The President of Fuller (where I attend) had this to say about the need for for charity among Evangelicals in a recent article he wrote for Christianity Today.
In a speech I heard several years ago, the Japanese-American theologian Kosuke Koyama put it nicely: We all have to decide, he said, whether we have a generous God or a stingy God. And the truth is that we evangelicals often give the impression that we have decided to be a spiritually stingy people. A recent Barna Group survey, for example, offers evidence that many young people in the larger society think of evangelicals primarily as “judgmental” types, hostile toward folks in other religions and mean-spirited in our attitudes about homosexuality. Even many young evangelicals share some of these assessments of the older generation. A leader at an evangelical college said it this way: “A lot of our students worry about typical evangelical attitudes toward people who have different belief systems and lifestyles. It’s not that they don’t take the Bible’s teachings seriously. It’s just that they have gotten to know Muslims and gays, and they are embarrassed by the harsh spirit toward such folks that they see in the older generation. If we don’t do something about this negative image soon, we could easily lose them for the evangelical cause.”
Carrying on from my last post I thought I’d point out a few more aspects to John (Jack) Caputo’s book I do like and then say something about what I don’t like. If you’re interest in getting into the discussion on deconstruction, and what it has to do with the church, especially in its more Catholic and Emerging forms (Caputo is a Catholic) this really is a great book to read. It’s helpful not just in how this applies to church, but also in his very succinct and easily understandable explanations of some pretty hard-to-get-at ideas.
Good Magazine, a site I really like, cover all kinds of topics, from culture to politics and the environment. This week they’ve begun a video series looking at LA’s homeless district, otherwise known as Skid Row. I look forward to following these videos.
Los Angeles’s police chief called Skid Row “the worst social disaster in America.” In LA county there are 80,000 homeless each night. Los Angeles is the first third would city in the United States.
I can’t believe this is my sixth quarter of studies! I am almost exactly halfway done with my course work. I am just about finished with my 3rd tutorial (on theology of church and culture) and completed my 4,000 pages of reading for the class about 1.5 weeks ago. This past week I’ve been working on reviewing my notes and trying to figure out some kind of thesis and outline for the paper. So far I am still pretty dry on inspiration so I am going to turn to a more simple model of paper and do a summary of three thinkers and their insights into church and/or culture: James Wm. McClendon, John Howard Yoder and Slavoj Zizek. The basic point of my paper will be to mine the best of their works in a way that allows me make comparisons and map out how their work can be used for dealing with the questions for the topic at hand.
I’ve had a lot of vested interest in the emerging church for a number of years now, partly because of my own previous experience in communities that reflected many of the qualities present in Bolger and Gibb’s “Emerging Churches,” and partly because upon reading that book I was better able to organize my own disparate thoughts on the future of the “emerging” Friends church, or what we now convergent Friends. But there is often a too complicated debate over who and what the emerging church (EC) is, whether it is a good thing, and who really represents this “movement.” I am not really interested in defending or critiquing this movement, though I am personally in favor of at least some of the expressions within these groups, because I think the church should always be contextualizing its message the best it can. But this doesn’t really help us understand the who and the what of the EC. That said, I have been playing around with various ways of categorizing these various emerging groups, and I wanted to throw out this very early, proto-typology and see how it flies.
For this last post in my church in mission series I want to explain the five practices that John Howard Yoder offers the church as a means of faithfulness and witness in mission. But first, by way of review, I’d like to restate my overall argument. I’ve argued that much of the church’s style of mission in the West has been shaped around consumerism, something we see in the way the church uses the word ‘relevancy.’ Following Yoder, I said that the church’s mission and ethics is to be first and foremost rooted in taking the life of Jesus (the incarnation) as our starting point for mission. Then I moved on to explaining how the church is to be a bi-cultural community. This community is always positioned within exile, refuses to become absolute (whether through physical power or other means) and seeks to transform, or bring the peace of the city in which it finds itself. The church is a remembering community, one formed around texts, practices, songs, and stories, but it is also an active, transforming community and is called to live out the reality of God’s kingdom now. This is an outlook, I think, the church must accept more and more Christendom crumbles.
If the Church, as Bi-Cultural community, is to be a people that not only seeks to remember its history but transform whatever society it is in, then how is it to go about this transformation? How do we go from self-preservation to societal transformation? Yoder, in his book Body Politics, names five practices he believes all churches can and should do, practices that not only govern and shape the church (or help it remember), but also point outward as a model for a new way of living that all of society can be transformed by.
According to John Howard Yoder, one aspect that distinguishes this bi-cultural faith community we call the Christian church from the world is it’s insistence upon being non-coercive. This point of view has major implications not only for the mission of the church in our culture as well as in others, but it also brings up some important points about how we read our history.
A Quick History of Christendom
Since the start of Christendom, when the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian and Christianity became the state (re:enforced) religion, the church has struggled to take the teachings of Christ seriously on matters of violence. This is why we call the marriage between Christianity and the state is called Constantinianism. This theological, and political shift for the church, which was a move from the margins of society to the center of power, had profound effects upon the way it understood itself.
Yoder says:
The deeper shift behind it all was the loss of the identity of the Christianity community, as visible over against the world, replaced by the effort to “Christianize�? (thinly) the entire society. Once the premise that Europe is “Christendom�? has been granted, the rest follows. The church-state tie and even the Crusades can make sense (as they still do in our day, in modern forms, to a host of Americans) once the first assumption, namely, that everyone is “in,�? is made�? (104).
This is the third part of the Church in Mission series where I am attempting to appropriate some of John Howard Yoder’s thinking in direct relationship to the mission of the church in our culture today.
So far we’ve look at the church in relationship to the question of how the church is to remain “relevant” to our culture, and secondly the question of how Jesus interacted with his own culture. Another way of thinking (that is complimentary to what’s been said) about the mission of the church as something over and against commodified relevancy can be seen this in Yoder’s primary missiological text, Jeremiah 29:7:
“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
For Yoder the Jews’ being scattered into the Babylonian empire is not a sidetrack of their history, but a new beginning. “It was rather the beginning, under a firm, fresh prophetic mandate, of a new phase of the Mosaic project” (For the Nations, 53). Dispersion is now the calling of the Jewish community of faith (52). And within this dispersion, YHWH calls the Jewish people to “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.” [Read more]
