Notes from the Corner - Hospitality Series No. 2 - Finding Community

For the first nineteen years of my life, I believed Christianity was chiefly a matter of doctrines and morals. God, I thought, cared mostly about my beliefs and my conscience.

As I began university, I began to question the purpose and value of church. I could mind my beliefs and my morals just fine on my own. Why spend time with other believers? What did they offer that I couldn’t find by myself in my personal quiet time?

Church offers community. When we’re part of a community, we can’t avoid people who need and expect our compassion and care. We have to ask ourselves if our habits and attitudes, as well as our beliefs and morals, fit in. In a community, we have sisters and brothers who keep our head, heart, and hands accountable to Jesus’ way. 

I soon realized that Christianity was not something I could do on my own. I needed a church-community. My fiancee Cindy and I decided to start a small group for others struggling to make it on their own. This community became a lifeline for my faith; it also set me on my first steps toward hospitality.

Church Is/Should Be . . .

I picked up this video from Eliacín's blog.

TransFORM: Missional Community Formation from TransFORM on Vimeo.

Quote

He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
-D. Bonhoeffer

This is something for me to chew on quite a bit. Quite a bit.

Saying I Do

I've never joined a church before. Somehow I've managed these twenty-six (near twenty-seven) years without committing myself to a local community.

But I've had a change of heart. After three years' stubborn denial, I'm tying the knot, tying myself into this community, for richer or (usually) for poorer, for holiness and harmony and arguments and hurt feelings. I'm in the whole nine yards.

As part of the membership process at LWCC, I needed to write a "membership paper." I'm still not exactly sure what this is supposed to be, but below I've included one take on how I met Jesus and the route I've traveled to get from there to here.

Local church-communities are good. I've written a number of times that I think they are our witness to God's coming kingdom, the way we meet God now. Committing to one seems to be part and parcel of committing to follow Jesus. I'm glad to do that.

A Young Church? A New Community.

Some things make me happy. Like last Sunday night.

The church group I'm part of stakes its identity on the conviction that community--fellowship, koinonia--is a major part of Jesus' message about the new order of things God is bringing. Just like God frees us through Jesus' death and resurrection to be in his family (John's Gospel says to be "children of God"), so we're freed to be family to one another. This is something we're struggling to learn how to live, to move this from conviction to habit. I think some would call this "discipleship" or, maybe, "spiritual formation."

We've been trying out different ways to do this. We're plotting to begin home groups in the next months. We've already passed around sign up sheets for rotating dinners around each others dining room tables (or on each others living room floors). (If anyone still needs to sign up, email me.) Another way we've been training ourselves in the discipline of friendship is a common potluck after each service.

Last Sunday night, this looked like fifteen or so people, clustering around three or four tables, slurping bowls of white bean chili (a Cindy specialty), chomping garlic bread, and savoring some cake batter cookies (if you've never had these, your taste buds are missing an new world of delight). Even better than the food (which, let me repeat, was quite good), people were trading stories, getting to know one another. Some are old friends--some are old married couples. Some are quite new. Everyone was, perhaps unknowingly, showing what the new life Jesus promised looks like, how it listens and laughs, ask questions, passes the container of cookies. This makes me happy.

We started out calling our Sunday night gatherings "the Five O'Clock Service." I thought that was a generic enough, straight-forward enough. But after some reflection, some prayer, and a few conversations, we're changing the name. From this point forward, we'll be the Five O'Clock Community. I hope when we follow Jesus, it looks a lot more like sharing in a potluck than listening to a sermon.

Jan 25, 2009 - The Kingdom of God Is Near

First Presbyterian Church of DuPage - The Five O’Clock
Mk 1.14-34 - “The Kingdom of God Is Near”

Now after John was handed over, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the good news of God. He said, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Now we’re in it. We talked last week about how Mark was letting us in on the secret, laying it all out in front of us, explaining who Jesus really is. He showed us first in his title--The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God. He showed us in the way he described John the Baptizer. He showed us through what happened after Jesus was baptized--the sky splitting apart, the Holy Spirit anointing him, God declaring, “You are my beloved Son, in you I take great delight.” But now Jesus comes back from down South where John was preaching by the river, he comes back form forty days in the desert, now he comes back proclaiming the good news that the kingdom of God, the new world set right that God brings, is just now arriving--and we’re plunged into confusion. The light’s go out. We’re left with all sort of people--normal people, rich people, farmers and fishermen, beggars, prostitutes, and political power mongers--all debating and misunderstanding who Jesus is, what his message is about.

Last week I told you to hold on tightly to the clear, mountaintop glimpse of who Jesus is as we spend the next few months walking through the sometimes frantic, sometimes monotonous, sometimes lonely, sometimes harried, sometimes anonymous world where Mark tells the rest of hist story, the world that we live in.

“The time is fulfilled! The kingdom of God is just about to arrive!” Jesus announces. In fact, in a lot of ways it’s arriving right now, in Jesus, through what he does, what he says. But it’s not here all the way. We can even see that in our day. This world does not look like--does not feel like--the new world, the good world that God brings. And this is part of Mark’s and Jesus’ point. The new world cannot really begin until Jesus is handed over to the authorities, before he dies, before he is raised into the new life of God’s new world. The new world, God’s kingdom, is here and yet a lot of it is, even still, just about to arrive.
But what I’m saying here is too theological, too abstract. Jesus doesn’t come to meet us in our theology; we don’t live the new life of God’s world in our doctrinal statements. He meets us while we’re washing dishes after potluck, while we’re chasing down a rambunctious son or daughter, while we’re inputting number into a computer at work or trying to appease a cranky customer, while we’re having an awkward long distance phone conversation with a parent, when we crawl into bed and wish we weren’t quite so alone. God’s kingdom--the new world, God’s new life--is something that we need to find in our every day lives.

But what does it look like? We all know there are too many counterfeits out there! We tend to water it down to a “God is in all things,” to a hunt for the warm fuzzies or the silver lining. Or else we fixate on one part of it, turning “Love your neighbor as yourself” into a baptism for our failing attempts at world peace, or our unapologetic defense of our way of life. Sometimes we turn the promise of eternal life into a raspy-voice, finger-pointing tirade about hellfire and brimstone. But as much as I read the stories about Jesus in the New Testament, I never see him going around Galilee peddling tickets to heaven, his message was never about a washing machine in every home, a laptop for every child, or two cars in every garage. And he certainly never gave his support to the Roman government’s “peace”--their pax romana enforced by a military garrison in every major city, heavy taxes to house and feed their “peacekeepers,” and just enough entertainment--gladiators, festival days--to keep the poor too distracted to revolt. But if none of these are the new life Jesus brings, what is it? What does God’s kingdom look like?

Starting Church

The past month has been really quite full. It’s seen a lot of changes. I’ve started seminary, refreshing my stale greek and hebrew, putting in a couple of sleepless nights hashing out my own synopsis of what preaching is biblically. Seminary is a forty-five minute drive north of here (and a 90 or so minute drive on the return trip!). That’s ratcheted up the degree of tension on my schedule.

A bigger change, however, occurred on September 5. A month ago I signed onto a project with a church located in Chicago’s southern suburbs (Bolingbrook, to be exact). The church is an old church (the second oldest in the Chicago area, according to the plaque in the history room). It’s full of families that have lived in that community since it was still dirtroads and cornfields instead of chain restaurants, big box stores, strip malls, and an Ikea. It’s a sweet Presbyterian congregation that reminds me much of my days at Cedarville United Presbyterian Church during undergrad.

But it’s also a church that hasn’t purposefully changed with the community. It has an aesthetically beautiful, large building that is awkwardly empty during most the week. This, I surmise, was part of the initial impulse to create my position.

I am the new director of young adult ministries. At this point, I don’t think anyone understands my role as just shoring up the giving-base of the church. That’s certainly not the way I understand it. Instead, the goal is to give birth to a young, growing christian community in the shell of an old one.

Vision

Over the past few months, I have been engaged in a conversation with the EFCA about my desire to help start new churches. As part of the application process, I had to write up my vision of what the church(es) I would start would look like. As Cindy and I are still a good three or more years out from doing anything non-academic, what I see is necessarily and unfortunately vague. Unfortunately because the church is such a particular, concrete reality, it's difficult to see it apart from its particularities.

At any rate, it's been a good exercise in clarifying what really are my core convictions about the what it means to be the church. I think the heart of my past reflections on church (see my old blog post here) are still present, but I've had to work some reconciliation between my natural anarchist bent and the need for institutional structures for the church to be both workable and faithful to what the church is.

Confusing? Read on...