Social Justice and the Lord’s Prayer

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church, discipleship, gospel of matthew, justice, prayer, social justice

Many Christians have recently rediscovered the part of our calling – or of our God, really – that moves us to pursue “social justice.” But some rightly fear that justice issues might eclipse other aspects of our gospel-centered identity and mission. (I say “rightly” because we’re liable to turn anything into an idol, especially something right and good and true.) The classic question is what should we give the proverbial hungry believer in a location where we can be pretty sure he doesn’t know Jesus: the gospel or a loaf of bread? Or perhaps more to our point, in the public square should we quietly work toward a living wage or look for opportunities to explain the truth about Christ?

My suggestion is that we pray the Lord’s Prayer. More specifically, that we pray all of it.

What does the Lord’s Prayer have to do with not turning justice into an idol? I’m thinking specifically of two phrases, one of which has rightly become a biblical battle cry for pursuing justice for the poor: May your kingdom come. Jesus’ gospel of God’s kingdom was nothing if not good news for the poor, no doubt in more ways than one. And the next phrase proves that this isn’t merely a future hope, for we are instructed to pray that God’s kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven. I agree and applaud all efforts to fully live out Jesus’ invitation to anticipate God’s future kingdom in the present.

But what does sometimes happen is that this phrase gets separated from what preceded it: hallowed be your name. Jesus cares not only about what we do, but that we do it in the right way, and part of doing the right thing in the right way is doing it so that God’s name is rightly honored. By all means, “preach the gospel everyday, and if necessary use words.” But know that using words will very soon become necessary if the gospel is to be preached. By all means, give the dude a piece of bread and work for a living wage, but do it in the name of Jesus for the glory of God. By all means, work for the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, but don’t be embarrassed by or shy about the fact that this is God’s kingdom or that it came and comes to the world in Jesus.

We haven’t been called to make or build a new world. We are called to live into the reality of the new world already begun in Christ.

Beyond Theology, Becoming Missional

What started out as an attempt to think through my experience at a Missio Intensive somehow morphed into my own filling out of some schemas they gave us. Things have gotten a little heavy, at least in terms of theology/theory. It’s been fun (for me anyway) but what the Missio folks offer is not necessarily any new theology, but rather a renewed approach to actually doing church.

And as I said up front, key to their approach (and thus the title of one of their books) is the word AND. The basic idea is that churches must embrace their dual calling as both gathered and scattered communities. The context that gives this claim its edge is the current debate between focusing the church’s energies on weekend worship gatherings to which we invite people (“attractional”) on the one hand, and on the other hand focusing energies on going out into the world and engaging people on their own turf (“missional”).

Missio’s answer to this question, which seems like a copout but is actually more substantial that, is simply “Both.”

Their simple response is simply not to be forced into unnecessary polarities. Learn to balance gathering and sending/scattering. Now here’s the deal. I can’t distill for you in one post why this insight is more substantial than it sounds, so I’m sorry but you’ll have to read the book. (Better yet, watch Hugh’s videos!!!) But I will share a couple of insights that you might find helpful. 

In-credible Church

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church, ministry

In The Divine Commodity, Skye Jethani tells the story of an interview he did with a seasoned pastor. Jethani kept asking what he was most proud of during his decades of ministry, expecting stories of praying with drunks, loving mean old ladies, and so forth. But all the pastor wanted to talk about was building campaigns, and in particular the one he pushed through that gave them an asphalted parking lot.

In his own words, “Three years ago we put in a larger gravel lot, but I knew it wasn’t good enough. ‘We’ve got people around here driving BMWs and Cadillacs,’ I told them. They don’t want to park on gravel. People expect asphalt! A church that can’t provide asphalt isn’t relevant. It’s not credible. Eventually the elders came around. A respectable church simply couldn’t ask people to park on gravel.”

Seriously? So much for at least attempting to model our ministry mindset on the way of Jesus. This is embarrassing, and yet I’m haunted by the question of whether the only difference between this pastor and me is that he can actually articulate the thought process behind some of our decisions. In the end, I think I’d rather be literally in-credible than fall prey to this kind of pathology.

From Van Gogh

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art, humanity, theology, van gogh

Van Gogh once remarked, “I prefer painting people’s eyes to cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral, however solemn and imposing the latter may be – a human soul, be it that of a poor beggar or of a street walker, is more interesting to me.”

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Even if we habitually “go to church” (or to a mountain, a monastery, or seminary) in order to find God and feel close to him, we should know better than to confuse what exactly the Spirit has promised to inhabit. Certainly God reveals himself through these instruments, but we’ve been told quite clearly that the only things created in God’s image are people. While the primary meaning of this phrase refers to our calling as humans to rule on God’s behalf, surely it includes the residual truth that it is through one another, among other means, that God encounters us.

Two Words Everyone and No One Understands

The gospel demands and creates a community, and we call this community “the church.” And in the church, community is paramount as is the mission from which it can’t be separated. But community and mission are two words that everyone and no one understands, which is why in these posts we’re taking so much time with definition. Because once again, what the church is should determine what it does, and how it organizes what it does. If we don’t work on that is, what we do will suffer in ways we’ll probably never see. So today we’re going to continue exploring the definition of church as gospel communities on mission.

Without This There Is No Church

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church, church planting, conversion, crucifixion, gospel, jesus, new testament, old testament, paul, salvation, theology

In the last post we highlighted the importance of defining the church properly by exploring the claim that what we believe about the church determines how we coordinate its life together. Today we’re going to dig further into the definition of the church rooted in teachings by the fine folks at Missio: The church is a networked family of gospel communities on mission. 

This definition requires further definition if it’s going to be helpful. What is the gospel? What is community? What is mission? Today we start with the gospel.

Legislating Morality? (from MLK)

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America, american culture, politics, sin

I didn’t want to lose this quote and it’s too long to micro-blog, so here you go…

From Martin Luther King, Jr:

“Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion.

“Well, there’s half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.

“So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.”

The Church Is. Does. Organizes. But what is it?

I love the church, but sometimes I don’t know how to love it well. Part of the problem is my confusion over what the church actually is. I’m not proud to admit this, in large part because of the amount of time and money I’ve spent learning and doing things that should equip me with the clearest-answer-in-the-history-of-the-world to this one simple question: What is the church?

I do have answers. Dozens of them. But most of them are either user-friendly but so general they raise more questions than they answer, or technically accurate but so complex that only theo-geeks would understand. (And most theo-geeks have no idea how to take accurate definitions and turn them into actual functional communities, which for me defines the purpose of such a definition.)

Enter my recent experience at a Missio Intensive, where two insights raised and helped answer this question. The first was a formula that I believe originated with Craig Van Gelder:

A Tangible Future for the Missional Church?

I recently traveled with a team to a short Missio Intensive conference led by Hugh Halter, Matt Smay, Brandon Hatmaker, Caesar Kalinowski, and Dr Bob Logan. Over the next couple weeks I’m going to blog about the conference, starting today with what I was hoping for before we even arrived. My expectations going into this conference were high, and to tell you why I’m going to bring back an old friend – my (always under construction) evangelical-missional family tree. (Click here for an older version.) I love history for it’s own sake, but this particular project is more personal in that I wanted to map out the story behind the church where I serve as well as the many different kinds I hear and read about. Here is the latest:

Evangelical-Missional Family Tree (click for PDF)

Contours of Paul’s Ministry

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church, colossians, conversion, discipleship, gospel, jesus, ministry, paul

I’ll flesh this out further in a future post as part of an upcoming series on Colossians, but I wanted to share a few things from Colossians 1.24-29. In this passage Paul cracks a window and gives us a glimpse of how he understood his own calling and ministry. I see eight contours of Paul’s (co)mission. It is:

• Thoroughly centered on Christ. In keeping with the rest of the letter, nothing derails Paul from his singular focus on Christ. Here he is the word of God in its fulness, the content of God’s now-revealed-mystery and therefore of Paul’s proclamation, the hope of glory, and both the context and definition of maturity.

• Marked by a willingness to suffer for others. Whatever else we can say about Paul’s strange words about filling up what is lacking of Christ’s afflictions, this much is clear: Paul has no problem suffering on behalf of the people he’s serving. He may even believe that his suffering somehow lessens the chance that they’ll experience their own. This extreme selflessness puts me to shame!

• Accomplished by teaching and admonishing. Teaching is clearly articulating the truth about Jesus, and admonishing is the followup task of straightening out fuzzy thinking and setting things in proper order. Both are crucial.

• Oriented by apocalyptic imagination. This section drips with apocalyptic hints and clues, which (among other things) means that in Christ God has revealed the meaning of history and brought his story to its dramatic climactic moment. Speaking of which…

• Grounded in the (hi)story of God. Paul never loses sight of the ways in which Christ is the one in whom God has brought all his past action and promises to fulfillment. Yes this story has entered its universal stage where all of us are invited to become a part, but this must be intentionally remembered for us to know what becoming a part actually means and looks like.

• Aimed toward full maturity. Paul here shows no contentment for mere conversion, and while no one would doubt his “evangelistic passion,” here we see that Paul rises above our silly debates about evangelism vs discipleship. Paul wants everyone to come to maturity, and he won’t rest until he’s done everything he can to that end.

• Attentive to every individual. Paul is communal to the core, but his passion for community does not hinder his commitment to the individual parts that make up the body. No person gets forgotten or let off the hook; all are intended and expected to grow into maturity.

• Fueled by the energy of Christ. Paul works his tail off (that’s a loose translation), not by his own power but by the energy of Christ at work in him.

Does it need to be stated that these markers provide a wonderful grid for thinking about our own ministries? This may not be a definitive guide, but it’s a pretty good start!