The Confession of Saints

I’ve given a fair bit of thought to the formation of community.  Over the course of the past decade, it has been popular with new churches to cite creeds as a basic element of their “DNA” or “core values”.  Really, citing creeds served to manufacture a perceived heritage and counterbalance the embarrassment embedded within the notion of non-denominationalism.  Non-denom implies that you just made some stuff up.  And the fact of the matter is, in the Purpose Driven, post-modern, power vacuum that is American Evangelicalism, they were just making stuff up.  But they had a theological license and mandate to do so.  To do anything less than relevant, expressive, and interpretive would smack of mouth-breathing Fundamentalism.

So creeds filled the gap on the “What We Believe” web page.  Because it was a bit too dicey to be honest and say, “I dunno” or “depends on what day it is.”  Unless you’re Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, or this guy.  The Emergent crowd proudly wore “Dunno” as a badge and definer of their theology.  For everyone else in the post-modern milieu, creeds at least gave your church the dignity, that is to say brand, of a theology.  To be brand-less in America is to be without identity.  The Apostles’ Creed or Calvinism served as a plug-and-play mechanism for continuing to use church as a play thing of individualism. That is to say, in post-modern American, church continues to be an expression of self.  Churches are chosen for personal reasons for personal rewards.  The particular theology simply becomes frosting on that cake.  The frosting doesn’t change the cake, and in most churches switching Calvinism with the Apostles’ Creed with the Southern Baptist doctrinal statement, wouldn’t change the practice of the church a bit.

Schillebeeckx. Discuss.

it depends on what the definition of is is

Dictionaries define how a word has been used. Dictionaries don’t define as much as they reflect. Because, naturally, a dictionary cannot be authoritative. This is why most words have anywhere from 1 to 6 “definitions” in a decent dictionary.

So people use words to imply more often then to define. People tend to refer to a constellation of meaning rather than a concrete concept. A fine example is “worship”. Everybody knows what it means, but nobody can define it. The box in our brain labeled “worship” is filled with notions and implications, not a functional truth. Most people have no notion of “good” or “bad” worship, or whether worship “worked” or not. We have worship services every Sunday, but no one knows if worship happened there or not. Likewise, “faith”, “sin”, “democracy”, “self”, etc.

You know that feeling when you discover you’ve been using a word incorrectly for most of your life? “Oh, that’s what facetious means” or “I always thought irony meant something else”. Our definitions are usually being refined, corrected, and otherwise made more useful.

Dismembered: the American FrankenChurch

Dis-membered is the opposite of membered, right?

Individual and member cannot be synonymous.  Member is part of the whole.  Individual is not part of the whole.  Individual is the name for the dis-membered parts.

But let’s collect all the dismembered parts into a room and call it a “church”.  We can’t call it a Body.  That’s  because we don’t believe the Body exists.  We like to think of the Body as a metaphor for all these Body Parts in the room.  The church is like a Body.  Brace yourself for another dose of enculturated American Irony: the abundance of Real Body Parts in this room leads to the conclusion that the Body is Does Not Exist.

Gray is the New Irony?

Grant McCracken raised an interesting question the other day.  Grant is an smart and interesting guy who posts on anthropology and culture.  You should check out his weekly postings.  Last week he made an observation about the new muscle cars and luxury cars being marketed in gray.

Which raises the question: when did gray become the color of fast and powerful? The follow up question: why? What is it about gray that makes it the necessary choice. What is there in the cultural significance of gray (past and present) that makes it the compelling choice?

Since I’m usually deconstructing church related themes, I thought this might be a good exercise in deconstructing something else.  Here’s my answer:

I’ll posit the gray movement began sometime in the fall of 2009, about a year after the 2008 meltdowns, when we began to get a gist of the subsequent cultural fallout.

Footloose: the Foot, the Individual, and the Body

You’re playing so cool
Obeying every rule
Dig way down in your heart
You’re yearning, burning for some
Somebody to tell you
That life ain’t passing you by
I’m trying to tell you
It will if you don’t even try
You can fly if you’d only cut
(Chorus)
Loose, footloose
Kick off your Sunday shoes
Oowhee, Marie
Shake it, shake it for me
Whoa, Milo
C’mon, c’mon let go
Lose your blues
Everybody cut footloose
FIRST – we got to turn you around
SECOND – You put your feet on the ground
THIRD – Now take a hold of your soul
FOUR – Whooooooooa, I’m turning it
Loose, FOOTLOOSE

“One central biblical way of saying much the same thing is to follow Paul and think of the church as the “Body of Christ,” the single body in which every individual, and every local community, is a limb or an organ. “The body” is more than merely an image of unity-in-diversity; it’s a way of saying that the church is called to do the work of Christ, to be the means of his action in and for the world.

Many people today find it difficult to grasp this sense of corporate Christian identity. We have been so soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture that we feel threatened by the idea of our primary identity being that of the family we belong to—especially when the family in question is so large, stretching across space and time. The church isn’t simply a collection of isolated individuals, all following their own pathways of spiritual growth without much reference to one another. It may sometimes look like that, and even feel like that. And it’s gloriously true that each of us is called to respond to God’s call at a personal level. You can hide in the shadows at the back of the church for a while, but sooner or later you have to decide whether this is for you or not. But we need to learn again the lesson (to take St. Paul’s image of the Body of Christ) that a hand is no less a hand for being part of a larger whole, an entire body. The foot is not diminished in its freedom to be a foot by being part of a body which also contains eyes and ears. In fact, hands and feet are most free to be themselves when they coordinate properly with eyes, ears, and everything else. Cutting them off in an effort to make them truly free, truly themselves, would be truly disastrous.”

NT Wright, Simply Christian

One point I would highlight out of this quote is the bit about being “soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture.“  Is that a bad thing?  Would it be possible to do anything BUT live as an individual in the midst of capitalist society that bases the very concept of identity on which markets I support: the music I listen to, the shows I watch, the clothes I wear, the sports I champion, the church I attend?  I define who I am based on what the logos I wear.  Whether implicit or explicit, these logos display a conscious effort to showcase my depth of character and breadth of thought.  The only way I can differentiate myself from the masses is to selectively define myself by symbols and symbolic actions.  As consumers we are what we eat, symbolic or not.

Church: If it’s a bunch of individuals, you’re doing it wrong.

You have to realize you are part of Christ’s body or some things won’t ever make sense.  Or, even more to the point, if you fail realize that you are the body of Christ you put yourself in danger of perpetual frustration, deception, or death.

Once you become a Christian you are no longer an individual.  You become part of the body of Christ.  But there’s two problems with that.  One, all of us have been born into sin, fragmentation, and alienation.  This has been a “natural” way of living.  Two, the culture around us, especially Western culture in general, and American in particular, is based on the ideal of individualism.

Yoder

Philippe, The Postmodern Evangelist by Krista Graham

Philippe, The Postmodern Evangelist by Krista Graham

Once there was a man named Philippe. He was a spiritual guide in an emerging community. One day he decided to go on a journey. So, he did. As he was walking along the road, focusing on the journey and not the destination, he found himself alongside the chariot of an African official. The man in the chariot was reading from a parchment scroll. He was reading aloud, so Philippe was able to overhear what the man read.

“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth.”

Philippe caught up to the chariot and said, “You read that text beautifully. It made me feel significant and connected to ancient traditions to hear you read it.”

Christian Maturity as Growth in the Body

I’m quoting myself in this post because it gives me the opportunity to display some thoughts on Christian maturity.  Thoughts that don’t have to be retyped, that is, just copy and pasted.  Thanks for your indulgence.

What I’m arguing against is the American/individual style of church that’s been created in America. Where church is used to augment my own Christian experience. Naturally, the notion of individual experience seems silly, given that once you’re “saved” you become part of a body. You once were an individual, now you are part of a body.

Paul’s whole notion of body is to defeat this very idea: hands don’t experience things differently apart from the body as a whole. That is, unless it detaches itself during the week and comes back only on Sunday. Which then becomes the definition of American church.

I think we don’t see clearly enough the idea of community or body. Church is not for me to learn something. Learning is a minor part of maturation. Maturation involves growing into the person/body of Christ. Maturation happens when I can provide for others in a context greater than myself

Again, let’s use the imagery of a parent. My maturity as a father is not based on the fact that I know more than my child. Maturity is measured in my ability to see past myself as an individual and realize my son and I are one. As are my wife and I. My I-ness has ceased to exist when I got married, and again when I have children. I have become less yet become more. I have grown into a new “person” that includes my wife and children. I can’t have experiences that affect me but not my family.