fully to each other and those we are called to serve because we know that we are cared for by a Father who never runs out.  We love because we understand that our love comes from the One who first loved us, we give because the Lord is our provider, we risk everything because we know we are held by the hand of the only One that will never let us go.

So why have I, after all of these years, continued to chase after the Body?  Because I know that at the heart of the matter, it is the expression of the only life I really want to live.  I continue to delve into the mess of all of these other broken lives because I have come to realize that we can only love as deeply as we hurt.  I continue to bother with church because I am on a relentless pursuit of who I really am and I realize that I am not myself by myself.   And neither are you.

- Heidi West

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