Community

The Wrong Kind of Hope for the Weak

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Joe’s car broke down for the third time. He was late to work as a result, so he lost yet another job. To add to the insult, the power company turned off his electricity.  You know this because he’s posting online asking for help.

Again.

And his teen daughter is a skank who can’t keep her legs together. Everyone in the church knows how that will end.

Ox-sized Joe shows up in church wearing the most hideous clothes that look slept in. You wonder if he passed out on the couch. You wonder what may have lubricated that slide into unconsciousness.

Still, Joe occupies the same pew week after week, skanky daughter in tow. Part of you feels for the guy. His wife died of cancer at 30, and Joe never was much in the parenting skills department. Look what he has to work with too.

But week after week, Joe’s in crisis. He’s an embarrassment when you get right down to it. The neediness never ends.

Really, the man should learn some boundaries. What’s next? Whatever the issue, it will probably arrive in five, four, three…

Every church has a guy like Joe. Or three or ten. Bad luck seems to shadow those folks. Their laments come one after another, and your compassion tank has run dry. Just bringing up their names elicits squirms and eye rolls. Isn’t it the responsibility of the mature to force folks like that to stand on their own two feet? Isn’t it high time for the tough love?

Paul wrote this:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

—1 Corinthians 12:21-26 ESV

Weak brotherWhen we start talking about the weak, we rarely think of folks like Joe. Our thoughts go to the boy with cerebral palsy or the granny in the wheelchair, especially if that boy and granny don’t demand too much from us. As long as we don’t have to bail them out of endless predicaments, we can deal with their kind of weakness.

Fact is, that boy or granny may be stronger than Joe. Our opinion of problem people like Joe and his daughter and our thoughts they might be served better at another church may signal they are the weakest of all.

Every church has problem people we would rather avoid. If we were serious about what we believe, though, I think we must ask ourselves if it may be the “problem people” Paul intends for us to honor. Not the folks who would make good poster fodder for charities, but the ones who wouldn’t. The people who aggravate us. The ones who don’t know about “boundaries.” The ones we hope would go elsewhere for their spiritual food.

Do we have that wrong kind of hope for the weak? Do we hope the problem people would vamoose? Do we like to define who we think the weak are rather than letting God define them for us? Does God truly love the luckless Joes of this world and their skanky daughters?

Or does God only look proudly on the respectable people like us, the ones who can handle our own affairs without any help (thank you very much)? The ones who live as if we don’t need Him for anything.

You and I don’t get a say as to whom God declares weaker. Ours is but to do His will and make certain we honor those weaker people we sometimes wrongly hope would go away.

Easy Accountability, Hard Accountability

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Iron sharpens ironIn my 35+ years as a Christian, I’ve heard a lot about accountability. In Evangelical ranks, the most common term of use is accountability partner.

An accountability partner is an individual who works with you to keep you on the straight and narrow. Iron sharpens iron and all that. In concept, it’s a nice idea.

It’s an easy one too. Maybe too easy.

The kind of accountability that an accountability partner provides, though, is that same kind of individualistic thinking about the Faith that seems ingrained in the American Church (see “The Church, Corporate Sin, and Christ as Community Savior“).

But there’s a harder accountability. Way hard. And perhaps because it’s hard, I hear about it as often as I hear about adding a Swahili-language service on Tuesday nights.

I’d like to see some accountability for all the prophecies and words of knowledge/wisdom some dole out that never come to pass. And I’d like to see the people who receive those words stop making excuses for their failures or for the people who pronounced them.

I’d like to see some accountability for all the times we go on and on about how radically “touched” our youth were at the retreat/conference/lock-in/whatever only to have those example youth walk away from the Church the second they graduate high school.

I’d like to see some accountability for the fact that so few of our church discipleship programs are effective enough to raise a church’s leadership from within so a church doesn’t have to scout the country for someone to lead it.

I’d like to see some accountability for the fact that we have thousands of Christian conferences around the country each year, and yet for all that wisdom being trotted out before thousands and millions, the trajectory of the general spiritual status of the populace of the United States continues sharply downward.

I’d like to see some accountability for the reality that most people who are on that downward slope only think about Jesus in negative terms because the people who represent Him are doing such a lackluster job of being excited about what they believe and sharing it in a positive way.

Getting an accountability partner for oneself is cake. Finding an accountability partner for the big “C” Church in America? Seemingly impossible.

I say seemingly because I don’t believe for a second that it really is as impossible as we make it.

As a whole, we Christians CAN do a better job. We CAN stop making excuses for the lacks. We CAN get serious about what we believe.

But we have to WANT to. And wanting to means dealing with the mess of the cleanup. We can’t kid ourselves about the job.

Do we want to improve? Or is taking the easy way all we want to be held accountable for?

The Church, Corporate Sin, and Christ as Community Savior

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“Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior?”

Anyone who has been around born-again Christians and Evangelical churches long enough has heard this said. A Christian mantra of sorts, this question often makes it into comedy routines, as both Christians and non-Christians poke fun at its overuse.

Anyone who fancies himself on the cutting edge of ministry would carve that phrase to pieces and come up with enough loaded Christianese in its eight short words to gag the most ardent deconstructionist.  “What does it mean to accept Christ? Doesn’t He instead accept you? And just what is a personal savior?”

While all the deconstruction going on in 2013 can get a little tiresome, I still find it worthwhile to ask that final question.

What is a personal savior?

Anyone who has read ancient Christian texts will find that the language used by the Church for most of its history has been the collective you and we. Community, the expressed life of the ChurchWhen Paul wrote, he wrote to entire churches. When Church leaders created policy, they aimed it at the collective Church. Even when the Church as a whole spoke about something as personal as sin, it maintained a corporate language. In other words, it wasn’t just individuals who sinned, but the assembly of those individuals.

I contend that one of the most destructive changes in the history of Western Christianity was the abandonment of a collective understanding of sin in favor of an entirely individualistic model. That individual model is driven by individual-focused language such as personal savior.

I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and one of the statements I can still recite today, despite leaving that Church decades ago, is the corporate confession:

“We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.”

We. Not I. We.

Approaching sin in terms of the collective changes everything. Sin doesn’t just become the collected sins of individuals, but something that the group may participate in as a group.

This is not American thinking, though. The closest most of get to thinking that a group has sinned is when we consider that a collection of people roots for the wrong sports team. “You guys are Steelers fans? Get thee behind me!”

But what does it mean that a group of people may sin by commission or omission?

What if an entire local church fails to show mercy? We can say that each individual in that church has failed to show mercy, but does the Lord always judge with that granularity?

Consider this: When the churches in Revelation receive their rebuke from the Lord, isn’t it the sin of that entire church that receives condemnation for what it did or didn’t do as a whole?

Another thought: At a time when we talk and talk about strengthening community in our churches, what does a better understanding of corporate/community sin do for building that better community?

It seems to me that the rise in the concept of Jesus as Personal Savior came at the same time that a more corporate understanding of sin and its effects on the community of faith were being abandoned.

What if the Church in America moved away—at least in part—from emphasizing Jesus as Personal Savior in favor of adding more of Jesus as Community Savior? What does that change in language do for how we Christians actually practice our faith? How might it reinvigorate certain aspects of the Body of Christ and how we see ourselves as believers linked by the Holy Spirit? And how would it possibly open our eyes to areas of corporate/community sin within the Church—as both a local body and as a whole entity—that we have routinely overlooked (yet unbelievers often notice first)? And what does it mean for you and I as individuals that the corporate body to which we belong is capable of sin as a collective?

Because it seems to me that the Golden City is both a complete building as a whole and is comprised of individual bricks of gold. That we have for too long focused on the bricks at the expense of the building has hurt the Church immeasurably.