Ganging up for God

In Chapter 4 of Letters to the Church, Francis Chan talks about one of the most vital and visible marks of the New Testament Church: the Church is a loving community. In a consumer-led model of church, people simply do not invest enough time in one another’s lives: “We live in a time when people go to a building on Sunday mornings, attend an hour-long service, and call themselves members of the Church.” Chan asserts that criminal gangs “have a much stronger sense of what it means to be a family than we do in the Church.” He makes that assertion on the basis of the experience of ‘Rob’ (not his real name), who came to faith while in prison and made the difficult and dangerous decision to break with the neighbourhood gang he had grown up in.

The gang was his family. These were loyal and dear friends who looked out for him twenty-four hours a day. There was a love and camaraderie from being in a gang that he had enjoyed since childhood. Now he would lose those relationships and be hated by them all. When Rob describes gang life, much of it sounds like what the Church was meant to be. Obviously, there are major differences (drugs, murder—you know, little details like that), but the idea of “being a family” is central to both gang life and God’s design for the Church. (Chang, Letters to the Church, p. 71)

Of course we all know about Mafia crime families: the glamour and the grubbiness, the law of omerta or silence enforced at gunpoint, the sense of being fundamentally different and at odds with surrounding society, the ever-present tension among members between the need for absolute trust and the fear of betrayal. We also know of religious cults that have operated like criminal gangs, where members have been brainwashed into committing crimes of fraud, extortion, prostitution, drug-dealing and even terrorism; but how can it be true in a positive sense, that churches should be like gangs? The answer is, in the sense of shared enterprise and shared dangers, the absolute and unconditional commitment to one another, the full-time involvement in every aspect of one another’s lives, and above all the sense of love emerging from absolute dependence on one another.

We’ll find Chan’s comparison easier to understand if we remember that the church began as an underground movement, barely tolerated and frequently persecuted by the authorities, the object of deep suspicion among ordinary citizens. People who came to Jesus drew apart from the surrounding culture, and were forced together. The stakes were too high for anything less than full commitment; church could not settle for being a mere club. Some writers believe that the true Church still emerges in conditions of secrecy and danger.

People talk all the time about the ‘church community’, but Chan believes the true Church is something much deeper. He quotes Alan Hirsch, a leading missiologist, who believes church should be based on the idea of communitas: a deep form of community that emerges when people pass together through powerful, often traumatic experiences, that bind them together in ways nothing else can. Gangs force new recruits to submit to tattooing, branding, tooth-pulling, the cutting off of fingers: symbolic acts that say, “there’s no going back.” Hirsch puts it like this: Communitas happens in situations where individuals are driven to find one another through a common experience of ordeal, humbling, transition, and marginalization (Alan Hirsch. The Forgotten Ways, Baker Publishing Group, p. 163).

People undergoing these extreme, disorienting experiences are said to experience a state of liminality. Liminality is a kind of solvent for secure personalities and settled world-views. It is the transitional state we enter particularly during rites of passage, when we cross the threshold between stages of being. Puberty, the transition from childhood to adulthood, is the classic example, observed and described by anthropologists in tribal societies around the world; another is mourning a loved one; a third the feeling of exile suffered by immigrants. To quote Hirsch again, Liminality is where we find ourselves out of our comfort zones, the unfamiliar, where we feel at risk, face a challenge, or are deliberately on an adventure. And it is absolutely critical in the formation of communitas (Hirsch, p. 163).

The armed forces (particularly elite units like the SAS) and even secular businesses use liminal experiences as a bonding technique. The now (supposedly) illegal practice of hazing in college fraternities is another example. Risky or degrading acts, often combined with excessive drinking or drug taking, are deliberately used to drive participants to the point where their personalities begin to disintegrate, so that they can be re-made in the organisation’s own image.

Countless film plots are built on the experience of liminality and communitas: characters are thrown together and forced to confront hardship and danger to defeat evil forces that threaten them and others. Usually, the plot is formed around a symbolic journey – a quest. The film might be comic, romantic or tragic: the pattern remains intact and easily detectable. These stories have real power over us, because they awaken something very deep inside us: the abiding human need for adventure, journey, and comradeship (Hirsch, p. 169).

Communitas is often lost when the time of danger passes, and more people are added or attach themselves to the group without passing through the traumatic initiatory experience: Too much concern with safety and security, combined with comfort and convenience, has lulled us out of our true calling and purpose. (Hirsch, p. 12)

Starting from this idea of communitas, you can see why Francis Chan compares church membership to being part of a gang. Gangs are particularly appealing to people who have grown up without the stability of a loving home; but what is it attracts to this lifestyle people who seem to have grown up with everything a child needs?. Gangs, with their strange and threatening initiation rituals and oaths, not to mention participation in violent criminal acts, bind members together in ways not experienced in the non-criminal world. Members give up everything to join a gang, which from that point on will not let them go. They are bound together in utter dependence, united by the excitement of danger and the fear of betrayal. The same was true of the early church.

How does this work out in the churches we belong to; or at least, how should it work out? First of all, in the experience of deep, committed love. People should experience in church a love they do not find elsewhere: in other words, communitas. This should be just as true for people who lead their lives surrounded by family and friends, as it is for those who come to church because it is the only family they have: the love felt in church ought to be a love the world cannot give.

Second, in liminal experience. Joining a church means entering a liminal state. We were leading settled, ordinary lives, but now we become strangers, not at home in this world any more. Hopefully, we are passionate, loving strangers, ready to help and befriend others – to be in the world, but not of it, is one of the central paradoxes of faith. But how many of us really live as strangers in the world?

Experiences of the liminal were fundamental to the ministry of Jesus and the formation of the Church: a deep form of togetherness and love is found when we embark on a common mission of discovery, when we encounter danger together and have to find one another in the process in order to survive. We find all these elements in the way Jesus formed his disciples (Hirsch, p. 185). Think of the wanderings on dusty roads, the bewildering words and inexplicable acts, think of the upper room, the last shared meal, and the dark conspiracy gathering outside.

Communitas only emerges through the sharing of liminal experience, but unfortunately churches seem less and less equipped to offer such experience, because culturally they have drawn back from the edge. For most ordinary people, liminality is the characteristic of a phase, perhaps their risky adolescence – but it should not be like this for the Church. Liminality and communitas are much more the normative situation and condition of the pilgrim people of God (Hirsch, p. 165). Most churches view risky forms of mission as something other people or other churches do, or ought to do. Perhaps it is something their own church used to do – when it was really alive. Refusal to engage in essential risk leads to a fearful neurosis and the decline of any living system—be it an organism, individual, or community (Hirsch, pp. 163-164).

Religious conversion is the ultimate gamble: we cannot know in this world if we have made the right decision, although of course we look for signs. Belonging to church is meant to be a costly and risky experience. It’s not just a matter of handing over money; it’s a matter of giving up everything we used in the past to define ourselves in the world’s eyes (money, job, clothes, cars, holidays, hobbies, luxuries). By stripping ourselves of worldly distinctions, comfort and security, we willingly enter a liminal state. We submit ourselves in faith to the will of an unseen God.

All our personal boundaries have to go, so that we can be remade in the image of Christ. That is why Christ asks us to deliberately give up everything we have, and tells us to hate even family for his sake; he warns us to expect rejection, persecution, and even death. We release our hold on everything superficial that pins us down us here, to emerge into the light of a greater love. This radical rejection of everything inspires fear, but is also liberating: Jesus’ yoke is light.

Baptism is a declaration, a manifesto, an external act that signals to the world that this transformation has taken place in a believer. We pass through the waters of chaos and death, and emerge as new people, part of a new community, free of our pasts, fearlessly living a new life together as the household of God. But at the moment, our lived reality seems to fall far short of what we were promised, and the problem lies not in God’s willingness to offer it, but our own preparedness to embrace it. The Church seems to conspire with its members to make everyone more fearful, less able to set out on the journey we are supposed to be making together. To close with more words from Francis Chan, “Pushing the Church to live as a family is not some gimmick, some flavour of ‘church’ that would be fun to try; it’s commanded. And it’s offered.” “It’s sad that our churches look nothing like this. It’s devastating that we don’t believe it is possible” (Chan, pp. 80, 81).

Image Gangsta Kat & Cool Dudes Do a Mural, Wikimedia Commons

Giving God what he asked for

So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith (Galatians 6.10)

In our study group this autumn, we‘re looking at a book by Francis Chan, called Letters to the Church
Chan was leader of a mega-church, but he walked away and started a group of house churches

The central argument of his book, and the reason he left his mega-church, is that churches are putting more and more energy into serving their members, and less and less into serving God

In chapter 3, he asks you to picture yourself in a restaurant
You’ve ordered steak, but the waiter brings a plate of spaghetti – how annoyed would you be?

How much more annoyed would you be, if the waiter reacted to your complaint with indignation?
What if he kept telling you this is lovely pasta, and you ought to be delighted with it?
Chan says this is what the Church has done with God: it hasn’t given him what he asked for

To illustrate this further, I want to treat you to a bit of management theory
I want to talk about a management tool called DPA: Departmental Purpose Analysis

DPA works like this: People who work in one department (call it Department A) make a list of the things they do for another department (call it Department B)
They sort the list in order of importance, to come up with a top five or ten

People who work in Department B do the same thing
They come up with their own list of the most important things people in Department A do for them

Then the people in Department A and Department B compare their lists
People in Department A discover they have a very poor idea of what Department B (their customers) actually want from them

Department A thinks it is doing a great job, everyone is doing their best, and Department B should be happy with that
Department A actually feels resentful, that Department B would like to see changes

Hopefully, after a lot of talking, people in both departments come up with a plan to make sure that what Department A does comes closer to what Department B wants in future

Let’s apply this technique to the Church: Department A is us, and Department B is God
Are we doing for God what God commands us to do for him?

God has been very clear in Scripture, about what he wants in terms of worship and service
It’s also very clear from Scripture, his people have not been very good at giving it to him

Cain brought an offering to the Lord, but it was not what the Lord had asked for
Cain reacted with indignation (like the waiter) – and that self-righteous indignation was his real sin

Look at what the Prophets say about the the worship of the temple
The priests and the people conspire to defraud the Lord they claim to worship

They are not committed, they cut corners, they skimp on the materials (substandard sacrifices), they betray the company by working for outside organisations (the gods of other nations)

God is so upset and frustrated, he spews them out of his mouth
He kicks them out of the company altogether
And leaves Department A to suffer history’s most hostile takeover, at the hands of Babylon

Eventually God lets Department A back into the company, but they are slow learners
Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi are prophets who wrote after the exile
They point out that this generation is really no better than the generation God sent into exile

So finally God sends Department A the ultimate management troubleshooter, his own Son
But Department A still doesn’t want to listen, and still doesn’t want to change its ways

But something surprising happens – a small group of people with a real customer focus leave the business
They start a new organisation, and people love it – it soon opens branches all over the world

That new business is the Church, of course, only by our time it’s become a very old business
Like a lot of old businesses it has lost its way, to the point it is no longer viable.

The Church has to change: how? Let me read you a short passage from Francis Chan’s book:
“There is a simple exercise I walk through with church leaders. First, I have them list all the things that people expect from their church. They usually list obvious things like a really good service, strong age-specific ministries, a certain style/volume/length of singing, a well-communicated sermon, conveniences such as parking, a clean church building, coffee, childcare, etc. Then I have them list the commands God gave the Church in Scripture. Usually they mention commands like “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12), “visit orphans and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27), “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19), “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2), etc. I then ask them what would upset their people more—if the church didn’t provide the things from the first list or if the church didn’t obey the commands in the second list.”

You should be able to see, Francis Chan gets those leaders to do a Departmental Purpose Analysis on their own church
It throws up the awkward truth, that this church invests all its resources in serving itself

Does this sound like us? How can we change? What commands has God given our church?
Galatians 6.1-10 is a really good summary. Church is about these things:

v 1 First of all, it means Being spiritual: don’t forget that! It determines how we are to relate to one another in church. We are new people, we are not to be conformed to the pattern of this world. How are we doing on this measure?

v 2 It means Bearing one another’s burdens: we are to support one another spiritually, and encourage one another in serving. We are not to be like the scribes and Pharisees (Mat 23), who lay heavy burdens on other people’s shoulders and won’t even lift a finger to help them. How are we doing on this measure?

vv 3-5 It means Being accountable: each one will bear his own load: We are to look honestly at our own contribution to the fellowship; we will answer to God himself for the work we do here. We are are not to be selfish or demanding: we are here to serve, not to be served. How are we doing on this measure?

v 8 It means Being fruitful, which goes along with being spiritual, and being unselfish. If our involvement in church is a self-centred involvement, we will rot from the inside out: The one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. How are we doing on this measure?

v 9 It means Displaying perseverance. That can be difficult, when we feel others in the church aren’t with us, but Let us not lose heart in doing good. How are we doing on this measure?

v 10 It means Being focused: knowing we have to do what we are called to do, while we have the opportunity. Time is a luxury we do not have. How are we doing on this measure?

It means Doing good to all people – not just ‘being nice’, but acting from real compassion, with a profound sense of others’ needs

It means Doing good especially to the household of faith, because the way we we feed and nourish one another, is how other people will recognise that the Church is God’s chosen people, a holy nation (1 Peter 2.9 – we talked about this last week). How are we doing on this measure?

And finally, remember, God is not mocked (v 6) – he is not taken in by any hollow displays of Christian devotion, any pretence of love, or empty gestures of service

The Galatians clearly weren’t doing everything Paul wanted, or he wouldn’t have written like this to them.
But wouldn’t you like to belong to a church like this?

Why don’t we build it? What stands in our way?
I suspect an honest answer to that question would make us all uncomfortable

Image from pixabay.com. Scriptures from the English Standard Version (NT) and JPS Tanakh translation (OT)

Holiness is not a hobby

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession (1 Peter 2.9)

We’re looking at a book by Francis Chan, called Letters to the Church
Chan was leader of a mega-church, but he walked away and started a group of house churches

He says he wanted three things: I wanted all of us to sing directly to God. I wanted all of us to really hear the Word of God. And finally, I wanted all of us to live really holy lives. I wanted our church to be a group of people who pushed one another toward action.

Chan says mega-churches base their appeal on giving worshippers everything they want
– The assumption is, if someone doesn’t find what they want in one church, they’ll go to another
– Or they’ll drop out of church altogether

He criticises worshippers for acting like religious consumers, only seeking to please themselves: Many today treat the Church as optional, as some outdated way to connect to God that has long outlived its usefulness. They’d rather connect with God on their own, in their own way, without all the weird people making things more difficult.

Chan is talking about something religious anthropologists call the ‘rational choice’ theory of religion
– Which is actually a consumer choice theory of religion
– People come to church because of what they expect to get from it, in the same way they patronise restaurants, night clubs, hair dressers or beauty salons
– They evaluate churches in terms of their attractiveness and value for money
– They weigh what churches offer, against what they themselves demand

Some churches silently buy into this worldly and cynical theology
Big churches have big reputations to live up to
They also have big running costs – so they focus on giving people what they want, to keep up their numbers, balance the books, and keep the doors open

Chan confesses in his book I have not always treated the Church as sacred. I spent years doing “whatever works” to get people’s attention – he regrets that now
He says, church leaders have addicted people to lesser things

What does it mean to say that the Church is sacred? The answer is in our reading from 1 Peter 2:
You [or rather we] are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, aholy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light

The Church is sacred because God has chosen us – not you, or me, but us – together
Peter talks about a race, a priesthood, a nation, a people – these are all collective terms (Peter is echoing Exodus 19.6 – to emphasise that what God is doing now is fulfilling Scripture)

In Judaism, we see God’s choice in his relationship with the physical descendants of Abraham: the Jewish people
In our Christian interpretation, it’s God’s relationship with the spiritual descendants of Abraham – it’s Christ’s relationship with his Church

So the Church is not a group of individuals coming together to express their individuality
It’s not about my personal tastes, or ‘my personal relationship’ with ‘my personal Saviour’
Our belonging to the Church is the consequence of God’s sovereign decision, to choose a people for himself – It’s a collective relationship, and it’s lived out in community

Last week we talked about ourselves as God’s bondslaves – this week, we’re told we’re chosen for God’s own possession – he owns us
But he doesn’t lord it over us from a distance – we are like the land he has chosen to live in, as his possession. God graces us with his presence, forever

So belonging to church is not a hobby, it is a sacred calling
God chose a people for himself, and declared that they were holy
That is the sacred blessing that worship has to celebrate

What do those words holy and sacred mean?
Francis Chan’s thinks Church has gone wrong because worship has gone wrong, and worship has gone wrong because We don’t understand what it means for something to be sacred

Our loss of appreciation of the sacred is an issue that goes far beyond arguments about what the sanctuary should look like, what kind of music or instruments are appropriate, what kind of liturgy (if any) we should use, what the preacher or worship leaders should should wear
– those arguments are just symptoms of the problem

When you read the Old Testament, you see that the holiness, the sacredness of God is like radium, or Novichok – it’s a lethal hazard, that has to be treated with infinite caution
The temple building is like the lead and concrete surrounding a nuclear reactor
The robes and the rituals are like the protective suits and the elaborate procedures the workers in a nuclear plant have to have to protect them

Only the High Priest can go behind the curtain that veils the Holy of Holies, and only once a year
If he wasn’t protected by the robes and rituals, he would be destroyed

Now, in Christ, we can meet the holiness of God face to face and shake it by the hand
But that shouldn’t alter our reverence for the sacred – it shouldn’t mean we trivialise it, or reduce it to the mundane
We should be all the more amazed, awe-struck, that God has been so gracious to us

Worship means coming into the sacred presence of God, in the right way
What does Peter mean, when he says we are a royal priesthood?
He means whenever we worship, we stand together behind the curtain, in the presence of the divine mystery

But do we feel we are in the presence of God when we worship? I’m not sure we do
I think we’ve reduced worship to entertainment, because we think there’s nothing else
We’ve rationalised worship the way we’ve rationalised everything in our lives – we’ve removed every trace of mystery

Modern society equates belief in the supernatural with superstition
Even sincere Christians can’t separate the supernatural from the superstitious anymore
People don’t like to admit to being superstitious in modern society, and it’s embarrassing for a lot of people to admit they believe in the supernatural
– yet as Christians, the supernatural is our life, our supreme reality: or it would be, if we let it

We read the Book of Acts, and we think how incredible it must have been to be part of church in the days when amazing things happened every day
I wonder when we stopped believing that church life could ever be like that again

I will admit to a sneaking suspicion – I suspect people stopped believing that early on
Remember John’s words, last week, about the church in Ephesus – the people there had fallen away from their founding vision, they had left their first love (Revelation 2.4)

I suspect that even in the time of the first readers of Luke’s gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, people’s belief in the miraculous was already beginning to fade
Or at least, the expectation that they would see the miraculous in their own churches

And that’s one one the reasons why Luke wrote the two books we remember him for
He wasn’t celebrating the life of the Church of his own day – he was calling them back to a vision they were losing

We are being called back today. The challenge we hear in Francis Chan’s book doesn’t just come from him – we are being called by voices on many sides to change our expectations of Church
Coronavirus restrictions are forcing us to change, and we are being challenged to believe that not all change is bad

We are being called to break out from the walls of an institutions that just wants to keep people happy, so that it can pay its bills and stay in business for a bit longer
We are being called to break out from a Church that doesn’t take the supernatural seriously, because it wants to be taken seriously by the world

Francis Chan wants Christians to really hear the Word of God, and really sing to God in worship – really believe that God is present with us, and that our praise is pleasing to him
Then, maybe, our hearts and minds will be opened, and God’s Word will speak to us like it never has before
Then, maybe, we’ll know the meaning of the sacred, because we’ll live in the presence of the sacred, and we’ll see miracles, every day

New Testament citations from the New American Standard Bible; Old Testament citations from the JPS Tanakh translation; image by ToBeDaniel, Wikimedia Commons

Shopping for Jesus

I have this against you, that you have left your first love (Revelation, 2.4. All NT citations from NASB)

We heard two readings:
– The first (Acts 2:14–18, but quoting Joel 2.28-32) presents an apocalyptic hope
– The second (Revelation 2.1-5) presents an apocalyptic warning

Both are messages to the church

In the reading from Acts 2, Luke is reporting a sermon given by Peter within a few days of the resurrection
Peter tells everyone that the coming of the Holy Spirit is the dawning of the Day of the Lord that the Jews, and the whole world, have been waiting and hoping for
– And this is the beginning of the Church

The reading from Revelation 2 is set in a time just a few decades later
There are believing communities in cities all over the Empire
The gospel is spreading despite infighting and persecution – but something is going wrong

The voice speaking in this passage isn’t John’s – it’s Jesus’ voice, so we have to listen
Jesus warns that the church stands under judgement

The church was meant to represent the solution, but it has become part of the problem
– To such an extent, that Jesus is threatening to take away its lampstand
– Meaning, he’s going to remove the light of his presence from them

In other words, Jesus is threatening the same judgement that fell on Jerusalem and the temple in the time of the prophet Ezekiel
His glory will depart, and the church will be snuffed out of existence

As I said, we’re going to look at a book by Francis Chan over the next few weeks
The book is called Letters to the Church (note the reference to this chapter of Revelation)

Chan believes the Church has got it badly wrong – big churches as much as small ones
It has fallen into the trap of consumerism – instead of serving God, it serves its customers
So even where the church seems to be succeeding, because it’s growing, it’s failing, because it’s serving itself instead of serving God

Francis Chan remembers how disenchanted he was with his own mega-church: When I looked at what went on [in Cornerstone], I saw a few other people and me using our gifts, while thousands just came and sat in the sanctuary for an hour and a half and then went home

You may not accept Chan’s diagnosis of the problem, or his solution, which is to break up large congregations and start house churches instead
– And be prepared to break those house churches up in their turn, when they grow too big

The fact is, as you can see from the letters to the churches in Revelation, and the letters of Paul, the church has been falling away from the original vision since the very beginning, and being called back in every age to the source of that vision

Times of economic and social dislocation have often been times when the vision of the church was restored
The denominations all agree, the present pandemic could be that kind of opportunity – because it’s unlikely we’ll be able to resurrect the church as it was, even if that’s what we think we’d like to do

Francis Chan wants three things from the church
He wants worship that is focused on Jesus Christ; he wants devotion to the Word of God in Scripture; and he wants people to encourage each other to lead holy lives

That’s what he sees in the New Testament church, the church we see in the Book of Acts
If someone asked you, what three things do you want from church, what would you say?

The passage from Acts 2 says three things about the church:
1 The church is full of people who have received the Spirit – but they can speak to people outside the church in their own language
2 They speak God’s Word. They have received a vision, they have dreamed a dream, and they are driven to proclaim that message
3 They feel called to serve – in fact, they are Jesus’ bondslaves. They do not belong to themselves any more, they do not belong to the world, they are set free from this world and their own past lives. They only reward they want or expect is to be permitted to serve

Bondslaves of the gospel, filled with the prophetic Spirit, able to relate to others and speak about Jesus – do we see those three qualities in our church?

In the passage from Revelation 2 the Ephesian church is also praised for three things:

1 Deeds: hard work and perseverance in missionary effort
2 Discernment: they don’t welcome false believers, and they don’t listen to false teaching
3 Endurance under persecution

But of course there is one ground for criticism, a serious one
– You have left your first love

So almost from the beginning, Christ was calling his Church back to its starting place
He was warning the Church that everything it had received, could easily be taken away

In his book, Francis Chan warns the Church it is in danger of losing the spiritual gifts Christ has given to it
He believes he is calling the Church back to its roots in the New Testament
Remember the three things he asks for: I want all of us to sing directly to God. I want all of us to really hear the Word of God. I want all of us to encourage one another to live really holy lives

If there’s one thing missing from our churches, I think it’s the last of those
We don’t encourage one another to live holy lives, in the way the people did in the New Testament church
We don’t encourage one another in that way, and we don’t feel accountable to one another in that way

Why is that? I think partly Chan is right – it’s because we’ve become religious consumers
We think of church as a kind of holy shop, rather than a community
It’s a place where we want to be able to choose the kind of religious goods we like to consume

If that’s true, then we’re not a family – we’re just fellow-shoppers
– And as a result, we’re not close enough to really encourage one another or hold one another to account

This is a very challenging book – I don’t expect everyone to agree with it, and I don’t think Chan is right about everything
But I do think he raises questions we have to think about seriously – and I hope we will

Image by Adbh266 at Wikimedia Commons