Yadda Yadda Yadda

It's official. I'm going crazy. It's 1:30am and not only have I written an assignment on "understanding the church as the family of God', but I've read 200 pages of a book on postmodernism and Christianity. I love this stuff, but it's just too much in too short a time period. I'm suffering from severe brain overload and I'm going insane. I just can't cope with any more information! I need to finished reading another 115 pages or so (tonight) but I think I'm going to give up and go to bed. My brain is fried. Too much information!!! And just because I can, I've decided to post my assignment here for anyone to read if they feel like it. Footnotes don't work on a blog, so I'll put any footnotes in brackets.


UNDERSTANDING THE CHURCH AS THE FAMILY OF GOD

The Bible speaks often about the Church as the Family of God. It seems to me that we do not fully understand what it means to be the family of God, but rather see ourselves as individual people of God who belong to this indefinable group that is ‘somewhere out there’. I want to explore what it means to really be the Family of God, and how we experience that in everyday life.
We tend to see Church as an institution rather than as a state of being. In biblical terms we are the Church, we do not go to Church. The Church is rather a collection of God’s people who are to be intertwined with one another as we travel through life. We ought not to simply meet together and share an isolated section of our lives, but rather share life as a whole. I long to be part of a real Church who share life, what life is, not what we make it out to be when we see each other on a Sunday.
I was thinking about the concept of discovering who we are. We most definitely need to know who we are before we can ask what we will do. I believe that God calls us to be, not to do. What we do will spring from who we are. When we are right with God as He calls us to be, then action is a natural flow on. James discusses this in great length. James 1:22 says "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says." It seems to me that it is not just that we act, but that we act out of a natural flow on from our relationship with God, from our faith (Not to say that these actions are always easy and life is always happy because we have God, because the nature of our world means that this is not so. But rather that we have the ability to choose to do what God asks of us because of the nature of our relationship with Him). We need to be defined as the people of God because of who we are. This speaks louder than anything to the post-modern world.
‘Postmodernism (a philosophical state) and postmodernity (a cultural shift)’ (Stuart Murray "Post-Christendom" pg. 12) are the settings in which we find ourselves. Regardless of what we would prefer, this is our world at this present time, and we need to accept that before we have any chance of having an impact on it. You can not have an impact on something if you are pretending it is anything other than it really is, and to accept it, you need to understand it (Having said that, it is almost impossible to understand something that is in itself undefined. It is called the postmodern era simply because it is post the modern era. Therefore we are in a period of transition and have not yet defined where we are as western society). As Stuart Murray discusses in his book ‘Post-Christendom’ we need to first understand Christendom (where we have been) before we can understand where we are. It seems to me that many denominations want to simply ignore the past and focus solely on the present and the future. While I can understand where this mindset comes from, it is a wrong one. How can we know what we are moving towards if we do not know from what we are moving, and why it is being moved away from? We need to realise where we have been, and then begin to assess where we are going.
I was really interested in David Wilson’s module of the Church as always the Church, but simply changing between gathered and scattered. It seems to me that this is not an easy concept for Westerners (myself included) to grasp. We may be able to grasp it intellectually, but we do not have a frame of reference from which to understand life in community. We compartmentalise our lives, Church being one of these compartments. We do not know how to tear down the walls we have set up for ourselves. It is one thing for me to imagine what it would be like, but I find it difficult (if not impossible) to understand how to live it practically.
Our culture is set up to be an individualistic one, and our society is based on mistrust. From our earliest days we are taught not to trust others; only trust when it is earned, do not have contact with strangers unnecessarily. This means that we are conditioned from birth to form relationships that are the opposite to what God is asking of us as the people of God. We are taught self-protection mechanisms, and we form them for ourselves as we are given cause to. We create layer upon layer of protection, most of them unconscious. Therefore when we try to have open relationships, we can’t. We can attempt to tear down these self-imposed walls, but how can you tear down a wall you do not know it is there? We become so accustomed to hiding our real selves that we can’t even show it when we desire to. This, to me, is one of the huge disadvantages of living in a materialistic society based on individualistic consumerism.
We spend 95% of our time as the Church scattered, so what does that mean? How do we still ‘be’ Church outside of our physical church setting? I wonder if people can tell that there is anything different about me, without me having to tell them I am a Christian. I wonder if we know what it is to be the people of God, and not just say and do the right things. That seems to be the crutch of it all in postmodern society. People do not care about the message until they accept the messenger. The question of postmodern society is not ‘what did you say?’, it is ‘who are you to tell me that?’. We need to be people that create an acceptable answer to that question by our lifestyles, not just by our words. Don’t get me wrong, words are very important. James chapter 3 talks about the power of the tongue, and how vital it is that we choose our words carefully. They can cut and destroy a person’s soul. But relationship is more important that words. In all areas of our lives we need to have the kind of relationships that answer the question ‘who are you to tell me that?’ The issue then becomes not what we believe, but rather how we present it.
How do we ‘do’ Church anyway, even when we are the Church gathered? Is our current system the way to go? If we look at how our current system originated, it might be right to ask the question of whether it is right to continue. Our current system came out of the Christendom era. Seeing as that era is passing away, does it still fit what we are moving in to? It seems to me that the system is not inherently bad, but perhaps we need to rethink our format. Do we do it because it works, or because it is comfortable and familiar?
Change is difficult. Human nature says that change is bad. It is uncomfortable, and we like homeostasis. Humans do not gravitate towards things that make us uncomfortable, we all move towards the familiar and the comfortable. This does not prevent us from moving into the unknown, it just makes us inclined not to do so. But given enough reason and motivation we seem willing and able to change. The thing then to me seems to be to know and understand that reason. Why change? Do we really want to reach people and see them come to Christ? Or do we want to see people come to us? I know what is easier, but what is right?
Dialogical relationships are the key. However, Christendom has left us with a legacy of ‘Banking Education’. ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ by Paulo Freire talks about two forms of education, Banking (or anti-dialogical) and Dialogical. Banking Education is where I deposit information into you, and you accept it. Dialogical Education is where we work things through together, and we all learn cooperatively. We cannot deposit the Gospel into someone and expect them to be grateful and accept Christ. It is all about relationship, and respecting the person enough to know that they will know the truth if they choose, given the opportunity. Coercion is not only ineffective, but I think it is unbiblical and unethical. Jesus never coerced anyone into believing in Him. He gave them the opportunity, and then left them with the decision. Why then would we see it as our task to ‘make sure’ that anyone accept Christ? (Not to say that evangelism is not important, but rather that it is not our job to make anyone believe in Jesus)
"When we review the intellectual history of the 19th century in panorama, we cannot help but be struck by the enormous profusion of ideologies that century managed to produce: Liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, Darwinism, Positivism, idealism, Hegelianism, socialism, Owenism, anarchism, communism, Romanticism and the list seems to go on and on. I would suggest that the proliferation of these -isms, of these grandiose systems, was the product of an age in which intellectual life had become much more complex and intense" (http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture23a.html) This is the history from which we emerge. There are so many options available to us about which direction to come at life from. Ideologies run rampant in our society, and postmodernism tells us to accept that truth is subjective, and we may make up our own minds as to what is right for us. This means that forcing the Gospel on anyone will not work. We must learn that we have moved to the margins. Christianity is no longer at the centre of our society, we are in the minority and we must behave accordingly.
So where does this leave us? It seems to present more questions that it does answers. The answer is, it seems, that there is no answer. We are in the midst of a time where we do not know what we are moving into, only that we are moving from something. We must learn to live with the ambiguity and become more flexible than we have ever been. It is vital not to lose the essence of what we are on about as Christians, but it is also important not to hold too tightly onto that which is not necessary. It is a difficult (and sometimes painful) task to sift through what needs to be let go of and what needs to be held on to, but one that must be asked if we are to survive as the Family of God.