Friends,
Thank you for going on the ReJesus journey with us. Over 100 people read and reflected on the call to ReJesus the church and our own lives.
What I took from this time included:
1. Exploring Jesus again (and again) is the call of the Christian disciple
2. The journey to find Jesus throughout our life is a challenge that brings wonderful rewards.
3. I need to keep pushing beyond what is comfortable and easy and continually ask, where is Jesus calling me now?
I enjoyed these weeks - reading the book and the posts helped me think through my journey with Jesus and I was refreshed as a disciple. I was also challenged to think of next steps.
Here are next steps to build on our focus on Jesus by growing in our biblical foundations:
+ Read through the New Testament. Here are a couple great reading plans
5 Minutes a Day, 5 Days A Week
90 Days to Read the New Testament
+Read the Gospel of Mark with a good study guide. I recommend:
Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Mark
Mark for Everyone
I will share a couple additional resources over the next several weeks.
I hope your time in our book study challenged you to renew your commitment to living as a disciple of Jesus.
Grace & Peace
Rev. Nicole Reilley
New Ministries, Cal-Pac UMC
Monday, December 2, 2013
Monday, November 25, 2013
ReJesus – Conclusion: Read This Bit Last by Craig Brown
While I am not tasked with writing a blog that draws Frost’s
and Hirsch’s work to a close, it is fitting for me to at least reflect on the
application they offer in the “Conclusion: Read This Bit Last”. The fictional conversation between
Peter and Paul and the drawn conclusions serve up a few new questions.
I became a Christian at the age of thirteen and began
attending a small rural United Methodist Church. I remember with vivid detail praying and inviting Christ
into my life on January 17, 1982.
The prayer, while sincere was profoundly formulaic. I attended college at a Christian
University and majored in Biblical Studies and Theology with a clearly
fundamentalist bent. I remember
memorizing the “Four Spiritual Laws” created by Bill Bright, the founder of
Campus Crusade for Christ. I
likewise remember being trained in the nine domains of systematic theology,
street evangelism, apologetics and a variety of other skills requisite to
function as a leader in the fundamentalist world. The only problem was that I was not a fundamentalist. What it afforded me was insight into
how that part of the Christian world functions. Frost and Hirsch are part of a group of “de-toxing”
fundamentalists searching for a new vision of what the church is. The essence of this church is
relational and missional.
On the other hand, I also have a strange third person
relationship with United Methodism which, for some strange reason, has an
aversion to talking too much about Jesus.
There were many times I would sit at Annual Conference both in plenaries
and in worship before being ordained and questioned why I seldom heard the “J”
word. In the late 80’s we seemed
enamored with new names and images for God but Jesus was mentioned little. In the 90s we struggled to redefine our
mission on the cusp of the 21st century with little acknowledgement
of Jesus at all (anyone remember Vision 2000?). Now we are beginning to engage in a process of “jones-ing”
up to Jesus. It is a welcome
return to becoming a church that is relational and missional.
While Hirsch and Frost actually ask an old question, “What
would happen if we went back to being the church of the first century?” there
is nothing at all wrong with asking it!
In my opinion, we live in a fascinating age in which two seemingly
segmented arms of Christianity are beginning to ask the most fundamental
question, “What does Jesus have to do with who we have become?” Having had feet in two theological
worlds, I am finding joy in observing these two polarities of the church asking
the same question! Every movement,
as it ages, must ask this question of what to do with Jesus? Both fundamentalist Christianity and
mainline liberal Christianity are approaching an intersection around this
question. It only seems
appropriate as they are both beginning to show their relative age!
If we are serious about this question of what to do with
Jesus, then these new questions being raised in the conclusion bear asking as
well:
Will we engage in assessing all we do in light of Jesus’
life and ministry?
Will we be honest about the authentic call to faithful
discipleship and eschew the milquetoast commitment many of us express toward
Jesus?
Will we become leaders that model and create authentic
Christian community instead of telling others what it should be like?
Will we allow the Holy Spirit to be our guide and leader
rather than our own machinations of strategy and vision? (More importantly, do we have the
spiritual skill set to allow that to happen?)
Will we be simply parochial or will become pastoral in
temperament and mission?
-Rev. Criag Brown is the pastor at San Diego First UMC
Sunday, November 17, 2013
ReJesus-- Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch - Chapter 7 by Rev Brian Parcel
Jesus' Community:
will follow the example of Jesus
will equip all followers
will move outward to serve others
understands that worship is a whole-of-life exaltation of Jesus
practices the presence of Jesus
insists that we need to be continually re-evangelized
learns and lives the values of Jesus
devotes itself to scripture and the exercise of spiritual gifts
Sound
refreshing? Compelling? Good News? Michael Frost and Alan
Hirsch assert that this description of Jesus' Community in fact is THE Good
News, gleaned right from their reading of the Gospels. They claim this
kind of community would develop naturally from people who followed the example
and teaching of Jesus and left behind dry, obsolete and hardened rituals and
ways of the church.
I must admit, some
of the language of Re-Jesus smells of the the all too familiar
"right" reading of the Biblical text and "right" theological
view that is espoused all too frequently in the Christian church. I do
find it quite ironic that almost all the 'little Jesus'' that are highlighted
within Re-Jesus are people who were formed by the very church of ritual and
domestication that the authors are proclaiming needs reformation. Despite
these reservations I cannot help but to be drawn to the list above.
That is the life I
want, I want it for my kids, I want it for my church, I want it for the
community I am called to serve as a pastor. I find the reminder that
Hirsch and Frost are giving to us refreshing and necessary. It is good to
rethink Jesus considering where we have added our baggage to the seminal
character of all history. It is a must from time to time for all of us,
individuals and the Church to step back and inspect where we have read our
lives into the story of Jesus and covered the values of God evident in the life
of Jesus with our own.
Whenever I do
this, including now as I read this book, I am reminded of the same scathing critique
of the Church -- the Church never seems to get it right. The Church has
always insisted, throughout history, for orthodoxy that does not necessarily
conform to Christ but always conforms to the Church. I think though, in
my own life and ministry, I have become bored with this realization, argument
and critique. Of course the Church never gets it right because the Church
by nature is an organization and the primary purpose of every organization must
be to preserve the organization at all costs. The argument then always
turns to a movement versus an organization, but this does not work all that
well either because every movement that has legs and lasting power must also
organize itself for the good work it is about and thus another organization is born.
So, an organization is bound to fall short and a movement (at least one worth
joining) is bound to turn into an organization......so what's left?
In the moments of
life (brief as they may be) that I align my life....my ministry......my
discipleship with Jesus I am reminded of the same simple truth -- Jesus always
cared for the next individual in his path, and then the next, and then the
next. I have come to believe that the only part of Christianity that can
truly be Christ like on a regular basis is the individual disciple of Jesus
Christ. Yes they are moments when we get it right as a team or a church
or The Church, but those are moments, fleeting at best. But an
individual, that is a different story. As a local church pastor I am
always looking for signs of the real Jesus and seeking the continuation of the
redemption story we find in the meta narrative of scripture. Most often i
don't find it in the work of the organized Church, rather I find it in the
lives of the individual disciples who make up the church.
I see individuals
develop relationships with others who are inexplicably different in every way
and yet a bond is grown that mirrors the sacrificial living for others of which
Jesus was so good.
I see individuals
who give of their time, talent, finances and so much more in a way that it is
clear they don't just understand but are living the Jesus lesson about heart
and treasure.
I see individuals
exhibit a grace to others, that I can only hope to attain someday, and yet I
know this grace ought to be the striving of my life because this is the grace
of which Jesus taught and with which he lived.
I was just
reflecting the other day amidst an All Saints Service how fortunate and blessed
I was to have known the stories of the people who's names were being read
amidst this annual ritual of the church. To some in the room they were
the beloved and to others they were just a name in print but as the pastor I
had a special view into their lives. In the same way I count it a great
blessing that I get to hear and experience the behind the scenes stories of how
individuals in my congregation became little Jesus' for a moment in their
lives. The Church rarely seems to accomplish this incarnational nature,
but the people of the church so often surprise me in the ways they become God
incarnate for the other. So while I share the angst of Frost and Hirsch
over the state of the Church I am also humbled to see the many individuals who
make up the Church living in real, relevant and powerful ways that bring the
reality of Jesus to fruition in the lives of so many. In the end I cannot
help but to find hope.
-- Rev. Dr. Brian T.
Parcel is a husband, father and Elder in the United Methodist Church and a
graduate of the Claremont School of Theology (M.Div, D.Min, 2002). Over
the past 14 years he has served as Lead Pastor of three congregations in the
California Pacific Conference, all three having experienced multiple factors of
growth under his leadership. He has also provided leadership
for clergy training opportunities through the Board of Congregational
Development and the Board of Ordained Ministry.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Chapter 6 ReJesus Book Study by Rev. Lynn Munson
Sign holders at stadiums and on street
corners, tracts handed out door to door, conversations and conflicts in our
churches; all cause me a bit of dis-ease. Each reducing Christianity to a set
of rules, a code of ethics, and a three-point prayer that will swing wide the
gates of heaven; only for the few.
And somehow it makes me uncomfortable. In fact, it feels to me as if
there is an anger and a coercion behind the proclamation. If you don’t do
this…you won’t get that….and in fact you’ll get something worse. Eternal
damnation…if you don’t believe exactly what I say. Did God really leave it in
our hands to believe exactly the right thing; when He knows how we humans have
been getting it wrong from the beginning?
I think of my daughter when she was
about two. She always wanted to be near me when I was cooking. I’d open the
stove, and there she was. I’d be stirring something over a burner and she
wanted me to hold her. Every time...wanting to reach out and touch the hot
surface or the flame. Until, one day, she saw me burn my finger, “ouch!” She
witnessed me cry out and shake my hand, and pull away. After that, when we were
near the oven or the stove top, she would gesture toward it and say, “owie” and
pull away. The way she saw me react to the burn, she re-enacted. She followed.
For me, this is a helpful epiphany found
in our chapter’s discussion on the dichotomy of Hellenistic and Hebraic
worldviews. I’ve not thought about it before, that Hellenism would direct us
toward a Christian Ideology; a system of ideas or ideals. And yet, authors, Frost
and Hirsh invite us to consider that no person, much less, no Messiah can be
reduced to an idea…or an ideal. And rather than someone to believe…as we would
an idea. Jesus is someone to follow.
Additionally, the point of faith changes
when not trying to labor over right-thinking; where the goal seems to be, that
if we could just get the right read on scripture we’d find the fast track to
holiness. Rather, if the point is, as Kierkegaard encourages, to “let the text
read us,” then it is only in following Jesus’ way with us that holiness can be
found.
This too, is uncomfortable. Because, I cannot control what Jesus might read in me. And I cannot control where He might lead me…or how He might lead me to change…or to do something I don’t want to do. He might even call me to love and have grace with those sign holders at stadiums and on the corner. He might bid me to welcome the tract distributors. And He might even push me into the center of those church chats to be present as He is present.
This too, is uncomfortable. Because, I cannot control what Jesus might read in me. And I cannot control where He might lead me…or how He might lead me to change…or to do something I don’t want to do. He might even call me to love and have grace with those sign holders at stadiums and on the corner. He might bid me to welcome the tract distributors. And He might even push me into the center of those church chats to be present as He is present.
What does the Word find when it reads
you (and me)?
How do we uncover our own preconceived
ideas of who God is and how He responds in the world?
Rev Lynn Munson is the Senior Pastor at Yorba Linda UMC.
Monday, November 4, 2013
Chapter 4 ReJesus Blog by Rev. Gary Bernard Williams
I thought I was finally
well equipped to be the father I had always wanted to be with my youngest child
Nicole. I had already walked through many life challenges of my own and thought
to myself this time things will be different with this child. My other two
children were raised without any input from me as their father and they had
entered their young adult years with thanks to their wonderful mothers who
raised them without me. Now I had a chance to have input in my third child’s
life how hard could it be to raise one child with a wonderful wife that I loved
with all my heart. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was the level of anxiety
in “getting it right this time.” It created in me a fear that caused me to want
total control over this child driving me to a place of near desperation that
this little girl would become the person I envisioned her to be. I wanted to
mold her into the image in my mind and my heart. There was nothing wrong with
the image I had created for my daughter; it just wasn’t an image that I had
allowed her to mold through a personal relationship with Christ. I was not very
open to her individuality; an expression of God’s working in her life. I wanted
her to be polite, caring, compassionate, but it was my perception of those
qualities that I wanted her to conform to rather than allowing her to discover
her own character and allow God to shape that through the ups and downs of her life.
Most importantly, I wanted to “domesticate” her so my life would be
comfortable.
Unfortunately,
the more I struggled to mold her to my image of the ideal daughter, the more
challenges I faced in truly building a loving, caring relationship where we
both could reach out and draw closer to one another. In order for her to become
her own person, she felt the need to break away because she felt threatened by
the walls I built. Those walls discouraged her from becoming too connected to
me as her father because of my need to control, mold, and shape her life. I
finally came to the realization that I did not have ownership over my child
that God had so graciously brought into my life. She was a gift, and my
responsibility was to care for that gift in a way that allowed her to grow and
find Christ in her own life, allowing God to mold her into his image. I needed
to see her as someone formed by God. I haven’t by any stretch of the
imagination reached that place of perfection in my relationship with my now young
adult daughter. I have, however, begun the process, and our conversations have
taken on a new direction that has brought us into a much better relationship
where we have much more open communication and respect. I am allowing myself to
see my daughter for who she is and to appreciate the woman she is becoming.
Do we have the tendency of creating an
image of Jesus in the same way? Is it our desire to shape Jesus into our own
image? Do we try to domesticate Jesus to avoid seeing the real God-Man the real
“Wild Messiah”? I believe we do, and in the attempt to domesticate him, we are
tempted to understand him in light of what we already believe about the world
through the lens of culture, race, and ethnicity. We try to place him in
familiar categories; we want to have some natural, comfortable understanding of
who he is. The tendency is to make him into something we might expect, what he
would be like if he were our creation. In that process of re-imaging Jesus so
he makes sense to us, we reduce him to the commonplace. Once we have finished
our re-imaging, we can be comfortable with our lives because he will pose no
threat to our complacency. “The benign images of gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
have comforted and encouraged many believers” (p. 87).
In order
to domesticate Jesus we also take his sayings and reconstruct them to fit our
image of who he is. When Jesus says “Anyone who does not give up all that he
has cannot be my disciple,” or when he says “When you give a feast, do not
invite your friends and relatives, lest they repay you. Instead invite the
poor, the lame, the blind, the maimed,” or “do not lay up for yourselves
treasure on earth,” we find it difficult to believe that we are asked to accept
these sayings literally. So our tendency is to reconstruct his sayings in a way
that feels more comfortable. What we have left is not true revelation. We
remove ourselves from the necessity of allowing the Holy Spirit to speak into
our lives in providing for us an understanding of the hard sayings of Jesus. We
are easily persuaded that the life Jesus calls us to does not require our total
surrender.
Our focus
has been on Jesus calling us to a change in behavior, when in reality Jesus is
calling us to character transformation and a changing of our hearts. We have attempted
to domesticate Jesus in a way that allows us to simply express love in good
deeds, but often that love doesn’t automatically come from a heart that’s
focused on Christ. We have changed our behavior, but not our heart condition.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross to provide self-improvement tips for better living
he died on the cross to provide a way for us to be reconciled to God, and in
that reconciliation, to be transformed to God’s image. We don’t always fully
understand what Jesus meant when he spoke of peace, love, and doing good. It
isn’t about feelings, or being nice, or tolerating others, although those are
good and honorable things. It is about conforming our will to God’s will that
is the only way the Church will become the “Living Body of Christ” we are
called to transform the world and to present the real Jesus the “Wild Messiah”
Jesus!
As I read
this book I realized that I have re-imagined Jesus to be friendly and caring
the kind of person I feel comfortable in befriending. Just as the Roman soldiers
stripped Jesus of his clothing and placed on him one of their own military
cloaks, I too have had the tendency to put on Jesus my own kind of clothes.
“One of the best ways to expose our co-option of Jesus to our own personal,
religious, and cultural agendas is to interpret the many images of him that we
entertain” (p. 92). Can you see how our understanding of Jesus can be so easily
shaped by who we are? We shape Jesus into our image through our personal
reality our own needs, wants and desires. “One of the best ways to expose our
co-option of Jesus to our own personal, religious, and cultural agendas is to
interpret the many images of him that we entertain.” (p. 92).
“Our
point is that to reJesus the church, we need to go back to the daring, radical,
strange, wonderful, inexplicable, unstoppable, marvelous, unsettling,
disturbing, caring, powerful God-Man. The communities around us are crying out
for him” (p. 111). Without a true understanding of Christ’s character can we find
a way to really be the Church? When we distort Jesus in order to re-imagine him
to fit our needs and desires, we effectively deny ourselves the opportunity to
be bold proclaimers of the Gospel we claim to love so much. Our re-imagining of
Jesus may provide us some comfort in the world, but we have robbed ourselves of
the transforming power that can only be found in a “Wild Messiah”. It is when
we see Jesus truly as he is that we receive the power to be all God calls us to
be. “The church needs to find itself in league with this Jesus, staring at him
in amazement and saying, as Peter did, with trembling voice, ‘What kind of man
is this?’ Even the wind and waves obey him. Even wild demons obey him. Even the
Pharisees quake at the thought of what he might unleash if left to his own
devices’ (p.111). We need to go back to the
authentic Jesus of the New Testament, whether or not that fits our
re-structured image of his character and mission. For we are told in 1
Corinthians 8:6 that there is only “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” When we take Jesus
out of his original context we begin to manipulate and domesticate him in such
a way that what we present to the world is a caricature of him rather than a
true portrait.
Questions
for reflection: What is it about
your Jesus that you are trying to imitate? In what ways have we framed Jesus
according to the parts of Him that appeal to us? What would our witness as the
church be like if we stopped trying to shape Jesus into to our image?
Rev. Gary
Bernard Williams is the pastor at Faith UMC and Hamilton UMC
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Chapter Five ReJesus by Katie Kevorkian
For as long as I can remember my family has had the same
nativity scene that went on display day after Thanksgiving and went back into
the box on New Year’s Day. When I came home from college, I was surprised and
thrilled to see that it looked quite different.
With an empty nest and no one to stop her, my mother had
painted the Holy Family. The once pale white, blue eyed and blonde haired
family now looked a little more like ancient Jews.
I was the child of the closest thing to a mixed race family
that I knew for most of my life. My Armenian father, with his olive skin and
dark features, is part of the less than three percent of people who are
identified as not Caucasian in our
small New England Community (really, that is what the pie chart says). My mother,
a native Vermonter, identifies with the other 97%. I was somewhere in the
middle, even though I looked like a white kid and enjoyed the same lifestyle
and privileges as most of the population. When there is very little diversity,
it is easy to pick out who is different.
I knew there was something that wasn't quite right about the
nativity set for a long time, at least since I had some idea about the
connections amongst geography, race and ethnicity. My father's family was
decidedly not white and blonde, and Armenia looked like it was pretty close to
the Holy Land on a map. Thus, I decided that Jesus must have looked Armenian. I
like to think that I wasn’t that far off, but looking Armenian and being Armenian became very intertwined
in my mind.
"If our conception of God is radically false, then the
more devout we are the worse it will be for us" (Kindle loc 2170). I
thought first of the Westboro Baptist Church when I read this, and then Islamic
Extremists. But I wondered how we can avoid being radically false. So much of
our conception of God comes from our own experience- and where else would it
come from? We can only imagine our God from what we know. The dinner table
conversation from Talledega Nights was funny, because it is an over-the-top
version of what many people do: The beautiful blonde Holy Family, Jesus as a
loving father, or even viewing "Self as God" (loc 2314) (or Armenian
as God, in my case).
The Shema prayer is a practical way for Christ-followers to
ground ourselves in the one-ness of God amidst a society and culture that
demands worship as consumerism, and value based on possessions. Lavishly
decorated churches equal respect for our faith and our God, and success is
measured in wealth, possessions and appearance. When we value things, God is not at the top of the
pyramid, as in Hirsch’s drawings, or all the lines are squiggly and confused.
We lose direction.
Valarie Kaur, an interfaith leader and civil rights lawyer,
told the story of her faith journey at a youth program I helped coordinate. As
a child and teenager, Valarie felt out of place with her Sikh family and Indian
heritage. While singing Christian hymns with her vocal coach, she said, the
realization of the one-ness of God washed over her, and she understood how to
live her faith, to fit into the Sikh faith in a place where she was a minority.
The one-ness of God that she was proclaiming through a hymn granted her the
understanding of faith that would allow her to produce a documentary film,
obtain a law degree, and now travel the world to speak about peace building and
religious tolerance.
I recognize that Valarie's story is not a Christian one, but
it was one of the most powerful testimonies that I had ever heard in the
subject of faith and works. The recognition of the one-ness of God can be life
changing; though we are told that God is One, though we profess that belief in
the best of times, Christmas rolls around a few months later and we begin to
worship the things we don't have, the things others have, the things we want.
Of course, Christmas isn't the only time of year that we consume, but we see consumerism with much more intensity in November and
December.
Questions: How do you experience the One-ness of God? If God is One how does that change what
it means to be created in God’s image and likeness?
-Katie Kevorkian is a young adult leader and the Field Coordinator for Imagine No Malaria in the Cal-Pac Conference. Learn more here: https://www.facebook.com/imaginenomalariacalpac
Monday, October 21, 2013
ReJesus Chapter 3 Reflection by Cedrick Bridgeforth
“His words and his example are the constants as we leave our
old traditions and look to bring the church and the gospel into new contexts of
traditional radicalism” (Pg 102) begs the question of whether an institution
can truly bear the name and expresses the power of a leader and affect as
powerful and engaging as Jesus.
With all that we profess to know of Jesus, entangled with all that we
have engaged in and created under the banner of “The Church,” as an
organization, Hirsch leads us to the brink where we, the Church, must wonder if
we have created something so perfect that the imperfections of any human
construct cannot even begin to hold or exhibit the character and purpose of the
one after whom it was modeled. He writes:
“The authority to bring transformation to the church does not rest in
the person of the leader or group but in God’s calling. If this is so, then the
key to the revitalization of religious organizations is to reappropriate, or
recover, their founding charism” (Pg 101).
As I read stories of the First Century martyrs and those who
were gifted enough to have their stories be told beyond a generation, there
seems to be a commitment and purpose to their living within the larger
community that gave their individual perspective meaning. They were a part of a
movement, not an organized, well or even haphazardly run organization, and
their very lives and livelihood depended on the grace of the community to
survive. “…the pragmatic and the traditionalist. The institution of the church
(traditional and contemporary) is not without God, beauty, or blessing. And we
recognize that deeply spiritual people have tirelessly worked for their advancement”
(Pg 81). I am hard-pressed to determine if this what Jesus intended for those
who decided to follow Him, which was always about following his teachings and
living up to the ideals and consequences such a life would bring. There was
power found in being one of “the Way” or one who follows Christ, but as time
marches on the ethos of the movement changes, and the central figure in the
movement shifts from Jesus to what Jesus said and eventually back toward a
trite but true pondering – “what would Jesus do?”
To have an organization there are rules and policies in
place to maintain order and to signal direction and inclusion. Hirsch points to
some of the trappings the Church; such as, “running programs and services
and/or guiding the laity through liturgical complexities in order to help
people get to the God they are all meant to access directly through Jesus
anyhow” as one way we have divided the community into classes and categories to
serve a function that may not have been intended. Of course the early church
set aside individual for service and for serving in varities of ways according
to their gifts, but there is not a sense that some were superior to others
based on professional credential or financial status. In fact, status is a blurred line in the early writings and
seems to be frowned upon in Jesus rhetoric and expressions of inclusion and
engagement throughout his ministry. He paused for the young and the old; the
known and the unknown – all for the sake of showing love and extending grace where
needed. “At the beginning of this new century, we have never needed so
desperately to rediscover the original genius of the Christian experience and
to allow it to strip away all the unnecessary and cumbersome paraphernalia of
Christendom” (Pg 83). This is a challenge to strip away all of the extras that
create barriers between Jesus and the movement that directs others toward him
and his witness, which is what ultimately allows all to experience him. But, people encounter Jesus and
interpret their experience in ways the project a necessity of like-experience
upon others without acknowledging cultural or social location as a platform for
experience. Hirsch address this in the following: “What happens in the
beginning of a movement is that they people encounter the divine in a profound
and revelatory way, but with successive generations this encounter tends to
fade like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy” (Pg 86). Successive
experiences dampen or weaken and thus ritual and writings are created to shape
experiences, but those rituals and experiences are removed from the original
source and may not reflect the original intent or expression of the Jesus who
made it all possible. “But for the disciple, the simple truth must remain; one
cannot bolt down, control, or even mediate the essential God encounter in
rituals, priesthoods, and theological formulas. We all need to constantly
engage the God who unnerves, destabilizes, and yet enthralls us. The same is
true for our defining relationship with Jesus” (Pg 87).
It is obvious the Church, as an organization has sought to
do good in the world and in the lives of those who venture in and dare to bear
the name and character of Christ. However, what seems to be missing and lacking
in our present age is not new to the organization. In fact, what we experience
today was noted in the 17th Century by Blaise Pascal who “uttered these incisive words about the
spiritual condition of the Christianity of his day: “Christendom is a union of
people who, by means of the sacraments, excuse themselves from their duty to
love God” (Pg 88). If we, on some level, did not believe we, as an organization
or church, has strayed away from the path set by the Jesus we want to know,
love, immolate and share, we would not be reading a book with this title. There
is a longing to right the organization and move in alignment with what God
intended and with what Jesus said and did, but, as Hirsch writes, “To reJesus
the church, we must first look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether the strange
and wonderful God-Man has invaded our life with purpose and freshness. If
Christianity minus Christ equals religion, then Christianity plus Christ is the
antidote to religion”(Pg 93). We must strip away the pieces and parts of
ourselves that make us comfortable being a member, leader and participant
within an organization that stands over-against the principles of the Man and
the Movement that started what has diverted from original intent and effect.
Are there obvious
organizational trappings do you experience that make it impossible for the
Church as you know it to be a true reflection of the Jesus you want to know or
once knew?
How can the Church, as
you know it, be place where relationship and experience of Jesus is so
profoundly different from every other experience in one’s life that individuals
are able to revision and reconnect in ways that allow for and encourages the
kind of faith which unites with Christ and inspires beyond a set moment in
time?
Cedrick Bridgeforth is an elder in the Cal-Pac Conference and is the District Superintendent of the North District.
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