N.T. Wright, the New Friars, and a Small Town Church

I've had time to do a bit or reading over the past few weeks. We've moved north, to Saskatoon following a job for Cindy that will start 1 July. Because we opted for a moving company (for the first time ever), we weren't sure when in the four-week window of June our goods would show up. So we've been waiting, eating off a card table, sitting around on folding chairs, sleeping on an air mattress. I like camping, but I was pretty happy when we got the phone call last week that truck was due in on Tuesday. It came, and now we're gradually unpacked. All to say: I've had some time to read.

Public libraries are great! Even for recent immigrants (like me), libraries offer immediate access to a near-boundless and haphazard collection of books and DVDs. You never know what you'll to find.

For instance: Wandering through our new local branch, I found Scott Bessenecker's The New Friars. I remember hearing about this book shortly after it came out in 2006. I remember meaning to find it and read it, but never quite getting around to it. Now, it seemed, it's time had come. So I checked it out with my brand new Saskatoon library card.

The New Friars is a good read--conversationally written, informative, challenging. I'd recommend it especially to students and twenty-somethings puzzling out how their lives fit into God's good desires for this world. That's the part of me, at least, that I felt it speaking to.

Bessenecker uses five words to characterize the praxis of those he dubs "New Friars"--Jesus' followers who become poor in order to serve the people Jesus loves. They are incarnational, devotional, communal, missional, and marginal. He fleshes each of these out with both stories from practitioners today and also those of their historical forerunners: the desert mothers and fathers, the Celts, the Franciscans and the Poor Clares, the Anabaptists, and the Moravians. Each chapter finds the right mix of personal confessional and prophetic discontent.

The New Friars struck me, got stuck in my mind and my heart, toward the end Bessenecker's discussion of the devotional aspect of the New Friars' work. He tells a story about shoveling snow (something and should get used to) and wrestling with his commitment to Jesus and his mission:

"You love my mission more than you love me," Jesus said to me. At first I found this a bit offensive. I suppose Peter might have felt the same way when Jesus kept asking him later, "Do you love me?" (John 21:15-17). How can this be? I wondered. Of course I love you, Lord. But then I began to ask myself, what was it that motivated me . . .
As wonderful as it is to bring the kingdom of God to the hollow places on earth, even this is rubbish in comparison to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus. Intimacy with Christ must be first. Without it, mission is empty and self-serving.

I hit these words like sparrow hits a window. I went back and re-read the paragraphs. Bessenecker was insisting on a distinction that I simply couldn't comprehend. I read and asked myself, how am I supposed to differentiate between my love for God and my love for God's purposes? If I love God, I want what God wants, right?

I eventually picked myself up and made it to the end of the chapter and the end of the book. I enjoyed it, but I keep returning to this question about what I love. I have a half-forgotten memory of a time in my Evangelical youth when this distinction would have made a bit more sense to me. At times, I feel a vague sense of loss or perhaps even regret that I can't find that conceptual apparatus or feel those feelings at this point. Other times I feel a sneaking sense of superiority or an adolescent air of maturity that I've "grown past" that capability. I'm not sure what I feel, but I keep feeling it because the question stubbornly keeps bobbing to the surface of my thoughts.

Reading The New Friars began to dredge up question about how I am joining in on God's project. Recently I've been talking with a small town congregation near Saskatoon. They need a pastor of a sort. They need someone who will do the things small town pastors do: sermons and committees and weddings and funerals and Children's Moments and the like. Set against the stories of saints and students giving their lives away in urban slums, a small town pastorate looks pretty far removed from the frontiers of God's kingdom. I doubt the church wants someone who spends more time "sitting with" the community than working in the church office.

So I began googling urban ministry opportunities around Saskatoon. I began making lists of the reasons why God wouldn't call me to a small town pastorate.

But the unanswered question of John 21 stopped once again: Do I love Jesus, or do I simply love what looks to me like his mission? Small town churches don't look like the frontline of mission. But maybe I'm seeing things incorrectly. I remember Jesus telling a story about people at the last judgment asking in disbelief when they served him, fed him, ministered to him. And Jesus responds tells them appearances can be deceiving (see Mt 25). Maybe there is a frontier running right down Main Street (even though it doesn't have a single stoplight). Maybe Jesus is forgotten somewhere amid the semi-affluent homes.  If I love Jesus, I have to go when he says go, right?

Which brings up N.T. Wright. After I finished The New Friars, I picked up Wright's Surprised By Hope. This one's been sitting on the shelf since I got it as a gift a few Christmases back. So when I was grabbing a few books to read while we waited for the moving truck to arrive, I slipped it into my bag. I'm glad I did.

Wright's basic argument runs that a revitalized eschatology will give us a more robust political ecclesiology.

Most of us have a pretty foggy personal eschatology. We know we will die, and we're confident that then we'll be with Jesus eternally. For most of us, this is what the good news is all about.

We may or may not have strong feelings about hell (thanks to Rob Bell and the barrage of books responding to his Love Wins).

Some of us (if you grew up in a certain kind of Evangelical church, like me) also have charts and diagrams about the particular of general eschatology. We're familiar with the various interpretations of "time, times, and half a time"; we've read Christian pulp fiction about the end of the world; we've debated pre-, mid-, and post-trib raptures scenarios. But most of us feel that it's best to hold onto these, if we do at all, with a pretty loose grip.

To all of our muddled feelings and convictions, Wright brings a solidly researched biblical theology. He confronts us with the unanimous early Christian hope in a bodily resurrection after a disembodied intermediate sate with Jesus in heaven/paradise/Abraham's Bosom. Because of Easter, he says, we have more to hope for than a spiritual exit from a sin-sick material world. Jesus has not just made us a nice place to go after the traumatic and unfortunate experience of death; no, he's conquered death. And his own resurrection--his own bodily return back from the dead--proves that death no longer has the final word.

And from bodily resurrection, he draws a clear line to concern for and action on behalf of the present social-political-ecological-material world. God called creation good, and God's intent has always been to redeem, to buy back the good in it. Jesus' resurrection shows us the "how" of that redemption.

Wright returns again and again to 1 Cor 15.58: "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."At the resurrection and renewal of all the world, God redemptively validates what we do in the present, just as Jesus' resurrection validated Jesus' work.

Wright doesn't want us confusedly to think that our responsibility now is to "build God's kingdom by our own efforts." There is no way for humanity, Christian or otherwise, to progress from here and now to the resurrection new creation. As Wright insists, "God builds God's kingdom."

Wright follows up this important disclaimer with the following: "But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human beings who reflect his image. . . . God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected--imaged, if you like--into his world through his human creatures." This is the key point: God chooses to usher in God's kingdom, at least in a preliminary way, through human agency. As Paul says to the believers in Corinth, "We are God's co-workers" (1 Cor 3.9). We wait for the final day, the day of general resurrection for the world to be made entirely new. But until then, we declare the glorious goodness of the God who saves us by building for God's kingdom (see Mt 5.16).

But how do we partner with God in this work? The kingdom for many of us includes only the souls of the saved. Others may steer us toward government offices and the need to legislate morality. Both these answers, I think, shoot wide of the goodness of God's kingdom. Look at Jesus: how did Jesus herald the arrival of the kingdom?

Wright suggest three pursuits for the church as we build for God's kingdom: justice, beauty, and evangelism. He concludes, "This is the good news--of justice, beauty, and above all Jesus--that the church is called upon to live and to speak, to bring into reality, in each generation." Then he asks, "What might the life of the church look like if it was shaped, in turn, by this hope-shaped mission?"

Wright develops this beautifully, and I can't urge you strongly enough to read it for yourself.

This comes back around to the small town church. Our strongest witness to Jesus' good news, our fullest participation in God's mission, is how we live together as church-communities. We herald the kingdom Jesus inaugurated by how we live and love as a community. Wright devotes final third of Surprised By Hope outlining this sort of ecclesial politics found in the New Testament. 

The work of the new friars, if we look past its (un)glamour, the strangely attractive unattractiveness of it, is primarily to demonstrate the way Jesus lived among the world's poorest people. There work is less one of social development than one of accompaniment. Their expectation seems less to be that they will end poverty than that they will live faithfully with poor people, welcoming them, eating together, sharing their resources.

My work (whatever the outcome of conversations with the small town church) is to love Jesus. In Jn 21, Peter answers Jesus three times that, yes, he loves Jesus. Jesus responds three times telling Peter to care for Jesus' flock. Earlier in John, Jesus said, "If you love me, keep my commands." And what is his command? Jesus continues on to say that his command is that we love one another as he loved us (Jn 15.12).

Loving Jesus (not just Jesus' mission) means, for me, loving as Jesus loved. This is first an ecclesial reality, something that we do together in the church family. If I am not willing to share table with my partners in this body, if I do not care for the, if I cannot forgo my own interests in order to attend to theirs--I have not love. I have not yet experienced Jesus' reconciliation of all things because I am not reconciled to my sisters and my brothers in this gathering. But if I do love them, then the kingdom of God is truly among us.

But as Wright and Bessenecker would both insist, a good congregational life is not enough. Just as my lone wolf activism for the kingdom falls short of God's desires, so also our in-group comfort and harmony does not bring us to the goal God has for us. No.

Instead, our church-community must build for the kingdom in this world. Our mutual love must spill over into love for the entire world, especially those places where justice and beauty are hardest to find. Remember, Jesus says, "As the Father sent me, so I send you." Sent from love to love.

And because we are a community--not just individuals--we can love more robustly. The lonely not only find a friend, they find a family. The movers and shakers of the world are confronted not only by a vote but by a grassroots movement. Politics (ecclesial or otherwise) gains force when enacted by a community, a polis.


So perhaps I'm still struggling to understand Bessenecker's distinction. Loving Jesus seems to entail loving as Jesus loved, which, in turn, seems to be the essence of mission. But I think the struggle is good for me, so I hope it continues.

Revisiting Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith

I'm a few pages away from the end of Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith.

For many years I've remembered Ancient-Future Faith as a turning point book in my spiritual development. But my memory of its content has been a bit cloudy. I could picture a page where Webber tells students that when life is hard and their faith is insecure to get to the eucharist as quickly as they could because God would meet them there. A story I treasured, but that was about it.

I do remember carrying this book in my backpack as I traveled with a music group through Greece as a junior in college. I remember poring over it while the tour bus passed the endless olive groves along the Aegean. I remember returning to it after our guide led us through the history and the archaeological sites of Corinth and Philippi.

I've mentioned this experience before: At a gig in Thessaloniki, between sets I found myself in the middle of a passionate discussion with a young Orthodox seminarian. While I asked about the personal quality of his relation to the divine, he urged me to return to the Fathers. Later, I remember, I got lost in the majesty of St. Dimitrios and the mystery of its catacombs, in the sacred continuity of the community of the faithful I found in a monastery at Meteora.

I came back from Greece changed, and I remember Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith being a catalyst for that change.

Returning to the text, I've been amazed at how much this book presaged the trajectory my faith development has taken. I look here, and I find the roots of my understanding of atonement, the outline of my commitments in ministry, a picture of the way I've come--via circuitous routes--to understand the church. Not a perfect type, mind you, but a quality sketch.

Friends, Ancient-Future Faith, despite the fixation with postmodernity of its historical moment, is excellent book to welcome into the conversation of your growing faith. College-aged friends, especially, check this book out. Find a used copy. Interlibrary loan it (I think that was how the copy in Greece came to me). Drive to the far north and borrow it from my shelf. See where it might take you. Read it.

May 20 - Blessed until Our Nets Break

Friends, let us begin this morning in scripture. God’s word to us may surprise us. God may speak to us in way we do not expect, at moments we do not expect. Even on a Sunday morning. But again and again we gather around these stories, these poems and prayers and laws and letters, here in this bible, because we hear God’s voice in them. So let us listen and wait this morning for what God will say to each and all of us.

Open your bibles to Luke, chapter 5, verse 1 through 11. Listen as I read for what God is saying to you, to us.

One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God. He saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.”

Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.

Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him. (Lk 5.1-11) Amen.

For seven months my wife Cindy and I lived in Skopje, Macedonia, a small country in Eastern Europe. We crossed the ocean full of love for Jesus, young and wanting nothing more than to spend our energy to love as he loves.

When I started the application process with the mission board, I imagined I would split my time in Europe between bringing comfort to orphans and refugees and sharing the gospel over cappuccinos with young people. But, instead, what met me once the plane touched down was confusion and loneliness. I asked what I could do in a city I did not know that spoke a language I did not understand. Instead of cafe conversations and building orphanages, I taught American missionary kids arithmetic, history, and grammar.

But wise friends and co-workers told me to persevere, that they could see that God had brought me there even if I was a bit foggy on God’s reason for doing so. They also encouraged me to learn to language. I would be a lot happier they said, once I could zboruvat Makedonski.

So every Tuesday and Thursday night Cindy and I would ride the bus toward the center of the city, to a neighborhood called Novo Lisiche, and sit for an hour or two with our language teacher Richard learning vocabulary and grammar, how to ask for directions, how to buy a kilo of potatoes or oranges at the market.

One Thursday night, a few months into our time in Macedonia--probably in February--I was riding the bus back to our apartment.

It is not warm in Macedonia in the winter. This night there was snow on the ground. I was sitting in the back of the bus. The bus was pretty empty, just me, a few men riding home from a day at cafes watching soccer, and a Roma family riding up front, a father and mother, one son who looked about ten years old and a younger son who was probably four or five. The mother and especially the father looked too old to have such young children, but by this point in my time in Macedonia, I’d learned that in Roma families people often look much older than they are. The Roma are gypsies, the trash-pickers, the scrap-metal collectors, the people who build their homes in the city dump. They live hard lives, so a man who looks sixty may only be thirty and a woman who looks fifty-five may only be twenty-eight.

I looked up again at the family at the front of the bus as we bounced through another intersection. The father’s toes and heels were sticking out of his shoes. There was snow outside, cold air blowing in around the doors to the bus, and this man’s bare toes and exposed heels had nothing between them and elements.

I sat there, disturbed, unsure what to do. I felt guilty. I felt guilty because I knew that I had come to the country with two pairs of shoes and a pair of sandals besides and this man had nothing that passed for decent shoes on a cold February night. And I felt afraid. How would I speak to him? I could barely express myself in my broken Macedonian, and odds were that his own Macedonian was not that great; he would speak some Roma dialect. Would I offend him? Is it an insult to his character if I offer him a gift in front of his children?

I sat there feeling guilty and afraid until he and his family stepped out into the cold a few stops later. When the bus finally reached the end of the line, my stop, I thanked the driver, pulled my coat collar up, and walked to my apartment, feeling disappointed at my lack of response.

I had an opportunity to love the way Jesus loves--to bring warmth to a poor man’s feet, to offer him some small measure of protection and stability. This action, this gift was what I wanted--the hope that brought me to Macedonia. But instead of untying my shoes and misspeaking and gesturing my way through an awkward interaction, I sat securely in my seat in the back of the bus. I failed to respond.

Luke’s story about Jesus asks us to make a decision. When Jesus brings us good news, he brings us a demand, a demand that we choose whether to follow him and join with him or to ignore him, to pretend nothing has really happened, to go back to life as normal. We must choose.

May 6 - Worship & Mission

Let me tell you a story: Eight years ago, just as Cindy and I finished college we heard rumors of a group of students and professors meeting in an old, red-brick church in a forgotten neighborhood of urban Springfield, Ohio. They would meet to praise God and hear God’s word. They would also meet to go door-to-door fixing broken windows in the neighborhood and offering gifts of baked goods.

Cindy and I had friends who’d gone on a Saturday night. We knew and admired some of the professors who led this group. But I, at least, was nervous to drive the fifteen miles north to Springfield and stop-in on this meeting. Finally, just as Cindy and I were preparing to pack up and move away to Eastern Europe, we made a visit.

It was an early summer afternoon. We parked our car behind the church. In front, I timidly pulled open one of the heavy wooden doors. I stepped inside, unsure where everybody was. After some looking, we found them in the musty basement, divvying up baked goods to take door-to-door as they introduced themselves to the red brick church’s neighbors.

Cindy and I were welcomed in. I was partnered with the wife of a music professor. I remember walking through a squeaking gate on a chain link fence to ring a door bell next to a cracked storm door. A big dog barked behind the door, and finally a bleary-eyed man came to the door. Nervous, I introduced us and pushed a coffee cake toward him. He wanted to know who we were. I said we were with the church down the street. He remembered a health and social services fair the group had held a month or two ago. We asked if there was anything he wanted us to pray for at our meeting in forty-five minutes. He couldn’t think of anything. He took the coffee cake, and we walked down the block.

Two or three conversations later, we met back at the church. Others had pulled out guitars and set some bread and grape juice on a table in front. One of the professors prayed, and then we sang songs printed on half-sheets of paper. I looked around. I knew a handful of people, recognized a few from campus. But many were strangers. Tired looking adults, some, I would learn later, fighting the demons of crack cocaine addiction. I saw kids, singing and fidgeting. Some were professors kids. Some were kids from the neighborhood who like the music, the stories, the children’s programs.

A professor got up and read a sermon about Jesus being baptized by John. The Red Brick Church passed around preaching responsibilities from week to week between a number of the adults. We ate and drank communion together. We sang one more song. The kids came stampeding down from their classrooms. We all walked down to the basement. Every Saturday ended with a potluck. Everyone brought what they had, everyone ate, and everyone helped with the dishes.

Cindy and I drove back to our small apartment in Cedarville just as the skies were turning dark. We knew we’d seen something good. This wasn’t our usual Sunday morning church service. We weren’t sure what it was, but we knew it was good.

Friends, I believe that a church that does not follow Jesus in mission is not a church. I’ve said this for two weeks, and I am giving this last Sunday to say this same thing once more: A church that does not follow Jesus in mission is no church.

The last two Sunday morning we have listened to Jesus in Mt 10 as he instructs his followers what it means to join him in announcing that God’s kingdom is arriving. Spilling over with compassion for the anxious and oppressed, Jesus ask God to send others to join him in bringing in the harvest. And then he tells his followers to go and do what he has done: to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons. And Jesus tells his followers that they must risk the things they hold dear to follow him in this work, and that, like him, they will suffer the loss of many things they love. Students are not above their teacher . . . It is enough for students to be like their teacher. But God their Father is trustworthy, and God will make all things right in the end. Every sacrifice is noticed, remembered, and rewarded.

This morning we turn the page to Mt 11 where we hear about the response to Jesus and his followers’ mission. We could spend our entire morning here. We could spend many mornings here. John the Baptist--the greatest prophet--hears rumors about what Jesus and his followers have been doing, and he’s confused. Making the lame walk and giving sight to the blind was not what he’d expected of a Messiah. But Jesus reassures him that these very actions are the signs of God forgiving and bring God’s people back to Godself.

Then in vv 16-24 we hear from the crowds. The crowds who are never satisfied. Whatever God does it’s not enough for them. John the Baptist came preaching fire and brimstone, and they laughed him off as a crazy man. Jesus comes giving life and blessing, and they think he’s too easy on sinners, lax and wishy-washy. These are the people who have seen the miracles worked by him and his followers, who’ve heard his message over and over. But what do they do? They go on with their lives as if nothing has happened. They are self-assured, maybe in their religiosity, maybe in their hopelessness and despair, maybe in their schemes and dreams. Unlike John, they won’t even acknowledge a God who disrupts their expectations. Jesus promises hard punishment for them at the last judgment.

We could spend a week or more on each of these stories. I believe that if we are quiet and patient and honest, we’ll see ourselves standing in one of these two groups. Either we’re with John and his disciples, believing Jesus, even when he surprises us, or we’re with the crowds, refusing to accept Jesus for who he is. And life and death, forever and for today, hang in the balance.

But at the very end of ch 11, in vv 25-30, Jesus says something that I feel speaks even more specifically to us--not just to the original twelve and the group of true-believers who traveled with Jesus, but to Dry Creek Bible Church here in the Gallatin Valley.

April 29 - How To Be a Missionary

A church without a mission is no church.

Last week we listened for what Jesus would say to us in Mt 9.35-10.8. Jesus looked out at the anxious and oppressed crowds, and like God, his heart ached for us. He told his followers to ask God that they might join in Jesus’ work. (This is incredible--that we get to share with Jesus, that we get to work alongside Jesus.)

And when we ask, God sends us out to bring in the harvest. So Jesus sent out his followers--his sent ones, his apostles. He told them to do what he was doing. If people are sick, heal them. If people are dead, raise them. If people are outcast, welcome them back home. If people are demon-possessed, free them. In short, whatever the needs of the world are, however it has been broken, go and show how God sets it right. By word and deed, announce God’s kingdom.

But how do we go? “Heal the sick,” “raise the dead,” “cleanse the lepers,” “cast out demons,”--these are, for us, all somewhat hypothetical actions. They’re hard to imagine in the course of our day-to-day lives. We may need help picturing what joining in Jesus’ work means here and now.

That’s why this morning we’re reading on, to listen to the rest of Jesus’ instructions to the original twelve sent out to carry on his work.