Re-thinking church

So why re-think the church?

Jesus is in charge, isn’t he?

Didn’t he say he’d be the One to build His church?

If the church isn’t the way he wants it to be, wouldn’t he change it so it is?

And since only he knows what the church is supposed to look like, who are we to judge it as something other than he intends?

I love the church.  I love my family too.

Even though I have an older relative who has a distinct pungent smell about her and an uncle who is near comatose for anyone other than young women under 25.

Between church and family, it’s their vulnerabilities I love most - a drooling Pope who dignified old age by being very public about his diminishing faculties, the cousin who wishes he wasn’t gay, the community church too poor to have its own roof.

Where my love turns cold and my bashing gene gets in gear is when either become abusive...the brother who beats his wife, the church which spends more in upkeep than in caring for the poor.

When abuse occurs in a family, an appeal can be made to ‘family values as taught by Dad’, which are of little impact if Dad too beat his wife.

But in the church, the issue of family values is pretty much entrenched in this one standard: those who believe in Jesus must live as he did.

Which if I understand this Taproot business correctly, explains the necessity for our re-thinking the church. Rare would it be to find anyone who believes that the contemporary church is living like Jesus did.

We’re more like the society we live in, than the Jesus we believe in. The question is - how do we look more like Jesus?

Perhaps the question to ask ourselves first is: what of our current behaviour is least like Jesus?

We are seemingly adverse to provoking the world with a social alternative which looks like Jesus...where our economics mean the person having much doesn’t have too much and the person having little hasn’t too little...where our politics advance the cause of the most vulnerable regardless of what it might cost us...and where our social relations encompass everyone so that no one is left alone and uncared for. 

In short we hold back from doing what it takes for the world to know we are his disciples by our love.

We are too much the status quo to be like Jesus. We’d sooner squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle than offend a rich man and his money. We push the poor aside during our ‘building’ campaigns and in times of economic recession. The poor don’t have the place in our eyes that they do in Jesus’ eyes. They are his first beatitude.The rich are his first ‘woe’.

Brian asks the question about whether we could be the church without money. I’m still unconvinced as to whether we can be the church with money!

Most of us have a pretty good idea of what Jesus would do if he got a hold of our cheque books. Fewer vacations and a whole lotta poor people for dinner.

But the disillusionment many have with the church has more to do with what we as churches do with our money.

Can we honestly look at a church budget of $1 million and say we are allocating the funds the way Jesus would?

This re-shaping of our economics and politics and social agenda can’t be legislated. We must be willing. But to be willing, we must have some sense of how profoundly short of the standard we now are and how our aversion to living life as Jesus did makes us shallow and ineffective and uninspiring and near comatose. Good reason to repent.