The Local Church is the Hope of the World

Among evangelicals, Bill Hybels is known for the title of this post. But others say the same thing. Jesus and Paul certainly emphasized it a few years before him.

In this article, Stanley Hauerwas wants to point out that Rowan Williams does too. Quotable:

"The entire Church is present in every local church assembled around the Lord's Table. Yet the local church alone is never the entire Church. We are called to see this not as a circle to be squared but as an invitation to be more and more lovingly engaged with one another."

...which is part of why some of us in the Church of the Nazarene desire to see the Covenant of Christian Conduct eliminated. (This is our specific list of "do nots"). But I believe that the local church not only should, but must work out what it means to be the Body of Christ in its context. 

Many are quick to point out how abusive, divisive, and whorish the local church has been and can be.

Hauerwas responds:

"I am all too well aware of the perversities of the so-called 'local church.' But you do not avoid the perversities of place by escaping to some alleged universal. You can only avoid the perversities of place by being the church of Jesus Christ..."

Bill Hybels would be proud.

Spoon-fed praxis from powers-that-be, even "democratically-elected" bodies such as General Assemblies, General Conferences, and other denominationally-led bodies, are not easily conducive to true gospel living on the dirt road, despite being cloaked "in the name of unity."

It might be notable that Paul has a letter to the Ephesians, and letters to the Corinthians, and a letter to the Philippians. And each letter focuses on different things resulting from the one Christ, each according to their context. Paul might have wrote one letter and sent it to the known Christian world. But that's not what we have. We have different letters to different churches. 

Are we trying too hard to force unity? Are we focusing too hard on "unity in essentials" and not enough on "in all things charity"?

A Prayer for Kids in School

Every morning since my kids began going to school, we have prayed together as we wait for the bus. Much of this is out of nerves that I've shared before. But even more so, we pray because I want my kids to know that today - not in the future - but today, they are able to reveal the Kingdom of God to those around them.

While the prayer changes sometimes from day-to-day depending on what's going on, teachers' names, etc., it always has the same elements. I thought I'd share the bones of the prayer here for anyone who might want to do the same. As it's so often useful for everyone, but particularly kids (and my own memory!), there's a bit of alliteration:

God -
As we go to school again today, please help us.
Help us to listen so we can better learn so we can better love.
Amen.

Sometimes it comes out like this:
...help us to listen so we can learn, but most of all, help us to love.

More reason for no war

CBS News reports that July saw 38 suicides amongst active duty and reservists...in the Army alone.

Thirty-eight.

If 38 people died in one month from a certain flu strain or salmonella or something, there'd be a nation-wide outcry and even panic. If 38 people died in one month due to drinking from plastic bottles, we'd outlaw them.

The answer is not to increase services to service people. That should happen regardless and many times over what is currently offered. I'm tempted to note again the billions of dollars that go into weaponry and "defense" and question just if and how a small percentage of that should be directed to post-war healing. But the fact may be that no amount of money can be thrown at such problems as a solution for healing.

The answer is not to have wars, or at the very least,
consider the morality of how we go about having them.

I can't do much of anything about that.

But the Church can still stand in as a means of grace in these situations.


Here again is Dr. Stanley on the moral injuries of war:

 

Ecclesiological, Ecclesiastical, Ecclesial

As I gear up for a possible re-entry into academia and have been thinking through research possibilities, I came across a syllabus from Bryan Stone wherein a footnote clarifies the distinction between three terms that I've wondered about in the past. I'm putting it here for my own future reference, but also because others might appreciate the distinctions:

Ecclesiological: “of or relating to the understanding, doctrine, or concept of the church”  

(e.g. “Church architecture has enormous ecclesiological significance.”)

Ecclesiastical: “of or relating to the church as an established institution” 

(e.g., “Our church follows an ecclesiastical calendar.”)

Ecclesial: “of or relating to the church or to the church's nature” 

(e.g., “Christian existence is ecclesial existence.”)

There. Now we know.

The difference between ecclesiological, ecclesiastical, ecclesial, ecclesiastes, ecclesia, ecclesiology, ecclesiologist

Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me

What a great book.

It's been a long time since I've posted about a book. While that doesn't mean that I haven't read any books great enough to talk about, this one really got me. It's cliche, but several times, it literally had me laughing in one moment and crying in the next.

Ian Morgan Cron and I have few things in common: we both lead a segment of Christ's people, we live in New England (and vacation in VT), we can't help but feel that raising children is similar to handling fine china, and we aren't sure what we'd do without the Eucharist. But other than that, my appreciation of his book hardly came from being able to identify with his life:

His father was an alcoholic and an agent for the CIA. He had a nanny. College was filled with drunken partying. He's an alcoholic himself.

And yet, I was able to identify with his story because he was able to tell it so well. What I really appreciated about the book was Cron's ability to say up front that the anecdotes and conversations he'd write about were obviously in the spirit of what happened, and not perfect historical accounts.

This is life. I can hardly tell you in exact factual detail how an event I witnessed an hour ago went down, let alone one from my childhood. But I can tell you the truth of how I remember it. In a world that tries so hard to remember - or worse yet: create - the factuality of events past, what we really have are warped shadows of what happened, or again, worse yet: a truth full of lies, which is no truth at all.

Truth is hardly about facts.

So don't let the facts get in the way of the truth.
No...really, don't.

(Just to be clear, I don't mean that facts and truth are totally unrelated or mutually exclusive. And facts serve the truth. But when it comes to faith and life, the truth does not serve facts or historicity.)

So I really appreciated the way Cron approached his own life story.

I've often looked at the memory of an event in my childhood and wondered what might have "really" happened. In the end, it doesn't matter, because I grew up thinking it happened one way and my life has been profoundly shaped by that thinking. The realization that things can be so often (mis-)remembered in this way - at least in terms of fact - hopefully causes us to be gentle in how we respond to the words, stories, and remembrances of others. And so, the media, politics, and the brutality of scientific fact...these things often make me weep.

I recently came across this picture that says: "Seek Truth" with truth crossed out and "Jesus" scribbled in instead.

Really?

This just admits that the quest for truth has become so misunderstood in relationship to who Jesus Christ was and is (we do remember what he said, right?). That we'd have to dismiss the notion of truth in order to search for Jesus is sad, and for me, totally faithless. For me, truth is much different than an end of having collected the right facts. And in Jesus' story, it looks like it was different than fact-checking, too. He apparently didn't care as much about presenting the facts as we do:

The high priest stood up and said, ‘Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?’ 

...but Jesus was silent.

I heard a quote last week that I love. We, like Thomas, want the details of the road ahead: namely, the destination. Jesus provides a way of living in the moment instead. This spanish proverb speaks to it:

"Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar."

Traveller, there is no road.
The path is made by walking.